Cursor + Kalshi Seed Investor on Spotting Outlier Talent | Ali Partovi, Neo
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2026
⏱️ 116 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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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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
Follow Ali
Twitter: https://x.com/apartovi
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apartovi/
Follow Turner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Allie, how's it going? Welcome to the show. |
| 0:05.0 | Thank you so much. Great to be here, Turner. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm excited you're here. I just read, there's an article in the Wall Street Journal talking about Neo. |
| 0:12.0 | I think it said you turned 150 million into $1.4 billion. Is that the number that I saw? |
| 0:22.6 | The headline there would have been 1.2. |
| 0:25.6 | That was 4-hour. That's net and that's the end of year number. |
| 0:30.6 | It's higher because one of the biggest drivers of that is Cursor, which has had a big step up since then. |
| 0:38.3 | I think there's a couple other Cal she was in that one too. |
| 0:41.3 | No, Cal she's in our previous fund. |
| 0:43.3 | So our first fund and our second fund are both on track to be 10 Xers or more, which is... |
| 0:49.3 | That's pretty good, yeah. |
| 0:51.3 | Very, very hard to do, especially two times. |
| 0:53.3 | Especially two times and especially like the second one was 2021, which is, like, one of the toughest vintages. |
| 1:00.4 | That was a brutal vintage. |
| 1:01.8 | Yeah. |
| 1:02.1 | I feel like even hitting 1X DPI on a 21 vintage is going to be, like, top quartile. |
| 1:08.5 | This is true. |
| 1:09.7 | And this was actually what led to that also journal article because Julia Chernova had written |
| 1:16.3 | an article about how the 2021 cohort of venture funds are all sucking and barely returning. |
| 1:22.6 | Like the 90th percentile is 1.5X. |
| 1:26.6 | And we were like, you know, we're like doing many multiples above the 90th percentile is 1.5x. And we were like, you know, we're like doing many multiples |
| 1:30.9 | above the 90th percent, you know, like. So, yeah, so we decided to share our numbers with her, |
... |
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