Ali Partovi, Neo CEO on AI Safety, Investing in People, & "Confession"

Grace Gong (0:03)

We're live, we're live, I see the red, I see the red, okay. Hi Ali, welcome to Venture with Grace.

Ali Partovi (0:10)

Hi Grace, we're excited to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Grace Gong (0:14)

I've been a huge fan of yours, so you probably don't know this, but my friends and I, so I went to a program called Blockade Building Venture, one of the Blockade Building funds. I met one of my really close friends, we both become a fan of yours, because we have discovered we've met some of the most iconic companies in the world, and you have built such a cool program for a lot of the students.

Fast forward to a few years ago, Jan became a friend and a mentor to me before I started. Lately, I hosted four conferences, and Jan was the first person who actually sponsored our conference, as well as her husband sponsored the location of our first conference.

Ali Partovi (1:02)

This is Jan from?

Grace Gong (1:03)

Jan from.

Ali Partovi (1:06)

Yeah.

Grace Gong (1:07)

Jan from, she used to work with you.

Ali Partovi (1:11)

Yes.

Grace Gong (1:12)

So, yeah, I feel like I like Jan. And then I'm also a big fan of some of the people from our company, Lai, Guayao, Shao, Tijuya, who sponsored our conference in Ro. And it was one of my old friends, Jason, from Teletruck. So those are some people who deal with our verse.

So enough about fangirling, but I want to start with like, let's get it out of the way. You started a podcast yourself.

Ali Partovi (1:43)

Yeah, just dropped it the first episode yesterday. What is it? Wednesday night? Yes, it was just yesterday. It's been kind of a whirlwind the last 24 hours. Exactly.

Grace Gong (1:53)

I saw the trailer. So obviously, you have such a powerful network, and you just did a podcast with the CEO of Microsoft and your cousin, who's like the Uber CEO, as well as many interesting partners. Who is the best person that you personally felt like you have worked with?

Ali Partovi (2:10)

It's funny.

Well, Satya, Nadella and Dara Khosrashwari are probably the two most famous people, and that's partly why we opened by dropping those two. But I've already recorded multiple, I've lost count, like eight or 10 episodes, and it's interesting. Grace, I'd say the most interesting ones may not be the most famous person. It's the ones that have some emotional content, where you can feel that the person is really divulging something, or sharing something that they haven't talked about before. You know, the premise of my podcast, it's called Confession with Ali Partovi, and its premise is that we all have had some painful lesson or moment where we screwed up, or did something that was really difficult, and maybe made a mistake and learned a difficult lesson. And a lot of people have those moments, but don't talk about them, or certainly don't talk about them publicly. And so I, with my podcast, I'm trying to create a space where inviting startup founders and tech leaders to share those moments, both to get it off their chest and to help other people learn from them. And yeah, it's been super interesting.

Yeah, it's hard to pick which specific one is my favorite, but there's definitely cases where people have shared something that really felt like from the heart and emotional, as well as the one with Satya and with Dara. Both of those shared things that I would say were major material events in the course of Microsoft's history. And in the case of Dara, it was Expedia history when the CEO of that company. But these are both public companies and Wall Street, I think until now, did not know about these events. So it's pretty exciting to have them share these old stories, but to share it publicly for the first time.

Grace Gong (4:08)

I have so many questions, so I think you also have these conversation moments, so one is like, I think you mentioned, I think Alfred was working for you.

Ali Partovi (4:18)

Yes. When we were just out of college, Alfred and I were classmates at Harvard. But then we went separate ways for a year or so, and then we ended up working together. My first startup was LinkExchange, and Alfred became our CFO.

At first, he was our part-time accountants, essentially, working two hours a week or something. He was mostly, he was getting a PhD, and this was a side quest.

Then he became controller or something. He was our finance guy, but not CFO, and then eventually he became CFO.