Deb Liu

Liu earned a B.S. in civil engineering from Duke University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She spent several years in product roles at PayPalPayPalPayPal Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: PYPL) is an American digital payments company that operates payment brands including PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, and Xoom, providing online and in-store payments, money transfers, and consumer credit to consumers and merchants worldwide.Open the full entry and eBayeBayeBay Inc. is an online marketplace company headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar; it started out with person-to-person online auctions and listed on Nasdaq in 1998. As of the end of 2025, it had 135 million active buyers, and its platform’s gross merchandise volume in 2025 was nearly $80 billion.Open the full entry, where she led integration between the two products; she recalled starting at Facebook the week after leaving eBay.⁠[1][2]

At Facebook Liu was a senior executive who led its first mobile app ad product and its mobile ad network, built its games business and its payments platform, including Facebook Pay, and created and led the product group behind the buying and selling platform Facebook Marketplace.⁠[1][3]

On February 2, 2021, Ancestry announced Liu’s appointment as CEO effective March 1, 2021, and she also joined Ancestry’s board. Ancestry chairman Mark Thompson said, “In the course of an extensive search, it became clear to all of us that Deb was the perfect next CEO of Ancestry.” Liu said, “It's an honor to join Ancestry.”⁠[3]

On April 12, 2023, a16zAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry released on its YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel the Field Notes video “Marketplace Tactics: Metrics, Growth vs. Focus, Business Strategy | Field Notes by Connie Chan,” hosted by Connie Chan, with Liu as a guest; its topics include marketplace metrics, the trade-off between growth and focus, and business strategy.⁠[4]

On January 15, 2025, Ancestry announced that Liu would step down as president and CEO, with chief financial and operating officer Howard Hochhauser succeeding her on February 1. At the end of her roughly four years in the role, Ancestry had more than 60 billion records, more than 3.5 million subscribers and more than 25 million people in its DNA network. Liu said, “Leading Ancestry over the last four years has been both demanding and fulfilling.”⁠[5]

The same day Liu wrote in her Substack newsletter that her four-year tenure at Ancestry would end on January 31 and that she would take time off for the first time in her career.⁠[2]

Liu serves on the board of Intuit, founded Ember AI, is a seed investor in and adviser to several startups, and sits on the board of visitors of Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering. She founded the nonprofit Women in Product, which supports women in product management and has more than 30,000 members. She is the author of Take Back Your Power: 10 New Rules for Women at Work and writes the weekly Substack newsletter Perspectives.⁠[1][3]