Ex-Ancestry CEO: AI Will Wipe Out Businesses

Hey everyone, I'm super excited to be sitting down with Deb Liu. She's the former CEO of Ancestry, mastermind and VP of Facebook Marketplace at Meta, and a longtime product leader who spearheaded the integration between PayPal and eBay. What I love about Deb isn't just that she was the CEO of a billion-dollar tech company or the creator of an online marketplace for a billion people. It's that she shatters the archetype of the entitled CEO and knows what it takes to get her hands dirty and build something great. She's a wellspring of executive level insight while also being radically open about her own challenges. I want to ask her what tech CEOs need to be thinking about in the age of AI, what we can learn from the tech companies to do it best, but also what it takes to climb the ladder to the chief executive office. Let's find out. Deb, thanks so much for being here. Super excited to have you on the podcast here today. Maybe to start things off, I'm curious, you know, from your perspective, What does being a CEO mean in 2026 in this sort of age of AI? And especially, you know, you've been a tech CEO. What's changed in the past five years at that kind of highest leadership level? Well, I think the expectations are now changing so much. Like, for example, I, you know, I stepped down as CEO last year, but I still stay really close in touch with the company. I sit on a couple of boards and I talk to CEOs all the time. And, you know, what's changed the most is the expectations. and also this time of transition. You think about, okay, so think about three years after the internet came out. That's 1998, right? And then think about the 10 years since then. If you were at a company or CEO of a company in 1998 that was not using the internet, you are not internet native. What were you doing at the time? And then 10 years later, which companies came along and who won and lost? And I think there's a lot of companies that are run by people who, you know, these companies have been around 10, 20 and Ancestry was around for 40 years. And we've gone through a lot of digital disruptions. And yet on the other side, this one is probably coming faster and harder than ever before. Because it's not just changing how we work, it's changing how work is done. It's changing how information is shared. It's changing actually so much of the superstructure of what a company is, which is, you know, you hire young people, you train them in your art, you have them move through the ranks. And yet now so much work can be done in a way that was never done before. And so I think that instead of expectations to change, boards are like, show us your AI strategy. And the answer is, if I asked you for an internet strategy in 1998, what would it have been if you were at Sears or a travel company or an airline, right? And so I do think that we don't look back at precedent from history and understand what that feeling is like for someone today. And yet the expectations are ratcheting up faster than ever. I think that's a really interesting framing of that. And I'm curious, you know, from your perspective, because, you know, at Ancestry, you know, I think even you've described it as inheriting a little bit of a legacy company, right? One that was built in kind of an earlier age of the Internet and working to modernize it. So, you know, as you said, people expect an AI, investors specifically expect an AI strategy and how you're going to build a more modern organization. What does that look like? I mean, I assume it doesn't look like, you know, just being Sears and saying no AI for us. Sorry. But as you think about how you improve your product, how you improve your organization, what are the types of questions you should be answering as you take your business into the modern age? Well, I think the first question I hear that's probably wrong is, how do I bring AI in? But AI is a tool and it's a channel and it's a strategy, but you have to really understand what AI could mean. If you were rebuilding your company today as an AI native company, what would that look like? And I think that's the first question that every company should ask is, if I were starting over today with this TAM, this mission, this brand, and I was starting at AI native, what would I do? because that doesn't say, I think there's a lot of companies who are like, I'll sprinkle a little bit of AI, right? I will get some Claude code in. I'll use, you know, cursor. I'll get a little chat chibi tea for everybody and we're all set. Like that's a strategy. And that's what happened in the internet age, right? A lot of companies were like, well, just use the internet as a channel. It's just one other channel, like every other channel. And yet it took over the world and it changed entire industries. And I think that's what's happening today is companies aren't sure what to do. So they sprinkle a little AI here, a little AI there. But if you actually did a massive rethinking, I'm going to rethink my company as if someone were going to come to instruct me. And by the way, the cost of disruption is now so much lower than it's ever been before, because the cost of building software is now much lower than it's ever been before. And you rethink your company from the ground up and said, if I were building an AI native version of my company, what would that look like today? And then what would I do now with the assets that I have that would give me advantage for the next 10 years? And I think those are really important questions that companies need to really wrestle with, which is, you know, by the way, a thousand people could be trying to replicate your company. They don't all have to win. A handful of them can succeed and disrupt you in a way that you could ever imagine. There were many companies that tried to do what eBay and Amazon tried to do. There were many other companies that, you know, try you look at the music industry, right? And how much that's changed. It doesn't even look anywhere near like what it used to look like. And so really thinking hard about what does, you know, building from the ground up look like, And then saying, OK, but what are our assets? What do we have that someone else from the outside does not have? It's customers, brand, it's loyalty. There was a VC, a prominent VC who said to me, the best companies don't have customers. They have hostages. And I laughed when he said that, but it's true, right? It's people who are so loyal, they feel like they can never leave for whatever reason that is. And if you have that reason, you'll win if you can figure out how to bring AI to make that those people you serve better off. I love the business first approach there. And I'm, you know, personally, I really like all the, you know, the callbacks to kind of the internet age. And I always laugh and think about like the, you know, I remember when it was like, oh, like Pizza Hut has a website now, but you can't order pizza. It just like is basically a poster on the internet that says Pizza Hut exists. And I feel like that's sort of the approach of a lot of companies now who are using AI, right? As you said. They're just using AI for the sake of it. So, you know, there's kind of this interesting challenge, which you said it's how do we rebuild our company if we no matter when we were founded, if we think about this holistically, what should we be doing differently? And Deb, if we look at organizations that aren't doing this, which, you know, sadly, I feel like is most of them, is the reason like fear? Is it a lack of courage at the leadership level that they're going to be too disruptive. And if you want to be successful, how do you actually get from point A to point B? Because I mean, the idea that, okay, we're just going to blow up everything and build something new, that's not quite the right answer. But what does this look like in your experience when you're really getting through the nuts and bolts of a fundamental shift like that? Well, I remember the time. So I was at Facebook in 2009 and I spent 11 years there and we were going through the mobile revolution. So it's 2011, 2012. And the stock price, we went public and our stock price was halved. And I think it was something like $19. So it's somewhere in the $700 today, but it's $19. And it was because we hadn't figured out mobile. We hadn't figured out mobile monetization. And we were a desktop company, right? And so we were like, everybody was a desktop product manager. Everyone was a desktop people coded. Everything oriented in the company was like, make our website amazing and the experience amazing. And suddenly it was like, actually, we need to think about it a different way. And at first, we weren't building even a mobile app. And there was a team inside the company who was like, we should have a native mobile app for Android and iOS. And it was not that, not everybody even agreed to that. I know it seems crazy coming back, looking back at that. And there was a team who was like, no, we're going to build this and every other team is going to help us get there. And we're going to take all of our features and return them to mobile. But we didn't even have any mobile engineers in most of the teams. And so at one point, Mark realized how that transformation had to happen. And he's like, we are now a mobile first company. And he declared it. And he said, every single screenshot, every product, everything has to be mobile native first. And so he's like, I don't want to look at anything that is not mobile first. And he overnight changed that you were not allowed to walk into his office and present any idea. No product reviews could happen unless it was a mobile first product. Think about that transformation. Literally a group of people who've been building products for years and years and years a certain way suddenly had to do it a completely different way. But it forced us to think differently because at the time there are not that many mobile product managers, mobile engineers. And so we had to actually think about the world in a very different way, our products in a different way, how users interact in a different way, you know, and it made us better because we were forced to do that. And so it wasn't that we replaced all the teams with someone else or we reorg the entire company. Instead, it was actually saying, hey, I'm going to change what is said and what is built such that what comes into the room and what gets reviewed from the top is going to look this way. And suddenly we thought that way. Our designers became mobile first, our product managers, our engineers, our analysts. And it really, I mean, within a year or two, everybody was modal native. And it was very interesting. And then they actually had to bring back a team to actually work on the desktop. So it was fascinating because you swing so far to one side. And I built Facebook Marketplace. And at one point, we were arguing about whether we needed a desktop version. And it turns out that we were a great place to sell cars and rent apartments, but nobody wants to rent apartments and cars from a phone because they want to open multiple tabs. And so, again, you go so far one way and then you swing the pendulum back. But I do think that really swinging the pendulum towards AI and saying, what would that look like if we were AI native, if we were AI first, and then come back and say, OK, and here's the things we wouldn't do is a great way to actually balance that out. The story about going mobile first with Facebook is it's so interesting to me. And you talk about the stock price halving. And I mean, you had a You had a front row seat to this, but like it was a big bet. And it kind of seems to me there's like there's a road where nobody puts up their hand and says we're going mobile first. And like, does Facebook even survive in that world or does it end up in the dustbin of history? Like, was that a bet the farm decision at the time? Well, I think it's one of those things where hindsight is always 20-20, right? It seems really obvious today. But at the time we were like, well, you know, there was a group of people who said, what if we just built in React Native and just, you know, built great mobile websites, you know, and things like that. So there were people who had different points of view. And in the end, we built the native apps. Right. And I think that was we were better for it. But I think eventually somebody would have figured it out. There were a lot of really smart people. But I think the thing that made the difference was not the team saying they want to do it, but it was buy in from the top because that's when everybody did it. You know, it's one thing to be a side team working on something. And, you know, Tom Allison was one of the leaders there. He's now running the Facebook app. He's just like, we're going to do this. And then we're going to get people to come alongside us. But, you know, without the everybody's moving in this direction, that mobile app wouldn't have had a lot of features because each of the feature teams had to build their feature into the mobile app one piece at a time. And so getting the buy-in is what made it a rich experience. He could have still had a pretty simple and good experience, but it wouldn't have been the rich experience people expect on a desktop. Check it out at the link below and don't forget to like and subscribe. You know, just by way of background for me, you know, I spent, you know, seven years leading digital, you know, product development teams and an innovation group here. And what's interesting to me about that story is that, you know, what what Mark didn't do is say, oh, we're going to spin up some. As you said, we're not going to spin up some side team and study it and have like an innovation lab. Like he kind of like, you know, cut the proverbial knot and just said, we're going all in here. This is our big bet. And I'm curious, you know, with your experience, what you've seen with other leaders, how you've acted as a leader, you know, what your stance is on that type of approach. When is like a big, you know, bet the farm approach right? Should you be more incremental? And like, can anybody other than the CEO do this? Or is this really kind of the most important thing a CEO can do for the organization? Well, I think that in the things like Bet the Farm, like, you know, for example, prior to my joining Ancestry, the last CEO and the last leadership team said, we are going to move to the cloud. We had our own data centers and they did a lift and shift to AWS. And that was a multi-year painful process because this is a company that's been hosting its own servers, hosting everything. It was one of the first online digital subscriptions that was ever launched on the Internet. And, you know, the move to the cloud was not easy and it took up a ton of resources. We had to stop building a lot of things. And then, you know, and I was there for the kind of finish of the migration and then actually like, you know, a lot of optimization and the work we had to do to make it work on AWS. And but by moving to AWS, that unlocks the actual ability to use like AI models and do all of these things that we could never have done before because, you know, now everything's in the cloud. And I think that's an important lesson, which is sometimes some things are not going to immediately pay off, right? So much is like, it wasn't like there was some financial number at the end. It's like, if we move from our data centers to, you know, our servers to AWS, it's going to save us exactly this much amount of money. That's not how it works, but it does open you up to so many other opportunities. And I think the challenge sometimes is when you bet the farm, you make these decisions, they don't pencil out the time. And this was true for international expansion for Ancestry. We, you know, we had discussed international expansion. We were in multiple countries, but there were many more countries we want to go to. But we didn't have a platform to do it. So we're shipping country by country. It was taking a long time. And every time the decision came up, they would defer it another year, whether I was there or not. So by the time I got there, we had also deferred it because we said, well, it doesn't pencil out. Right. But at some point. And then one day I said to our leadership team, what is the, you know, what is the future us sitting here in this room in three years wish we had done? decided today. Because it's going to take over a year, probably a year and a half, two years to launch this. And we're like, yeah, of course we wish we had shown this. Like my son always says the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is today. It's his favorite quote for some reason. And one of the things that's true is that I wish the leadership team of 10 years ago had made this decision to build the platform, but they didn't. And the leadership team that I was leading two years ago would have made that decision, but they didn't either. And so I said, but what do the future of us in three years wish we had started? Because that journey is a multi-year process. And so I do think sometimes you have to have conviction. And I think that's true of AI as well. I'm, you know, in the firm that I'm working at now, and I just co-founded, we talked to some companies like super forward-leaning. They're like, we want to be AI forward, AI native. And others are like, why would I want to do that? It's going to disrupt my business model. And it's very interesting to see the economy. They're in the same space, but have completely different points of view as to where the world's going to go. And in five years, that thing will, you know, those decisions will play out. I'm just chuckling to myself about the, that would disrupt my business model. Cause it's like, yeah, that's, that's the point. That's, that's what we're here to do. But, but I love, I love the framing device of the, what, what would we wish we had done three years from now? I think that's like a really, really nice North star for decision-making there. I'm curious, you know, just as you were talking about that, one of the other challenges in tech, in product, in leadership in general, is difficulty killing projects or killing initiatives. And like you said, there's like these things just get kicked down the road again and again. Do you have any sort of, you know, insight around just your philosophy on how and when that projects should die? Well, first, I think, you know, I use the analogy whenever we kill something of pruning. right? That a tree is more healthy or a bush is more healthy if you prune it because you're not having dead parts of the tree taking up resources and you're actually giving more life and it actually revitalizes the plant. And so pruning is actually a really good thing. I think there's a lot of companies that have these, and we had this as well in a lot of my projects over the years, was what we called zombie features, right? A few people use it, they love it, and you don't want to get rid of it because they might be upset. But at the same time, it costs just as much to maintain it as it does any other feature that's used by 100 times as many people. And so what are you spending your time on? And there's no such thing, by the way, I tell you in tech, there's no such thing as maintenance mode because things deteriorate over time. New code gets shipped and then it breaks the thing from the old code and you have to go back and fix it. And the more complexity that you have, the harder it is for you to maintain your new code and your old code. And so one of the things that I think is really important is thinking about pruning. Which is, I always ask, and I ask this from a perspective of like when people aren't sure they want to keep somebody on their team or, you know, they're not sure if, I always ask them, hey, you know, if given a choice today, would you hire this person back today? The same thing is, given the choice today, would you build this feature today? And the answer is no. Then what are you doing? You already have all the information you have. Either you need to coach that person to get them to be the person that you need to be, or you need to make that feature as successful as it needs to be, or you give it three months and then get it out. Because at the end of the day, that's just sucking up resources from the rest of a more vibrant opportunity. And I think people have a some cost fallacy and opportunity cost, you know, opportunity cost ignorance because some cost fallacy is like, I've just put so much into this and it didn't work. So I'm going to keep pouring resources in it. And then they don't realize that everything you keep alive, there's an opportunity cost, a real true cost of maintaining it, supporting customers, of actually like really, you know, fixing bugs. And that true cost is something that weighs on the organization. And over time, it's one of those things where you just keep adding straw on the camel's back. But at some point, it just it becomes too complex to launch new features. Yeah, everything you're saying is like resonating very strongly with me from, you know, from a lot of my experience in that space. And I completely agree, right? It just like at some point it like diminishes your velocity and your responsiveness as an organization because, oh, what about the impact on, you know, product line A or B or C? And it just gets it gets heavier, heavier. But I did want to flip that around a little bit and maybe talk about building great products because you've, you know, Devin, your career, you've built some really amazing stuff with a number of different organizations. How do you how do you think about that? You know, what are the questions you should be asking? Is it is it as simple as, you know, a stroke of just, you know, inspiration or how do you how do you come up with a great product? And if you have, you know, the germ or the seed of a great idea, how do you make sure that actually, you know, to continue the tree analogy, like blossoms into something great and you don't take too many, you know, wrong steps that, you know, make it die on the vine. We're way overboard on the plant analogies now. So one of the things I do is really thinking hard. I've worked on a lot of things. There's zero to one within a large company. And that is not usually a popular place for people to be because all those things die on the vine. and there's a lot of issues with it. But I've had so much fun doing so many things I wouldn't have had the resources or support to do outside. And that kind of founder mindset is one I brought into every product that I ever done And one of the things that I think is extremely important is really thinking hard about what is the problem you trying to solve in the world and is it worth solving Often we have this thing, it's like we have this thing, we want to build X product. And I'm like, no, no, no. What problem are you trying to solve? The product is the answer, but what's the question you're asking? and often the when you ask customers what they want and what they and what they tell you is different than what actually you build because when you iterate you see that they want something completely different and to fall in love with the problem not the solution often people like i need to build x like i need to build a marketplace for x i need to build you know y and like a way to just you know and i'm like but what is the what is the human need you're solving and how are you going about that. And I think that's an important way for me, which was when you see something happen organically, and a lot of what I build was, you know, people show you, and we call it people centric development, which is people show you the answer because they're trying to solve a problem with the tools, the very poor tools you're giving them. And you say, hey, if I just build a great tool, then they're going to use it, right? And so really thinking through that question, and then thinking, what is my organization and my team? What is a unique take on this? What is our right to win? And I think often people are like, well, you know, X has worked. We could just do X. And I'm like, yeah, but there's something about your team, your distribution, your customer base, your brand that gives you a right to win in a way that someone else doesn't. How do you lean into that as well? And so fall in love with the problem. What is your right to win? And then thinking about what is what you know at the end if you're successful what is your what is your vision such that if you succeed at this what is the outcome because often people say oh i want to build x but the tam is not big enough there's not enough people who want this if the outcome is you solve the problem for 10 companies and you know each with 100 customers is that enough to really build this and say really saying if i solve this problem this is the thing that's changed in the world and then seeing if that's big enough and worth enough your time to make it happen. I really appreciate that answer. And again, it aligns sort of with my thinking on it. I want to bring AI back into the mix because my sense is right now, AI is almost a blessing and a curse, if that makes sense. It's a blessing because, as you said, there's this whole new tool set available to help us, you know, solve these problems or, you know, just, yeah, just have these tools in our toolkit that we've never had before. At the same time, I sometimes worry, you know, you talk about the, you know, to use an analogy again, like with AI, it's kind of become the hammer and, and like organizations, like suddenly they only see nails and it becomes, how can we use AI for this and for this and for this? And it's taken so much of the oxygen out of the room out of more creative problem solving, or at least that's one of my hypotheses. I'm curious if you see the same thing and what's the right and the wrong way to use AI as a tool in this broader exercise? Well, I think right now, I'll use the analogy of what's happening in high schools and colleges, right? Which is in high schools, in my kids' high school, basically AI is supposed to be banned from any, they can't use it at all. They use kind of one of the tools like Turnitin that says, hey, did AI write this? And so kids have almost no proficiency in using AI because of that. They get to college and some classes are fully banned and others are like, use whatever you want. And I think the question is this, how do you build the fundamental muscles to use the tools of future? If you don't practice, so the answer is nothing, then you have no skills. But if you use it, over rely on it, you don't understand the fundamentals that actually get you so that you understand what the answer is. And I think somewhere in between is where companies are. Some companies are just like, you know, I'll just like shove our strategy into this, you know, and our decks into this tool. And it's just going to spit out the answer. But human judgment is actually this AI is the summary and average of all human judgment of things that have been published over time. And what you're doing is something that's plowing new ground. I mean, presumably your company is doing something that's new. If everyone's already done it before, you're in a commodity business. Right. And so how is it going to give you an answer if you just ask it? You know, tell me what everyone else has done for looking back in time. That's not going to give you a great answer. But instead, using your judgment and actually, you know, using as a thought partner, thinking through what are the questions you want to ask, that is a skill like any other. And so sometimes I think we just over-reliant on it. And then sometimes you're like, I don't use it at all. You know, we don't we don't really use AI. We give people a chat to BT and we're good. And that's also the wrong answer because it could be so powerful and unlocking value within your company that you had not noticed before because you have a lot of workflows that are very manual. You have a lot of tools that don't make sense and you could combine them. You have all these things you could do, but you're just like, nope, I think I see AI as just a chat, you know, a chat window and that's it. And I think somewhere in the spectrum is where most companies are. They're struggling to figure out where do they sit. It's kind of like between high school and, you know, kids cheating in college, which is like I just use AI for everything, but I've learned nothing. And I worry a lot because there's kind of how do we teach people to be smart users so that you're using judgment, but also discernment. And I think discernment is very important. It's like what is useful and what is not. And I think organizations are really struggling with that, both on the government side as well as really, you know, data usage. Like, are you putting customer data in there? How is it being used? And then what are you extracting and how are you using that data as well? Because if all your competitors use the same tool, you're going to get the same answer also. And is that, you know, is that the outcome you want also? It's something that I think a lot about. And I want to, you know, pick a very specific use case that I think is probably, you know, near and dear to your heart, which is the impact of AI on product teams and development. You know, just like, you know, code development, engineers, all that good stuff. And, you know, there's been a lot of obituaries written lately for, you know, developers like AI has made them obsolete. It's all about vibe coding. I'm curious in your experience and from, you know, everyone you've been speaking with and working with, you know, how real is that? What is the future of those functions where AI exists? And what's the best way for these teams to be structured and making use of them? Well, what's fascinating, there was a chart that I recently had that I put together, which was basically the hiring for senior engineers is actually going up, but going down for junior engineers. And so that means that AI requires a type of understanding, not just of the AI tools, because I think younger, especially more junior developers, were actually native to using a lot of these tools. It's understanding how do you use AI within the superstructure of a company with other applications already there. You know, not everything is like somebody's like you can go in cloud code and build everything. And I'm like, yeah, if you have no databases, no data, no customers you have to secure, you have no dependencies and databases from 20 years ago to honor and all these rules and privacy things and GDPR. Sure, you can build something green fields. And that's what a lot of junior developers are doing. That's how they learn. But when you're in a company, you have to fit this into the shape of a box, which is like, here's 15 products that can't be touched. You know, we have PCI compliance over here and GDPR requirements over here. And if you delete an account, it has to be quarantined here. That is a skill that is very highly in demand because you can spit out code for a feature. But how do you fit it in the company shaped hole where this product belongs? And I think that's where you're seeing a lot of more senior engineers being hired because they understand how to work within that complexity and bring AI into it. But that also means that, you know, new companies can be started by junior engineers that can start from scratch, but it's very hard to fit within existing companies. I think beyond that, you know, what's happening is there's more and more need for, for example, security engineers because AI spits out code, but it is not necessarily secure. You've seen there was a few studies that said that something like 30 or 40 percent of AI built applications have catastrophic security issues. And or even like a cookie banner, like it just doesn't automatically say, oh, you need a cookie banner to launch this product. You know, there's going to be a lot of AI driven products that are not compliant with a lot of the local laws, a lot of the requirements to even exist. And that takes discernment as well. And so you can't just trust AI to do all those things. And I think that's why you're seeing the dichotomy between a senior and junior hiring. But also it requires thinking. And yes, they can produce the code, but someone has to say which part of the code makes the most sense and how do we use it and then how do we secure it? It's all of these are concerns that are on my mind. And I'm worried that there's companies that are going kind of off in the wrong direction here because they're not maybe appreciating, you know, the technical complexities of doing this. And, you know, I'm curious on your perspective, Deb, but, you know, it seems like there's almost at a CEO and board level this belief that like AI is easy or, as you said, like you just kind of sprinkle it here and there. And one of the trends I've been following right now is this trend. You know, there was a BCG report fairly recently saying that CEOs are increasingly taking over AI, that it's not living with a CTO or a CIO, even in tech companies. It's at the CEO level. And, you know, my concern is that if we don't have this, you know, enterprise technology involvement, we don't catch all these like very important technical concerns around security, around architecture, around integration, around, you know, issues like cookies, as you mentioned. And, you know, you've been a CEO in an organization like this. What's what's again like what's the right approach and what's the wrong approach here to be, you know, governing and structuring how an organization implements AI? Well, I think first it's really asking the right questions, you know, so for every CEO is asking the right questions, which is not just how do I bring AI in? But what does it mean to use AI in our organization? And this was the how do we become a native, you know, asking those questions as a leadership team. But, you know, there's a difference between the what and the how. So the what is what are we doing with AI in our company that, you know, this is becoming AI native. It's actually bringing in AI into our strategy. It's bringing it to the boardroom. It's bringing governance. But then there's the how. How do you secure it? How do you implement it? How do you retrain? And I think often we don't separate those two things. the what is we just munch it all together and say, oh, the CTL just take care of this. And we'll just make sure we can, you know, we have a comms person to tell people, the employees how to use it. And the legal team will just make sure everything's in compliance. And you're like, no, that's not how it works because it's such a different technology. It requires everybody to align on the what and then align on the how. And, you know, a lot of organizations, if you're not careful, will not think about it that way and not think about the governance required to actually bring it in, but then also how it's implemented. What are the guardrails? And I think, you know, it is such a powerful technology, but recently you've heard people talk about how, you know, military plans were uploaded into a commercial chat QBT. You know, people are uploading, they're like, oh, I upload my, you know, my W-2 to get analysis. And I'm like, you realize you have all the things necessary. And we have no idea how LLMs ingest that information and you can never take it back. And so I just think it's very, you know, people are doing this at companies, people are doing this in government. And that's a very dangerous thing into having clear governance and understanding of what the guardrails are, how much customer data, you know, what are the governance on using customer data and leveraging for the models? And then taking on the other side is like, what is the outcome we want? And really sitting and aligning, which is this is the, what is the future us wish we did today to get us to where we think the future is going? You know, the companies that did not thrive in the mobile and internet age were the ones who just said, well, we'll just tack this on. We'll just sprinkle it on. The ones who said, you know what, there are going to be competitors who are AI native or internet native or mobile native who are going to disrupt us are the ones that actually had a strategy. And whether they executed or not, they had a chance to actually win in the next age. There was something you said in a different podcast that caught my attention and really resonated with me, which is you talked about, you know, I'll paraphrase here, but basically said that a successful executive needs to be a builder, not just somebody who's, you know, understanding the what, but the implication is creating stuff in the how. Can you unpack that a little bit and just share a little bit about how that's influenced, you know, your decision making and approach as a senior leader? Yeah, I think as a senior leader, often you can float above everything, right? There's like the kind of guru senior leader who's like, I just tell people and it gets done. And I'm like, a great leader is a conductor. They understand the music. They don't have to play every instrument, but they understand what great music looks like and they put together the right team, but they also call out when things aren't working. And I think sometimes you could just say, well, I have a conductor for that. But not hearing the music up front and in detail is a very dangerous thing because you can get very disconnected by what's happening on the ground. And one of the things I think is very important for senior executives is to really understand at the deeper level what's happening when the music is not quite right. And, you know, really getting into the details because, you know, people don't come to you and say, hey, I saw this problem, right? So one of the things I did in Ancestry is I hosted magic wand dinners and people would, 10 people would come and have dinner and it would be throughout the organization. You know, some people worked in customer service and member services. Others worked in our pro-genealogy group and others were like, you know, engineers, product managers, people in law, the legal team, HR. And we just had dinner together. And I would ask, you know, what is, if you had a magic wand, what would you change about the company, the process, the teams? And they brought up things that they would never say in another place. But I think hearing helps you understand what some of the challenges are, but also what some of the opportunities are, too. And if you're really disconnected from hearing what people are saying, it's a very dangerous thing because you're not understanding what employees are saying. But these are the employees who are listening to your customers every single day. And they have a level of empathy that can't be summarized in the one pager on how customer sentiment is. I really, really like the idea of magic wand dinners. And, you know, even just hearing about it briefly, it's such a like, to me, obvious tactic for getting to being able to hear the true concerns of people and figure out from your own staff how to make the company better. one of the ideas rattling around in my head though that you know I'd love to get your reaction to is even the notion of hey yeah we're all having dinner together is it feels like it's eroding in this world where you know when we think about the modern workforce so much of it is remote we're not often in the same room we're not in the same city anymore we're kind of all over the place and and so you know maybe this is a difficult question maybe it's not but you know what does that look like? Do you, are you sort of all in on, we need a team to be in the same room together? What's the right way to think about how to structure a workforce between, you know, onsite and remote? Well, I think that there is, it's one of those things where we, when we got together, it was magical. And yet people were, you know, it's like, oh, there's a ton of travel. How do we get together? And I think there's something really special about these side room conversations. What happens, we call it what happens after the meeting, which is the conversation behind the conversation. And, you know, one of the things that you really miss is, you know, when you hang up, you know, the Zoom, it's over, right? But there's always the follow-up conversation, what's happening on Slack. And so creating moments, it doesn't have to be every single day, but it has to be moments where people are connecting, where having dinner, where you just have a conversation around what's working and what's not working with people that you might never have met. I mean, there's something really important about that. It doesn't have to be five days a week in the office, but it has to be, you know, people don't work in complete isolation because you're not actually getting everything on the table. People just don't. It's like you have an idea and you'll just lean over and talk to the person behind you, but you wouldn't slack them and say, hey, Jeff, I have this idea. What do you think? You know, because that just seems so formal. Right. And I think we're missing a little bit of the informal communication and being able to replicate that is important. And so whether I've, you know, I've, I have friends who run companies where they say, Hey, look, we just, we do home week once a week, once a month, or once every quarter, we're like together for a week. And we just like, you know, pack all the time together so that at least we know each other. And others are like, Hey, look, we just do two days, you know, in the office. But I think the fully remote teams, I think that can work, but then you have to create those moments and it's artificial and you have to be very thoughtful about creating that culture. Yeah. And that's exactly what I'm getting at. And, you know, I'm talking to you now as someone who is and has been a team lead, both in person and remote. And yet to your point, it just feels like there's tasks and certainly like a level of creativity that just doesn't lend itself well to being fully, fully remote, like a whiteboard exercise, like, hey, I just had this idea. and you know there's lots I'm the same way like I'm not advocating for like hey we need people in the office five days a week every week but it feels like there's just like there's something very human and something very creative that's missing if you're just not ever in the same room as your colleagues is that is that your experience as well yeah I mean I think it's how do you build connection I think for a long time during remote work it worked really well because people had all the connections from before. And then as there's a road and you hire, you know, hundreds of new people and suddenly, you know, a third of the company has not ever met each other. You know, that's, that happened to some companies during COVID. And I think it just really, you know, you have less of those relationships and those relationships and those, those serendipitous moments, those are the ones that really matter because that's where ideas happen, where people talk about, you know, something that they've been, that's been on their mind, where they get support for something where, you know, the next meeting is going to get pitched. And I think, you know, creating enough of those moments so that you can carry it through the year is important. I know, I agree. And I think that's that's very well said. So, yeah, I think we're I think we're pretty aligned on that one. I do want to shift gears a little bit and talk about CEO hood, if I can. And, you know, CEOs are kind of a funny thing in the sense that it feels like culturally right now, there's like, you know, almost like a backlash against CEOs. And there's this narrative of, oh, you know, especially with, you know, layoffs happening, CEOs are people who, you know, they shake a bunch of hands and they're these extroverted older white guys and they lay off a bunch of people and they get a, you know, a big bag of money for doing that. And it's this, you know, it's almost cartoony, but this is kind of propagated. And Deb, you know, what strikes me about you in, you know, a lot of more obvious and more subtle ways is that, you know, you, you've been a successful CEO, you've been a successful senior leader in a way that's, I think, a completely different mold from what people often think of when they think of as a CEO. And I think that's a really good thing. And you've talked previously about, you know, introversion and being able to lead, even if you're not, you know, what I've called in the past, like sort of a type A leader personality. What does that look like to you? And you know what your message to people who would want to take on more of a leadership role but think you know I maybe maybe I can do this because of my personality type or how I look or you know not being the traditional profile in that space Yeah, well, first I rose through tech, which is Asian women in particular, 13 percent of tech workers who enter and three percent of executives. So they fall off at a much higher rate than any other group of people, I believe, who's at that size where, you know, it's a it's a pretty large group, but they really make it to the top. And, you know, I think part of it is how do you lead that's authentic to you, but also adapt to the environment. And I think that those are two things which are very hard for people to navigate. I meet a lot of people who are like, well, I'm just introverted, so I'm not going to talk at meetings. And I say, you know, I coach a lot of people. So I've coached over a thousand people over the years. I do these kind of quick calls and And I said, well, you know, if your dream job are available and they said you needed to, let's just say your dream job is in Japan. They're like, you need to learn Japanese, but you can go run our Japanese, you know, Japan office and open our new Japan office. Why didn't you go learn Japanese for your dream job? You would figure it out. Well, here's the thing. If you aspire to leadership, communication is 80% of that job. If you say, well, it's not going to do it. Do you think you're going to be successful? And I think as a woman leader, there was a study that said that men and women are seen as leaders differently. So men are seen as leaders that they're competent, but women have to be competent and warm. And in the two by two matrix of competence and warmth, there's a lot of women who are not born warm. I am not. I'm one of those people. And I had to decide what does that mean? And do I just say, you know what, I don't want to be a leader or do I figure out what being warm really means. And I think I came off very cold because I was an introvert. So I was like, I kept to myself, I got things done, I was very hyper competent. And I'm like, if I were just hyper competent, I'm going to succeed in the workplace. And I was absolutely wrong. And so I have a lot of women who tell me, well, I'm not warm. So, you know, and I just, you know, I don't want to wear a mask. I don't want to fake it. And I realized something, which is, you know, why do we adapt to other things. We weren't all born learning to walk. We weren't born public speaking skills. We weren't born knowing how to code. So if those are skills, why don't we treat warmth? Why don't we treat leadership? Why don't we treat speaking up as skills that can be learned? And suddenly, if you turn it from a, this is a fixed thing, like I was born this way, to a learning mindset, I can actually learn these skills. It's amazing what's possible. And I learned those things the hard way, which is I failed multiple times just saying, this is who I am, take it or leave it, because it worked really well in school, right? You take the SAT, you get straight A's, you get your 4.0, and then you check the box and you graduate, and then you go into the workforce, and what success looks like is completely different. And it requires you to learn a set of skills that you never previously had. You brought up failure. And to me, that's like a really interesting point, because, you know, I expect you've seen the same thing where there's just an awful lot of people who believe like, I can't fail. I'm not allowed to fail. Like if I speak up or I say the wrong thing, people will think I'm dumb or like it feels very fear motivated. And that's not what I that's not what I'm hearing you say about failure. How do you how do you conceptualize failure? Well, so there was a study that I was reading about where people who they looked at early researchers at that got an NIH grant and then they looked at the group of people right below them. And they said, you know, the people who were given a no versus a yes on their first try, the people who were given a no actually went on to have better research careers than those who just got the yes the first time. And part of it is they said it was because failure made them rethink and double down or leave. And so they just had to rethink. And I think it's one of those things where the people who are most successful in life that you see and you admire, it's not that they never failed. Those are the people who actually took the failures and took a lesson from it and using it as a stepping stone. So, you know, how do you turn a stumbling block into a stepping stone into the thing that you want to achieve? And I think one of the things that we forget is that, you know, I use this quote from Chuck Swindoll, like life is 10% what happens to me 90% when I choose to do about it. And those who are like, well, I failed, can't ever do this again. They're the ones who sit on that rock and say, you know, I'm not going to continue this climb. But those who are like, actually, this rock's going to, you know, I get it. It sucked, but it's going to, I'm going to double down and redouble my efforts. Those are the people who rise further and faster. And so a lot of that is the mindset of, you know, do you allow failure to, to teach you a lot? It's just another thing that teaches you a lesson and makes you stronger. And there's analogy of the trees in the biosphere. So they've grown these trees in the biosphere. They grew super fast because there's no wind, there's no rain, you know, there's not all these, you know, elements. And then they realized the trees got super tall and then they snapped. They just fell over and snapped. And they realized that the wind and the rain, the bending of the trees during these storms actually created these micro tears. And those micro tears were filled with the type of new wood that made it much stronger. And it reinforced so that they could grow longer and stronger over time. And without adversity, trees will fail. And I think that's the same. It's true of our careers. We avoid adversity. We avoid failure. We don't learn anything because then we think everything we did was right. I was, this is a silly reference, but I've got young kids and I was watching, I was watching an episode of Bluey and I don't know if that's the wrong era for your kids. But the dad on Bluey was trying to be Zen and he said, the obstacle is not in the way of your path. The obstacle is the path, which was, I thought, very deep for like a show for toddlers. But I really like that, you know, like to me, it's reframing it as this is, it's exactly what you said, right? The trees need to learn how to bend. It reinforces them. And yeah, it's very easy to get wrapped up into this idea that like, oh, the people who have made it or at the top are really successful. They're successful because success is just sort of like this linear thing. And they're the people who have never failed and will never fail. And yeah, it's nice to hear. It's always nice to hear from people who, you know, have that lived experience and are willing to put up their hand and be like, I can tell you from experience that's not true. I've failed lots of times and lived to tell the tale. And it sounds like that's your experience as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I want to come back to something you said earlier, which is, and I may misquote the number, but you said something like 80% of being an executive or senior leader is about communication and just the importance of communication. And that's something that is maybe an overlooked, you know, skill or ability in people who are a little bit farther down the career ladder. Can we unpack that a little bit? Like, what is good communication? What is the communication that sets a strong leader apart from an average leader or a weak leader? And if you were coaching someone who was looking to up their communication game, what advice would you give them? Well, first, I think, you know, when you're, you know, new or an entry-level employee, your whole job is doing. Every single day, you're doing, right? You are moving this task forward. You're doing that. And you're checking a checklist. As you rise in the organization, your job is to do through others. So, you know, the first time you're a manager, you don't you can't do the job anymore. You're actually managing people doing the job. Then you become a manager of managers, then a manager of organization, a GM. And as you rise, you don't get to do the job. But you also have to be careful not to tell everybody how to do their job. And so communication is now you're communicating what does success look like? What are our values? What are you know, what how do we want to serve our customers? What is it that we that we represent as a company? And suddenly you're going from, hey, this marketing brief has to be really good to what do how do we want to present in the world? You know, how do we want to think about our strategy? Because a very good and successful leader isn't making decisions anymore. They're enabling great decisions to be made. You know, what I loved about working at Facebook was Mark said, you know what, if you have an idea, and Tom had an idea to build the mobile app, I had an idea to build Facebook Marketplace, he would support planting those seeds. But he said the culture is you can do hackathons. There's an outlet. If you have an idea, some of the best products were not products that he would have chosen to build. but you know when the when the opportunity came he supported them and i think that's where it's really important it's like what kind of culture do you want and what are you cultivating and so one of the things about communication though is we ignore it as as critical skill because the first thing when we talk is we think about what we're going to say but instead the best thing you can do is think about how it's going to land to the other person which means you say a different thing to someone who's a brand new employee to somebody who's your senior executives to someone who's the on the board, someone who's your investor, and really learning to tune your message to what's landing. What is the other person hearing? What filter are they using? And how do you deliver that? Those are really critical skills. You talked about competence and warmth and that you had to work more on the warmth side. But I'm curious, Deb, you're someone who started with more of a technical background and you rose up the ranks from a technical background to increasingly, senior roles all the way up the flagpole to CEO. That's something that I know a lot of people in technical roles struggle with is say like, oh, it's a different competency. I don't have those skills. I couldn't gain those skills. Is that something you struggled with as you jumped to, as you said, a manager level, a manager of manager level? And how did you how did you overcome that? And what did that look like for you? Yeah. So I remember when I first became a manager, I was a few years out of a couple of years out of business school. And my manager's like, hey, the team's gotten too big for me to manage. I'd like to make you a manager. And I just remember how frustrated I was working with some of the junior employees that we had just hired because they had never done the job before. And I was like, I could do this so much faster than they could. It's driving me crazy to teach them. And he said, yes, but then your career will never scale because you can only do so much as one person. But when you're scaling and leading through others, you have to learn how to teach them how to do the thing that you do the best. And that was a really important lesson. My manager went on to step away from the team and I took over the team when I had no business running the product team for the biggest business at PayPal. And, you know, I was just a few years out of business school and I had only been a product manager, I think like two or three years. But the point was, You know, he taught me to look at the perspective of how do you think about your career? What is the future you want? And then what are the things you're doing today to get you there? If I continue to like micromanage the APMs, it would have been a disaster. Right. But instead, I learned to teach them and learn to lead them and support them. And that taught me a lesson, which was so often the expert is a terrible manager. And by the way, we do this all the time. It's like you take the best product manager, the best engineer, the best salesperson, and you make them the manager and they suck because managing is a totally different skill than doing. And, you know, you think about the, you know, some of the best coaches were not great players, you know, but they could see a different skill set, which is strategy, you know, rostering, like putting teams together or training. But they were themselves not necessarily the top superstar players. And I think that's true of so many things. And too, I think learning management as a skill and learning communication as a skill is really important if you want to rise in an organization. I completely agree. And there's just I'm just processing all of that. And there's a theme that we've kind of been talking about in a number of these, you know, in a number of these answers here, which is the importance of, I think, listening as a leader and as an increasingly senior leader, making sure you're you've got a feedback mechanism within the organization and finding a way to balance that with having some sort of, you know, vision or ability to say, yes, this is right. I'm placing my chips here. And I find myself coming back, Deb, to the example with Mark and, you know, going mobile first. And you just said, you know, Tom was the one who proposed the Facebook mobile app. How do you conceptualize this as a leader? And how do people like Mark do that? How do you balance the ability to take things from other people, to be listening, but also not just end up so reactive that you're not willing to put your own touch on things or prioritize what matters most? Well, I think that what I loved about my time at Facebook was that it was a company where the culture was very bottoms up, where anyone could have an idea no matter who you were. And, you know, part of the magic wand dinners was people came up with product ideas. They had, you know, process ideas and opportunities for how could we, you know, build our business. And, you know, one of the dinners was where it came up with the idea for Pro Tools, which was a set of tools for, you know, really pro genealogists who really wanted to go deeper in their family research. And so, you know, creating opportunities and outlets for people's ideas, because these are the people who on the front lines who are talking to your customers, who know what the questions are to ask. Those are the people you want to hear from. But if you create no outlet for them to ever bring forward their ideas, because our roadmap's locked for the next two years, you can't do anything. I think you lose out on a lot of really special opportunities where, you know, because we're often when you reach a certain level in a company, you don't see the day to day anymore. Right. Everything is a summary of a summary of a summary. And now it's all written by AI. It's like, you know, customer feedback is not rich anymore when you have a summary that's three levels smoothed out. And so having real opportunities and creating a culture where thought leadership can come from anywhere and ideas can come from anywhere is super important. Then you have to have a process to distill the information because there are a lot of also bad ideas, too. And so how do you create a culture of pruning so that you're actually focused on the real ideas that are going to make a difference? I'm fixating a little bit on the point about AI and this smoothing and the summary of a summary of a summary. I mean, I've lived that. And it seems to reinforce just the human connection here and being able to have, no matter what level you're at, that human connection there, which, you know, it feels like a valuable lesson. And the pruning part, too, to me is interesting because it seems like it can be a challenge to solicit ideas, but also be comfortable telling people that is a bad idea, you know, versus a good idea. Because if you're not careful calibrating that, you know, you can actually discourage, you know, employees sharing their ideas. Is that a challenge you had? And how do you make sure that you're able to prune without creating too much discouragement? Well, I think first, you know, there's a lot of ideas that are not well formed. And so really asking people, well, who is this spore? You know, you know, just put together even just like a 15 minute brief, which is like, who is this spore? How big is this opportunity? Where do you think this could take us? Often, you know, the idea is then people having to think the next level down are now saying, oh, actually, maybe not that many people would do it. How will we build it? Like, you know, and it forces kind of the conversation to go from just a like off the top of your head to a deeper conversation of like, Like, what would that look like? And, you know, I think the people who actually spend the time to do that will now think through the idea. And a lot of times they say, oh, that's not going to work. But then the times they're still pushing for it, then it's like, well, why do you think this is going to work? And what is it that why should we be doing this? And what can we accomplish there? And so really thinking in a process, like having a process to get through those ideas. I see this happen where the thing about, you know, innovation within a company is often people, what you said earlier, it's like they have an innovation team that sits on the side where it doesn't matter. But innovation actually is the lifeblood of a company. You can't just make it a side project for somebody or you have one executive who innovates for everybody. That's not how real work is done. It's actually the people who are working day to day that have the best ideas because they understand what's happening in the company, what the assets are, what is buildable, and also what customers want. And so building a culture where, you know, and celebrating the ideas that make it through to the shipping. So one of the things we do is like we used to have hackathons and then we celebrate the things that made it to live. And like it wasn't everything. Like hackathons would have like dozens and dozens of projects. But the one or two things that made it live made people feel like, hey, there's an outlet for this, that customer saw it. It made it through. And so I think that's an important part of it is like do create a place for those ideas, but then also an outlet for it. as well. I really like that. And yeah, it's, it feels like a great way to tie together those challenges. And to your point, the celebration, I think, probably goes along there, a long way there. And I'm chuckling too, because I led that side innovation team. And we had that exact challenge, right? Which is, as soon as people believe like, well, we're not, we're not innovating anymore, the innovation team is, you know, that was one of the reasons we ended up kind of dissolving the way that team was structured because it's not productive for the rest of the business there. Sorry, I had a question and I totally lost my train of thought there. Oh, I wanted to ask you, Deb, from your time at Ancestry, what would you say was your proudest accomplishment? I think, you know, the thing that I'm really, it's hard to show what it is because customers didn't see it but it was how we build things we actually were able to ship more products than we ever were before we were able to innovate you know we were like there's so many things and the infrastructure and the substructure of the company that we had to change to make it possible to ship new features to customers because we had done the lift and shift to from a from um our data center to uh to aws and in that we also had to like actually open up the opportunity to build so we stopped building a lot of things for a while, but then we were able to open up new opportunities. And so we built, for example, you know, through lines, which was you could actually see your DNA from your parents. So even if your parents passed, like my hub, you could see your ethnicity estimates from your parents and then your grandparents. That was something that was never possible before. Same thing, we were able to look at edit history and collaboration on your family tree, things that we could never have built without a lot of, you know, investment in really the infrastructure. But that infrastructure means that for every team and every product going forward, it can move faster, it can get to customers faster, and we can iterate faster as well. I love that answer. And I'm curious, like, I guess it's a big question, but how? How did you do that? Because that's a cultural shift, right? Like, that's not just, oh, we ship this one thing, It's not singular. It's like a layer within the organization where you change the way people do things. How did you go about doing that? Well, first, I mean, our CTO was really incredible. He had become the CTO at the same time I came in. And he had been at the company and he had led a lot of the AWS migration. And he was able to really rework how we did engineering, for example. We used to have kind of more siloed teams who worked on their own code bases. And then he was able to do kind of, you know, people being able to code across the company and work together. So that helped a lot. We changed our process, our roadmapping process. You know, it's funny when you describe it because it seems very mundane. Like we changed our roadmap process and we published a roadmap and we changed our product process. But what it unlocked was, you know, things are either happen fast or slow because of everything that happens before the product. And often people are like, oh, my favorite product is X, but what's behind it is this iceberg of all the things necessary to make it possible to do that thing And when I describe you know how it was possible for us to ship things like Pro Tools in just a few months it because we had done all of the groundwork for the year and a half, two years before that, where we could build a B, we had built an A-B testing that we had built, you know, the infrastructure, we had, you know, ranking and ML and all of these things that we had invested in were coming to fruition for us to build something that we could, you know, and it's not just that infrastructure stays on for the next feature and the next feature and the next feature. And so I know it's not sexy, but at the same time, actually really thinking hard about is your platform, you know, something that enables or is it hinders? And if it's not something that enables, you really need to rethink the platform first because every other feature is stuck behind that. I'm just chuckling because the word that came to my mind was platform for what you had built. And that's exactly it. Like it's a platform, you know, in the broader sense of the word, but it makes absolute sense to be able to have that platform that then becomes the jump off point to, you know, do everything else. The, you know, the part of the iceberg that's under the water. I wanted to go back to something you said earlier, though, which is the part about mentoring a thousand people, which I think is amazing, by the way. I think it's such an amazing gift that you've given, the gift of time and the gift of wisdom and your experience. I'm curious, for the people that you're mentoring, at that scale, what are the themes in terms of what people are worried about, what they need help with, and where you find you're able to create the most leverage or help people the most? It started when I was leading product recruiting at Facebook, and I used to teach a new hire class. And I said, I have an open door policy. You can schedule 15 minutes with me anytime if you need help. And suddenly, you know, and it would be like one or two calls a week. You know, people would stop by my office. And then, you know, over time, it just built up where, you know, and then I opened it up to everybody. And a lot of people reach out and I do a 15 minute call while I was traveling. And, you know, the thing that I see the most is people need permission. They come to me with a problem. But I'm like, the reason you're calling me is you want permission for me to say you can leave this job or you can, you know, you can basically quit because you have a toxic manager or you're struggling with something. People don't ask a question unless there's something wrong. I see that as a huge theme, which is, you know, often people feel very powerless for a bunch of reasons and they need someone just to say, I hear you, I see you and I see that this is a problem. You can leave and you can leave your team and your product. I know how much you love it, but this is not a good situation for you. So that happens a lot. I also get a lot of calls when people are between roles where they're trying to make a decision, either within the company or exiting the company. And often they'll tell me all these things and then I'll say, well, where do you want to be in five years? 10 years and they don't know. And I said, well, the problem is unlike college where everyone, you know, is everyone kind of graduates at the same time. You kind of enter as a major in the same time you go to sophomore. Yeah. You know, careers, jobs come along and they're it's asynchronous. Right. And so you don't know. But I'm like, if you don't know where you're going to go, what are you evaluating every job against? Are you just saying, hey, it's better than the current job I have, but instead really having a thoughtful, you know, three years from now, here's who I want to be five years from now. How do I make it there? And is this getting me closer or further away? That happens quite a bit too. And, you know, often people will say, let me think about it and call you back. And then they say, okay, this is what I hope to accomplish in the next five years. And then we actually reevaluate. Finally, people ask me specifically about like, should I do X or should I do why. Usually it's like between jobs or change jobs or change roles or change products. And usually they tell me, I just said, describe what it would be to stay, describe what it would be to go. And then you can tell from their enthusiasm and what they're trying to sell you, what they actually want to do. 80% of the time they tell you the answer. And then I'm like, well, why are you calling me? You already know the answer. And so it's been really fascinating to hear, you know, different problems from different people throughout the years. And it's been really gratifying as well. It's funny how big a theme that that sense of permission or I just need a sounding board. I need some sort of validation that I'm not crazy or that my logic makes sense or what I'm experiencing makes sense. The piece you went over in the middle, which was where do I want to be in five years, which is, you know, I have to imagine that is a pretty challenging exercise for a lot of people. And if the answer is CEO, well, I mean, that's kind of like that makes the exercise a lot easier and especially if you think that there's a lot of roads to get there if the answer is not ceo which is you know you've been a ceo if the answer is not ceo what are some of the answers that you hear i'm curious just from your perspective and for maybe anyone who's listening and is thinking well i don't think i want to be a ceo but that makes it a lot harder to answer what are the categories or answer of answers or what are some of the more common ways that people structure that as a way to have that North Star. Well, so some people just say, hey, look, like I, you know, I want to start a company at some point. You know, I want to be a founder. That's pretty clear because if you're going into a very, very large company like Apple as a, you know, as an analyst, like, are you going to get the skill set? Because your span of control is going to be very small, right? And so, you know, or if your choice is going to, you know, these three different startups, but they're in different spaces. There's other people who say, hey, you know, what I really want to do is I need something. I want to be able to start a family. So in the meantime, what do I do? And so that's a very different thing where some people are like, I want to push hard. But, you know, at that point, I want to have kids. And again, you know, I read the book Lean In. Cheryl's giving me the Lean In talk when I was debating whether to join Facebook. And, you know, I think it's really important to understand how your life and your work is going to intersect. And I wrote an article about this in order of a lot of the women who've asked me this question about what is the reality of maternity leave and then the reality of being a parent and you know especially in tech and you know my car my career stalled out for six years during the time i had my three kids and you know and eventually it took off but it's not a given right and so i i share that very candidly because it's not always going to be easy um there's others who are like hey look i just want to have, I want to work on something I really care about, like meaning is really important to me. So whether it's climate or it's AI or it's something that I'm like, okay, then chase that, you know, because some, for some people, it's not the title, it's not the money, it's the, I want to work on something that's like world transformative. And then, you know, but then I'm like, well, why would you take this, like, you know, risk management role at a payments company? Then if you feel like, you know, are you going to have as much impact than if you, you know, do something directly in the things you care about. And so I think it's one of those things where really having a vision of who you want to be helps filter out all the things you don't want. And it also gives you a sense of whether this is going to add to your bingo card to get to where you want to go. Hearing you say, you know, with a rearview mirror that your career stalled out for six years, I think in some ways, you know, for me and for a lot of people is really validating, especially in relation to parenthood because I think you know there's a lot of people out there who believe okay well I've got kids now and it's my career is stalled out therefore it will stay stalled out like I've missed the track like I can't get back on the track and the fact that you're you know you're you know living and breathing proof of like you know I don't want to I don't want to oversimplify your entire journey but saying like who cares like you can things turn out okay, you can still end up somewhere really great. And that for a lot of people, that may be a worthwhile trade-off. Is that something that people talk to you about and that you've given specific coaching on? Absolutely. I think after I wrote that article in particular, I think it's really, we don't want to talk about it, right? We don't talk about the sacrifice of having families. And it's not always easy. And one of the things that I really write about very openly is because I've gotten to the other side and I can talk about some of the challenges. But there's many people for whom during those six years, they just give up because during those six years, I tried to quit twice. I was almost one of those statistics, but for very specific reasons, I didn't. And I thank those mentors every day for helping me through that because it just feels so frustrating. You are swimming through molasses. I had a baby with colic and two toddlers and it was, you know my dad had stage four cancer and i was like what am i doing you know and you know i but on the other side i'm glad that i pushed through the thing is people always say like nobody ever says this out loud and i'm going to say this out loud to all of your your parents your parent listeners get help like hire help because that is so important we always pretend we can do it all right you can do everything that's not true most of the people who are very successful. And by the way, something like 70 or 80% of men who are in the C-suite have a stay-at-home spouse and only 20% of the women in the C-suite. Why do you think there are only 20% of women in the C-suite also? Is it correlation or causation, right? Because I have an incredibly supportive husband, but we got help all of those years. And I think a lot of people want to say, well, I did it all myself. And I'm like, no, no, no. The people you see are successful have tons of help, whether from their family, whether from their village, whether they have to hire help. That is so important to success. And I wish people didn't hide it so much because it does a disservice because then people feel like, well, I can't handle this. She got to CEO and she didn't need help. And I'm like, no, no, no. I had a lot of help. And, you know, I had a lot of help from my family. I had a lot of help from my husband. And I hope that we don't write other people out of our stories and make it seem like we did it alone. I really, really appreciate you, Deb. Not just sharing that story, but the openness that you bring to it. Because I think there's just sort of a stigma out there about a lot of this in general, that if you're going to be successful at work, it means sort of almost like shedding your human side. You need to be an automaton employee. And, you know, how dare I be dealing with, you know, the sickness or death of a loved one or family, the family side of things. And to be able to say, you know, you will go through these things and that's OK. And you can be successful. You know, you can have career success in spite of that. to me, that's just such a powerful message for people to hear. And I don't know, it's just, it's really resonating with me because that speaks to, it speaks to the world that I think we want to build and the cultures that we want to build. And yeah, I'm sorry if I'm being a bit effusive here, but it's just, it's like a refreshing take, I think, from a lot of the, you know, traditional messaging you hear from senior leaders. Well, I think sometimes we, it's like, you know, we spend more time at work with our teammates than we do at home with our families. You're at work eight, 10 hours. You know, you're actually spending physical time when you're in the office with them. And that's really, you know, something that we don't talk that much about. Recently, I read an article called Make Friends at Work because the friends that I've made from work are the ones who have, you know, I've invested in companies. I buy some of them. They've gotten me jobs. I've gotten them jobs. You know, I've like referred them to boards. They have been references for me. You know, these are people you live your life with, but they're also want to know who the real you is. And I hate when people say, oh, you know, we're not we're not at work to make friends. And I'm like, no, that's true. You're here to work. But at the same time, you're missing a whole dimension of richness if you're not building friendships and community. And so I do think it's really tragic. It's kind of this like transactional approach to work. You know, the reason I am the product that most people know me for is Facebook Marketplace. I championed that product for many years. And it is the product came about because I am a mom. And I was the only mom PM at Facebook for many years. And I helped recruit the next mom PMs. And if you think about it, because I could see a world no one else could see, which was all of the people in my local community buying and selling bikes and strollers and, you know, cribs from each other. And that was, you know, a world that it was a blind spot for, you know, a company where everybody was 20 something at the time. And I had three kids. And so, you know, what makes you special is something you don't have to hide. It's something that could be iconic in the things that make you you. I love the story. I love the message. I feel like I'm saying that way too much and people are going to get tired of me of me saying that. But I think it's a really, really nice message. Just sort of along those lines, and I should start to think about wrapping up at some point, but making friends at work, probably more difficult for an introvert than for an extrovert. And there's that dreaded word that people talk about, which is networking. And, oh, I hate networking. And, well, I can't be, you know, do I really have to network? Like, based on the conversation we've been having so far, I have to believe you have a take on this and that there's an angle here that is more useful for introverts than you just have to go out there and network. What do you tell people like you or who may have been like you about building these bridges and these connections? Well, you know, I was somebody who was, you know, as I said, very introverted, especially at work. And it was really hard. but you know one of the things that um when i was in uh but because i went to engineering school so i grew up in a small town in the deep south and looking as i do there were a lot of comments about like you go back to where you came from what are you those types of things and so i was like if i just make myself smaller and less visible then people would stop saying those things to me and i you know i was already an introvert so i just got more and more introverted as i went along then i went to engineering school at duke and you the great thing is you can get through engineering school and never talked to anybody. You know, you can do, you know, I had great, I had friends, but like we did problem sets and silence in the library, you know, together. That was our social interaction. And then I went to consulting and I was at Boston Consulting Group and I didn't get the highest rating. And I've always been like the type A, you know, perfect score, 4.0 kind of person. And I didn't get the highest rating. And I asked the partner, why did I get the top rating? And he's like, you're kind of bad at this, the client part of client service. And that's what we do. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, you're supposed to hang out with the client, talk to them, socialize and, you know, get drinks up. And I was just like, why? My work is objectively good. And that's when you got the first lesson of like book smarts and objectively, you can have great PowerPoints, great strategy. And, you know, even your presentations could be very good. But if you're not actually connecting with the clients, this is a client service relationship business. And I got that all wrong. And I realized this and I went to business school and, you know, business school, by the way, a third or half of your grade is class participation. I was like, Oh, crap. And one of the things that we did was I took an organizational behavior class. And at the end, they asked a question, what are you going to change because of what you learned in this class? And I said, I'm going to be an extrovert at work. And it was really hard because I just at the end of the day, my husband would want to talk because he's a lawyer and he spent all day like working on contracts and by himself in his office. And then he want to talk. And I'm like, I'm out of words for today. things. But I realized something, which is people crave connection. And if you say, well, you know, you don't, I'm just, I'm not with, you would never go into a meeting and, you know, talk to a friend and say, I'm going to withhold my ideas from you. I'm going to make it hard for you to get to know me. But that's like the ridiculous, unintentional, ridiculous strategies. My friend, Carol Izazaki says, it's like, you know, you go through life doing things. And then if you actually said that was your strategy, you would be like, that's stupid. And it's like, you wouldn't go to work and say, I'm going to withhold all my good ideas because I don't like talking. I'm not going to make friends here because I don't like people. You know, I'm going to make them work really hard to get to know me because, you know, I'm an introvert. That's a dumb idea. But yet we do that because that's where our comfort level is. So instead, I looked at it from the other perspective, which is how do I make other people comfortable? Yes, I'm uncomfortable, but how do I look at it from their perspective? And suddenly they really changed the way I learned to show up. And I think that matters a lot, which is, you know, how do you want to be who you are and have people be a part of your life? And, you know, when we say networking, I think it seems so like clinical, right? So transactional. But what if I just said you're going to just like connect with some people and get to know some interesting people? Suddenly it's like less foreboding, right? It's not, I have this transaction. I need to get your LinkedIn connected and your phone number. Instead, it's what if I just spend the evening getting to know some interesting people? And so, I just invited my coworkers to my house. I worked with these people 20 years ago, PayPal. And they came to my house and had dinner and reconnected. And I've been friends with most of them through that whole time. And it's because I learned to do that before I got to PayPal in business school that I was able to make those friendships. And they became people who I had a chance to work with again and I've had the chance to get jobs with again and live life with. That's awesome. And I think is, you know, in some ways exactly what I expected to hear in terms of the, you know, just kind of destroying the myth of networking as being this cold clinical thing. But it's such a cool story. Deb, we've covered a lot of ground here. And, you know, I've been very thankful for so many of the insights that you've shared. You know, for business leaders in particular, for people who are trying to get their career to the next level or take their organization to the next level. Do you have any parting words of guidance that you would want to share with them as they think about how they do something better tomorrow than today? Well, I think that first in an age of AI, always be learning. Adaptability is going to be the most important skill over the next 10 years that it hasn't necessarily been in the last 10 years. If you think about careers, often everyone is focusing on expertise. You get better and better and better. And now it's how do you assimilate new information? How do you learn? And how do you adapt? And so that skill set is going to be valued more than anything else. And I encourage you to try new things. You know, take a vibing class, learn what's possible with AI, build something, you know, talk to people, network, as you say, with people who are the cutting edge, because you'll see the world of possibilities of bringing this tool into what you do every day, and thus making your role in the company more important, but also that you're able to actually bring it to your company so that it will be more successful in the long term. And in turn, you're able to help others get there. That's great. I really, really feel that that resonates with me and I really appreciate that advice. Deb, I wanted to say such a big thank you for coming on to the program today. I've really, really appreciated the conversation and not just your insights, but your candor and your openness in challenging some of the stigmas that we find, And, you know, not just with AI, but with interpersonal relationships, with what it means to be a person at work and, you know, how anybody can be successful. So I wanted to say a really big thank you for that. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. If you work in IT, Infotech Research Group is a name you need to know. No matter what your needs are, Infotech has you covered. AI strategy? Covered. Disaster recovery? Covered. Vendor negotiation? Covered. Infotech supports you with the best practice research and a team of analysts standing by ready to help you tackle your toughest challenges. Check it out at the link below and don't forget to like and subscribe.