Deborah Liu

In recent years, people all over the world seem fascinated to learn more about their family history. One of the companies helping people do that is Ancestry, a company now led by Deblu, a technology expert previously working at PayPal and Facebook. I had a chance to sit down with her to learn why it is that people are so interested about their ancestry. So tell me this. What does Ancestry do for its customers.

Ancestry has over three point six million active subscribers, and these subscribers come to learn more about their history, building their family tree. They're discovering new content, They're actually building their family story every single day on our platform. We

I suppose I go onto your webs site and I say, okay, I want to learn about my ancestors. Do I send an email to you saying I want to subscribe, and do you actually do the searching, or do they do the searching based on the records that that you make available to them.

We consider this a collaborative process. So let's say you go to ancestry dot com and you sign up. The first thing you do is put in a little bit about yourself. You can put your name, your birthday, where you're from, and then we start helping you build that family tree, so you know a little bit about your parents, your grandparents, and as you go further further in your history, we might actually suggest ancestors that you didn't know about.

So, but if somebody calls up or sends an email and says I want to use the service, they pay a fee and then you have somebody that works with them, or you just give them their records and they can dig through it. But then if they need help, they can maybe pay a little a bigger fee or something.

Yeah, so if you come, it's really the automation and technology that we've built. You know, we have over one hundred and thirty million family trees that are already been built, and using that we can help derive a little bit about your cousins, your second cousins, your third cousins, something about your grandparents, your great grandparents as well. And so using technology, this assist of technology allows us to help

So why do people want to know so much about their genealogy? Because, like in my case, I'm afraid I might have some horse thieves in my background and I wouldn't want to know that. So tell me why do people want to know so much about their background?

Well, you know, we actually surveyed folks and three quarters of Americans actually want to learn more about their family history. But a lot of that is we call it journeys a personal discovery because you know, what brought you here today,

Typically people can go back one hundred years, two hundred years, two hundred years. Sometimes in Europe people say I can go back a thousand years or so. Is that realistic? You can trace your ancestry back a thousand years?

Definitely, especially of European heritage. We have those records. We have worked with archives and governments throughout Europe to actually gather those documents so that you can trace yourself. And so many people say, hey, I trace myself to a sixteen hundred royalty.

You know.

And what's really amazing about that is that journey is actually helping unfold so many stories, not just the most famous royal that you have, but also all the people in between.

Sometimes I've heard of people, some friends of mine, who have done ancestry or equivalent on some other method and they find that their parent isn't really their parent or their biological parent. So that happened a lot.

We do see occasionally surprises in your DNA in particular, so when people take a DNA test, you'll find some relatives that you knew about who've already done the test. But sometimes we do find folks who get new information about their family. We actually have a dedicated team that helps folks who experience that so that they can talk them through that experience.

So how many people here go on to your website and say I want to learn my genealogy.

Actually millions of people come even every month every year to actually learn about the genealogy. As I said, we have three point six million active subscribers, but we have millions of people come. And you know, we have twenty three million people who have done their DNA as well, So we have millions of people coming to discover something new about themselves.

So today, if somebody wants to use your service, they become a subscriber. But a subscriber means you pay a one time fee or an ongoing monthly fee. How does that work?

So ours is a subscription service, so you pay an ongoing monthly fee as you continue to access your tree and access the records. We have new records coming in all the time. So not only do you know you're not just finishing your tree, there's actually new records that are coming to help you on your journey. So you know, we have over forty billion records already on our platform. This year actually we're adding fifteen billion, so there's more discoveries to be had all the time.

So the average person who is a subscriber, they are subscriber for three months six months a year. How long does somebody typically subscribe.

Well, you know, people come for various reasons and there's actually different tenures. Some people are doing it for a single project where they want to discover one thing, maybe for a fiftieth anniversary party. Others are really here to you know, we have subscribers who've been here ten twenty years, and so it's really important to really think about what it is that they're trying to do.

When did this company start?

So this year we celebrate our fortieth anniversary. Surprisingly has been it's been such a journey over the four decades.

So who helped start it?

So you know, there was a group of people actually in Provo, Utah who started this as a publishing company. So this was not always a technology company or subscription company. It started as a publishing company, publishing records and genealogy to help people discover their past.

So you've obviously risen up to run a publicly traded company. And what's the market value of this company today?

So we're actually privately owned by Blackstone and the transaction was at about close to five billion Dollarsay, it was public, It was public about ten years ago, and now.

It's privately owned by Blackstone.

That's correct.

Okay, So presumably Blackstone, since I know that business reasonly, well, they'll probably try to sell it at some point or take a public but not in the media future.

Yeah, I mean I think, look, you know there are owners, and I think you know our partnership with them is very very close.

Right, So how are you going to grow the company? The company is now the biggest in the United States certainly maybe the biggest in the world. But everybody wants growth. So how are you going to grow the company? Or we have new lines of activity you're going to get into or something like that.

Well, as I said, you know, seventy five percent of the United States has said that they're interested in family history, and you look at globally, actually in many key countries that we're in that's very similar as well. There's so many more people interested than are in the category today and part of that is pretty intimidating. And come to our site. You know, you're trying to figure out how to make it work. We want to make it simpler.

So what about your DNA and your ancestry of you to check that out?

I have, I have done my DNA and no surprise, I am Southern Chinese and so my family is from guangzhel I.

See, let's talk about your background for a moment. You grew up where.

I grew up? Well, I was born in New York and when I was six, I moved to a small town in you're Charleston, South Carolina.

And why did you do do that.

So my dad actually was discriminating against at work, and my parents really felt like there wasn't a future for them in New York. And so his friend in Indianamerican family said, come down to Charleston. I work at the Charleston Naval Shipyard and the government doesn't discriminate. So my dad, I have no idea what he was thinking, picked up our whole family. We drove to a place he had never been, and we moved and became South Carolina.

And were your parents immigrants from China or were they born here?

So my parents were both immigrants from Hong Kong and they actually met and married here.

And so you grew up in Charleston, right, yes? And so where'd you go to high school?

I went to school. It's a place called Hanahan High School. So it's a small town about thirty minutes from Charleston.

And then you went to Duke University I did. And were you an engineer student?

I was. I studied civil and environmental engineering at Duke.

Were there a lot of women in engineering at that time?

Not at that time and probably still not as much as it could be today.

And then after you graduated, what did you do.

So I graduated and went to Boston Consulting Group. And then right after that, after a couple of years of being in the Atlanta office, I went to Stanford for business school.

Okay, so you graduated from Stanford, and then where did you go?

So it wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life. We thought we wanted to move back to the South, and so we were looking for jobs, but the economy was terrible, and so I stumbled on the startup. It's called PayPal. Is actually fairly large today, but obviously when I was there, there were about three hundred people in Mountain View working at that company. And I joined.

She joined PayPal, and what was your responsibility at PayPal?

So I joined as a product manager. Back then, there weren't a lot of product managers, and I wasn't one hundred percent sure what the job was. When I showed up, they asked me, well, just tell us what you think we should build. And I thought, as an advid eBay seller, I was a power seller at one point. I I had all these things to make the selling experience better, and so I led the seller experience for a time and eventually led the integration between PayPal and eBay.

Right, So after PayPal, where did you go?

I finished up at PayPal after a few years. I had had my son, I was working part time. I was thinking about quitting tech. I was really struggling and feeling like I was making a difference. And I got a call to lead the buyer experience at eBay, where I spent a couple of years.

And then after that, did you join Facebook at some point?

Yeah? I got a call when I was actually on attorney leave with my daughter. So and my friend had joined Facebook and said, I have the perfect job for you. You need to come interview. And I thought, I'm nursing a newborn, I have a toddler, It's probably not the time to do another startup. And at the time Facebook was a startup, but I just had to see where it was going to go. And I joined Facebook when it was about nine hundred employees.

And what was your job at Facebook?

So I was in product marketing. So I was really there to build what we call consumer modization, so the alternative to ads. So is there a different different products we can do modization with outside of ads?

Right? So how many years were you at Facebook?

Eleven years? I was there for over a decade, right, so over.

A decade and then somebody calls you a headhunter and says, how about Ancestry.

Yes, I did actually get an email that said, Hey, there's a tech company looking for CEO. Do you want to talk to us? And at first I I had deleted a lot of those emails over the years, but I thought, I'm really interested, So you know.

All right, So when was that?

That was twenty twenty. It was during the lockdown, lots of things going on, but it is really interested in learning more.

So that was about three years ago. So you've been the CEO for three years?

Yeah, about two and a half years. Yea.

So what is your biggest challenge now at anceftire? What are you trying to do that wasn't done before?

Well, what's been amazing about Ancestry is it's been such a resilient company over so many generations, and yet there's so much more to do. And what I'd say is, you know, one of the things I really wanted us

Okay, so you have competitors who else competing with Ancestory. You don't have to mention their names if you don't want to, but I assume they're competitors.

But I think a bigger competitor is really time. Right, this is a hobby where you're spending time on discovering your family history, so you know, things that compete for your time and attention is really our biggest competitor. The other thing is people learning about their family history. They use pencil and paper and research and we you know, a lot of what we're trying to do is bring digitize all of that and make it a lot easier.

And so in the business of genealogy genealogy research, are you the biggest company in the United States?

We are the biggest company in the United States, in the world, I believe in the world too.

So in China, there's a lot of interest in genealogy historically, and I think it's the case that you can trace your genealogy back many hundreds of years, not a typically the case. There is there an equivalent in China of ancestry.

Well, we do partner with a company called my China Roots, which does a little bit of you know, expat genealogy in China as well, and I've used them for my own family.

When you did your own genealogy, what was the most surprising thing that you learned about your own genealogy?

Well, what's really fascinating is, obviously, you know, beyond and point the records are from China and so I don't have access to those records. But what's fascinating is really seeing my cousins all come together and actually pull together photos from our family. Each of us have sections of the family photos from our parents' childhoods, and we realize that each of us only had a portion of them, and we've all been scanning them and actually putting them together onto ancestry.

Now do you do the ancestry of let's say, presence of the United States? Have you've ever done that? Or Presence ever call you up and say can you chase my ancestry?

We do have some well known people's ancestry on there's public trees that we have put out, and it's something that we have done for folks.

And do people ever call you after they get their research down and they say, I'm not happy with what I learned.

Actually, a lot of people it's really a journey sometimes what they learned for the first time and how they feel the first call versus the second, versus the third. People are processing new information about themselves that they might never have known, and so part of that is part of what we do is try to help them along in that journey. I don't think that it's about discrimination, and like my dad faced, it's much more about kind of what societal expectations are. I have three kids, I

You've written a book about how women can maybe get ahead in their careers. So what prompted you to write that book, when did you have time to write it, and what are the main lessons that somebody who hasn't read the book yet might learn from you? Right now? About the book?

You know, yeah, I started this book Journey actually several years ago. It was actually a four year process, and when I was working on it, it was because I was coaching a lot of women. So at that point I

I suppose I don't want to spend the money to buy the book, but I'm thinking about buying the book, and I'm a woman. Can you give me one tip or something or one thing that you would say somebody should do if they want to rise up there a woman in a business environment.

Well, give you an example, you know, don't give yourself a free pass? Right, how many times before you turn on that zoom meeting, before you show up to a meeting, do you tell yourself, well, I'm just going to show up and not say anything. I'm not going to have any impact. I'm just going to sit in the back. Like my friend caroliz Azaki, who's a leadership coach, calls

So did you write this when you were at Facebook or so.

I wrote it over for your period and partly when I was at Facebook.

And there was somebody else at Facebook that wrote a book about women leaning in. You're probably familiar with that book. Did she say, Hey, look, this is my territory. You don't write a book about this.

Well, I can tell you the definitive answer. She wrote the forward to my book, So you can watch the book. You you could read her thoughts on it.

Okay, any more books than the works, I.

Think I'm good for book writing for now. I actually write a weekly newsletter though, where I share some thoughts that I'm having top of mind.

So you've been in the technology world for most of your professional career. Where do you think the tech world is going as artificial intelligence is going to eat up the rest of the tech world, and where do you think the future of technology is going in Silicon Valley and elsewhere over the next five or ten years.

Well, I think that one thing we talk about when we talk about technology is we have this kind of monolithic idea of what it is, but actually Technology is changing different industries at different paces in so many different ways. And if you think about the things, you know, what was technology like twenty years ago before the iPhone, for example, and where it is today. The ability to have you know answers in your pocket Jenai is going to make

I see. So do you think technology is still going to be centered in the United State it's largely around the Silicon Valley area, or is it going to change?

I think that what's amazing about what technology has done over the last twenty years also is that you know, now you can start an app anywhere in the world, you can live anywhere, you can have you know aws, and you can set up and not have to have a system ANDAs administrator or a server that you have

So artificial intelligence AI has changed the world and is changing the world dramatically. People believe, what is AI going to be able to do for you or not do for you?

Well, I think one of the most incredible things about AI is gen AI is coming and it's changing the way we're doing things. But what you have to remember is so much of what we do every day actually is already involving AI. I'll give you an example. So last year, nineteen fifty census came and you know you have these you have millions of pages of these records that are handwritten, just people, you know, going door to door and writing it down. And you know, we had

But most of what you do, or a lot of it, I think, is based on public records that exist, but sometimes public records don't always have the full story. So do you have people Sometimes if you have a service where you say, okay, the public records shows A, B and C. But if you want to know about DEE and F, you have to do more legwork. You have to go out and talk to people, or you don't do that well.

So you know, if you actually think about our record collection, seventy percent of our forty million, forty billion records are actually proprietary. So you know, just what public records are available is available on our site, but we have so much more records that we have gotten from archives and partnerships over the years. And then beyond that, we have people who are every day organizing those records, augmenting them. They can comment on them and actually makes them richer.

Good for you. I made a speech not long ago at a genealogical society in New England, and as a gift to me, they gave me my genealogy had some things in there I prefer not to know. But okay, but they were based on public records. But if I went to your service and became a subscriber, would I learn a lot more?

Yes, you could potentially learn a ton more because there might be records you're not seen. One thing we have is the archive of newspapers dot com, where you might be all the newspaper mentions. We might have trees that other people have built, so it goes even deeper than maybe what you were able to somebody one individual can do. We actually have the power of the community that helps build better and deeper experiences.

So if somebody doesn't know much about ancestry and they are watching this, what would be the best reason why they should go on to your website and become a subscriber. What is it that you have that is unique and why somebody should know more about their background?

Well, so much of our our lives is shaped by decisions made by our ancestors, right the choice of my parents. I talked to my parents about when they came to America. They just picked up, went to a country with two suitcases and a few hundred dollars and said, I want to start a new life, not knowing whether they would

Well, very interesting business, and you expect to stay running this for quite some time, I assume absolutely.

I love it and it's so interesting every day to feel like we're helping so many people really discover things about themselves.

Thanks for listening to hear more of my interviews. You can subscribe and download my podcast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen.