[applause] the highest calling of mankind, ive often thought, was private equity. [laughter] and then i started interviewing. I watched your interviews, so i know how to do some interviewing. [laughter] ive learned from doing my interviews how leaders make it to the top. Jeff i asked him how much he wanted. He said 250. I said fine. I didnt negotiate with him. I did no due diligence. David i have something i would like to sell. [laughter] and how they stay there. You dont feel inadequate now because being only the second wealthiest man in the world, is that right . [laughter] 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 deb liu, a Technology Expert previously working at paypal and facebook. I had a chance to sit down with her to learn why it is people were so interested about their ancestry. Tell me this, what does ancestry do for its customers . Deborah ancestry has over 3. 6 million active subscribers, and these subscribers come to learn more about their history. Theyre building their family tree, discovering new content, they are building their family story every single day on our platform. We also have a business in consumer genomics. 23 Million People have taken their dna test, and we can show you more about your Family History through genetics. Really where you are from, your communities, ethnicities, but we can also show matches such as distant cousins you might never have discovered. David lets suppose i go to your website and 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 you make available to them . Deborah we consider this a collaborative process. Lets say you go to ancestry. Com and sign up. The first thing you do is put in a little about yourself. You can put your name, birthday, where you are from and we help you build the family tree. A little bit about your parents, grandparents. As you go further and further into your history, we might suggest ancestors you did not know about. Maybe you dont know the names of your great grandparents but you might know where theyre from or you might not know much about your great aunt. We would say, hey, this might be a potential ancestor of yours. We actually unfold their history. Maybe its your grandfathers draft card or your grandmothers immigration papers. We start helping you put together the story of their lives. David if somebody calls up or sends an email saying they want to use the service, they pay a fee, and then you have somebody that works with them or you give them the records and they can dig through it or if they need help they can pay a bigger fee or something . Deborah yeah, so if you come, its the automation and technology we built. We have over 130 million family trees that have already been built. We can help derive a little bit about your cousins, second cousins, third cousins. Something about your grandparents and greatgrandparents as well. Using Technology Allows us to help you build out the tree for yourself. If you needed additional help, we have progenealogists that can do Research Projects specifically for you. David why do people want to know so much about their genealogy . In my case, im afraid i might have horse thieves in my background and i may not want to know that. Why would people want to know about their background . Deborah we actually survey folks, and three quarters of americans want to learn more about their Family History. We call it journeys of personal discovery. What brought you here today . What brings your children here . Its a history of lots of people migrating throughout the world. Having impacts in so many different ways. So many people want to go back and understand where they came from so they can understand who they are today. David typically, people can go back a hundred years, 200 years, 300 years. Sometimes in europe people say i can go back 1000 years. Is that realistic, to trace their ancestry back 1000 years . Deborah 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. So many people say, i traced myself to a 1600 royalty, and whats 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. David sometimes ive heard of people, friends of mine who have done ancestry or the equivalent , some other method, and have found out their parent isnt really their parent or their biological parent. Does that happen a lot . Deborah we do see occasionally surprises in your dna. When people take a dna test, you will find some relatives that you knew about who have already done the test but sometimes we do find folks who get new information about their family. We have a dedicated team that helps folks who experience that so that they can talk them through that experience. David how many people a year go on to your website and say i want to learn my genealogy . Deborah millions of people come even every month, every year to actually learn about the genealogy. As i said, we have 3. 6 million active subscribers, but we have millions of people who come. We have 23 Million People who have done their dna as well and millions of people coming to discover something new about themselves. David so today, if somebody wants to use your service, they become a subscriber. But a subscriber means you pay a onetime fee or an ongoing monthly fee . How does that work . Deborah ours is a subscription service. You pay an ongoing monthly fee as you continue to access your tree and access your records. We have new records coming in all the time. You are not just finishing your tree. There are new records coming to help you on your journey. We have over 40 billion records already on our platform this. This year we are adding 15 , billion. There are more discoveries to be had all the time. David the average person who is a subscriber, they are a subscriber for three months, six months, a year . How long does someone typically subscribe . Deborah people come for various reasons. There are different tenures. Some people do it for a different project where they want to discover one thing for a 50th anniversary party. We have subscribers who have been here 10, 20 years. Its important to think about what it is they are trying to do. David when did this Company Start . Deborah this year we celebrate our 40th anniversary. Surprisingly, it has been such a journey over the four decades. David who helped start it . Deborah there was a group of people actually in utah who started as a Publishing Company. This was not always a Technology Company or a subscription company. It started as a Publishing Company publishing records and genealogy to help people discover their past. David you have obviously risen up to run a publicly traded company. Whats the market value of this company today . Deborah we are privately owned by blackstone and the transaction was at close to 5 billion. David it was public . Deborah it was public about 10 years ago. David now its privately owned by blackstone. Deborah that is correct. David presumably, blackstone , since i know that business reasonably well, would probably try to sell it at some point or take it public but not in the immediate future . Deborah they are the owners and our partnership with them is very close. David how will you grow the company . The company is now the biggest in the United States, the biggest in the world. Everybody wants growth. How will you grow the company, . Do you have new lines of activity you will get into or Something Like that . Deborah 75 of the United States has said that they are interested in Family History. You look at that globally in many Key Countries we are in, its very similar as well. So many more people are interested in the category. Part of that is pretty intimidating. You come to our site. You try to figure out how to make it work. We want to make it simpler. One of the things we are doing, on top of ancestry for all, we have something called me to we. How do we take genealogy from the solo activity where one person is doing it for the family and bring your family together . So that as we are doing it, as with my cousins, we add photos together. We talk about those things. We are collecting Family History one piece at a time. David what about your dna, and your ancestry, have you checked that out . Deborah i have. I have done my dna. No surprise, i am southern chinese. David i see. Lets talk about your background for a moment. You grew up where . Deborah i was born in new york , and when i was six i moved to a small town near charleston, south carolina. David why did you do that . Deborah my dad was discriminated against at work and my parents felt like there was no future for them in new york. His friend, an Indian American family, said come down to charleston, i work at the naval shipyard, and the government does not 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 s carolinians. David were your parents immigrants from china or were they born here . Deborah my parents are both immigrants from hong kong and they met and married here. David so you grew up in charleston, right . Deborah yes. David where did you go to high school . Deborah its a place called hanahan high school. A small town 30 minutes from charleston. David then you went to Duke University . Deborah i did. David were you an engineer student . Deborah i was. I studied civil and Environmental Engineering at duke. David were there are a lot of women in engineering at that time . Deborah not at that time and probably still not as much as it could be today. David after you graduated, what did you do . Deborah so i graduated and went to boston consulting group. After that after a couple of years of being in the atlanta office, i went to stanford for business school. David you graduated from stanford and where did you go . Deborah i wasnt sure what i wanted to do with my life. We thought we wanted to move back to the south. We were looking for jobs with the economy was terrible. I stumbled on this startup called paypal, its fairly large today, but when i was there there was about 300 people in Mountain View working with the company and i joined. David you join paypal and what was your responsibility at paypal . Deborah i joined as a product manager. Back then there were a lot of product managers and i wasnt 100 sure what the job was. When i showed up they told me to tell them what i thought they should build. As an avid ebay seller, i was a power seller at i had all these one point, things to make the selling experience better, i led the seller experience for a time and eventually led the integration between paypal and ebay. David after paypal, where did you go . Deborah i finished up at paypal, after a few years, i had my son, i was working parttime. I was thinking about quitting tech. I was really struggling and feeling like i wasnt making a difference. I got a call to lead the buyer experience at ebay where i spent a couple of years. David after that, did you join facebook . Deborah i got a call on Maternity Leave with my daughter. My friend had joined facebook and said, i have the perfect job for you, you need to come interview. I thought, im nursing a newborn. I have a toddler. This is not the time to do another startup. At the Time Facebook was a startup but i had to see where it was going to go. I joined facebook when it was about 900 employees. David what was your job at facebook . Deborah i was in product marketing. I was really there to build consumer modernization. The alternative to ads. Is there a different product we can do monetization with outside of ads . David how many years where you were you at facebook . Deborah 11 years. I was there for over a decade. David over a decade and someone calls you, a headhunter, and says, how about ancestry . Deborah yes, i got an email saying theres a tech Company Looking for a ceo, do you want to talk to us. At first i deleted a lot of those emails over the years but i thought, im really interested. David when was that . Deborah that was 2020 during the lockdown, lots of things going on. But i was just really interested in learning more. David that was about three years ago, so you have been the ceo for about three years now . Deborah about two and a half years. David what is your biggest challenge now at ancestry . What are you trying to do that wasnt done before . Deborah what has been amazing at ancestry is it has been a Resilient Company over so many generations and theyre so much yet there is so much more to do. One of the things i really wanted us to do was really make ancestry for all. How do we make the product not just amazing if you have european heritage, but across any heritage . Part of the work we have been doing is diversifying our product, making sure we bring in new communities, new content to make it possible from people from different backgrounds to have a great experience. David ok, so do you have competitors . Who else is competing with ancestry . You dont have to mention names, if you dont want to, but i assume there are competitors. Deborah the biggest competitor is time. This is a hobby where you spend time on discovering your Family History. Things that compete for your time and attention is our biggest competitor. The other thing is people learning about their Family History use pencil and paper and research. A lot of what we are trying to do is digitize all of that and make it a lot easier. David in the business of genealogy research, are you the Biggest Company in the United States . Deborah we are the Biggest Company in the United States,. David in the world . Deborah i believe in the world. David in china, there is a lot of interest in genealogy historically and i think its a case that you can trace yr genealogy back many hundreds of years, not atypically the case there. Is there a equivalent in china of ancestry . Deborah we partner with a Company Called my china roots that does expat genealogy in china and ive used them for my own family. David when you did your own genealogy, what was the most surprising thing you learned about your own genealogy . Deborah whats really fascinating is, obviously beyond a certain point, the records are from china, so i dont have access to those records. But what is fascinating is really seeing my cousins all come together and pull together photos from our family. Each of us have sections of the family photos from our parents childhoods, and we realized that each of us only had a portion of them and we have all been scanning them and putting them together onto ancestry. David do you do the ancestries of president s of the United States . Have you ever done that or do , they call you up and say, can you trace my ancestry . Deborah we have wellknown people and ancestries, public trees we have put out on something we have done for folks. David do people ever call you after they get their Research Done and say, im not happy with what ive learned . Deborah actually, a lot of people. Its really a journey. Sometimes what they learned the first time, how they feel the first call versus the second, versus the third, people are processing new information about themselves they might never have known. And so part of that, part of what we do is try to help them along in that journey. David where do you think the future of technology is going in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the next five or 10 years . Deborah technology is an underpinning, it is not its own industry. Its a part of every industry and its actually going to , increase productivity and make our lives better. Youre a rock star. Were all rock stars. Oooo look look at my data driven insights, im a rock star. Great job putting finance and hr on one platform with workday. Thank you guys, can you keep it down. Im working. You people are guitar noises . Hand over the air guitar. Ive got another one. Tamra, izzy, and emma. They respond to emails with phone calls. And they dont circle back, theyre already there. They wear business sneakers and pad their keyboards with something that makes their clicketyclacking. Clicketyclackier. But no one loves logistics as much as they do. You need tamra, izzy, and emma. They need a retirement plan. Work with principal so we can help you with a retirement and benefits plan thats right for your team. Let our expertise round out yours. David youve written a book about how women can maybe get ahead in their careers. What prompted you to write that book, when did you have time to write it, and what are the main lessons that somebody who hasnt read the book yet might learn from you right now about the book . Deborah you know, yeah, i started this book journey several years ago. It was actually a four year process. And when i was working on it was because i was coaching a lot of women. At that point i had coached maybe a thousand women over the years. I would do 15 minute calls to help them through their careers. And i realized a lot of the themes were similar. So i pulled them together and a lot of the advice i put in the book was based on those conversations that i had over that eight year period. I was able to pull it together into 10 new rules for women at work and those rules are really to help women take back their power, as i say, which is, every day there are so many circumstances where you dont have a lot of power. But when you do, taki