Ali Rowghani ( fa, علی روغنی, born 21 January 1973) is an Iranian-born American businessman. He was raised in

Dallas Dallas () is the List of municipalities in Texas, third largest city in Texas and the largest city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the List of metropolitan statistical areas, fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States at 7.5 ...

Texas Texas (, ; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2 ...

, where he attended the

St. Mark's School of Texas The St. Mark's School of Texas is a nonsectarian preparatory day school for boys in grades 1–12 in Dallas, Texas, United States, accredited by the Independent Schools Association of the Southwest. History St. Mark's traces its origins to the T ...

, graduating in 1991. He received his undergraduate degree from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1996, and his MBA from Stanford in 2002. Rowghani worked in finance at

Pixar Pixar Animation Studios (commonly known as Pixar () and stylized as P I X A R) is an American computer animation studio known for its critically and commercially successful computer animated feature films. It is based in Emeryville, Californi ...

for nine years, serving as

Chief Financial Officer The chief financial officer (CFO) is an officer of a company or organization that is assigned the primary responsibility for managing the company's finances, including financial planning, management of financial risks, record-keeping, and financ ...

between 2002 and 2008. He helped with the restructuring of Disney Animation with the entrance of John Lasseter and Ed Catmull. In 2008, he left Pixar to become

CFO The chief financial officer (CFO) is an officer of a company or organization that is assigned the primary responsibility for managing the company's finances, including financial planning, management of financial risks, record-keeping, and financ ...

for

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, a post he held for four years until he became Twitter's

Chief operating officer A chief operating officer or chief operations officer, also called a COO, is one of the highest-ranking executive positions in an organization, composing part of the "C-suite". The COO is usually the second-in-command at the firm, especially if t ...

Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American entrepreneur, industrial designer, media proprietor, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a ...

attempted to dissuade him from joining Twitter. He left Twitter in 2014. In November 2014, Rowghani joined

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Str ...

as a part-time partner focusing on helping YC alumni scale their companies. He launched Continuity, a $700 million investment growth-stage fund, which was closed in 2015. He is now a managing partner of YC Continuity at Y Combinator.

References

1973 births Living people American computer businesspeople Businesspeople in information technology Iranian businesspeople American people of Iranian descent Stanford University alumni Businesspeople from Oakland, California American chief operating officers American chief financial officers St. Mark's School (Texas) alumni Stanford Graduate School of Business alumni 21st-century American businesspeople {{US-business-bio-1970s-stub

See also

References