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Interview by Jordan Calder

Paul Allen is a social entrepreneur, well known for co-founding Ancestry.com. Sharing his name with another well-known entrepreneur and co-founder, Paul has dubbed himself Paul Allen “the lesser,” however he is by no means “lesser.” Paul’s specialties include viral marketing, family history, and social networks.

Calder: Could you give some background on yourself and career as an entrepreneur?

Allen: I spent seven years as CEO at Infobases, which was my first company. We published a lot of religious CD-ROMs. We had around 150,000 LDS households using our gospel study products. Then I spent 6 years at Ancestry.com as founder and CEO. I brought in my brother and he brought in all the venture funding. I left there in 2002 and have been involved with startups and an incubator. In the last four years I’ve been working on a company called FamilyLink.

Calder: Can you talk a bit about what you are doing at FamilyLink with Family Village?

Allen: Family Village is one of the funnest projects I’ve ever worked on. The game apps on Facebook are doing very well. One example is Cityville. It launched in December and got 100 million users in 41 days, which is insane! So we’re super excited. We’ve been working over here with some funding partners and game designers. On April 18, Family Village will finally be able to launch. I hope that we can get millions of people playing a Farmville-like game, but you invite your relatives and your ancestors to actually come into the game. You create an avatar for each one with our character editor and then you build a family village that is populated with your own relatives. And then the coolest part is that in the background we’re searching billions of documents and records to find family history about each of the people that you’ve put into your village. So we can be doing your genealogy for you in the background and present the documents to you which you can accept and add to your family library. Then soon you will be able to share that library with your relatives privately.

Calder: What demographic is Family Village targeting?

Allen: Most of the active users for Facebook games are women age 35-55 and we think that will be our target market. We think a lot of women will enjoy the social aspects of game play. In this case it’s not just a fun social game that you can play with family and friends, but also there is real meaning and real value being created while you play the game. We think that it will be women in the 35-55 age range, but we’ve got a lot of testers, about 9000, young and old, male and female. The game seems to appeal to a large cross section of people.

Calder: How are your testers reacting to the concept of mixing genealogy and gaming?

Allen: They love it! Absolutely, it has been the funnest concept to launch. The combination when you describe a game like this, we almost get a universal response of “I have to try it. I haven’t played Facebook games before, but I’m going to try this one.” It just sounds socially valuable and rewarding as well as fun. The concept is being incredibly well received.

Calder: You recently spoke in Kanab about how technology can enable rural entrepreneurs and build rural communities. Can you highlight some of your main thoughts?

Allen: I’ve been doing rural business/entrepreneur speeches for 7 or 8 years and this one was a small group in Kanab that included the Mayor, the city council, and county commissioners. I learned a lot about Kanab in the 24 hours or so that I spent there. I did a bunch of research to try to find software, internet or high tech success stories where a company completely started and grew in a very rural or very remote area. It’s actually really hard to find. The best recent example that I have come across was myyearbook.com, which is worth tens of millions of dollars and has tens of millions of users. It was founded by a 15-year-old girl and her brother in their house in New Jersey. They relocated the business and it is now headquartered in a very small town called New Hope, Pennsylvania. The population, I think 2,500. And they have 100 employees. That was a good example of a very small start-up in a remote area that has gotten some good traction.