Deborah Liu

Deborah Liu is the CEO of Ancestry.com, a genealogy company that maintains billions of historical and genealogical records. She is the founder of Women in Product and Maya Road. From 2009 to 2021, Liu worked at Facebook (now Meta.) She was a key developer for Facebook Credits and Facebook Marketplace, founded in 2016.

Liu was born in Queens, New York but raised in Hanahan, South Carolina. Her parents immigrated to the United States from China in the 1960s with almost no money or belongings. From a young age, she dealt with racist comments and discrimination as she was one of the very few Asian people populating South Carolina in the late 1980s (about 22,000 versus 2.4 million white people counted in the 1990 census.)

Liu holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Duke University and a master of business administration from Stanford University Graduate School of Business. While attending Stanford, Liu was an active eBay seller.

From 1998 to 2000, Liu worked as an associate at Boston Consulting Group. She worked with major clients across sectors such as consumer goods and telecommunications to develop custom business strategies based on different situations. These included various entry, investment, and growth strategies.

Liu first joined eBay in October 2000 as a category management intern. She specialized in analyzation of the online markets of musical instruments and adventure sports; she also worked to develop proposals for category expansions. She left the company in March 2001 and joined PayPal the following year, where she helped direct the integration of eBay and PayPal over the course of about six years.

From June 2002 to March 2008, Liu held four positions at PayPal. First, she was a senior product manager of PayPal's Marketplaces in which she led two teams: one responsible for product strategy and user segmentation development, and the other responsible for completing the post-acquisition backend integration of eBay and PayPal. She also managed the development of multiple PayPal products. eBay acquired PayPal in a deal that closed in October 2002.

The tasks of Liu's second position at PayPal, which was director of Marketplaces product management, were aligned with the interests of the eBay-PayPal acquisition. She managed a team that developed joint features for the two companies and partnered with the company's business unit to develop a new team strategy in light of the acquisition. Her third position, director of Marketplaces product marketing management, was a continuation of her second after she integrated the Marketplaces product management and business unit teams to form the product marketing management group. She was in charge of planning and directing the verticalization of cross-functional teams to develop a new team for Marketplaces. She managed this new team to deliver the 2006 eBay-PayPal joint roadmap.

Beginning in February 2007, Liu was PayPal's director of corporate strategy, social commerce, and charity. She managed investments and a roadmap for the development of PayPal's social network and blog features, as well as its distributed payment services. Through her position, she was able to negotiate a joint business relationship with MySpace to power donations for the 2008 US presidential election race.

After working at PayPal for nearly six years, Liu returned to eBay from March 2008 to July 2009 as the director of end-to-end buyer experience product management. She managed its team and worked with numerous product managers to oversee and enhance key eBay site buyer flows (Home Page, View Item, Bidding, Checkout, and more.) She established a three-year business strategy and one-year roadmap regarding end-to-end buyers; another accomplishment was the building of global solutions with international counterparts.

Liu cofounded Maya Road with her sister, Caroline Lau, in March, 2003. Maya Road sold scrapbooking and altered-art products. Liu managed the company's supply chain and product design. She designed and sourced 600 products that were sold in over 800 stores worldwide. The company closed in January 2015.

Like at PayPal, several of Liu's positions during her Facebook career were involved in product marketing and management. She started working at Facebook in July 2009 as the leader of the product marketing team for the company's gaming platform and Facebook Credits, of which she was a key developer. She worked alongside major social network game companies to launch Facebook Credits; the feature was eventually rolled out to all Facebook platform games. Additionally, she managed an end-to-end redesign of Facebook's payments features.

As director of product management and platform monetization from 2012 to late 2014, Liu developed a new team responsible for managing Facebook features like payments, commerce, games, and more. She launched Facebook's mobile app install ads, which were an incredible success for the company and led to hundreds of millions of new mobile app downloads. Eventually, mobile app install ads were updated to include re-engagement ads.

Liu held two positions as vice president at Facebook, starting in October 2014. She was vice president of Facebook's platform and Marketplace product group, and vice president of the Facebook app commerce product group. Liu began developing Facebook Marketplace in 2015, although she'd had the idea since 2009. Marketplace is Facebook's seller platform, officially launched on October 4, 2016. Facebook users can sell many items on the website, including vehicles. In terms of active users, Facebook Marketplace is the world's second-largest marketplace behind Amazon. Liu left her position as platform and Marketplace vice president in September 2017, but continued in the other VP role until February 2021.

Founded by Liu in March 2016, Women in Product connects women working as product managers in the science and technology fields. The company hosts over one hundred events annually in locations all over the world. Women in Product also holds an annual conference in which thousands of women product managers attend.

Liu began serving as Ancestry.com's CEO on March 1, 2021. She also serves on the company's board of directors. Liu says she hopes to use her past experience in building technology products that connect people at Ancestry.com.

PayPal is really connecting small businesses so that anybody can create an account to accept payments. 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. And the goal is, how do we connect people with their heritage? How do we connect people with each other?

Liu is the creator of Mommy School, a comic series based on the lives of her and her family. Mommy School was created to remember the childhood moments of Liu's three children.

Liu has written a book titled Take Back Your Power: 10 New Rules for Women at Work. It is set to be released on August 9, 2022. The book is aimed at women working in the tech industry and discusses how to deal with common problems women face in male-dominated fields, especially regarding power in the workplace.