It is the most inspiring moment for new innovation that I've seen maybe in multiple decades.

It means a lot of things that people already depend on might be going away or might

struggle to compete so there's potential for disruption but it also means so many exciting new things

can be imagined that weren't possible before.

Technology investor, entrepreneur, and mentor, Ali Partove is the CEO of Neo,

a startup accelerator, mentorship community, and investment firm.

Neo's accelerator this week announced a new

AI track, working in collaboration with OpenAI and Microsoft to help startups build businesses

on newly emerging artificial intelligence capabilities. Partovie, who grew up in Tehran during the

Iran-Iraq War, sold his startup link exchange to Microsoft in 1998.

He was an early investor in companies including Airbnb, Dropbox, Facebook, and Uber,

and 10 years ago, co-founded Code.org with his twin brother, Hadi Partovey,

who continues to lead the computer science education

nonprofit to this day.

I'm Geekwire co-founder Todd Bishop.

Ali Partovi joins me on this episode of the Geekwire podcast to talk about the role that

AI will play in the startups of the future, Microsoft's relationship with Open AI.

His experience at Microsoft reporting to a young Satya Nadella as his

manager, Neo's approach to identifying and supporting a diverse group of technical and entrepreneurial

leaders, his larger takeaways from the Silicon Valley Bank meltdown and more.

Ali Partovie, thank you very much for joining me. Thank you so much, Todd. It's great to be here.

You are a long-time technology entrepreneur and investor, and we can get into a little bit of that history later on, but your latest venture, as it were, is Neo.

...