david: this is my kitchen table and also my filing system.

over much of the past three decades i have been an investor. the highest calling of mankind i've often thought was private equity. then, i started interviewing. i what your interview so i know how to do interviews. i've learned from doing my interviews how leaders make it to the top. >> i asked how much he wanted, he said to 50. i did not negotiate or do due diligence. david: i have something i'd like to sell. and how they stay there. you don't feel inadequate for 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 led by 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: it has over three point 6 million active subscribers and they come to learn more about their history. building their family tree, discovering new content, they are building their family story every single day on our platform. we have a business in consumer genomics. 23 million people have taken their dna test and we could 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 distinct -- distant cousins. david: let's suppose i go to your website and i want to learn about my ancestors. do i send an emailed to you saying i want to subscribe, and do you do the searching or do they do the searching based on 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 sign up. but your name, birthday, where you are from and we help you build the family tree. about your parents,

grandparents. as you go 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 know where they're from or you might not know your great aunt. we would say, 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 a story of their lives. david: if somebody calls up her sons and email saying they want to use the service, they pay a fee. 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: if you come, is the automation and technology we built. we have over 130 million family trees that have been built. we can help derive a little bit about your cousins, second cousins, third cousins. something about your grandparents and great-grandparents. the technology allows us to help

you build out the tree for yourself. if you needed additional help, we have pro-genealogists who 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: three quarters of americans want to learn more about their family history. we call it journeys of personal discovery. we call it journey as a personal discovery. what brought you here, 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. 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 you have, but all the people in between. david: sometimes i've heard of people, friends of mine who have done ancestry or the equivalent 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 occasional surprises in your dna. when people take a dna tests 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 who experience that so that they can talk them through that experience. david: how many people 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 learn about the genealogy.

as i said, we have 3.6 million active subscribers, but we have millions of people, we have 23 million people who have done their dna as well and millions of people coming to discover something new about themselves. david: 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: hours -- ours is a subscription service. you pay an ongoing monthly fee has to access your tree in your records. we have new records coming in all the time. there are new records coming to help you on your journey. we have over 40 billion records already on our platform 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 the 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 in utah that 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 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. presumably, blackstone 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? it's 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 is pretty intimidating. 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 we have something called me to we. how do we take genealogy from the solo activity where one person does it for the family and bring your family together? so that as we are doing it, as with my cousins, we at folders together. -- we add photos together.

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 done my dna. no surprise i am southern chinese. david: 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, in indian american family, said come down to charleston i work at the naval , shipyard, and the government does not discriminate. 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 into south carolina. david: where 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? 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: where you and engineer student? deborah: i was. i studied civil and environmental engineering at duke. david: where 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 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 so i wasn't 100% sure with 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, i had all these things to make the selling experience better, i let the seller experience for a time and eventually lead 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 in 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 with a toddler.

this is not the time to do another startup. at the time facebook was a start up 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 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 at facebook? deborah: 11 years. i was there for over a decade. david: over a decade and a headhunter calls you 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. 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 that ancestor, 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 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: do you have competitors? who else is competing with ancestry? you don't have to mention names, but i assume there are competitors. deborah: the biggest competitor's 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 easier. david: in the business of

genealogy research, are you the biggest company in the united states? deborah: we are the biggest company. 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 your genealogy back many hundreds of years, not a typically 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, beyond a certain point, the records are from china, so i don't have access to those records. what's 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 realize 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 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: 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. 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's a part of every industry and it's actually going to increase productivity and make our lives better. ♪

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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 one of the main lessons that somebody who hasn't read the book yet might learn from you right now about the book? deborah: i started this book journey several years ago. it was 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 realize 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 for 10 new rules for women at work and those rules are really to help women take back their power, 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 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 for 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: 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 won't 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 with intention. what do i want to accomplish today how do i want to show up, , and make their choices. the things that don't matter, cut them away. no longer giving yourself a free pass and saying, 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 wrote it over for years, 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: any more books in the works? deborah: i think i'm good for book writing for now. i actually write a weekly newsletter where i share thoughts that i have top of mine. david: you have been in the technology world for most of your professional career, where do you think the tech world is going? will artificial intelligence 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 talking about technology is 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 where it is today, the ability to have answers in your pocket. genai makes 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's not its own industry, it's a part of every industry and it will increase productivity and make our lives better. david: 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: 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 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 an solvay anywhere. 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 change it dramatically, what is ai going to be able to do for

you or not do for you? deborah: the most incredible thing about ai's 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 allowed us to accelerate. 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. ai is a very fast field and

jenna ai is offset 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 19 60's? a lot of that has to do with a history around the chinese exclusion act on 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. 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 lot 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 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 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, what i learned a lot more? deborah: yes, 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 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 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 if they would make enough money to return home. that journey is so incredible and yet that journey is

something i know about is because it was proximately so close to what happened because it happened in 1960. that happened in 1600s, 1700s, 1800's, 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 say running this for quite some time, i assume? deborah: absolutely, i love it. it's interesting to know we are helping people discover things about themselves. ♪ (♪♪) at enterprise mobility, we never stop looking for new mobility solutions. because sometimes the best road forward, is the one you didn't expect. (♪♪)

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