emily: they are twin brothers who grew up in wartime iran, teaching themselves how to code on a commodore 64. then, after perhaps a life-saving break from the u.s. immigration system, they landed degrees from harvard and silicon valley, eventually striking startup gold with companies that sold to microsoft and myspace. with their financial future secure, hadi and ali partovi became prolific angel investors backing companies like uber and dropbox and focused on democratizing the opportunity that gave them success with code.org.

a nonprofit that aims to bring code into classrooms everywhere. they kicked off a campaign that went to number one on youtube on launch date with some of tech's most iconic faces. joining me on "studio 1.0," founders of code.org, hadi and ali partovi. i am used to interviewing you guys separately, but it is a pleasure to have you together. i am curious, what was it like growing up as the brothers partovi? >> it was wonderful to be a twin. i was felt i had something amazing that other people did not have because i had someone i could trust with everything and look up to. and try to be as good as him. emily: and you are identical twins, right? >> [in unison] identical. emily: how are you similar and different? >> were similar being competitive and driven. our backgrounds are similar. we are both harvard computer science majors. we are the only set of twins to both sell companies to microsoft. a lot of the things we have done are similar.

>> think our differences are part of what make us unique. i think i am more of a stress case. my brother is more easy-going comparatively. emily: you were born in tehran. you were six years old when the iran-iraq war broke out. what was living through that like? >> it was horrific. my childhood, i remember feeling scared almost all of the time. either scared of my neighborhood being bombed, which is certainly was, and i also remember always being worried about something would happen to my parents. that i would come home from school and i would not have my parents there anymore. there was a period during the bombardment when we would spend overnights in the basement holding our ears, because our neighborhood was actually being bombed. so that was also pretty rough. i will say though, having gotten out of that, it is certainly something that makes me feel much stronger, because i feel like i can take on anything. if you can survive that, it makes day-to-day problems today seem much easier to deal with.

emily: how did your parents communicate to you what was going on? >> one of the things i remember is my dad tried to make it seem like the bombardment wasn't actually our neighborhood. he would say that these planes are breaking the sound barrier so you can hear them from miles away. he would wake up in the morning to go see whose homes were still standing. emily: what did your parents do? >> my dad was the founding professor of what is now the main university of technology called sharif university. my mother was a systems analyst. once the revolution happened, it was hard to keep a job. women were just so oppressed at the time. emily: and in the midst of this, is that when you learned how to code? >> yes, we were nine years old. our dad was a physicist so he had gone to a physics conference and brought back a commodore 64. this was 1981 or so? no games, no software, just a couple books on how to program

in basic. he spent maybe the first hour or two with us, getting us started. then we read the books and basically taught each other how to do it. he spent a lot of time giving us ideas on what we could create. a big part of learning computer programming is the imagination part, imagining what you might do, and then kind of feeling the confidence that it is possible and then go out and tackle it. emily: was there a moment when he thought, this is what i want to do? or did that come later? hadi: a great thing about computer programming in iran during the war, it was an escape. all of our family had left iran to come to the united states. we were alone without family and our mom and dad. when you are programming a computer, you can close that all out and create whatever you want. emily: humid to the united states when you were 11? >> yes, leaving a country like iran for starters, it is not

that easy. especially during the war. it took a lot of time to get the paperwork done and so on, to get out. we first moved to europe. then we were traveling around for a whole summer trying to would u.s. embassy that grant us visas to be able to enter the united states. we had reached the point where, one more rejection, it would be like, you can never come to the u.s. i remember that we rented an apartment in italy, we were there, and the phone rang. my mom picked it up, thank god it was our mom and not our dad. she picked it up, and it was a woman on the other end of the line informing her that we have been rejected. so my mom, who is -- like many iranian women, fiery and fearless, she started sobbing, saying that this is not fair, if we had to go back her sons

would probably die in the war. she asked the woman, can you please tell the head of the consulate to give us another chance? and the woman on the other side said, actually, i am ahead of the consulate. so they had some sort of connection and she asked the state department to make a special exception for us. so we found out a few days later that we had been accepted, so we were this close to never coming here. i would take, ever since then, i have always felt that the world would be a much happier place if there were more women in leadership positions. emily: if you want something done, get a mother on it. she will get it done. iran was on a list of travel ban countries. like being an iranian immigrant in the age of donald trump? >> it was difficult, but at least we made it. it would have been completely impossible today. we wouldn't even have applied. we would have been banned. i think being an immigrant from any country is difficult in a

time when one group is being singled out. so much of what america what it is is that we are a land of immigrants, especially for our selves, knowing how it would be for us, especially right now, it is particularly difficult. emily: your family is quite successful. the c.e.o. of uber is your cousin, one of your cousins also funded an ai company that was bought by intel. should that be a lesson to president trump? adi: there are a lot of iranians immigrants who are very successful in tech. our family but many others as well. immigrants have created many of the greatest companies and the largest number of jobs in this country. the reason i started code.org was to show an immigrant can give back and create opportunity in a country that seems like it is lacking it. emily: you both ended up at harvard studying computer science. how did you get there, and what happened next? >> we both worked really hard to get the grades to be accepted into harvard. we were lucky they provided financial aid.

and we also spent all of our summers in high school working on computer programs to help us save money for college. what happened next, graduating in 1994 at the dawn of the internet, it was such a wonderful time to be in tech and already fully knowledgeable. all the companies that are famous today were basically started over the next 10 years. so much of our career got shaped by being at the right place at the right time with a network of people who are now many of the greatest folks in tech. emily: you started working at microsoft, and you started working at oracle. this was when the dotcom boom was hitting a fever pitch. >> hadi's career was already at a higher pitch than mine. within two years of graduation, i left oracle and joined a start of that was not doing well and was fairly doomed. meanwhile, hadi headed joined the microsoft explorer team, the creator of the browser, and it was probably one of the most

exciting jobs in the whole tech industry. emily: didn't you try to convince microsoft to do search, and they didn't? adi: at the time, this was 1998, search advertising did not exist. if you went to the top search engines at the time, it was big banner advertising. we tried to convince microsoft the biggest way to monetize search was to have text-based ads that were keyword targeted and to sell them on an auction basis. which is exactly what adwards is today, except, we call it keywords. it wasn't something microsoft was prepared to invest in at the time. emily: did you ever tell bill gates or steve ballmer. "i told you so?" >> he wrote a letter to steve when he resigned leaving microsoft saying i had a great , experience here, but as i leave, you should keep your eyes on this new startup called google, they have great

potential. it was a very diplomatically worded email, but very prescient as well. ♪ >> we will invest in something we think is a bad idea if we like the person. ♪

emily: you do have possibly the most impressive list of angel investments of anyone, including facebook, airbnb, uber, dropbox. zappos. how did you get into all those deals? >> i think investing in good people is the most important thing. every investor talks about investing in good people, we take it a lot more seriously. the way i mean that -- we will invest in something we think is a bad idea if we like the person. emily: you also invested in mark zuckerberg. how did that happen? >> we were lucky to get introduced via a number of routes, when facebook was still eight or nine people.

that was an unbelievable thing to get to see the company at such a stage. a lot of people at the time were saying, why are you involved in this company? i remember my wife saying at the time, are you trying to get into fraternity parties or something? facebook at that time was in just about 100 colleges, a place for college students to meet each other and flirt. but i remember the very first time i met mark, my immediate reaction was like, this guy is more like bill gates than anyone i had ever met. he reminded me of every time i had interacted with bill gates at microsoft. i remember the level of vision he had was so much more than the fraternity angle. the dropbox story is my favorite, because it captures several parts of what hadi and i brought together to investing. there was a senior at mit that hadi already knew, having had him as an intern. his name is mac, and we were trying to recruit him into a small startup.

he had his eyes set on a bigger company because he was just graduating from college. we referred him to go to facebook, which at the time was 200 people or so. hadi asked him, can you tell us who the smartest kids are in your class? he said, i know this guy, but he will not join your startup either because he has his own new company. we learned about his start up which was drop box. it was just a two-person company. at this point, we had them fly out to the west coast and gave them coding tests to assess how good of computer programmers they actually are. and this is part of our routine for all investments. basically, if we are investing in a company, we won't do it unless the technical funder can pass a rigorous technical interview. based on his coating skills, we decided to invest in dropbox.

and we spent the next several years, even quite recently, helping dropbox recruit engineers. emily: what about uber? >> uber we weren't as early in. in fact, i wish we had an in earlier investors because so many of our network were early investors. >> getting into later stage investment, not everyone has access. part of what has enabled us to have access to investments like that, it is not just based on who we know, it is because we have developed a reputation for helping companies like facebook or dropbox with recruiting. emily: when you are watching from the outside at uber, what do you think went wrong there? >> it is really hard to manage hypergrowth. i think there was a culture of a no holds barred approach to competitiveness. and i think there are some lines that you should not cross. it is really hard for a company at large to know, which laws are we paying attention to? which laws are we ok breaking? who gets to decide that. when you are going through hypergrowth at the same time,

you get into this cultural situation where anything kind of think it got a little bit out of control. emily: do you think at this late stage, that dara khosrowshahi who is your cousin, can turn things around? >> i do. it is still an incredibly healthy business at its core. when you consider the turmoil that happened, where the entire senior staff was axed. did anyone miss a ride? did we have any reports about cars stopping or not picking up their passengers? dara is like a prince among men, who inherently because of the humility and incredible respect his personal character brings, people want to see him succeed. the sheer goodness of his character is enough to change some of the things. starting with changing the culture, as hadi mentioned, and peopleg the way other interact at the company. the key to getting u.s.

education to adopt computer science has been the american teacher. ♪

emily: there is something missing from your stories about the amazing people in your network, and the people you funded, and that is, women. i'm curious how you would describe the role of women in those early days of the dotcom boom, and how you have seen that e or not givenlv , that the numbers haven't really changed. >> the lack of women in tech i think, bothers everybody, and bothers women and men alike. it is very personal to us. our mom had a masters in computer science, so i grew up with a mom who was a woman in tech. a large part of why ali and i started code.org was to fix the diversity issue, starting with the pipeline. the diversity problems are not only about the promotion path,

but also, about the pipeline. if the graduating population is 80% white and asian males, it is hard to have a balanced workforce when the students coming into the field are so imbalanced. >> what we have done at code.org has completely changed the high school and the k-12 picture. teaching using code.org materials as early as elementary or kindergarten. the student base is now 25 million students, which is much larger than the software engineering population in the united states. and it is 45% girls. there are almost 12 million girls coding on code.org. emily: how did you do that? >> the answer to that really is teachers. we did a lot of great things at code.org, but the key to getting u.s. education to adopt computer science has been the american teachers. if we want to reach every student, especially the students who have the least opportunity, they are not going to

afterschool clubs. we have to reach them in school. >> the platform is free, it is on the web. in fact, the school could assign it as homework if they don't have enough time on the schedule or computers in the classroom. it is still much easier for kids to do it if they feel like it is a standard part of school. everyone learns fractions whether they like it or not. so, when a school teaches it, it gives it a sense of social universality that you cannot accomplish necessarily at home. emily: how do you recruit teachers when they could be making a lot of money at facebook or google? >> so, we don't get computer scientists to become teachers, we get teachers to learn computer science. we are by far one of the largest workforce retraining operators in the country now. emily: how do you convince schools who are already resource strapped to add these courses? >> the teachers are convincing their schools. emily: so they're already work at the schools? >> they're already working in the school, it is the math

teacher, english teacher, science teacher, they see our materials and they realize our school should be doing this. the oakland teacher who asked, why isn't oakland teaching computer science? the first teacher there, her name is claire, she taught herself computer science on her own and started to teach a class. but she wanted it to be in every school in oakland, so she came to code.org. and we said we will train one teacher in every school and every district. two years later, every district school teaches computer science. emily: what are the challenges that remain? >> changing the school system is hard. >> funding is hard as well. emily: and code.org is a nonprofit? >> we are a nonprofit. i should say we are funded by the same tech companies that i believe should be fixing a lot of the gender issues in tech, so we are part of the solution. i believe. i believe that those same companies should get credit for the work that we do, so amazon, facebook, and especially, microsoft, those are our three largest donors. when we are bringing 12 million girls into this field, those

companies should get credit. for funding an operation like this. emily: eric roberts, longtime computer science professor at stanford, wrote a paper where he talked about the capacity of collapse and the ability to handle computer science students. in 1984, the max out, everyone was so excited about studying computer science. schools cannot accommodate, so they start turning students away and the number of computer science degrees starts declining. he warns that we are facing another potential capacity collapse today because so many people are interested, but they cannot accommodate them. >> that is happening now. the university of seattle turns away 3/4 of the students trying to get into computer science. >> it is not based on their gender, but it is based on grades. which, you know, i think everybody should have a chance to learn. the university system really needs to recognize that if you cannot teach them the most important subject that students

want to learn, then the university system either needs to change or students will go to learn some other way. this is a really big problem for our country. i know that code.org is in some exacerbating the problem because we are bringing 25 million students interested in the field. the university faces a problem that is only going to get worse. and they need to absolutely adapt to that demand. emily: my concern is it will hurt women again. because, if you are filtering students based on their experience and their grades, when traditionally, boys have have had a computer in the room -- >> it could. carnegie mellon has a similar situation, where there are so many spots for computer science. you can't just elect to choose that major, you have to apply. basically by edict said they will accept 50% female computer science applicants. so, they are essentially going to give an equal number of spots to men and women.

>> and that might actually tilt things in favor of women. emily: so, if you are a parent right now, what should you be doing if you want your kids to have a chance in this field? >> the first thing i would say, make sure that if your kids are in school, make sure that your school teaches computer science, is most american schools don't teach computer science. most americans don't think the school system can change, but we have shown on a massive scale of tens of thousands of schools that schools can change. if the parents ask the teacher, there is usually one teacher at the school who wants to see computer science taught at that school, and that teacher will pick up code.org and start doing it. change happens at the local level. the differences, parents are wondering what should my kids , do? we tell them, what should your school do? emily: let us talk about neo. it is your new thing. it is a community of engineers, there is a venture arm attached to it -- what is it? >> it is really focused on finding the tech leaders of tomorrow. our aim is to identify future

tech leaders as young as sophomores in college. we identify, include them in the community, and we invest in them. hadi: we have brought together this amazing spectrum of people that includes the cto of microsoft, the original cto of google, the original cto of face book, as well as these amazing people who have created amazing things. the woman who founded task rabbit for example, or the guy who invented photo tagging, the guy who created ios, all of these people, not all of them are famous, but they have all contributed something amazing to the world of technology. so we are bringing them together with a pool of young people who have been curated and selected based on their talent and their promise. emily: so how is it similar or different to something like y combinator? >> i would say it is similar in the youthful energy and the belief in unlimited possibility. it is extremely different

in that these are not founders with companies. some of them are, some of them might become future founders, but we are not incubating business ideas. we are just trying to find 10 or 15 of the best computer science students in the country and bring them to the community. emily: for the young men and women who want to make it in silicon valley, be an investor, entrepreneur, b an engineer, what is your advice? >> my first and most important thing is just to believe in yourself. the tech industry is something that you can come from very humble beginnings and make it based on what is in your head and your heart and hard work. studying computer programming is like learning a sport or an instrument. anybody can start, and if they put time into it, they can become successful. >> i would add to that and say, even if you don't want to become a coder, learning computer science can help, no matter what you want to do in tech. in this day and age, everybody should have at least a basic

background of computer science because it is easy and a lot more fun than people imagine. it can open doors in any field, but especially the tech industry. emily: hadi and ali partovi, thank you so much for joining us on "studio 1.0." great to have you guys. ♪ : retail.

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>> coming up on "bloomberg best," the stories that shaped the week in business around the world. president trump's angry tweeting. >> intention to make a deal today. we made the deal. >> the ecb keeps policy on a patient half. >> they know they fired the arsenal they have. >> china's central bank signals a shift toward stimulus. the lira shutters in response. >> investors are losing faith in the central bank's independence. >> reports coming fast and furious. >> we want to be a global carmaker. >> that was a disappointing