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Deborah Liu

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37
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2024-01-04
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2024-01-04
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  1. “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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Well, so much of our lives is shaped by decisions made by our ancestors, right? The choice of my parents. I talk 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 going to 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 the 1600s, 1700, 1800s that brought people all over the world that make you who you are.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “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, somebody, one individual can do. We actually have the power of the community that helps build better and deeper experiences.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So if you actually 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 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 make 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 that's put that together that allows us to make that experience good for you.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Is one subset of that. Jet 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 in 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 the experience your grandparents might have had with the Spanish flu in Chicago, 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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “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 in 1950 census came and you have these, you have millions of pages 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 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 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. 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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think that what's amazing about what technology has done over the last 20 years also is that 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 and administrator or a server that you have to build. 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 anyplace.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “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, what was technology like 20 years ago before the iPhone, for example, and where it is today, the ability to have 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 actually am 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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “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 Carola Zazaki, who's a leadership coach, calls it ridiculous, unintentional, ridiculous strategies that we employ. But then how many times 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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “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. So I do 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 rules for 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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I don't think that it's about overt discrimination like my dad faced. It's much more about kind of what societal expectations are. I have three kids. I want a three maternity leave. Did it slow my career down? During those six years, I wasn't promoted at all. In fact, I took a demotion to go to Facebook. And so I don't think it's as easy as pointing to one thing and saying, hey, this was a circumstance like what happens to my father. It's much more of how do we build workplaces where it makes it possible for everyone to rise together.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “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 direction.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, what's really fascinating is obviously 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 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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Do partner with a company called MyChina Roots, which does a little bit of expat genealogy in China as well, and I've used them for my own family.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “But I think the bigger competitor is really time, right? This is a hobby where you're spending time on discovering your family history. 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 a lot of what we're trying to do is bring digitize all of that and make it a lot easier.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, it's been amazing about ancestry. It's just 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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “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 so we can do monetization with outside of ads?”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I got a call when I was actually on attorney 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 it was about 900 employees.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “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 advid 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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “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 is 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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “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, an Indian 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 and we drove to a place he had never been, and we moved and became South Carolina.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Well, as I said, 75% of the United States has said that they're interested in family history. And you looked at it 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. You 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 Meet a Wee. So how do we actually take genealogy from this kind of solo activity where one person's 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 one piece at a time.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “So there was a group of people actually in Proville, 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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “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 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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “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 we have 23 million people who have done their DNA as well. So we have millions of people coming to discover something new about themselves.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “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 1,600 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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “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, is a history of lots of people migrating throughout the world, having impact in so many different ways. And so many people want to go back and understand where they came from so they can understand who they are today.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “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 have 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 assisted 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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “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, 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 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 aunts. 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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “To his 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 in 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.”

    2024-01-04 · The David Rubenstein Show · Deborah Liu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source