How Two Brothers Who Fled War Taught the World to Code | C.Lab

Sometimes the most powerful ideas start with the simplest materials. A secondhand computer. A programming manual. Two curious kids in a country at war.

The story of Hadi and Ali Partovi — twin brothers who grew up in Iran, fled conflict, and eventually built Code.org into one of the most influential education nonprofits on the planet — is not just a tech success story. It is a story about access. About what happens when a child gets the chance to create, even when the world around them offers every reason not to.

If you are a parent wondering whether coding really matters for your child, this story might change the way you think about it.

A Commodore 64 in Tehran

Hadi and Ali Partovi were born in Tehran, Iran, in 1972. Their parents were intellectuals — their father, Firouz Partovi, was a theoretical physicist and a founding professor at the prestigious Sharif University of Technology, where he chaired the physics department. Their mother studied computer science at Boston University while their father conducted research at MIT, so the family spent a few years in the United States when the twins were toddlers.

But they returned to Iran, and soon found themselves living through the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. Schools in Tehran did not offer computer science classes. There were no coding boot camps, no YouTube tutorials, no app stores. The world the Partovi brothers grew up in looked nothing like the Silicon Valley they would later help shape.

And yet, everything changed because of one object.

Their father brought home a Commodore 64 from a conference he had attended in Italy. It had no games. No apps. Just the machine itself and a book about BASIC programming. Their father told them something along the lines of: if you want to play games on this, you will have to build them yourselves.

Hadi and Ali were about ten years old. They started teaching themselves to code.

Think about that for a moment. No teacher. No curriculum. No internet. Just two kids, a book, and the motivation to make something happen on a screen. That is the spark that would eventually reach hundreds of millions of students around the world.

Fleeing War, Finding a Future

In 1984, the Partovi family left Iran, fleeing the war. They immigrated to the United States, where Hadi and Ali would eventually attend Harvard University. Hadi earned a master’s degree in computer science.

From there, both brothers built remarkable careers in tech. Hadi joined Microsoft during the browser wars of the 1990s, serving as Group Program Manager for Internet Explorer. He later returned to Microsoft as General Manager of the MSN portal, delivering its first year of profit. He was also on the founding team of Tellme Networks, a voice-recognition company that Microsoft later acquired.

Ali, meanwhile, co-founded LinkExchange, an online advertising network that Microsoft acquired for $265 million in 1998. He later founded iLike, a music discovery platform that was acquired by Myspace. Both brothers became prolific angel investors, backing companies like Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb, and Uber in their earliest stages — long before those names were household words.

By any measure, the Partovi brothers had made it. They had fled a war zone, built careers at the highest levels of Silicon Valley, and accumulated the kind of success most people only dream about.

But Hadi was not finished.

The Day Everything Shifted

On October 5, 2011, Steve Jobs died. For Hadi, Jobs had always been a role model — someone who used technology not just to build products, but to fundamentally change how people lived and worked.

That day, Hadi found himself thinking about legacy. Not about the next startup or the next investment. About what he would leave behind. About what mattered most.

The answer, when it came, was rooted in his own childhood. He had taught himself to code on a Commodore 64 in a country at war, without a single computer science class available to him. And decades later, the situation in American schools was shockingly similar. At the time, roughly 90 percent of US schools did not offer computer science courses. The subject was treated as a niche elective, not a core part of education — despite the fact that technology was reshaping every industry on earth.

Hadi decided to change that.

Building Code.org

In January 2013, Hadi and Ali launched Code.org, a nonprofit with a mission that was as simple as it was ambitious: make computer science accessible to every student in every school.

Their launch strategy was brilliant. They produced a short video called What Most Schools Don’t Teach, directed by Lesley Chilcott — the producer behind An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman. The video featured Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and other tech leaders talking about how they got started with code and why it matters.

The video went viral. It surpassed 12 million views in its first two weeks. More than 260,000 people signed a petition on Code.org’s website calling for more computer science education. The conversation about coding in schools shifted overnight.

But Code.org was never just about a viral video. It was about building real curriculum, training real teachers, and changing real policy. And that is exactly what happened.

The Hour of Code: A Simple Idea That Changed Everything

In December 2013, during Computer Science Education Week, Code.org launched the first Hour of Code — a challenge inviting students everywhere to spend just one hour trying computer science. The idea was disarmingly simple: you do not need to commit to a full course or buy expensive equipment. Just try it. One hour. See what happens.

That first year, 500,000 students participated. The numbers kept growing. By 2017, the Hour of Code had served over 500 million hours of coding. By 2022, a single year’s campaign set in motion 80 million hours of coding across more than 185 countries. The Hour of Code has now engaged more than 15 percent of all students on the planet, making it one of the largest learning events in history.

What makes the Hour of Code so powerful is not just the scale. It is the philosophy behind it. The campaign is designed to show students — and their parents, and their teachers — that coding is not something reserved for a certain kind of kid. It is not only for the math prodigies, the kids who already own a laptop, or the ones who fit a particular stereotype. In 2018, 50 percent of Hour of Code participants were female. The initiative has reached students in over 180 countries, from well-funded suburban schools to classrooms with almost nothing.

The message is clear: every child can do this.

The Impact: From Movement to Mainstream

Code.org’s influence extends far beyond a single week each December. The organization has fundamentally changed the landscape of computer science education, particularly in the United States.

In the 2024-25 school year, 60 percent of US public high schools offered foundational computer science classes — nearly double the number from 2017-18. About 82 percent of high school students now have computer science classes available at their schools. Eleven states now require students to earn credit in computer science to graduate. More than $88 million was allocated for computer science in state budgets in 2024 alone.

And the impact is reaching younger students too. About 13 percent of elementary students and 8.3 percent of middle school students are now enrolled in computer science courses annually — numbers that were virtually zero a decade ago.

There is still work to do. Girls make up only about 33 percent of high school CS students. Black, Hispanic, Latino, and Native American students remain less likely to attend a school that offers foundational computer science. But the trajectory is unmistakable. What was once a niche subject, available to a privileged few, is becoming a standard part of education.

That shift did not happen by accident. It happened because two brothers who taught themselves to code on a Commodore 64 in wartime Tehran decided that every kid deserved the same chance they had.

What This Means for Your Family

Here is what I take from the Partovi brothers’ story, as someone who teaches coding to kids every week.

You do not need to be a “tech family” for your child to benefit from learning to code. Hadi and Ali did not grow up in Silicon Valley. They did not have coding classes or tech-savvy peers. They had a curious mind, a basic machine, and permission to explore.

That is all any child needs to get started.

Computer science is not about turning your kid into a software engineer (though it might). It is about giving them a way of thinking — breaking problems into smaller pieces, testing ideas, creating something from nothing. These are skills that serve kids whether they become developers, doctors, artists, or entrepreneurs.

The Partovi brothers proved something profound: access changes everything. A child who gets to try coding — even for just one hour — sees the world a little differently. They realize that the apps on their phone, the games they play, the websites they visit — someone made those things. And they could make things too.

That realization is worth more than any curriculum.

One Hour Can Be the Beginning

If the Hour of Code taught us anything, it is that you do not need a grand plan. You do not need to commit to years of study. You just need to start.

Let your child try. Let them tinker. Let them build something silly, something broken, something that makes them laugh. That is exactly how two kids in Tehran got started — and look where it led.

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