Interview with David Sacks, CEO of Geni

Geni is what we call a viral networked family tree. What it means to be viral is that when you start creating a family tree, you can add in someone’s email address, and if you do they’ll be invited to join. Then they can invite other relatives by putting in their email address.

So the idea is for you to create a family tree that keeps growing as relatives invite other relatives with the goal to create a family tree of the whole world. It’s networked in the sense that you’re all collaboratively working on the same family tree.

It’s our goal to layer on family networking applications on top of the family tree to help you stay in touch with your family network.

We want to apply social media concepts to the family space. We believe people are going to want to have a separate family network, in the same way that people want to have a separate professional network.

Well I think people want to make a distinct separation between the different areas and people in their lives. If you think about the face you’re going to present to the world on LinkedIn, it is very different than the face that you’re going to present on Facebook. On LinkedIn you present your most professional face, whereas on Facebook it’s really much more social.

I think that when it comes to your family, you’re also going to want to present a slightly different face of yourself. But it is also about providing different information about yourself, because family information is very private.

So there will be different networks for the different parts of your life and it is about those networks also serving the different aspects of your life by providing targeted functionalities.

My own family is in many different countries. My family immigrated into the United States when I was about five years old and my grandparents were immigrants. My parents emigrated from Africa, my grandparents emigrated from Europe. I’ve always been curious about who all these people are. The idea for this came to me as an interesting way to apply principles of mass-collaboration, user-generated content, and social media to the genealogy space. Which is something that I don’t think people have really done till now.

Well I’ve been to a lot of genealogy sites out there and we are doing something that I think is quite distinct from what they’re doing. If you look at genealogy sites, in general, they’re almost exclusively concerned with understanding who your direct lineal ancestors are. By direct lineal ancestors I mean your parents, grandparents, great grandparents and so on. So if you make a family tree on those sites, they look like tournament brackets. And our family tree actually not only goes vertically it also goes horizontally because we include siblings, your spouse, their family, your siblings’ family whether it’s your uncle or your cousin and so on. We’re not just going vertically back in time, we’re also branching and going horizontally among all your living relatives.

Well, we have a three point plan for our development. One is, make the site viral. Number two is, make it sticky, and then number three is monetize it. And so right now the way we’re prioritizing our features is by working to make our family tree as useful and viral as possible.

Step two is how to make it sticky which mean layering on family networking features. And step three, we layer on things like advertising and other ways to monetize our user base. To elaborate on that, the reason why that makes sense is because you first you have to acquire the users. If there’s no one to retain, then there’s nothing to monetize.

One of the things we really learned from eBay, is that we need to be active participants on the discussion boards where people were talking about PayPal. We did that very early on.

What we’re seeing is that that’s now even more intense now. When we launched our site, we launched a blog, and we’ve made frequent updates in the blog to our users. We’re seeing a tremendous amount of activity on our blog from users who are posting comments. We’re also going to build a user forum.

I would say the one thing that’s new from when I was working at Pay-Pal, seven years ago, is the phenomenon of bloggers. I would say that at this point most of the people who learn about our site for the first time learn about it through blogs. The most common is TechCrunch and then Digg.

So the blogs have been very important in generating word of mouth traffic. I think that’s definitely new with startups.

This really is a site that we want everyone in the world to use. Everybody in the world has relatives and is related to somebody else. Our goal really is to create a family tree of the whole world. In that sense this is an even more universal application than PayPal. The goal there was to allow any two people in the world to do transact with as little friction as possible.

I think the users that we really want to get right now are the ones who are going to be the most viral, and the ones that are going to spread it to the most other users. In that sense, the TechCrunch audience is actually a pretty good audience.

Exactly. You want the early adopters to try out your service and it is essential to reach out to them via the bloggers. We do want to reach out to the genealogy community. They don’t take holidays. They’re not TechCrunch literate. We want to reach out to any other groups which are very interested in family trees. That’s something we’ll definitely do over time.

Geni is growing faster than Pay-Pal did at a similarpoint in time. This launch has been pretty phenomenal.

I think that what happens is when you start a network and people find use in that, they tend to grow very, very quickly. My hope is that certainly five years from now we’d have an enormous network.

Well, it’s really a lot of the same things I thought worked at PayPal. First of all, you’ve got be truly product-focused. That was my focus at PayPal, just making the product as useful and simple to use as possible.

Beyond that, I think it’s useful to have a product that’s highly differentiated from what other people are doing. The Internet is so competitive that you want to be doing something that’s quite different. Although there are a number of genealogy sites out there, I’d never seen one that really approached the problem in the way that we’re approaching it. So I feel pretty good that we’ve got something that’s pretty different. The reaction of the blogosphere reflects that.

And then, I think you have to focus on the distribution question, which are the user acquisition questions. How are you going to find users? I think that’s something which is ideally embedded in your product in a very deep way. It’s not something you layer on through marketing. You want your product to be self-distributing. If you can’t, it’ll take a lot longer to get traction.