An Interview with Alan Tien, GM for Geni

Recently, Kevin Lim wrote about an interesting web 2.0 start-up called Geni which is an interesting family networking site that connects families and friends through genealogy. In Kevin’s words, “With all the buzz about social networking, this is the kind of niche social network I’ve been motioning innovators to get at.” Independently through an introduction, I managed to speak to Alan Tien, the current GM for Geni, and get him to talk about Geni and what keeps his entrepreneurial streak going for this new interesting social network site.

BL: Hi Alan, thank you for the interview in SG Entrepreneurs. Can you tell your background and what prompted you to start Geni?

Alan Tien: I’ve been in the internet field for the last 10 years, beginning in Silicon Valley, and then moving out to China. I experienced the boom/bust cycle with Jamcracker, joined PayPal just before the eBay acquisition and experienced 5 years of wild growth, capped by my fantastic 2 year expat experience in Shanghai. I was just about to move to Singapore for PayPal Asia’s Strategy role when the Geni opportunity came up.

Geni was founded by ex-PayPal COO David Sacks, whom I overlapped with a month before he left PayPal. Luckily, my PayPal network was strong enough to land me the job when David sought out a GM for China. Interestingly enough, I was contacted through LinkedIn by Geni’s first employee Elliot Loh, who was a fraternity brother of mine from Stanford! It’s all about networking.

BL: We understand Geni is an interesting family networking site that connects families and friends through genealogy. How did you and your fellow co-founders come upon this concept?

Alan Tien: There are three circles of people you care about in your life: family, friends and co-workers. At the time Geni was founded (over a year ago), there were very strong Social Networking Sites (SNSs) for 2 of the 3 circles, co-workers and friends, but family seemed to lack representation. Furthermore, the “viral” nature of a family tree – inviting family members to help build the tree – makes this concept fabulous.

BL: Is there a business model associated with Geni or are you still exploring a business model?

Alan Tien: Currently, we are still in beta. We are trying to grow our user base as quickly as possible, and then provide our users superb features to connect with their family members. We do not believe in bothering our users with subscriptions, upsells, and irrelevant ads. When we have a critical mass of users who find our site compelling enough to visit daily, then we can offer extremely targeted ads and products. For example, wouldn’t it be nice to get a friendly reminder that your mom’s birthday is coming up next week and you could send flowers or a calendar of family pictures, all from Geni?

BL: What are the best features you believe to be innovative for Geni? Care to share with us some of them?

Alan Tien: Geni’s best feature is its extremely simple and intuitive user interface. Built on Flash, the UI is almost like a game, encouraging users to build out their tree rapidly. When they enter their relatives’ emails, Geni invites those relatives to help grow the tree. Instead of the traditional “super admin” approach where 1 person in the family builds the entire tree, Geni allows “distributed” tree building. Each person adds to the tree their immediate family and perhaps a few more, but he or she doesn’t have to be a genealogy expert.