The David Rubenstein Show: Deborah Liu

This is my kitchen table and also my filing system. Over much of the past three decades, I've been an investor. The highest calling of mankind I've often thought was private equity. And then I started interviewing. Well, I watch your interviews because I know how to do some interviews. I've learned in doing my interviews how leaders make it to the top. I asked him how much he wanted. He said 250. I said fine. I didn't negotiate with him. I did no due diligence. I have something I'd like to sell and how they stay there. You don't feel inadequate now because being only the second wealthiest man in the world. Is that right? 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 that people are so interested about their ancestry. So tell me this. What does Ancestry do for its customers? Ancestry has over 3.6 million active subscribers, and these subscribers come to learn more about their history. They're building their family tree. They're discovering new content. They're actually building their family story every single day on our platform. We also have a business in consumer genomics. So 23 million people have taken their DNA test, and we can show you a little bit more about your family history through genetics. Really where you're from, your communities, ethnicity, but we can also show matches such as distant cousins that you might never have discovered. Let's suppose I go onto your website and I say, OK, 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? We consider this a collaborative process. So let's say you go to Ancestry.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 a little bit about your parents, your grandparents. And as you go further and further in your history, we might actually suggest ancestors that you didn't know about. So maybe you don't know the names of your great-grandparents, but you might know where they're from. Or you might not know that much about your great-aunt. We would actually say, hey, this might be a potential ancestor of yours. And then we actually unfold their history as well. So maybe it's your grandfather's draft card or your grandmother's immigration papers. We start helping you kind of put together the story of their lives. 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 the records and they can dig through it. But then if they need help, they can maybe pay a little bit of 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 130 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 assistive technology allows us to help you build out your tree for yourself. Now, if you need an additional help, we actually have what we call pro-genealogists that can actually do research projects specifically for you as well. 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, you know, three quarters of Americans actually want to learn more about their family history. But a lot of that is, we call it journeys of personal discovery because, you know, what brought you here today? What brings your children here? You know, it's a history of lots of people migrating throughout the world, you know, having impact in so many different ways. And so so many people want to go back and understand where they came from so they can understand who they are today. Typically, people can go back 100 years, 200 years, 300 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 1600 royalty, you know, and it's 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 the equivalent of some other method, and they find that their parent isn't really their parent or their biological parent. Does that happen a lot? We do see occasionally surprises in your DNA in particular. So when people take a DNA test, you know, you'll find, you know, 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 a year 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 3.6 million active subscribers, but we have millions of people come and, you 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 do you 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, 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 40 billion records already on our platform this year. Actually, we're adding 15 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 50th anniversary party. Others are really here to, you know, we have subscribers who've been here 10, 20 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 40th anniversary. Surprisingly, 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 $5 billion a few years ago. OK, so it was public? It was public about 10 years ago. And now it's privately owned by Blackstone? That's correct. OK, so presumably Blackstone, since I know that business reasonably well, they'll probably try to sell it at some point or take it public, but not in the immediate future. Yeah, I mean, I think like, you know, they're our 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? Are you going to have new lines of activity you're going to get into or something like that? Well, as I said, you know, 75% 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. Come to our site. You know, you're trying to figure out how to make it work. We want to make it simpler. And one of the things we're doing is on top of Ancestry for All, we have something we call Me to We. So how do we actually take genealogy from this kind of solo activity where one person is doing it for the family and bring your family together so that as we're doing with my cousins, we're adding photos together. We're talking about those things. We're actually collecting family history, you know, one piece at a time. Okay. And your ancestry, have you checked that out? I have. I have done my DNA and no surprise, I am Southern Chinese. And so my family is from Guangzhou. I see. Let's talk about your background for a moment. You grew up where? I grew up, well, so I was born in New York. And when I was six, I moved to a small town near Charleston, South Carolina. And why did you do that? So my dad actually was discriminated against at work, and my parents really felt like there wasn't a future for them in New York. And so his friend, an Indian American 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 a school. It's a place called Hanahan High School. It's a small town about 30 minutes from Charleston. And then you went to Duke University? I did. And were you an engineering 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 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 I 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. It's actually fairly large today, but obviously when I was there, there were about 300 people in Mountain View working at that company, and I joined. All right, so you 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 100% 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 avid eBay seller, I was a power seller at one point, 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. All right, so after PayPal, where did you go? I finished up at PayPal after a few years. I had my son. I was working part-time. I was thinking about quitting tech. I was really struggling and feeling like I wasn't making a difference, and I got a call to lead the buyer experience at eBay, where I spent a couple years. And then after that, did you join Facebook at some point? Yeah, I got a call when I was actually on maternity leave with my daughter, 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. This is 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 I was about 900 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 modernization. So the alternative to ads. So is there a different product we can do modernization with outside of ads? All right. So how many years were you at Facebook? 11 years. I was there for over a decade. All 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 a CEO. Do you want to talk to us? And at first, 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 2020. It was during the lockdown. Lots of things going on. But I was just really interested in learning more. So that was about three years ago. So you've been a CEO for three years now? Yeah, about two and a half years. OK. So what is your biggest challenge now at Ancestry? 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 say is, you know, 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? And so part of the work that we've been doing is really diversifying our product, making sure we're bringing in new communities, new content to make it more possible for people from different backgrounds to have a great experience. OK. So you have competitors. Who else is competing with Ancestry? You don't have to mention their names if you don't want to, but I assume they're competitors. But I think the 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 digitize all of that and make it a lot easier. And so in the business of genealogy research, are you the biggest company in the United States? We are the biggest company in the United States. And in the world? I believe in the world, too. So in China, there's a lot of interest in genealogy historically. I think it's the case that you can trace your genealogy back many hundreds of years, not atypically the case there. Is there an equivalent in China of Ancestry? Well, we do partner with a company called MyChina 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 you learned about your own genealogy? Well, what's really fascinating is obviously, you know, beyond a certain 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 realized 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, presidents of the United States? Have you ever done that? Or presidents ever call you up and say, can you trace my Ancestry? We do have some well-known people's Ancestry on. There's public, you know, trees that we have put out. And it's something that we have done for folks. And do people ever call you up after they get their research done 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 the first time, 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. Where do you think the future of technology is going in Silicon Valley and elsewhere over the next five or 10 years? Technology is an underpinning. It's not its own industry. It is a part of every industry. And it's actually going to increase productivity and actually make our lives better. 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 had coached maybe a thousand women over the years. I did these 15-minute calls to help and help them through their careers. And I realized a lot of the themes were so similar. And 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. And 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, you know, every day, you know, there are so many circumstances where you don't have a lot of power. But when you do, taking advantage of those opportunities and really leaning in and making things happen, that's really what the book is about. All right. Let's 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? They're a woman in a business environment. I'll 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, Carol Izazaki, who's a leadership coach, called it ridiculous, unintentional, ridiculous strategies that we employ. But then how many times, you know, do you actually leave a meeting when you just did that? Where you didn't have an impact. So what if you walked in every meeting every day with intention? What do I want to accomplish today? How do I want to show up? And just made those choices. And the things that don't matter, just cut those things away. Really kind of no longer giving yourself a free pass and saying, you know what, I'm just not going to get that done. That's really critical. So did you write this when you were at Facebook or? So I wrote it over a four year 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 is she wrote the forward to my book. So you can read. You can read. You can read her thoughts on it. OK, many more books in 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 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 10 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 20 years ago before the iPhone, for example, and where it is today, the ability to have, you know, answers in your pocket. Gen AI is going to make it easier to access more information faster. How do we think about all those things? And where is that going to go beyond this? I'm actually very bullish on technology because technology is an underpinning. It's not its own industry. It is a part of every industry. And it's actually going to increase productivity and actually make our lives better. I see. So you think technology is still going to be centered in the United States, 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 20 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 administrator or a server that you have to build. You know, now it's made it so much easier with these tools to actually look at a problem that you have and solve it anywhere. And so I actually think that distributes the ability for us to bring technology together any place. So artificial intelligence, AI, has changed the world and it's changing the world dramatically, people believe. What is AI going to be able to do for you or not do for you? 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, 1950 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 done the 1940 census 10 years before that. It took us nine months to digitize it. This time in 1950, so last year, it took us nine days to do the same thing. And it's because we had built AI around handwriting recognition and it allow us to accelerate so much of the work. That's why we can go from 40 billion records to another 15 billion in just one year because of the technology that we have built over the years. Gen AI is the type of AI that's coming, that's really helping people to discover things in a different way. So AI is a very vast field and gen AI is one subset of that. Gen AI is really helping to understand storytelling. So for example, you know, my parents immigrated in the 60s. What was it like and why were Asian-Americans coming at such large rates in the 1960s? A lot of that has to do with such a history around, you know, the Chinese Exclusion Act and those types of things. And with gen AI in line, we can actually answer that question. We can answer questions of, you know, the experience your grandparents might've had with the Spanish flu in Chicago, you know, these types of things. And we think that that's going to engage people to really learn more about how their parents came to America, how their grandparents lived through various world events. And it's going to be really powerful for people. 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 record shows A, B, and C, but if you want to know about D, E, and F, you have to do more legwork. You have to go out and talk to people or you don't do that. So, you know, if you actually think about our record collection, 70% of our 40 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. They're actually attaching it to people so that a record might not look like it's related to your great uncle, but actually somebody has put it on their tree and you can actually explore it as well. And so it's really kind of both the what is available in our archive, but then the work that humans have put in as subscribers to really make their experience great. Let's put that together that allows us to make that experience good for you. Now, 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 had not seen. One thing we have is the archive of newspapers.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. Okay, so somebody doesn't know much about ancestry and they are watching this. What would be the best reason why they should go onto 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 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'm gonna start a new life. Not knowing whether they would ever make enough money to even return home. That journey is so incredible. And yet that journey is something I know about because it was so approximately so close to what happened because it happened in 1960. But that happened in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s. It brought people all over the world that make you who you are today. And I think that that journey is so important to understand because it makes you who you are. 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.