Paul Allen

Current

• CEO at FamilyLink.com
• Board Member at FundingUniverse.com

Past

• Co-Founder, Board Member at Infobase Media Corp (dba LDSAudio.com)
• Managing Partner at Provo Labs
• Adjunct Faculty, Internet Marketing at Brigham Young University

• Board Member at Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum
• Chairman at 10x Marketing
• Manager, Technology and Innovation at LDS Family History Department
• Adjunct Faculty at Utah Valley State College
• Co-founder, CEO, VP Marketing, etc. at MyFamily.com
• Co-founder, CEO at Ancestry.com
• CEO at Infobases, Inc.
• Data Preparation Specialist at Folio Corporation

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Education

• Brigham Young University
• Orem High School
• Cascade Elementary

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Recommended

49 people have recommended Paul

Connections

500+ connections

Industry

Internet

Websites

• My Blog
• My Company

Paul Allen’s Summary

I am a social entrepreneur, trying to build businesses that improve the world and connect and strengthen families.

I am best known for co-founding what is now called The Generations Network (formerly MyFamily.com). We launched the Ancestry.com website in 1996 and the fast-growing MyFamily.com web site in 1998. We started attracting millions of users. We brought in an executive management team that raised $90.5 million in venture capital. I moved from Utah to Silicon Valley during the bubble, and we planned to take the company public.

We survived the dot com bubble burst but after we became profitable I left in 2002 to start new companies. The company had decided to focus on genealogy while I thought the best strategy included providing free web sites for every family in the world.

I left the company in February 2002, but have watched the company continue to grow. The company generated approximately $190 million in revenue in 2008. A majority stake was acquired in a private equity buyout by Spectrum Equity Investors in late 2007 for $300 million.

Like many founders, I did okay with this business, but not as well as I had hoped. As Ray Noorda of Novell fame once quipped, "finders keepers, founders weepers."

I have been involved in electronic publishing since 1990, mainly in religious, educational and genealogical content.

Since 2007 I have focused on FamilyLink.com. Our vision is to help people worldwide to use technology to connect to their families.

Our We're Related app on Facebook is in the top 5 of all Facebook apps, with 47 million total and 15 million active users.

We have raised $4.1 million in angel and venture capital for FamilyLink.com, and turned profitable in late 2008. We have 61 employees and contractors in the US and overseas. We plan to open offices this year in Seattle, Palo Alto, Boulder, and New York City.

Paul Allen’s Specialties:

viral marketing, genealogy, family history, content acquisition, electronic publishing, internet marketing, web usability, guerilla marketing, competitive intelligence, market research, strategy, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, social networking, family social networks, Facebook Apps, public domain content, CD ROM publishing

Paul Allen’s Experience

• CEO

  FamilyLink.com

  (Online Media industry)

  January 2007 — Present (2 years 11 months)

  FamilyLink.com connects families. We build social networking tools for families and extended families and we help people build family trees. We are backed by angel and venture capital. We have aggregated nearly 1.5 billion genealogy records from 33 countries, and we have more than 24,000 active subscribers to WorldVitalRecords.com. More than 23 million people use our family applications on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and Friendster.

• Board Member

  FundingUniverse.com

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)

  January 2005 — Present (4 years 11 months)

  FundingUniverse.com is a network of 50 web sites that match (free of charge) investors with entrepreneurs at a local level.
  
  Our mission is to help entrepreneurs build teams that are fundable, and then to recruit investors to join our sites so they find good companies that are seeking capital.
  
  Our first site was FundingUtah.com. The concept has worked so well in Utah that we rolled it out to every state and to many countries.
  
  FundingUniverse.com has hundreds of investors and thoursands of registered entrepreneurs. CEO is Brock Blake.

• Co-Founder, Board Member

  Infobase Media Corp (dba LDSAudio.com)

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

  September 2003 — November 2007 (4 years 3 months)

  Developed strategic plan for company, advised on web site design and internet marketing strategy, raised funds ($1.15 million raised in August 2004), recruited key team members and helped form strategic partnerships.
  
  I also advise the company on growth strategy. It is branching out from its successful niche religious audio and text market to additional vertical markets. It is also moving in the mass market audio book industry through its mp3books.com brand.

• Managing Partner

  Provo Labs

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)

  September 2003 — January 2007 (3 years 5 months)

  Provo Labs is a seed stage fund and incubator. We seek to build internet businesses that will make the world a better place. Most of our concepts involve content and community.
  
  Using market research and competitive intelligence methodologies, we identify concepts which appear most promising. Then we form a prototyping team and provide initial funding for an early launch.
  
  When the web site is live, we use internet marketing tactics and guerilla marketing to generate significant traffic to the web site. Then we monitor key performance metrics to determine if the business model is viable.
  
  Once we have determined to fully back a startup company, we help identify investors and management for the new company. Provo Labs sometimes provides additional bridge capital to get the business on its feet.
  
  We are often willing to take a minority stake in our own companies, reserving a majority of the equity for the investors, management team and initial developers.

• Adjunct Faculty, Internet Marketing

  Brigham Young University

  (Non-Profit; 1001-5000 employees; BYU; Higher Education industry)

  August 2005 — December 2006 (1 year 5 months)

  I teach internet marketing (BusM 457) to more than 50 students. Our focus is hands-on experience with internet marketing. We cover pay-per-click marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing, affiliate marketing, web analytics, auctions, guerilla and viral marketing, online advertising, blogging, and user generated content strategies.
  
  Our "text book" is the daily edition of MarketingVOX, a great email newsletter that covers all the happenings in internet marketing.

• Board Member

  Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum

  (Non-Profit; 1-10 employees; Non-Profit Organization Management industry)

  March 2003 — August 2005 (2 years 6 months)

  UVEF has monthly meetings with 1-2 speakers who share business success stories and key lessons learned. I help suggest speakers and am working to help the organization get a web site and more members attending.

• Chairman

  10x Marketing

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Marketing and Advertising industry)

  March 2002 — June 2005 (3 years 4 months)

  Founded interactive marketing agency focused on affiliate and search engine marketing. We sold 10x Marketing to Innuity, a publicly traded company based in Seattle, in June 2005.

• Manager, Technology and Innovation

  LDS Family History Department

  (Non-Profit; 1001-5000 employees; Non-Profit Organization Management industry)

  August 2003 — May 2004 (10 months)

  Help the church bring their billions of genealogical records to people worldwide.

• Adjunct Faculty

  Utah Valley State College

  (Educational Institution; 1001-5000 employees; Higher Education industry)

  August 2003 — April 2004 (9 months)

  I co-taught a Business Formation (online entrepreneurship) class with Dr. Rick Farr, a very successful entrepreneur and investor (six times his companies have won Inc. 500 awards). Our students are forming businesses, some as teams, some individually.

• Co-founder, CEO, VP Marketing, etc.

  MyFamily.com

  (Privately Held; 1001-5000 employees; Internet industry)

  July 1997 — February 2002 (4 years 8 months)

  Founded Ancestry.com and was first CEO. Wrote business plan, raised angel investment, recruited CEO, helped with venture rounds. Worked in marketing, general management, executive site producer, strategy, and corporate development. Conceived of MyFamily.com idea (for private family web sites), moved to Bay Area to open S.F. office for company (in our pre-IPO frenzy). 19 months there, mostly in strategy and corp. dev. Final role at company was VP Marketing (all interactive) over $7 million annual budget. Responsible for generating subscriptions to Ancestry.com through interactive marketing.

• Co-founder, CEO

  Ancestry.com

  (Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Internet industry)

  July 1997 — July 1998 (1 year 1 month)

  Served as CEO of Ancestry.com (now MyFamily.com) during first year of operation; then recruited Curt Allen (brother) to become CEO.

• CEO

  Infobases, Inc.

  (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  September 1990 — July 1997 (6 years 11 months)

  Co-founded company to publish religious and educational CD ROMs. Grew to $4 million in sales in five years. Made Inc. 500 in 1996. Primary roles were content acquisition, product development, management and finance. Company president focused on sales, marketing and business development.

• Data Preparation Specialist

  Folio Corporation

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)

  June 1988 — August 1990 (2 years 3 months)

  This was my start in the computer industry. I ran a $40,000 Kurzweil (OCR) scanner for my first few months. We scanned professional reference information for large publishing companies and for internal use.
  
  A few months into my job I was hired to do "data preparation" -- to build infobases for Folio's large publishing clients. I learned WordPerfect macros, Turbo Pascal, and Basic programming, as well as Folio's markup language (somewhat akin to SGML or HTML). I had some great mentors (thanks Rick Edwards, Steve Barwick and Lee Gibbons!)
  
  I especially loved using FSR, a GREP-like utility for doing massive search and replaces in huge files. (Written by Grant Beckman)
  
  During my last two years there I built dozens of huge (10-100+ megabyte) infobases for major legal and accounting publishers. I learned enough about electronic publishing to start out on my own.

Paul Allen’s Education

• Brigham Young University

  B.A. , Russian , June 1983 — December 1990

  Also began masters program in Library Science at BYU, but dropped out to build first company.

• Orem High School

  1983

  Activities and Societies:

  Showed up for more high school yearbook club photos than anyone else. :)

• Cascade Elementary

Additional Information

Paul Allen’s Websites:

• My Blog
• My Company

Paul Allen’s Interests:

search engines, angel investing, languages, history, education, basketball, venture capital, world religions, politics, presidential campaigns

Paul Allen’s Groups:

Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum, Mountain West Venture Group, AlwaysOn, v100, VCIR

•    Brigham Young University Alumni
•    AlwaysOn: Stanford Conference Alumni
•    Internet Affiliate Marketers Association (IAMA)
•    New Media, Social Media, and Social Networking Participants
•    v100
•    iPhone Developers - www.iPhoneintouch.com
•    Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum (UVEF)
•    Niche Media Network
•    The Official Brigham Young University Alumni Network

Paul Allen’s Honors:

2008 MarketingSherpa Entrepreneur of the Year
2007 Fellow of the Utah Genealogical Association (FUGA)
2006 Top 25 Most Influential Utah Business People (Connect Magazine)
2006 Entrepreneur of the Year (Provo/Orem Chamber of Commerce)
2002 Arthur Watkins Entrepreneur of the Year Award (Provo-Orem Chamber of Commerce)
1999 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year (Utah)

Paul Allen’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch