Profile of angel investor and Code.org co-founder Ali Partovi, who now manages Neo, a fund that matches talented young engineers with tech industry veterans
s venture capitalists mingled with members of the Golden State Warriors at a fall 2016 cocktail party, tech investor Ali Partovi scrambled to find something to talk about. Tweets: @apartovi , @robot_md , @apartovi , @apartovi , @hadip , @hkanji , @forbes , @forbes , and @alexrkonrad . Thanks: @alexrkonrad Tweets: Ali Partovi / @apartovi : ... in which @bcarson trolls me with a graphical parade of my greatest misses — like failing to back the genius @MLevchin when he left LinkExchange to start Paypal. Thank you Max, for supporting @Neo 20 years later. http://www.forbes.com/... http://twitter.com/... Carol E. Reiley / @robot_md : Today @neo's community is 43% women and 15% people of color. Of the Neo fund's investments, 40% of the money has gone to startups led by female CEOs. Great profile Ali about how Neo came together with you and your team's vision! I'm so proud to be part of this community. http://twitter.com/... Ali Partovi / @apartovi : “The old boys' club is on its way out. We're replacing it with something that's merit-based and diverse from day one.” (Thank you @bizcarson for this humbling profile of our work at @Neo, with @cklshorall and @nadsinger.) http://www.forbes.com/... Ali Partovi / @apartovi : I just love @makinde's quote here: “It was ‘pretty crazy’ how dedicated to diversity Ali was from the beginning.... Today @Neo is 43% women and 15% people of color. Of their investments, 40% of the money has gone to startups led by female CEOs.” http://www.forbes.com/... Hadi Partovi / @hadip : That time when you were profiled by the @NYTimes and your identical twin one-ups you with the top headline on @Forbes the next day. #proudTwin http://twitter.com/... Hussein Kanji / @hkanji : The NBA had a talent network. Silicon Valley did not. And Partovi wanted to build one http://www.forbes.com/... via @nuzzel @forbes : Early Facebook investor Ali Partovi is creating a scouting network for brilliant engineers. He learned the lesson of getting access to fresh ideas the hard way, making some well-placed bets and missing out on others http://www.forbes.com/... http://twitter.com/... @forbes : Ali Partovi's Neo community links the best young engineers with top programmers from Facebook and Google and startups like Stripe, then promises to invest in whatever they do http://www.forbes.com/... http://twitter.com/... Alex Konrad / @alexrkonrad : Early Facebook and Dropbox investor Ali Partovi drew inspiration from the NBA to create a scouting network for top tech talent. Really good deep dive into his project, Neo, by the always-sharp @bizcarson: http://www.forbes.com/... Thanks: @alexrkonrad Expand More For Next Unexpand More For Next
Context & Ripple Effects
When Forbes profiled Ali Partovi in January 2019, Neo was still an experiment: a fund built around a scouting network pairing young engineers with veterans from Facebook, Google, and Stripe, committing capital to whatever those members started. The diversity numbers attached to it — 43% women in the community, 40% of investment capital to female-CEO startups — made it a distribution thesis as much as a talent one.
The payoff arrived later: by 2026, Neo's early bets on Kalshi and Cursor had pushed its first two funds' values far above industry averages, validating the scout-driven sourcing model at exactly the moment larger firms were rebuilding their own pipelines around operators.
First-order effects
- Neo's scouts function as its origination engine — because the fund commits to invest in ventures started by network members, its deal flow and its diversity allocation are set at the community level before any partner sees a pitch.
- Partovi's own track record, including publicly owned misses like passing on Max Levchin leaving LinkExchange for PayPal, becomes part of the fund's pitch: the network exists to catch founders the individual angel misses.
Second-order effects
- Established firms responded by institutionalizing what Neo does informally — a16z raised a $2B fund and registered all 150 employees as financial advisers so they could go deeper on riskier bets (the a16z adviser registration), while Sriram Krishnan moved from product roles at Facebook, Twitter, and Snap into a general-partner seat at Andreessen Horowitz.
- A validated scout model pressures rivals' sourcing costs: when a small fund can surface winners like Kalshi and Cursor through its community, large firms must either build equivalent networks or pay up for deals discovered elsewhere.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, venture returns concentrate in firms whose origination is structural rather than personal — echoing Sequoia's move under Roelof Botha toward a fund holding stakes past the traditional 10-year cycle, both changes pointing at firm design, not individual stock-picking, as the durable edge.
- Scout networks also shift who gets funded: routing capital through engineer communities with explicit diversity allocations makes access to early-stage money depend on membership in these networks, raising questions about how gatekeeping moves from Sand Hill Road partnerships to private invite-only groups.
The trend: Venture capital is shifting deal origination from partner Rolodexes to institutionalized scout and operator networks, with fund structure and community composition becoming the competitive moat.