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.

BL: If you have three lessons to share with young entrepreneurs, what are these lessons you feel that are important in your experience when you started up Geni?

Alan Tien: Be very wary of starting an internet business that doesn’t have a “viral” component. Don’t talk yourself into thinking that your idea is viral if it’s not.

Hire the best people you can.

Understand your strengths/weaknesses. Not everyone has to build a world-changing, VC-funded, billion-dollar market opportunity startup. Niche plays in the internet are often very profitable for the few founders/employees (see Hot or Not and Plenty of Fish).

BL: What is the future for Geni? Where do you see it going?

Alan Tien: We hope Geni will become the Facebook or MySpace for the family. Many people suggest that 1 site will dominate the entire SNS market. I disagree. The 3 circles of people you care about it in your life certainly overlap, but they are also distinct. We have 2 pictures on our company refrigerator to illustrate the point. In one picture, a young lady is smiling pleasantly and dressed conservatively. In another picture, the same woman is holding up a mug of beer with her tongue sticking out. Guess which one is her Facebook profile picture and which is Geni’s?

BL: Web 2.0 companies are currently on the rise. What are your opinions on the trends about online social networking sites?

Alan Tien: Like the internet bubble in Silicon Valley, we are in the explosive side of the cycle. We will eventually hit the implosive side where many of the me-too’s will disappear. The winners will consolidate the overcrowded SNS space into a few distinct networks. That said, the innovation will continue to accelerate with the increasing flexibility and power of the new web 2.0 tools. I joined Jamcracker, an Application Service Provider (ASP) aggregator, in the early 2000’s because I believed in web services, but the idea was too early. Now, mash-ups, which are popping up everywhere, are really the emergence of web services, merging together in interesting ways to provide altogether different experiences. Facebook was the first major SNS to understand this and make themselves a platform for 3rd party developers to create applications – or web services – to run in their environment. This puts a lot of pressure on the others: MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.

About Alan Tien: Alan Tien is the China GM for Geni. Prior to Geni, Alan was the China Country Product Manager for PayPal, an eBay company. During his 5 years at PayPal, he launched PayPal China and PayPal’s first set of APIs. He graduated from Stanford University with a BS in Electrical Engineering.

You can read up more about Geni in TechCrunch, and BL thanks Eric Hsu for the link up with Alan that leads to this interview. :)

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