May 24, 2026, 7:55 p.m. ET
Darius Partovi started taking classical piano lessons when he was 7, but he soon grew restless and gave them up. It wasn’t until the coronavirus shut down schools that he picked up his keyboard again out of boredom.
He heard about a local teacher, Payam Khastkhodaei, who was offering lessons out of his home in Bothell, Washington. One session and Partovi was hooked.
He practiced several hours a day without any cajoling. He mastered favorite works such as Yann Tiersen’s soundtrack to the 2001 French film “Amélie.” Then he placed third in a national piano competition. Today he’s a 19-year-old freshman at NYU who teaches piano and composes his own music for fun.
His father, Hadi Partovi, a Harvard-educated technology entrepreneur who sold his startup to Microsoft for $800 million and invested early on in Facebook and Airbnb, marveled at his son’s transformation. Partovi was the driving force behind Code.org, a nonprofit that introduced millions of kids to coding by making it easier and more fun to learn and he was intrigued by the similarities in the 32-year-old piano teacher’s approach.
The son of Iranian immigrants, Khastkhodaei devised a new teaching method his students loved. They learned to play music before they learned to read it with a notation system based on languages they already knew – their ABCs and 123s. And, instead of the standard repertoire of Bach and Brahms, his students chose their favorite songs, just like Partovi turned to Minecraft and Angry Birds to make computer science more appealing to kids.
The results spoke for themselves. Not only were kids learning the piano more easily at Payam Music, they no longer dreaded lessons and fewer quit them. The tiny school with just five music rooms had a long waiting list and enthusiastic reviews from parents.
Partovi – an investor with a knack for sniffing out opportunity – saw potential.
He started by advising Khastkhodaei on how to grow his business but then doubled down, signing on as CEO and turning to his powerful network to raise an initial investment in the single-digit millions from technology and Hollywood heavyweights like billionaire investor Mark Cuban and Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer. That seed money is financing an ambitious expansion plan that calls for hundreds of piano schools across the country.
It’s an unusual gambit for Partovi but his goal for Payam Music is classic Silicon Valley in scale, to take a tiny school in Washington state and build it into the first national piano school.
“I love the idea of helping children and I also love that nobody else is doing this,” Partovi told USA TODAY in an exclusive interview. “There are so many other startup ideas and venture ideas that have lots and lots of competitors clamoring for attention but my guess is I am the first person pitching you to write a story about a piano school. It’s not what anyone would expect as a business and the freshness of that – the idea that you can take something that is 300 years old and do it differently and better – is energizing to me.”
Speculative bets that tinker with the status quo are a hallmark of Big Tech and Partovi is far from the first to take a flier on a lofty idea. But is Silicon Valley know-how enough to transform a small cottage industry into a thriving national business?
“Almost everything can be disrupted theoretically,” Stanford University business professor Ilya Strebulaev said.
This teacher’s students love piano lessons
Khastkhodaei took up the piano when he was 3, and, by the time he was 6, he could play just about anything. But as he got older, his interest waned.
He found his way back to music when he was 11 but on his own terms. Inspired by his Nintendo Game Boy, he taught himself to play the Super Mario Bros. theme to the delight of his friends. Soon, he was playing songs he heard on the radio or at the movies. “It lit a spark,” he said.
At 16, Khastkhodaei started teaching piano, but his students were turned off by the same things he was: a repertoire they didn’t want to play, sheet music they had a hard time reading and the tedium of traditional scales.
In college while studying developmental psychology, a professor pointed out during a lecture that infants learn language by hearing it. That got him thinking. “Music is a language. Why is it not taught that way?”
Khastkhodaei says his alphanumeric notation method faced skepticism at first but ultimately won over students because it freed them from rigid teaching methods and rote memorization while allowing them to “speak” music before they could read it.
Not only did they learn faster, their enthusiasm and confidence grew along with their finger dexterity and auditory skill. It’s a point of pride that most of his students can play their favorite song on day one − and they keep playing.
Some 97% of Payam Music students continue beyond the first year of lessons compared to the 15% to 20% of those studying piano using traditional methods, according to Khastkhodaei. And, he says, 96% of Payam Music students achieve a diploma in four years, three times faster than most.
“Ten years ago, people were like: ‘What is this weird method and why should we try something new when for hundreds of years it’s been the same way.’ But this weird method of ABCs and 123s is working,” Khastkhodaei said.
We’re teaching kids piano all wrong, Hans Zimmer says
The methodology won over Zimmer, whose organization of composers called Bleeding Fingers is investing in Payam Music and will mentor some of the program’s top students.
The son of a classical pianist, as a child in Frankfurt he studied with a piano teacher for two weeks and hated it so much that he decided to teach himself instead.
“I always had music in my head. I learned to play because I wanted to put my music out into the world,” he said. “Kids want to learn songs that move them, they want to learn to make their own music. This is how I learned myself.”
After taking up film composing in the early 1980s, Zimmer scored his first Oscar nod for “Rain Man.” He took home his first Academy Award for “The Lion King” and his second for “Dune.”
While many kids never make it past Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” or Beethoven’s “Für Elise,” Payam Music taps into their innate curiosity and creativity, Zimmer said.
“Young people don’t want to do homework. It’s just too damn boring and there are so many better ways to learn,” he said. “Kids want to play. They love music, but teaching them with drills takes all the fun out of it. Make it more exciting, make it more creative, make it more relevant to today.”
Music teachers say the concept that children can learn music the way they learn language is nothing new. Payam Music is also not the only school dreaming up innovative ways to engage the next generation of students.
Where Payam Music may have cracked the code?
Motivation, says Samuel McDougle, an assistant psychology professor at Yale and a bluegrass musician who researches how the mind and body work in concert to make music. The school’s students refer to their piano homework as “fun work.”
“I think it’s good to try to innovate in all fields,” McDougle said. “At the end of the day, if it works, it works.”
Cuban, the former majority owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and retired ABC reality TV series “Shark Tank” investor, took piano lessons when he was 9 years old. His mom hounded him to practice at least an hour a day and the lessons only lasted six months. Cuban continued to play on his own. Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” was his go-to song to play in college.
His love for the piano was lifelong but not his playing days. He’s convinced the Payam method would have given him the motivation to pursue it.
“The reason I invested, and the reason why I think this is so amazing, is I know what it did for me in terms of confidence, in terms of always having an outlet. Literally, when I had nothing, I made sure I had a keyboard, just because it’s a chance to just express yourself in a way that allows you to feel things that you may not be able to communicate otherwise,” Cuban said.
“By simplifying it and having the schools, you get kids out of the house, you get kids away from their electronic devices, but you also give them a unique sense of confidence and a unique way to express themselves that only somebody who plays an instrument truly understands,” he said.
Tech innovator invests in joy without screens
For Partovi too, music has been a constant since childhood. He and his twin brother Ali learned to play the piano as children when they were stuck at home in war-torn Iran following the Islamic revolution.
At first, their father cut out musical notes and taped them to the piano keys so they could teach themselves to play. Then he got them a piano teacher.
After immigrating to the United States, the family moved in with Partovi’s grandmother and lived in a single room. No longer able to afford a piano or lessons, Partovi continued to play on his own. Over the years, the piano became an emotional outlet for Partovi, who composes his own music.
In a world increasingly subsumed by the technology he has spent his career developing, Partovi wants children to grow up with music the way he did.
“The more the human race advances in technology, the more we also need to advance in the things that make us human in the first place,” he said. “Just as everyone is getting more into their screens, more into their phones and more into their keyboards, I think it’s important to remind everybody that you also should do things that bring joy without any screen involved.”
Interest in music education still runs strong. About half of parents – 54% – sign their kids up for music, dance or art lessons, with parents who have more education and disposable income enrolling their kids at even higher rates, according to the Pew Research Center.
The National Center for Education Statistics says about 1.3 million students are enrolled in piano classes at the elementary, middle and high school level.
With school budget cuts to arts programs, parents are increasingly turning to private lessons. Those lessons generate annual revenue of $725 million, but piano lessons make up just $83 million of that, according to market research firm IBISWorld.
Gabriel Seiler, a senior analyst with IBISWorld, anticipates growing demand for piano because of how instrumental it is in the creation of musical tracks in today’s most popular genres such as hip hop, rap and electronic dance music.
“This is an industry where you need new people to be interested in music. That’s the main driver of revenue,” Seiler said. “I think piano is your best bet based on what music is popular right now.”
But technology is rapidly changing how many people study piano, whether through YouTube videos and music apps or increasingly artificial intelligence, he added.
“The main issue is going to be do people want to learn piano by going to a piano teacher or do they watch a video online and pay zero dollars,” Seiler said. “It does surprise me that Silicon Valley would be interested in investing in the old method of physical locations to teach lessons.”
‘Music industry is ready for disruption’
Partovi is wagering that many parents want what he did for his son. Already millions of school-age kids take in-person piano lessons, not to become the next Carnegie Hall virtuoso but for the lifelong benefits of playing music, from boosting creativity to soothing anxiety and depression.
As affordable keyboards and online lessons make piano lessons accessible to more families, Partovi sees potential for the market to grow larger. He’s not drawing a salary and gets “almost nothing” unless the company achieves a “significant level of success, more than 10 times where it is today,” he said.
So far, Payam Music has two schools in Washington, four in California, one in Great Neck, New York, and one in Bethesda, Maryland, with plans to open more.
Lessons cost about $100 for a 50-minute in-person session or $75 for an online session, though fees vary based on age, level and location, among other factors. Partovi says Payam Music plans to offer financial aid and scholarships for families who need them.
Some of Payam Music’s biggest cheerleaders are parents whose children have flourished there.
Afshin Adam Sepehri, a software engineer at Salesforce, says his daughter is now a teacher at Payam Music while studying computer science at the University of Washington and his son, who is still in high school, is progressing quickly.
Sepehri is such an evangelist that he begged Khastkhodaei to invest in Payam Music’s seed round. According to Payam Music, half the investors are parents at the school.
“The music industry is ready for disruption,” Sepehri said. “After centuries, it should change for the better.”
