The Celtics won only 24 games last year, but this year
experienced the single biggest turnabout in NBA history, after Danny Ainge
orchestrated two major trades last summer, bringing Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen
to Boston.

Danny Ainge is my favorite basketball player/coach/general
manager of all time. While most people will agree with me that Michael Jordan
is the greatest NBA player in history, and it is popular to say, “I want to be
like Mike,” personally, I’d rather be like Danny.

Basketball was big at BYU. I started attending games at age 5 when Kresimir Cosic, the first All-American from a foreign country and Yugoslav Olympic star, filled the stadium. BYU led the nation in attendance with 21,818 fans per game back in 1971-72.

I was such a fan of Cosic, that my mom wrote this about me in my Book of Remembrance (I should do a blog post on this sometime--it's what my mom did instead of scrapbooking, for each of her 8 kids) when I was six years old:

“You were a
devoted BYU basketball fan, and throughout the basketball season, you followed
every game with diligence. You were especially interested in Kresimir Cosic and
cheered his every move. You wanted to go to every ballgame, and because you
couldn’t, you carried the radio around with you at home, settled down in some
corner, and listened with your ear close to the radio. Whenever someone made a
basket, you cheered and reported it aloud to whoever might be nearby. Your
enthusiasm was something to behold, and the entire family enjoyed your
enjoyment of the sport as much or more than the sport itself.

“Each
morning as you got out of bed, you raced upstairs to check the ratings of the
BYU team in the sports section of the newspaper. When they achieved 9^th
place standing in the nation, you made as much fuss as if you had won the world
championship yourself. If they dropped a notch or two, you took it as personal
disappointment. One morning as you called to me from the other room with “Where
is BYU” I answered, “in Provo.” You
kept asking me the same question, over and over as though I hadn’t heard you
right. Finally I learned that you meant, “Where do they stand in the national
ratings today?”

“Your
teacher told me that when she put all the ‘C’ spelling words on the board for
your class, you raised your hand and said, “You left one out, Miss Piquet.” She
checked the list again and said that she thought she had them all. Still you
insisted that she’d forgotten one. Finally she said, “Paul, what word did I
leave off?” Grinning broadly, you replied, “Cosic.” Because she understood you,
she accommodated you by adding Cosic to the list.”

I remember that Miss Piquet didn’t actually know how to
spell Cosic, so she asked Mr. Mike, the janitor, and he knew how.

Ainge was the next huge BYU basketball star. According to Wikipedia:

“Ainge played basketball at Brigham Young University and became a
household name after hitting one of the greatest shots in NCAA March
Madness history against Notre Dame in 1981. His coast to coast drive with
only a second remaining gave the Cougars a one point win. Ainge concluded his
senior year by winning the Eastman Award as well as the John R. Wooden Award, given to the best
collegiate player in the nation. During his four-year career at BYU, Ainge was
an All-American, a two-time First Team Academic All-American, the WAC Player of
the Year and a four-time All-WAC selection.”

His play against Notre Dame is one of the great moments in
college basketball history. ESPN once rated it the 6^th best ending
in a college game. During the 1981 Sweet Sixteen against Notre Dame, with just
9 seconds left in the game, Ainge took an inbounds pass and drove the length of
the court, past all 5 Notre Dame defenders and made a finger roll layup over
outstretched defenders hands with a second left to claim a 51-50 BYU victory
over Notre Dame. You can watch the video of Ainge's drive on YouTube.

When you are 15 years old, and you get to watch the best
college player in the country almost every week, you grow fond of the guy and
he becomes a hero for life.

I remember consciously imitating how Danny Ainge walked
(slightly turned-in toes), how he wiped dirt off the bottom of his shoes on
the opposite sock, where he stood when the opposing team was shooting foul
shots, how he would save possessions by throwing balls off opposing players
legs when falling out of bounds, his no look and around the back passes, and on
and on. Nearly every good move I had, I learned from watching Ainge.

As you may know, I was a wanna-be basketball player. (See my
blog post on “53”.) I didn’t even make my high school team, but my church team
did win three tournaments my junior year, our stake, region, and area
tournaments. I kept a journal from age 14 including my own basketball stats--I guess I was blending family history and competitiveness even back then. During my senior year in high school, playing church ball, I averaged 28 points per game my senior year, ranking me right up next to NBA leading scorers LeBron James and Kobe Bryant this year. :)

The highest compliment anyone ever paid to me when I played
church ball was when a friend of mine on an opposing team used to call me
“Danny” after I made a great play.

Ainge was an incredibly smart player, and really a player
coach all throughout college.

I also saw him do something once that I’ve never seen any
college or pro player ever do, and I’d love to see a Youtube video of this
sometime. Once while at the foul line, with his team slightly down, before
everyone was really set, he kind of grabbed the ball from the official (they
used to hand you the ball and not throw it to you), threw it off the front rim,
got the rebound, and made a layup. That pretty much blew my mind.

So, to make a long story short, Ainge went on to play 14 years in the NBA, win 2 rings with the Boston Celtics, and ended his career as one of only three players who had made 1,000 three-pointers.

Following his NBA career, Ainge "joined TNT as a color analyst for the 1995-96
season before returning to the court with the Phoenix Suns as an Assistant
Coach prior to the 1996-97 season. Just eight games into the season, he was
promoted to Head Coach and guided his club to a 40-34 record after the team
started the season 0-8. He spent the next two-plus seasons as Head Coach of the
Suns and compiled a 136-90 (.602) record before stepping down on December 13, 1999 and returning to TNT as an analyst. In his three-plus
seasons as the Suns coach, he guided Phoenix to three playoff berths.” (source: NBA.com)

He retired from coaching the Phoenix Suns to spend more time with his family, which is another reason I admire him.

In 2003, the Boston Celtics hired Danny Ainge as Executive Director of Basketball Operations.

Last year was a disaster. Everyone wanted his head. Celtics fans were calling for the owners to get rid of both Ainge and head coach Doc Rivers.The Celtics won only 24 games, 2nd worst in the NBA.

Then Ainge orchestrated the trade of the century. Sports Illustrated has the best article about how he pulled it off.

When I think about Ainge's career, I think about how he went from player to coach to GM.

I think entrepreneurs go through a similar evolution.

When I was in my 20s, entrepreneurship was about how much work the founders could
do, how many all-nighters we could pull, how hard we could work.

In my 30s, it became more about networking, and discovering how much smarter we could work if we knew the right people and read the right books and attended the right conferences.

But in my 40s, entrepreneurship for me is about finding the
best people can to be on my team, and then watching them go to work. If I carefully scout for the right investors, the right management team, the right
partners, the right business model, and provide the right motivation and occasional feedback for everyone, then magical things start to happen.

Business Lessons to Learn from Danny Ainge

• It's all about getting the right people
• Do whatever it takes to get the right people
• When you get one right person (Ray Allen) it makes it easier to get the next right person (Kevin Garnett.) Like attracts like.
• To know the right people, it helps to be the right kind of person. Ainge's years as a player at ever level, and as a coach, gives him a feel for the game that is extremely rare and valuable. Be a player first.
• Don't give up too soon. Before you experience the thrill of victory, you almost always experience the agony of defeat. Most successful companies that I know about almost didn't survive the early years.
• You can spend more time with your family and still have a successful career

Danny Ainge is once again a World Champion, but this time he
didn’t make a single point, or throw a single pass, or play a single minute. He
didn’t even coach his team. He sat on the sidelines watching the players and coaching
staff that he helped assemble satisfy their thirst for a championship, and after the game he was swarmed by Garnett, Allen, and Perkins. Their smiles said it all. "We did it because you brought us together."

My top goal at FamilyLink.com is to assemble the right people to build a great company. For me that includes getting the right investors, the right management team, the right employees, and the right business partners, and to make sure that our business model fully motivates and compensates everyone on our team.

It helped to start with three key engineers who had actually built Ancestry.com and MyFamily.com from the ground up. That was like starting the year with Paul Pierce on board. Working with Cliff Shaw (founder of genforum.com, gencircles.com and creator of Family Tree Legends) and his brilliant designer to build our next generation family tree collection engine (coming soon!), is a lot like getting Ray Allen, the purest shooter in the NBA on board. And it might take us six months or a year, but we are working hard to recruit our equivalent of Kevin Garnett.

I think Danny Ainge knows now that it's all about getting (and keeping!) the right people on your team.

I think Warren Buffett, the world's greatest investor, would agree. He never takes risks on unknown people. When he buys or invests in companies, he almost always leaves the proven management in place.

I heard him say at a Berkshire Hathaway investor conference that he saw no reason to take risks on people or business ideas, and had no interest in doing anything early stage, because it involved risk. From what I know about Buffett, he spends the great majority of his time scouting for undervalued good businesses with excellent management teams, and only makes a trade every year or two, a lot like an NBA GM.

I heard Jon Huntsman, Sr., one of Utah's billionaires, say at a BYU lecture/dinner that he wouldn't hire anyone directly out of college, but that he waited for them to get 2-3 years of work experience on someone else's dime, and then he would hire them. That is an interesting idea.

The main lesson I think entrepreneurs can learn from Danny Ainge is to know who the right people are, and then do what it takes to get them on your team. And then hold on until things gel.

The next lesson, of course, is to attend BYU, and send your kids there too.

Go Cougars!

Go Celtics!

In fact, we announced something that I have personally hoped for and dreamed of for more than a decade.

Today we announced a partnership between FamilySearch and FamilyLink.com to publish the Family History Library Catalog -- the largest single database of genealogy sources in the world -- in Web 2.0 fashion.

This means that individual genealogists, librarians, archivists, and others from around the world will be able, when the Catalog 2.0 comes online in the coming months, to enhance and extend the value of the catalog. Users will be able to add new sources that are currently in the library catalog, and thus extend its scope of coverage. They will be able to improve the source descriptions, and even rate and review sources as to their usefulness.

Whenever a source listed in the catalog has been digitized, and exists somewhere online, there will be links created to the digital version by users or through automation technology that FamilyLink.com will utilize.

The catalog lists millions of sources from more than a hundred countries, including more than 2 million rolls of microfilm. About.com genealogy guide Kimberly Powell calls it the "gem of the Family History Library," and "the best resource on the FamilySearch web site."

The Genealogical Society of Utah has been microfilming valuable records from all over the world since 1939. The catalog lists all of these films, and organizes them by locality and record type. Some of the records that have been filmed have since been destroyed by war or accident, and so the films become the only surviving copy of the valuable records. And the films themselves are preserved in the famous Granite Mountain Vault.

The catalog also lists books, periodicals, maps, and all kinds of other holdings in the world's largest family history library (in Salt Lake City) that would otherwise be unknown and unused.

As I said earlier, I have wanted to work with the catalog for more than a decade. I think it is one of the most valuable tools in the world for family history, and I think it can become more accessible and more useful to millions of people worldwide, who don't yet know that it exists or how to best use it.

When we founded Ancestry.com in 1996-97, our vision was to digitize the genealogical records in all nations and make them available online. We saw the catalog playing a key role in that vision.

I had started a Masters Degree program at BYU in Library Science back in 1990 (although I had to drop out early to focus on my electronic pubishing business.) I have a great respect for libraries and library science. After all, the accessibility to most of the world's information, prior to the internet, came because of the organizational skills and care of libraries and archives around the world.

I had also watched as the founders of Yahoo began to turn an online classification system for web sites into a multi-billion dollar company. Until Google came along, Yahoo was the most valuable of all web sites. Why? Because it catalogued all the rest. It could be the starting point for all queries, even before search had been perfected, when browsing was one of the dominant activities on the web.

We made several attempts over the years to see if we might be able to license and publish the catalog. But the timing must not have been right. Until Web 2.0 and social networking came on the scene, I'm not sure what value we would have been able to add to it, so our attempts were not successful.

But today, I'm overjoyed that my new company, FamilyLink.com, will have the privilege of working with this precious asset in partnership with FamilySearch, to develop the next generation version of the catalog, that will become more comprehensive, more open, more accurate, and provide more intelligent, algorithmic guidance to sources for family historians worldwide.

Since only a tiny fraction of the known genealogical content in the world is in digital format today, the catalog serves an incredibly valuable purpose, directing researchers to offline sources including microfims that contain the answers they are looking for. (And those microfilms can be accessed from over 4,500 family history centers around the world, for a very small fee.)

As more and more sources become transcribed or digitized, the catalog will directly link to the online version, whether they exist on Ancestry.com, WorldVitalRecords.com, FamilySearch.org, Footnote.com, NEHGS.org, or on Google Books, Microsoft Live Books, USGenWeb, WorldGenWeb, or other web sites, saving researchers countless time.

The new catalog, which will be available via both FamilyLink.com and FamilySearch.org in the future, may become the single best starting point for family history searches, the way Yahoo used to be the best place to find any web site, and may help any researcher quickly see which sources will help the most, and which other researchers have used those sources previously.

This project will bring the "wisdom of the crowds" to genealogy in a way that has never been possible before, showing which of the sources for any locality in the world ought to be consulted, and in what order.

I want to thank everyone who made this announcement possible, including those who have worked on the catalog for many years to make it the wonderful resource that it already is, and those who have been designing the next version of it, as well as the decision makers at FamilySearch who believe with us in what is possible for this catalog.

In addition to what has been described above, how would you like to see the catalog enhanced? What would make it most useful to you personally, or to your institution?

As always, I welcome your comments and feedback.

Official Press Release

One of the best parts about being an internet entrepreneur is how immediately your actions translate into measureable results. Our team members are working hard on search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, email marketing campaigns, and improving our affiliate marketing program. As each channel improves, the overall cumulative results are exciting.

When you have team members that have experienced the thrill of extreme growth in the past from how a web site was built or marketed and when they are hungry to experience it again, and know how to do it, then you have a great success formula. When you don't have a team that has done it before, you have to inspire them by getting them to listen to or read about people who have done it before.

My personal observation is that the vast majority of people that work in most companies have never experienced anything like the rapid real-time success of a massive internet marketing campaign that they personally helped launch, or a melt-down of servers caused by publicity or viral marketing from something they personally helped build. I remember watching a few product and marketing managers in the early days of MyFamily.com go through a personal transformation when they personally designed or launched a feature, or a marketing campaign, that brought in huge numbers. They were never the same again. From that point on, they wanted to do it again and again, and avoid as many meetings and as much bureaucracy and red tape as possible. They wanted to be on a small dedicate team focused on rapid development. They wanted to experience that thrill again.

Most people I have worked with over the years are willing to spend a lot of time in meetings, or in planning, or in writing 20-page MRDs (marketing requirements documents), rather than spending most of their time building a site or actually launching a marketing program. We have a high concentration of experienced and hungry team members at FamilyLink.com, so we are optimistic about the future.

A good description about the difference between a traditional business with its long-term planning cycles and a fast-paced internet company comes from Meg Whitman, who joined eBay after a successful career with Hasbro, Disney and Proctor & Gamble. In the book Net Entrepreneurs Only, on page 179, she describes the radical difference. I blogged about this in 2004. 

Everyday we use Omniture Site Catalyst to run our online marketing programs. But we are also looking at our public Quantcast numbers every day. Recently we were able to figure out how to place a Quantcast pixel on our Facebook application so that we can get credit publicly for the Facebook users that are using our We're Related application every day.

Our Quantcast chart for the FamilyLink.com network of sites now looks like we must be on the verge of a server "melt-down" -- and we've had people ask us about this. But in fact, we've had a ton of Facebook traffic for months now, and it is only just now showing up on our public chart. And the good news is that thanks to Amazon EC2, we are scalable as far as the eye can see.

After another two weeks of Quantcast tracking our actual usage across all of our properties, it appears that our network will break into the ranks of the top 1,000 web properties in the U.S.

It takes about 2.1 million unique visitors per month to be a top 1,000 web site or property. We'll soon be in the company of prweb.com, looksmart.com, and stanford.edu in terms of unique monthly visitors. To break into the top 500 web properties, we'll have to reach 3.3 million monthly uniques.

I remember going to Fall Internet World in New York City back in 1998 and first running into Media Metrix. At their booth they had a list of the top 500 web sites at that time, and I was thrilled to see Ancestry.com on that list. I remember later, after the successful launch of MyFamily.com with its meteoric viral growth, and after our acquisition of Rootsweb.com, that our network of properties broke into the top 50 in reach, and our reported monthly page views put as at #19 for all US internet properties. Imagine that--a top 20 internet company based on page views!

It is clear from those early days that genealogy sites and tools for connecting families have huge potential. With the right business model, partners, and the right team, a company in this space has tremendous potential. It's no wonder, to me, that Geni.com reportedly got a $100 million valuation on their Series A round last year. They are still, of course, trying to grow into that valuation, but they are showing steady growth. The family tree and family social networking space is hot. It has huge potential. The big question now is which of the many various companies in this space will execute well enough to survive and to attract enough customers to become viable. Our team is quite confident that we can make it. We have a number of team members who have experienced the thrill of victory before and are hungry to experience it again.

As I said in my previous post, We're Hiring. If you have been a part of a fast-growing internet company in the past and are interested in joining with us, please contact me and send me your resume. It's going to be a really fun ride.

Great web sites don't necessarily seem great at the beginning.

Marissa Mayer laughs about how bad many of the early Google beta products were. (Check out her Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture at Stanford--it is so worthwhile.) In 05 or 06 they started making sure that the true alpha versions of their products were rolled out under the Google Labs logo, so that products that go to beta now are actually pretty decent. But she reminds us that when Google Video launched you couldn't actually watch any videos on it. Remember...it was snapshots of still screen shots and used closed-captioning transcripts for search. Can you even believe they launched Google Video that way? It's pretty astonishing. And yet, in the tried and true Google fashion, they threw it out there, quickly iterated, and now they dominate. Ok, they had to buy YouTube for $1.6 billion in order to dominate online video, but getting started in that space surely lead to them learning how difficult it would be and how an acquisition would be necessary.

Guy Kawasaki talks about how perfectionism or the desire to do super high quality work, which we sometimes don't actually have time for, often prevents us from doing anything at all. He talks about "getting to good enough." Entrepreneurs have to take action: launch a site, pitch a customer, do something. Don't just plan, and don't just prepare forever.

Clearly, I have established in my career that I don't have a problem with getting to good enough. In fact, my threshold for good enough may be way lower than it should be. :)

Case in point: check out the original Ancestry.com web site design. I personally designed this logo with some kind of paint program back in 1996. It cured me forever of any aspirations in graphic design.

Horribly ugly, yes. But good enough to get us into the online genealogy game. None of us (there were about 4-5 of us working on the web site, search engine, and databases back then) obsessed over any details. We just took action and moved ahead. And as soon as we could, we improved the site design, changed the logo, improved the search results pages, and made hundreds of improvements over time.

My level of embarrassment declined steadily.

And that is exactly what is happening at WorldVitalRecords.com and FamilyLink.com.

Our site design isn't what we want it to be. But it has been functional enough to get us in the genealogy game. On Kory Meyerink's list of the top 50 genealogy web sites (based on traffic analysis from multiple sources) we are now #10. And the sites ahead of us have either been around for 10+ years or have raised several times as much capital from investors as we have. (Our Series A round in August was $1.2 million plus a bridge loan to our B round.)

Now that we have traction from customers (we're approaching 30,000 paying subscribers and nearly 3 million installs of our Facebook app) and from investors, our team is growing, and we are getting serious about upgrading all the features and aspects of our web site and our business where we initially had to just get to "good enough."

In some cases our good enough was actually pretty poor. Maybe it was just barely good enough, at least in our judgment, to move forward. But we did move forward, and we like where we are now.

In order to really improve our business, we are working on the following:

• improve our web site design
• streamline our buying process
• upgrade our image viewer
• get the next billion records from our content partners onto our web site; and continue forming more partnerships
• automate our royalty reports and accounting processes
• reaching out to genealogy partners in dozens of countries
• truly enable genealogists to help one another on familylink.com
• improve our search algorithms and search templates
• build our recommendation engine to help every genealogist to know what to do next
• double our sales and support staff
• port our We're Related application to other social networks
• and dramatically increase our external marketing campaigns

Fortunately we already have a world class data engineer and search engine engineer working on our back end systems, and we use the world's best web analytics from Omniture to measure and analyze everything happening on our web site. Yesterday I spent my first couple of hours using Omniture Suite, which takes online marketing to a whole new level, connecting our marketing campaigns to the Site Catalyst reporting back end. It is the best upgrade I have ever seen from Omniture.

When you have just a few employees, it is hard to make steady improvements in multiple areas of the company at the same time. You kind of do things serially. But with nearly 20 employees and 10 overseas contractors, we now have the bandwidth to divide and conquer. This way we can identify multiple weak areas at once and attack them in parallel with separate teams. It feels really good when a startup gets to this point.

There are a number of positions that we need to fill so that we can continue making progress in key areas. Unfortunately, one of the areas of weakness for us right now is that we haven't built or automated a way to post job openings yet on our web site (no, it's not even content-managed, so that our HR department--wait, we don't have an HR department--can bypass development and just get the job postings online and syndicated to other job sites.)

So...there is way too much inefficiency and too much manual effort involved in recruiting. I love efficiency, and love to find ways to automate everything possible, especially for things that are going to be ongoing frequent tasks. And I expect that recruiting will be one of the tasks we will be repeating a lot as we grow into a major company in the genealogy and family social networking industry. (Now that is a mouthful--we'll have to find a more concise way to describe what we do.)

Job Openings -- Coming Soon -- at FamilyLink.com

• User Interface Designer (over all of our properties)
• Full Time Accountant (already filled--starts April 7th)
• VP Marketing
• Other marketing positions: affiliate marketing, email marketing, media buyer
• Inbound and Outbound Sales (we've raised our wages to $12 per hour base plus commissions; we are ready to hire several people immediately)
• Genealogy content experts and licensing managers
• IT manager

Look for these job openings to be fully described and listed on our web sites soon, as well as in other places. Most of the non-sales positions, I expect, will be filled by people in our personal networks or social networks that come highly recommended from trusted sources.

Whenever possible, we want to hire employees with experience in family history, but absolutely required is a serious passion for building something great, and for being a part of what we hope will become a global company connecting families through technology.

Please let me know if you'd like to join our team.

And remember, you get to spend 10% of your paid time working on your own family history.

Five principles:
1. The Del.icio.us Lesson. Delicious let you have bookmarks and access
them everywhere. You could tag bookmarks, adding your own comments.
Tagging was new back then. Designers talked about subverting
hierarchical structures and folksonomies. But people were just saving
bookmarks for later. I tell all my clients: "Personal value precedes
network value" or social value. These are great tools even if your
friends don't use them. I ask: is your service/software valueable even
if no one else uses it. The Delicious popular page has huge social
value, but it started with the personal value of people saving
bookmarks for later.

2. Tie Behavior to Identify. Profiles support identity; but not all
social software is about a profile. Amazon.com customer reviews: some
have real names, some are by "A Customer". Subtle distinction. EBay
feedback profile may be the best one to look at, sometimes we overlook
what Amazon and eBay do, but they aggregate feedback about each
seller--even though you don't know who they are, you know how trusted
they are. On eBay you only need to know behavior, not who they are.

3. Give Recognition. Example: top Diggers. It showed who was most
successful for getting their stories to the home page. People started
seeing this as a competition. They all friended each other and helped
each other get top diggs. The top diggers ended up kind of controlling
the home page. So I talked with Daniel Barka, lead interface designer
at Digg, and I asked him if they had a problem with users gaming the
system; he said no, that's what the interface let's you do. Early on,
this was great for the growth of Digg. But once they hit the
mainstream and had enough users to support it, they removed the Top
Diggers feature. I've never worked on a project where anything was
removed.

Recognition seems to work better when it comes from the group and
isn't permanent. One problem with Top Diggers was that once you got to
the top it was easy to stay there, since top diggs were cumulative.
Made it hard for new users to break in.

Threadless also does this well. They have competitions like Digg, but
any recognition ends. Don't make everything cumulative.

4. Show Causation. You want to provide options for action and feedback
when they take an action. In the "old days" the screen would go white
as you had a page refresh. Now with ajax you see spinny things showing
something has happened. When someone is rating a movie on Netflix, you
need to show them something is happening. They are excellent at this.
The more you rate movies, the better their suggestions are. On one
screen he shows how it mentions like 5 times where they show causation
of what they are doing. I tell clients this, and they say, "don't they
already know this?" People know to stop at intersections, but we still
give them signs.

"Rate your recent return" is like a game: waiting for your rating. Makes it fun.

5. Leveraging Reciprocity. I have worked on ratings and review sites.
Clients ask me, why do people leave reviews? Are they altruists? I say
no. I don't think we ask people know why they do this. I interviewed
people. They didn't immediately know. So I asked, why do you leave
reviews on Yelp. They say, "I don't want anyone to eat at a place that
doesn't have good food, make the same mistake that I did." So that's
altruism. They always also add, I like to see how many people read my
reviews; I like compliments and tips. So there are many reasons why
people do reviews. They say, I get a ton of value from what others do.

On LinkedIn, where one of my good friends works, there are remarkable
stats on reciprocation when someone writes a positive review for you,
it is often reciprocated.

These are the five principles, there are many more. I just finished a
book on this, coming out in a month or two.

Q. Amazon top reviewers are also cumulative.
A. Hariet Clouser (sic) is top reviewer on Amazon, with over 14,000
book reviews. I did the math. She reads and reviews 7 books a day. She
is one of the most hated people. I blogged about this: is she real?
Many bloggers came and said, she can't be. Amazon now does both
quantity and quality of reviewers. The rankings are being weighted by
helpful/not helpful more than by just quantity. If you read Harriet's
reviews, you'll notice they are a lot like the back of a book--so
she's not for real. So quality of review is now getting rewarded more.

I am starting to see more and more how social networking will completely change the world of genealogy. Very few genealogists use social networks today, but that will change. One interesting fact that you can discover using Facebook Ads (www.facebook.com/ads) is that there are more people over 50 in Canada using Facebook than there are people over 50 in the U.S. using Facebook. Since genealogists tend to be older, the power of social networks won't become evident to the 15+ million genealogists in the U.S. until more and more of them embrace social networks. But what they really need is a social network designed for genealogy.

FamilyLink.com is a close to launching our first feature that could make this social network essential for all serious genealogists. It's a feature that has never been tried before on a massive scale. We are excited to roll it out.

What is interesting to me is that ever since last week when I blogged about 10% time, and as I have been contacting relatives and gathering information about my own ancestors, I now view everything that we are doing at FamilyLink and WorldVitalRecords through the lens of "how will this help me and my family with our genealogy?"

Just this morning, as the sun is rising on "my city by the bay", I had two breakthrough ideas that I think could be implemented quite easily that would make my life so much easier. I want to find my ancestors and connect with my relatives who have already gathered so much information about them. A social networking concept that is becoming more popular but has not been applied to genealogy would really help me out. 

One of them, of course, is that every Google engineer gets to work on
their own pet project for 20% of the time. Marissa says that in the
second half of 2005, 50% of the products Google introduced came from
20% time.

Another was that "ideas come from everywhere," including customers,
employees, senior management, and through acquisitions.

Clearly Google folks are encouraged not only to have ideas but to
share them and to pursue them.

That is a very different culture from most companies I've ever seen,
where few people are energized with new ideas, and those that have
great ideas are often frustrated by politics or lack of resources to
the point where they have no hope that their ideas will be heard or
implemented.

Also last week two things happened that struck me personally. First, a
genealogist ribbed me good naturedly after my keynote speech Friday at
BYU.

He said, "why can't we get you guys (meaning those of us who run
genealogy internet companies) to do genealogy yourselves so that you
know what we need you to build for us."

I defended myself by saying, "but you heard me say that I've read
2,000 pages about genealogy sources in the past year--I'm really
trying to do better this time around." (After I started Ancestry.com I
focused for 6 years on strategy and internet marketing and did very
little genealogy reading.)

"But reading about genealogy, and doing genealogy are two very
different things," he chided.

Later that day I came across a blog post from last September
complaining that I was travelling so much and blogging so little that
I might get out of touch with the needs of genealogists. The blogger
wished out loud that Dick Eastman could be the CEO of a genealogy
internet company so that it would be sure to do all the right things.

Both of these comments stung me. They have been haunting me all weekend.

So I decided to do something about it. I really want our company to
make genealogy easier for millions of people. And I really want to
create a Google-like culture of innovation and ideas. (One of the
reasons I left Ancestry in 2002 is that the culture of innovation had
disappeared.)

We have a huge amount of data online and much more coming, thanks to
many content partners, but we need to make sure every feature of our
web site is easy to find and easy to use. We need to make it easier to
search by country, by database, by family. We need to address the user
experience to start to finish.

Like Google, who launches alpha (Google Labs) and beta versions of
their products before they are really ready, we have shown a
willingness to put new features up as quickly as we can.

But Google immediately seeks feedback from their huge customer base,
measures it, and then iterates as quickly as possible to make the user
experience better.

I know we can do a better job of seeking input from customers and
iterating more quickly until we get the product right.

And I know that if we take the time to use our own products
continually, that we will have more insights about how to improve the
user experience.

So, today I am announcing 10% time for all employees at FamilyLink.com.

I am asking every full time employee in the company to spend 10% of
their paid time working on their own family history. This includes
researching, collaborating, preserving, and sharing. It means using
our web sites and other software and web sites as well.

I will commit to do the same.

In addition, I am asking each employee to document the frustrations
and obstacles they encounter along the way. And whenever they have an
idea about how to improve something to jot it down.

I will regularly review the top ideas that are submitted by each employee.

As Marissa Mayer kept a list of the top 100 personal projects under
way at Google, I will keep a running list of the top 100 best ideas
for improving the online experience in family history.

To determine the best ideas, I may use my own subjective judgment or
have a few advisors review them with me, or maybe even rely upon the
"wisdom of the crowds" and use customer surveys to gather votes.

Each month, I will award bonuses to the employees who submitted the best ideas.

Once we have this structure in place, I'd like to open it up to our
customers as well, and reward them for taking the time to tell us how
we can improve our services.

Our company is here to stay. We are feeling the financial and moral
support of tens of thousands of genealogists who want us to succeed.
We have sufficiently matured to move out of the frenetic start-up
phase of our business, where maybe we sometimes cut corners or moved
too quickly or recklessly, to a more thoughtful and careful stage
where we can really understand customer needs and improve the user
experience.

And a major part of that stage will be doing genealogy ourselves every week.

I know my whole family would be thrilled if we can learn more about
Charles Allen, my distant ancestor on the Allen line. He shows up in
New Hampshire in 1635 and we don't know where he came from. I now
believe that we are most likely to get a clue about his origins by
doing DNA testing and finding some related Allens in the UK.

But whether or not we can find Charles, I have thousands of known
ancestors to learn more about, and new ancestors and living relatives
to discover.

I'm excited to get started.

And I know the ideas for improving the customer experience are really
going to start flowing.

--
Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com

Paul Allen
CEO, FamilyLink.com / World Vital Records

office: 801-377-0588
mobile: 801-376-2738
Blog: www.paulallen.net

FamilyLink: connecting families
WorldVitalRecords.com: fastest growing genealogy community in the world

20 startup and growth companies, including 14 from Colorado and 4 from
Utah are here to present business plans to 200-300 venture capitalists
from 8 states. Our company, FamilyLink.com, was selected as a
presenter. We each get 15 minutes and then 5-10 minutes of Q&A.

Here is a brief rundown of the presenters:

- Albeo Technologies (Colorado) markets solid-state lighting systems
based on white light-emitted diode (LED) technology. Lighting accounts
for 40% of all electricity consumption in the commercial market. Have
raised $1.55 million in two rounds of funding.

- Altela (New Mexico) has raised $10 million to develop a new
energy-reuse water desalination product that operates at remote
locations such as oil and gas wells.

- AVA Solar (Colorado) was spun out of Colorado State University. They
have "perfected a robust, industrial-scale, continuous process for
producing solar photo-voltaic modules at an industry-leading
manufacturing cost below $1 per watt. The market for solar PV is
large, growing rapidly, and currently hampered by a significant supply
shortage. Growing at a 46% CAGR since the late 1990s, the market is
projected to be 23 gigawatts, or $40-60 billion by 2012.

- Control4 (Utah) has raised a total of $80 million in funding since
inception to create a platform for the digital home. An estimated 38
million households are potential customers for Control who have
installed or plan to install home theaters, plasma TVs, LCD Flat Panel
TVs, big screen TVs, intercom, lighting control, security system,
structured wiring, digital or media PC, surround sound, and MP3
playback through stereo.

- DAZ Productions (Utah) provides easy to use 3D software and
ultra-high quality 3D models and accessories. They operate the
Artzone.com social marketplace. Have been funded by Highway12
Ventures. $10 million in revenue in 2007; raised more than $4 million
last year. They have a huge opportunity in social networks, online
gaming, and virtual worlds.

- FamilyLink.com (Utah) runs a genealogy subscription web site with
more than 25,000 paying customers. Worldvitalrecords.com has nearly 1
billion searchable names online with 2.5 billion more in the pipeline.
Genealogists pay $49 to $149 per year for access to these databases.
FamilyLink.com also builds social networking applications for familes,
with more than 2.8 million users of its We're Related app on Facebook.
(I'm presenting this company as its CEO.)

- Filtrbox (Colorado) has raised more than $400,000 from angel
investors. They provide filters and alerts for knowledge workers who
want to monitor news, blogs, and other content sources. They had 250
beta invitations available today, and I was excited to get one.

- Format Dynamics (Colorado) has raised $4.4 million from NY angels.
They turn printed internet pages into a revenue opportunity for web
sites by providing magazine quality formatting and by inserting
dynamic ads onto the pages. Third party research shows 61.2 billion
internet pages were printed last year.

- Go Fast Sports and Beverage Company (Colorado) creates a great
tasting energy drink. The company is listed as one of the top 100
Beverage Companies in the world the past three years.

- HiveLive (Colorado) has raised $2.2 m in angel investment and closed
a $5.6 million venture round last week. They provide solutions to
companies who want to create their own social media applications or
customer communities.

- ISONAS Security (Colorado) was founded in 1999 and provides IP based
Access Control enable by a true network appliance.

- Newmerix (Colorado) had bookings of $4.74 million last year, more
than double 2006. They are the leading provider of automated
application lifecycle management solutions for SAP, PeopleSoft, and
Oracle E-Business Suite.

- Nilar has raised $11 million to date. They produce advanced bipolar
nickel metal hydride batteries for large format applications,
including hybrid vehicles.

- ProStor (Colorado) has raised $23.4 million in two rounds. They are
the leading supplier of removable disk solutions for data protection,
long-term archive, and compliance applications.

- Socialthing, Inc (Colorado) has raised $375,000 to date. They let
social networkers consolidate all their popular social websites into a
single interface, including on mobile phones.

- Tendril Network (Colorado) has raised more than $8 million in
funding to bring energy efficiency to the energy industry.

- WBS Connect (Colorado) is owned by its two founders. It had revenus
of $6.4 million in 2006 and $18.5 million in 2007. They provide high
bandwidth IP-based telecommunications services.

- Yieldex (San Mateo, CA) is backed by Sequel Ventures, First Round
Capital, and Woodside Fund. They have unique technology to analyze and
allocate online ad inventory, increasing yield by 10-40%. Focus is
yield optimization. Very impressive management team. CEO founded
NetGravity in 1995.

- Zayo Group has raised $225 million in equity and $140 million in
debt to do a roll-up of broadband fiber optic networks. They will have
revenue of $160 million and EBITDA of $45 in CY2008.

• Record page views the last two days on WorldVitalRecords.com
• My new Amazon Kindle: I love it!
• The new $20 cell phone from India
• A video of my Nov. 6th lecture at BYU about having a Second Chance in the "connecting families" business
• The Scrabulous incident on Facebook and a blog post that linked to a US gov't web site about how games are not copyrightable
• Wall Street Journal coverage of FundingUniverse.com
• Analytics tools for Facebook apps
• The launch of the new World Collection from WorldVitalRecords.com
• Quantcast's $20 million in new funding: this company will be very disruptive in the online advertising space, imo
• Ted.com
• DEMO 2008
• Google.org renewable energy grants
• Facebook Beacon
• Google Presentations
• Genetree.com launch

There were actually a total of 50 items in my Blog Ideas doc that I haven't taken time to blog about.

I keep hoping I can find more time to blog. I keep thinking, "maybe when we're cash flow positive."

I recently switched my blog site from WordPress to Drupal, with the help of an IT consultant. The way my site has been set up will make it more SEO friendly, and it should also be easier for me to insert images, and to email blog posts without errors. Drupal is a very robust content management system used by some major web sites.

Finally I got my growth spurt, and was about 5'10" as a senior where I tried out for my high school team. I made first and second cuts, but was the final person cut from the team and I've never fully recovered.

Back then I was a pretty good shooter. About 25 years ago I once hit 40 consecutive free throws. That was my personal best. About 10 years ago while practicing basketball at my local church (yes, a great reason to join the Mormon church is that they have a gym in almost every chapel) I hit 40 consecutive free throws again and was so upset when I missed on number 41. But my nerves got to me, and I choked.

But this week, I am thrilled to announce to the entire world that I achieved one of my major goals in 2008 by hitting 53 consecutive free throws on my new home court. That is now a very special number to me. And isn't it the number of Herbie, the Love Bug too? I might have to buy a miniature Herbie on eBay and mount it on my trophy case.

When you were a basketball wanna-be who was the last person cut on his high school basketball team, and you've lived all these years wondering where your basketball career would have gone if only that one coach had believed in you...and then you do something like this...well, it just made me feel really good and I thought you might be happy for me.

So now, what do you do if you've achieved your year goal in February. I'm not sure what to do next.

I want to know if you have achieved any of your 2008 goals yet? If so, feel free to tell the world here, and then tell us what you are going to do next.