Cursor + Kalshi Seed Investor on Spotting Outlier Talent | Ali Partovi, Neo

Ali Partovi is the Co-founder and CEO of Neo.

Neo started in 2017 as a network for the top college students. Neo is a “people-first” investor, a thesis it developed missing out on early investments in PayPal and Google at three employees.

Neo has since invested in the Seed rounds of Cursor and Kalshi, and Ali shares everything he’s learned about spotting outlier talent, how to hire the best people, how computer science is the best business education, and why the best entrepreneurs start young.

Special thanks to Hadi Partovi, Fuzzy Khosrowshahi, Alan Shusterman, and Claire Shorall for their help brainstorming topics for Ali.

Thank you to Numeral, Flex, and Amplitude for supporting this episode

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Flex: Get premium banking and a net 60 day credit card at 0% APY https://home.flex.one/referral/bananacapital

Amplitude: AI analytics, all you have to do is ask https://www.amplitude.com

Timestamps:

(0:09) Neo’s two 10x funds

(2:19) Missing PayPal led to Neo

(9:32) Not investing in Google at 3 employees

(11:31) Backing Facebook despite the idea

(13:01) Starting Neo to help top college students

(17:21) How to identify outlier talent

(24:38) Neo’s coding test

(27:41) Bootstrapping the first cohort of Neo Scholars

(34:58) How Cognition President Russel Kaplan changed Neo forever

(39:21) Starting Neo after talking to Steph Curry

(46:42) Launching [Code.org](http://Code.org) to teach 20M kids to code

(59:38) Is coding still relevant in 2026?

(1:03:43) How to hire outlier talent

(1:07:25) Why you should aggressively apply for one job

(1:11:09) Neo Residency: $750k uncapped

(1:19:51) Growing up in Iran during the revolution

(1:26:03) Impact of the immigrant mentality

(1:29:15) Most entrepreneurial roots start very young

(1:39:18) Lessons investing in Cursor + Kalshi seed rounds

(1:50:27) Confession: a podcast about failure

(1:52:36) Fucking up a $50m deal by lying to Steve Jobs

Referenced

Neo: https://neo.com/

Neo Scholars Application: https://neo.com/scholars

Neo Residency: https://neo.com/residency

Code.org: https://code.org/

Lying to Steve Jobs: https://x.com/apartovi/status/1447251334814523392

Losing a deal with Yahoo: https://x.com/apartovi/status/1449856639331340289

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