david: this is, uh, my kitchen table, and it is also my filing system. over much of the past three decades, i've been an investor.

[applause] the highest calling of mankind, i've often thought, was private equity. [laughter] and then i started interviewing. i watched your interviews, so i know how to do some interviewing. [laughter] i've 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 didn't negotiate with him. i did no due diligence. david: i have something i would like to sell. [laughter] and how they stay there. you don't 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. they're 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: let's 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. let's 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 don't know the names of your great grandparents but you might know where they're 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 it's your grandfather's draft card or your grandmother's 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, it's 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 great-grandparents as well. using technology allows us to

help you build out the tree for yourself. if you needed additional help, we have pro-genealogists that can do research projects specifically for you. david: why do people want to know so much about their genealogy? in my case, i'm 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? it's 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 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. david: sometimes i've heard of people, friends of mine who have done ancestry or the equivalent , some other method, and have found out their parent isn't 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 one-time 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. it's 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. what's 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 it's 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, it's 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. let's 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: it's 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 wasn't 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, it's 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 wasn't 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 part-time. i was thinking about quitting tech. i was really struggling and feeling like i wasn't 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, i'm 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 there's 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, i'm 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 wasn't done before? deborah: what has been amazing at ancestry is it has been a resilient company over so many generations and they're 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 don't have to mention names, if you don't 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 it's 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 ex-pat genealogy in china and i've 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: what's really fascinating is, obviously beyond a certain point, the records are from china, so i don't 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 presidents 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 well-known 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, i'm not happy with what i've learned? deborah: 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 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. it's a part of every industry and it's actually going to , increase productivity and make our lives better. ♪ you're a rock star. we're all rock stars. oooo look look at my data driven insights, i'm a rock star.

great job putting finance and hr on one platform with workday. thank you! guys, can you keep it down. i'm working. you people are (guitar noises). hand over the air guitar. i've got another one. tamra, izzy, and emma... they respond to emails with phone calls... and they don't 'circle back', they're already there.

they wear business sneakers and pad their keyboards with something that makes their clickety-clacking... clickety-clackier. 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 that's right for your team. let our expertise round out yours. david: you've 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 hasn't 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 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 is really what the book is about.

david: 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 as a woman in a business environment? deborah: i will give you an example. don't give yourself a free pass. how many times before you turn on that zoom meeting or show up to a meeting do you tell yourself, i'm just going to show up and not say anything? i'm not going to have any impact, i will sit in the back. my friend, who's a leadership coach, calls it unintentional ridiculous strategies that we employ. how many times do you actually leave a meeting when you just did that, where you didn't have an impact? 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 made those choices. the things that don't matter, cut them away. 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. david: did you write this while you are at facebook? deborah: i rode it over a four-year period, partly while

at facebook. david: somebody else at facebook wrote a book about women. leaning in, you are probably familiar with that book. did she say this is my territory? deborah: i can tell you the definitive answer is she wrote the forward to my book. you can read her thoughts on it. david: ok. any more books in the works? deborah: i think i'm good for book writing for now. i actually write a weekly newsletter though where i share thoughts that i have top of mind. david: you have been in the technology world for most of your professional career, where do you think the tech world is going? is artificial intelligence going to eat up the rest of the tech world and where is the future of technology going in silicon valley and elsewhere in the next five or 10 years? deborah: one thing we talk about when we talk about technology is we have this monolithic idea of what it is. but technology is changing different industries at different paces in so many different ways. if you think about the things, what was technology like 20 years ago before the iphone and for example and where it is today, the ability to have answers in your pocket. genai is going to make it easier

to access more information faster. how do we think about those things and where will it go beyond this? i'm very bullish on technology because technology is an underpinning. it is not its own industry. it's a part of every industry and it will increase , productivity and make our lives better. david: i see. so do you think technology is still going to be centered in united states largely around the silicon valley area or is it going to change? deborah: i think what's amazing about what technology has done, now you can start an app anywhere in the world, you can live anywhere, you can have aws , and you can set up and not have to have a system administrator or a server that you have to build. now it has 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. david: artificial intelligence, ai, has changed the world and has changed it dramatically, people believe.

what is ai going to be able to do for you or not do for you? deborah: the most incredible thing about ai is genai is coming and changing the way we do things. so much of what we do every day is already involving ai. last year, a 1950's census came. you have millions of these records that are handwritten, just people going door to door and writing it down. and we had done the 1940 census 10 years before that, it took us nine months to digitize it. people typing things, indexing it manually. this time in the 1950's it took us nine days to do the same thing because we built ai around handwriting recognition and it allowed 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. genai is the type of ai that's coming that's helping people discover things in a different way. so ai is a very fast field and genai is a subset of that. genai helps understand storytelling. for example, my parents

immigrated in the 1960's. what was it like and why were asian americans coming out large rates in the 1960's? a lot of that has to do with a history around the chinese exclusion act and those types of things. with genai in mind we can answer the question. we can answer questions of the experience your grandparents might've had with the spanish flu in chicago. these types of things. we think that that is 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. david: most of what you do or a a lot of it i think is based on public records that exist, but sometimes public records don't always have the full story. do you have people sometimes, if you have a service where you say, the public record shows a, b, and c, but if you want to know about d, e, and f, you have to go and talk to people or you don't do that? deborah: if you think about our record collection, 70% of our 40 billion records are actually proprietary. so just what public records are

available is available on our site, but we have so much more records we have gotten from archives and partnerships over the years. beyond that, we have people who are every day organizing those records, augmenting them, they they can comment on them and makes it richer. they attach it to peoples of the record might not look like it's related to your great uncle, but somebody put it on their tree and you can explore it as well. it's really 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 that has put that together that allows us to make that experience good. david: 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. they had some things in there i would prefer not to know, but they were based on public records. but if i went to your service and became a subscriber, would i learn a lot more? deborah: yes, you could potentially learn a ton more

because there might be records you don't see. one thing we have is the archives of newspapers.com where you might have all the newspaper mentions or we might have trees that people have built, so it goes deeper than what one individual can do. we actually have the power of the community that helps build better and deeper experiences. david: 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? deborah: so much of our lives are shaped by decisions made by our ancestors. the choice of my parents. i talked to my parents about when they came to america. they picked up and went to a country with two suitcases and a few hundred dollars and said i will start a new life, not knowing whether they would make enough money to return home. that journey is so incredible and yet that journey is something i know about because it was proximately so close to what happened because it happened in 1960.

that happened in 1600's, 1700's, 1800's and brought people from all over the w it makes you who you are today. that journey is so important to understand because it makes you who you are. david: very interesting business and you expect to stay running this for quite some time, i assume? deborah: absolutely, i love it. is so interesting to know every day we are helping people discover things about themselves. ♪

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orlando: private equity firms, the good ones definitely beat the public markets. we are in the business of turning great innovators into great businesses. there is one component of our industry that people need to focus on. and it is not ch