Deb Liu, President and CEO, Ancestry
Interviewer: Maria Aspan, FORTUNE

MPW Next Gen 2022 - Taking Back Your Power

Conferences

MPW Next Gen 2022- Taking Back Your Power

I should point out we did not coordinate our house. That is absolutely true. Deb thank you so much for joining us and for being here today, it's great to be here. So you joined ancestry as Ceo about 18 months ago and since then you've not only been a ceo you also read a book Why now and why this book. You know I had I had just been thinking about this book for a long time. You know I have actually had an open door policy for eight years where people who need some code advice could call me and at around eight years I realized I had coached about 1000 women. It's gonna take me another eight years to talk to another 1000 women. And I decided I would write a book. So all the advice because there was a lot of themes that were very similar and so I put it all in the book and I hopefully that will increase the reach and scale of which you know a lot of the lessons that I learned the hard way. And I also talked to a couple of dozen women who also share their stories and their lessons as well. It struck me that it's it's a very practical guide and you acknowledge up front that the system is broken but that you know individuals can't necessarily change the system and you're trying to give advice for how to navigate within it. What like what led you to that conclusion? How do you sort of how do you sort of deal with the the imperfect larger and trying to get ahead yourself or help other women get ahead? Well, I heard that there was criticism of lean in like we shouldn't ask women to do more. We should fix the system. But my question is what do we do in the meantime? Because there's no magic wands. You know, the women who've been fighting for equality all these years, they had to live within the system for so long. And part of this book is to say, look, I see you I hear you for every 100 women, 100 men who are promoted to management, only 86 women are. But nobody tells those 14 women we didn't promote you because you're a woman And so you feel stuck. Maybe you feel like maybe something's wrong with me. You know, same thing for every you know, every person man who asked for a raise, 20% of them will get a raise and 15% of women will get a race. Nobody says the five women, it's just that's the way it is. But my my point of view is, you know, if you don't ask, you know, the probability is zero. So the difference between 15 and 20 is the system. The difference between zero and 15 is the power that we have and that's what what I talk about, take back your power. That's what I mean. You also you talked a lot about some of the personal challenges you've faced, including what struck me was you talked about what a source of strength growing up, your family was your community, you were your family was chinese american immigrants in the south in a town where you were very different from most other people. You felt bullied, you were bullied and um you also talk a bit about your church and how that was also a source of strength for you. But sometimes it created some problems like when you were gonna move across the country and your pastor was like why would your said your fiance or your husband, why would you move across the country for her job? So how do you how do you navigate structures that can be both a source of strength but also um a source of pain. You know, I grew up in a christian home, my parents were christian and raised us in the church and to this day we raised our family as christians as well. But one of the things is it was a very conservative church, especially evangelical churches in the south as many of you know, um Adhered to a certain type of comp carrion is um that says that, you know, men and women have complementary roles. A man should be the head of the household, the woman, you know, so they when we were in premarital counseling, they said to my then fiance, you know, why are you going across the country with Deb to get her? And I was getting my M. B. A. From stanford, I'm so excited to tell our counselors And the pastor said, you know to my husband, you have the lead career, she doesn't need a master's degree to stay at home. And it was really crushing for me because to think that your faith, that somebody who is a leader in your church says to you that your dreams are not worth living, that you know this is outside of what God's intention is for you and to be 24 years old and to hear that and then to say what if I'm doing something wrong. And I had to come to terms with that. And I went to talk to my then boyfriend who has not been my husband for 22 years and I said to him, you know, I just, I didn't know whether to be angry or sad and he said you know your name, Debra for a reason. And in the bible, Deborah is a woman who was the judge of all of Israel, which meant she was a leader and she was a leader written in the bible and he said, you know, God doesn't make mistakes. He didn't write a story about Deborah to say that there was a woman leader and therefore women should be leaders and you know, he talked about the proverbs, 31 woman and if you don't know that story, it's about a woman who is an entrepreneur, she's at home, she's a small business, this owner, she feeds her family, she takes care of so many things. And he said, you know, that's the faith that we have and so, you know, in life, I think there are moments that are that can be stumbling blocks as stepping stones. And for us, that was a transformative moment in our relationship, but also transformed relationship with how I thought about what women's leadership could mean both inside of the church and out. I should point out that you say you're an introvert now, speaking on stage two and 200 people, um have to become easier to become a deliberate extrovert. You know, I just think there's this huge bias in the workplace that we don't really talk about, which is this huge bias towards people who can speak on any topic any time, right? You can rip on things if you can show up to a meeting and speak. And by the way, men often do that in meetings. If you look at the amount of time men and women speak in meetings, men out speak women substantially. And so that hidden bias is something that we all have to face, and we have to decide what you gonna do about it. And for me, being an introvert worked for a long time until it stopped working and I had to decide what am I gonna do with it. And it was a journey for me to teach myself and I decided that speaking up is gonna be a skill that I was going to learn, I was gonna figure out exactly how to do it. I broke it down like every problem, I was a product manager for many years and I broke down the problem and I said, okay, what is my goal? How am I going to measure myself? How am I gonna, Great. And I really kind of work towards that and now I have a comfort level of city Here speaking to you, but that was not true, you know, 15, 20 years ago and I think it's been an evolutionary process. I do think that in the workplace we do have these biases, right? What if English is not your first language? What if you aren't comfortable speaking because you have a disability or you're differently abled? How do we think about actually being more inclusive and how we actually judge people and judge the quality of the work, that this is not the one skill and yet this is just the reality we are in today. I hope that that will change over a period of time. So a couple of years ago you decided to leave facebook after a long career there becoming one of the most senior product manager, female product managers there um to be ceo of a smaller, privately owned tech company. Um how do you feel about that decision today? You know, it's been an incredible journey. I had a wonderful time working at facebook mail meta and you know, but I think I realized that as I got more senior there, I got better at working there and I was having more impact and less learning and I think a lot of you will feel this right, you're learning and impacts are often against each other. So when you get better and better at your job, you're probably not challenging yourself and stretching yourself enough and taking a step back. You know, I remember just how hard it was for me to leave a place that I loved and somebody said to me, what are you gonna learn in the next two years that you haven't already learned and what are you gonna learn the new job in the next two years? And that was the pinching moment and I said, you know what, I want this, I want this opportunity to learn something completely different to see the world differently. And so that's what really kind of showed me that this was the next chapter for me. You know, the end of that chapter doesn't mean that that book is not a part of my life, it just means that you know, I'm going forward to something different with everything that's happened to facebook and at facebook now meta since you've left um, between increasing public scrutiny and criticism to the massive layoffs down last week, how do you um how do you feel about what facebook has evolved into since you since you joined? Well, I think that facebook and its properties WhatsApp in an instagram and messenger. They are such a vital part of our society and I think they can, they will continue to be. And I think that there's a lot of, you know, easy to criticize, but they're doing really important work keeping the world connected. And I think that that's an increasingly something that we should never underestimate. And so I have great fondness for my time. They're, they're incredible people still there really kind of making real change and I'm really excited about that. I do think that, you know, there's a lot happening in tech right now and there's a lot of scrutiny and that's something which is going to continue over a period of time. We're also, we're seeing layoffs across tech right now. Um, how, how are you thinking about this ancestry? What are you doing to prepare for the economic climate or react to the economic climate that we're in. I think the companies that prepare the best that really think hard about kind of where they want to go and what they need to do. Those are the ones who are going to come out stronger on the other side. We don't want to be too reactionary, but we also want to prepare for whatever to come. And I think that, you know, we're going to go through a period over the next 12 months that none of us can anticipate and you know, we have to actually prepare for what that's gonna be. I do think that the companies and say, you know what, this is an opportunity for us to look at efficiency effectiveness for us to think about how we want to situate our workforce, how we want flexible work to go. Those are the companies on the other side, 234 years from now, they're gonna be way stronger than those who said, you know, we're just gonna pull back really quickly or we're gonna swing too hard. I think that somewhere in there is the right path and each company needs to find that for themselves. You've talked about how ancestry you're doing a lot to sort of expand the audience and also expand um its status to make sure that it no longer um serves just a core of people who maybe came from or their ancestors came from Western europe. And to diversify the sources of data that you have. Can you tell us a little bit about where you are in that program? Yes. So part of what we're doing over and we started this kind of, when I joined about 18 months ago was really what we call ancestry for all, how do we make ancestry like, you know, 80% of people in America really interested in and across the world actually are interested in learning more about their family history, where their families come from and yet because of our historical relationships and our records, we are an amazing company. You know, if you come from a western european background, that's just the history of where we came. That's also the partnerships that we have with a lot of the archives and governments. But you know, it doesn't mean that the other people who for whom we don't have records, love their family any less, want to discover their family any less. So the work we've been doing is to get records from different, you know, different diverse regions as well as you know, DNA samples from from other regions to really help turn our product not just to be amazing discovery experience for those from Western europe, but across everybody who loves their family and wants to participate in it. And it's early in our journey. But I do think that that is gonna be the next chapter of where we're gonna go as a company ancestry is privately owned by Black Rock. How do you like business journalist here? Um how do you, how does that affect how you're able to navigate in this environment? And are you glad to be at a private company versus at a large, publicly treated? Well, I think in uncertain times, it's actually better to be a private company because you can't invest in the future and not worry quarter to quarter what you're answering for. We still do earnings calls, we still, you know, put our financial to the, the data is out there but more so you know, your expected, you're not setting expectations trying to beat those expectations. What you're trying to do is really run the business for the long term. And that's what's great about the model that we have is that you know, we're really investing in really revolutionizing and evolving our product towards, you know, different communities making our product from being too. We used to be a very solo activity. We want to make it more connected, bring it all the more user joining your content and you know, make it a family activity that you're doing not only with by yourself but with your family and sharing their discoveries and we can only do that because we don't have to every quarter say we need to hit this specific number or we need to make changes that has given us the freedom to really change the way we think about our products and invest in the product and technology area. I want to end by asking you a little bit about your time on a board on into its board and how that shaped your advocacy to get other women onto boards because I know you spent a lot of time on this. Um, what have you found to be the most effective arguments for championing other women on boards. Well first how I got on the board was that Cheryl Sandberg actually introduced me to brad smith is the Ceo, when I was a random director at facebook where there are hundreds of them and she said, you know, I want you to meet brad smith, he wants to learn about platform and payments. And I said, great. And then she said someday he might have a board seat as, and, and you can join his board. And I thought I'm nobody like I was kind of, you know, really far down the organization. Three years later she called me and she says brad has a position on his, would you like to interview? And at this point I was the GM of a pretty big area and I had risen in the organization and I interviewed and I got the role and what was very interesting was nobody ever called me about a board before into it. And then the week after it was announced, it was on that board every week. I had gotten a call or an email and I thought, okay, the whole system is broken if I wasn't good enough the week before, but the week after and I haven't done anything yet. I had shown up to one board meeting. Um, and then we did the announcement and you know, what is the difference between me the week before and the week after? Somebody validated me and so how do we pay that forward? I can't join aboard a week and there's such an opportunity for us to pay that forward. And by the way, this is the experience of all women on board. By the way, we get asked to be at every other board. And so I pulled together a board list, actually board list published today. I have like a recommended list of amazing women, board board members. And I send that to everybody who contact me. Like you don't need me, you need one of these people who are way better than me. And here's why. And I think sometimes you know, so it's it's the person who opens that door for you. Cheryl did that for me. I want to open that door for other people. And I think that's important work that we need to do is really pay it for because somebody was your sponsor. Somebody open that door. I hope to open that door for the next dozen two dozen people. Deb thank you so much. Thank you.