How to own your career growth and become a powerful product leader | Deb Liu, Ancestry (ex-Facebook, PayPal)

**Deb Liu** (0:00)
We don't talk about this, by the way, but if you look at the very senior people who rise faster in organizations as senior executives, they have this skill. And I noticed this as I got further and further in my career. I didn't realize how important this was. And then I realized that anyone who can go into a room and speak about almost anything intelligently without any preparation has a huge advantage in our industry.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:24)
Deb Liu is maybe most known for incubating, launching and scaling Facebook Marketplace, which is now used by over 1 billion people around the world every month. But before Facebook, where she spent almost 12 years, she was at PayPal, where she led much of the product integration with Ebay after they were acquired by Ebay, and then she went on to lead much of the PayPal product team. Currently, she's the CEO of Ancestry, she's also on the board of Intuit. In our chat, we cover what made PayPal so special and what she learned from the people, the culture and the way they build product that's informed her approach today.
We also talk about how despite being an introvert, she was able to excel in numerous leadership roles, what attributes she's found to be most common to PMs that do super well, and also what skills she believes PM should focus on above all else. We also chat about Facebook Marketplace, her upcoming book, Take Back Your Power, and a whole lot of stories from the course of her incredible career. As you'll see, I so enjoyed my chat with Deb, and I'm really excited for you to hear this episode.
Hey, Ashley, Head of Marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?

**Ashley** (1:33)
At least 40 percent.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:34)
And how many of them screw that up, and what happens when they do?

**Ashley** (1:38)
Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chock-full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:57)
I am percent surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leveraged opportunities for both sign-up conversion and increasing long-term retention.
Giving people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.

**Ashley** (2:12)
Totally. It's incredible to see how our press stores like Square, Spotify and Zura are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile.
It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:28)
If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com/lenny.
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Welcome to the podcast, Deb. I am really excited that we're finally doing this.

**Deb Liu** (3:31)
I'm so happy to be here, Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:34)
So you're currently the CEO of Ancestry, and before that, you were at Facebook for about 11 years, where you led the Facebook Marketplace team, which is a product I love and have used so many times, and I've sold so many products on it.
And you also did a bunch of the payments work at Facebook, led a lot of the teams that did the payments work. But before that, you were at PayPal for six years, where you led the integration between PayPal and Ebay, and also led a lot of the product team at PayPal. And so my first question is around that. There's been a lot of writing coming out about the early history of PayPal. I read this book called The Founders.

**Deb Liu** (4:13)
Jimmy, it's awesome. He actually interviewed me. It's part of that book.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:17)
Okay, I missed that part, and I will have to go read it.
It's such a fascinating tale of the story of PayPal. And there's a story about Meg Whitman coming to the office when the acquisition was announced in her very corporate t-shirt, and everyone at PayPal was like, oh no, what are we doing joining this big company?