... [+]Facebook executive Deborah Liu will be the next CEO of Ancestry and will serve on the company’s Board of Directors, effective March 1. In December, Ancestry’s then-CEO Margo Georgiadis announced her plan to leave the company.
An innovator in her own right, Liu was the brains behind Facebook’s Marketplace—an idea that she first proposed to Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg at her job interview, and which now boasts 800 million users each month. She also formerly served in Director roles at eBay and PayPal and is the founder of Women in Product, a nonprofit for thousands of women leaders in technology.
“PayPal is really connecting small businesses so that anybody can create an account to accept payments,” she said. “Ebay is about allowing people to build businesses out of their garage and eventually be able to sell, and the work I’ve done at Facebook is about connecting people and community, whether to buy and sell, to play games, to pay one another. Ancestry is really about connecting people.
A key element of connecting people is “building a product that everyone can use,” Liu said. “Ancestry is something that appeals to everyone. People want to learn about their families and a lot of them want to understand their heritage, and so it is a product that I hope we can bring to even more people in the world.” Ancestry currently has over 27 billion records, three million paying subscribers and more than 18 million people in its DNA network aimed to help people learn about their roots.