Name: Leadership Next: Ancestry CEO, Deb Liu
Uploaded: 2023-11-28
Duration: 3 min 9 s
Description: Ancestry CEO Deb Liu on the challenges facing women leaders and choosing to become 'the victim or beneficiary of your own history.'

Ancestry CEO Deb Liu on the challenges facing women leaders and choosing to become "the victim or beneficiary of your own history."

Leadership Next: Ancestry CEO, Deb Liu

Leadership

You know, rather than just looking up, you know, the name of an ancestor, you can actually now see where their descendants live as well. You can connect with them, you can message and so all of that has come together to building the family history experience that we have today. Welcome to leadership. Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Alan Murray and I'm Mia Yeah, you know, early in the pandemic actually, right before the pandemic hit, um I was called for a public company CEO position to ask if I wanted to interview and I just, it, it didn't occur to me that was something that was possible. And so I went through that process thanks to Jim Citroen. And I remember sitting down to dinner and I said, well, why me, like, why would you ask me? And he said, well, why not you? And he opened the door to a lot of possibilities of maybe this is the next step for me. Ancestry, started in Provo Utah. And it was really focused on publishing genealogy books and documents and helping people find their roots and it started there. But then it started to evolve, it started publishing more. It went online early with floppy disks and C DS. And then it actually built one of the first subscription products online ever, which is basically they allowed their community to, to get a lot of their content on a subscription. And it is absolutely a tech company. It is actually a network where we're allowing people to build their family trees to document their family story to upload their family photos. And now, you know, it's with over 40 billion records, we make that available to anybody who joins our ecosystem. There was a study that was published in the Harvard Business review that said men are considered leaders if they're competent and women are considered leaders if they're competent and warm. And in the two by two matrix of men and women being warm and not warm and competent and not competent, look, there's just an extra criteria for women is that if, if you do not have the base warmth to be to, for people to feel like they can connect with you, you will struggle as a woman leader, you get to decide what to do. You get to say, you know what? That's not fair and absolutely, I agree. That's not fair. And then you get to decide what do I do next? I say in the book, you know, you get to be the victim or beneficiary of your own history. And for a long time, I just felt like a victim. I was so upset and angry at how I grew up that it was actually bleeding into my relationships at work. And in fact, I talked about how at one point I, I gave a presentation about a product that was finally succeeding was making, you know, we are on a path to a billion dollar business. And Cheryl pulls me aside after the meeting and she said you can stop fighting. Now you won. And she's not talking about not fighting for equal rights or not fighting for somebody who was in the same situation. She was talking about how that fight was actually alienating people. The fight for feeling like I had to win every argument. And it really shaped me in so many different ways and it actually brought me back when she said that I had to take a step back and say, you know what? She's right. And so much of this was unpacking all of those things and now to going from a victim to the beneficiary of my history and actually taking those things, processing them and then helping me to look forward.