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Hadi Partovi is a tech entrepreneur and investor, and CEO of the education nonprofit Code.org. Born in Iran, Hadi grew up during the Iran-Iraq war. After immigrating to the United States at age 11, he spent his summers working as a software engineer to help pay his way through high school and college. Upon graduating from Harvard with a Masters degree in computer science, Hadi pursued a career in technology starting at Microsoft where he rose into the executive ranks. He founded two tech startups that were acquired by Microsoft and Newscorp respectively, and he has served as an early advisor or investor at many tech startups including Facebook, Dropbox, airbnb, and Uber. 


In 2013 Hadi and his twin brother Ali ‘94 launched the education nonprofit Code.org, which Hadi leads full-time as CEO. Code.org has established computer science classes reaching 30% of US students, created the most broadly used curriculum platform for K-12 computer science, and launched the global Hour of Code movement that has reached hundreds of millions of students spanning every country in the world. Hadi’s family lives in Seattle, Washington and in his spare time he enjoys skiing, water sports, playing music, and playing word games.

"When I was 7 and the country was going through a revolution and war, I don’t remember thinking, “Oh my god, I’m suffering hardship.” I had no context. I just was like, “O.K. This sucks. But I can just go on with the day.” I got used to seeing people getting killed and waking up every morning to go to the roof to see which houses near us were still standing or not. Thinking about it now, I’m like, “God, that’s horrible.” Back then, that was just routine.

"We were not well-off at all. Our family couldn’t afford a home (in the US). So all four of us lived in one bedroom in my grandma’s house in one bed, which is an awkward thing to do when you’re 12 years old. My parents worked three jobs, but they put all of the money toward our education. That left an imprint of how important education is. Education is the No. 1 thing you should invest in."

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