Ancestry’s CEO on Lessons About Leadership and Success

“Doctor, engineer, or failure – you get to pick.”

Ancestry’s CEO Deborah Liu faced high expectations for her career. As a daughter of working-class immigrants, she felt she had to work harder to reach the American dream that her parents hoped for. Later, she realized that to succeed in the workplace, she would have to adapt her mindset.

Liu was born in Queens, New York, but she grew up in South Carolina where there were few people who looked like her, an Asian American. Faced with limited career options from her parents, Liu decided to follow her father’s footsteps and become an engineer, which later forged her path to successful careers.

She worked at companies including PayPal where she led the integration with eBay and at Meta (Facebook) where she built Facebook Marketplace. Liu also founded Women in Product, a 30,000 member-strong nonprofit network supporting women in product management.

In 2021, Liu took the helm of Ancestry, a genealogy company, as president and chief executive officer. She also wrote Take Back Your Power: Ten Rules for Women at Work, which looks at the obstacles women face in a workplace and the ways they can overcome them.

At Goldman Sachs Talks, recorded on May 7, 2024, Liu shared with Alex Chi, co-head of Americas Direct Lending within Goldman Sachs Asset & Wealth Management, her journey to CEO as a child of immigrants and recounted some lessons about leadership and success she learned along the way.

1. Adapt to find your voice

"Keep your head down, get your work done, [and] ignore everything else” – that was the immigrant mentality Liu grew up with.

Growing up in South Carolina wasn’t easy. Liu’s house got egged, her family received prank calls, and people shouted at her family to go back to “where they came from.” By staying small and quiet, Liu thought no one would notice her. But when Liu entered the business world, she found the opposite was true.

She found that to succeed, she had to show up, speak out, and sell her ideas. But she felt like an imposter – did she betray her and her parents’ culture by speaking up?

Liu realized she had to look at success from a different lens. She had to change her mindset: What if this was called adaptation? What if this was the path to success?

Liu found her voice to thrive in the workplace. To get through her imposter syndrome, Liu decided she had to find something she could be really good at, then show up, and speak out for what she had to say.

2. Don't ask somebody to invest in you – make yourself investable

When it comes to getting the job, Liu believes it’s not about how you’re going to get the job - it’s about being ready when the job comes. Here is the advice she received from a founder who had raised over $100 million for his business: You don’t ask somebody to invest in you – you make yourself investable.

But Liu struggled to be the kind of person that people would want to invest in or invite to the party. She had to learn how to put herself out there and talk about what she knows, but she often felt uncomfortable doing so for fear of being judged.

Liu realized she had to change her way of thinking: Instead of calling it self-promotion, what if you call it finding your voice? What if you think of it as an opportunity to help others who are in the same circumstance as you?

By changing her mindset, Liu changed from taking to giving – sharing her ideas and accomplishments to help others. While some people might not agree with her, she believes by being part of the conversation and making yourself more investable, you’d be surprised by what you may be invited to.

“And that’s when opportunities come to you when you put yourself out there, someone else actually responds and responds and responds. And that is what a rich career can really be,” said Liu.

3. A sponsor is more valuable than a mentor

For Liu, mentors are valuable, but they are distinct from a sponsor. A mentor gives you advice, but a sponsor can open doors. Sponsors put their reputation on the line and offer you the opportunity to take part in a project or a chance to speak at an event.

But how do you find a sponsor?

“Often the people who actually sponsor someone, they'll sponsor someone who reminds them of themselves when they were younger,” said Liu. That’s why representation matters, and it turns out that women will have lots of mentors, but men are more sponsored in corporate America, according to Liu. Sponsors tend to be endowed on people, not assigned.

That said, Liu believes you need to make yourself worthy of being sponsored. More often than not, it’s the mentors who can become sponsors. In her experience mentoring, she found that while she didn’t sponsor everyone she mentored, she gravitated towards sponsoring those who took and tried her advice – then came back to tell her what happened and asked for more help on what to do next.

The mantra in Silicon Valley is that if you want advice, ask for money. In a roundabout way, Liu noted people would give a lot of advice instead of money, but if you wanted money, you should start by asking for advice.

“Because if someone gives you advice and you take it and you come back, they will say this person is worthy of investing in,” said Liu.