We study the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of random matrices with iid entries. Let N be a random matrix with iid entries which have symmetric distribution. For each unit eigenvector v of N our main results provide a small ball probability bound for linear combinations of the coordinates of v. Our results generalize the works of Meehan and Nguyen [59] as well as Touri and the second author [67, 68, 69] for random symmetric matrices. Along the way, we provide an optimal estimate of the probability that an iid matrix has simple spectrum, improving a recent result of Ge [37]. Our techniques also allow us to establish analogous results for the adjacency matrix of a random directed graph, and as an application we establish controllability properties of network control systems on directed graphs.