 So super great pleasure to be here despite what John says. I'm actually not that busy, so No, I'm actually thrilled to be here so I'll start with a Very brief sort of summary of ancestry and hopefully put in context some of the lessons that I have been part of learning and been along for a long For the ride for for a lot of these things, but but it's been a Fantastic journey as I as I'll try to talk about a little bit today Watching and helping the evolution of our organization become better faster More responsive to our customers and frankly just more effective at delivering on our mission So we're one of those interesting internet businesses that's been around for 17 years And I think we largely Invented the commercial category of online family history people have been doing family history forever literally and And and but but we have over the past, you know, 17 years In a series of waves we think really revolutionized How people do it and with that the number of people that can do it and and Really proud of the fact that as the category leader We take very seriously our responsibility to be the category innovator as well So we have about 2.7 million paying subscribers around the world About a third of that is outside the United States The core of the business is a phenomenal collection of digitized historical content Supplemented by family trees that people build and upload to our site Supplemented by all the media that people scan on their own and upload to our site and share with the rest of that community so 12 billion record count is our is our latest number and that's sort of a again an aggregation of about 55 million individual family trees and About a hundred and seventy five million Individually scanned Documents photographs stories that people write and upload to their own family tree and then most of the time Share that with the rest of the community And we did just under about under five hundred million dollars in revenue last year Which I think most people are a little surprised that answers trees as large as it is But family history is you know one of those things that's pretty universal So this is our mission and our mission is to Help everyone everyone hopefully discover preserve and share their family history And and obviously this mission, you know underpins Almost everything we try to do with the company, but I think it's also particularly relevant to this topic today because to do this We have to pretty massively Evolve or really move forward in more revolutionary steps the actual product experience on ancestry family history Even with all the years of investment that we've we've made is still something that is Hard to do and and frankly most of our subscribers love the fact that it's a challenge and a journey of discovery but this vision has a view that We really want to make it something that anyone can do including those sizable populations of folks that don't want to invest the same amount of time that don't come to family history with the genealogist hobbyist mentality And therefore we want to make it something that's you know that it isn't today that is easy universally accessible and a whole lot of magic sort of behind that technology therefore innovation constant innovation speed of innovation is It's not too dramatic to say is the only thing that matters in terms of driving growth in the future We do a lot. We spend a lot of money marketing, but marketing only Essentially matches the innovations and the evolution of that value proposition. It's not going to grow the market for us It's going to be successful at helping us grow the market But at the core of our business mission to deliver on this mission We have to innovate and we have to create new product experiences Constantly that are better and better and better to appeal to more and more people over time so in talk and so therefore before you know this topic these topics that That I've been you know learning about from John and others over the past several years Have become absolutely critical to like how we view our future going forward So before I talk about going forward or today. I want to wind the clock back to 2006 and talk about as an example of what we don't do anymore a massive audacious ambitious Giant project that we took on in 2006 when we recognized that wow It was time for ancestry to pivot away from just being a place that people search for records and access a Incredible collection to a place that you know now people could begin to store their own family history and have family trees and upload Their own content and share that content with other members of the community so real pivot in there in the whole You know core the value proposition and and this was a so we had a long list of ideas which became a long list of requirements and we wrote those requirements and off we went and This project was a long project. I think it was something like six months or more And it was interesting a lot of learnings and a lot of lessons. So why do we do it this way? Well as I said We envisioned that we needed change we needed a ton of change and so our idea was just to do it Do it all in one big giant leap forward We also kind of had to do it that way Given the technology and the architecture and infrastructure that we had at the time There wasn't a real ability to No services not not a whole bunch of services sort of underpinning the systems And so we were pretty locked into doing it in that sort of classical way I think our culture at the time and Certainly, you know my own experience was to do it this way. I had never heard. I'm not a technologist I should have said that sort of at the top of this But I didn't know anything about agile or or any of the things that we have since Adopted as sort of core to our development process in patience I think incorrectly we viewed that We had a lot to do and we needed to just do it all at once right because we just it was just a huge Leap forward for us and then as I said, I didn't know any better and So that was the way we were going to do this. So what are the problems with this approach? I'm pretty sure this slide is Pretty familiar to everyone here Tremendous risk, right? I mean we didn't wait in a project like this That is a major revamp of an entire consumer experience You really hope it launches. Okay, right and doesn't blow up and and I've been involved with previous companies major match.com 2.0. We rolled out one night at one in the morning and rolled it back at five in the morning and that was not a pretty sight and not a fun experience To You know This was not a this was a long process as I said This was about a six-month development cycle and so it certainly isn't an example of rapid development probably the biggest problem is that We had no idea whether consumers would actually like the new ancestry after six months of development and work we Sprung it on consumers a little bit of research in advance and I would say that they loved Two-thirds of it and about a third of it They were ready to attack our building with pitchforks because there were certain facets of this experience that they just didn't like and we didn't have the opportunity to gather continuous ongoing feedback from them as we were building it And then lastly, you know, there's a lot of change at once and so an ancestry is not a simple site Nor was it a simple site even you know six years ago or seven years ago a lot of dependencies a lot of teams Running around trying to build different features that were inter interdependent on each other So it was it was complex. It was hard So really I would say that the cobalt experience which by the way, let me say it was a massively six it was a massively successful set of changes. It was very painful but it to a very real extent set ancestry off on a new direction which You know has allowed us to grow as successfully as we've grown over the last six or seven years But I think we recognized in that experience that we had to do things differently We needed to get stuff to market faster. We needed to break up that change and get bits and pieces of it to market faster and and And essentially make smaller changes all the time on an ongoing basis And to that point that I mentioned earlier We really needed to have a process that was much more connected to consumer feedback So that we could in real time Figure out whether these wonderful ideas that we had come up with to advance the service were in fact ones that advanced the consumer experience And and as I said before we had a lot of systems that had to change a lot of time And so we had to have systems that could allow us to Change different systems in parallel And so our view was this thing called agile really is the way to go Now before I go to let me go back to this page and say so this was launched summer of 2006 and I would say that for a couple of years we we tried to Bring agile into our company and have the culture sort of migrate to that and I and I'd say honestly Over most of that time We were not terribly successful and I think because we were trying to Put in place new systems, and I'm not sure that we were attacking The things that really needed to change with the culture. So now fast forward to March 2010 and I'll sort of take you through You know a brief three-year timeline of really what has been a pretty phenomenal transformation at our company So it really began, you know in this March 2010 John who was kind enough to introduce me and make up a bunch of stuff about me joined our company as Director of Agile development and John's role was to you know try to turn this company on to this system of Development and I think that involved obviously rolling out you know scrum and lean practices But but more importantly You know doing what we thought was necessary to sort of evolve the culture and have the culture adopt this new system So then really the next nine months after we started on this journey really focused on educating people and I would say that You know this was a process of more than anything else John parachuting into group by group by group at the company And coaching teaching you know inspiring probably wrapping a few people on the knuckles every once in a while to try to get teams you know teaching teams how to operate in this way and Inspiring them to want to operate in this way and I think one of the things I can say about this nine month period is that this was a time as an observer right sort of outside of this education process it was Incredibly tangible how much? enthusiasm and excitement Got lit up team by team as they sort of adopted these new ideas and new way of working together And it really was the beginning of a wave of excitement and enthusiasm for For buildings products at ancestry The last two years so nine months into this process. I think the attention at our company turned to Really pushing these ideas out through the whole company so agile for the for the enterprise And what did that mean? architecture to start with and I think what we realized is to really take the ideas that Benefit a divin to build projects and extend them throughout the whole company and impact the way the whole company operated Was not as easy as just coaching the marketing team and other teams. It really did require some fundamental evolution of A lot of things including architecture, so you know, we were a fairly systems centric architecture company not really a Whole lot of services built in place to allow us to to move over quickly. So this was a huge area that we needed to change infrastructure You know really really hard to implement Agile across an enterprise when you're manually Configuring systems and manually Rebooting system so a ton of work to do there DevOps You know during this period we were a public company for most of that period we're now a private company we had Mike Schreffer the CTO Facebook on our board and And I know this was you know We tried to connect Mike to Scott sorenson our CTO and did connect to a bunch and in our teams And this was one of the real areas that I I remember Learning from Mike that this idea of DevOps the idea of taking really extending Agile into the technology operations groups and having You know DevOps folks part of these teams and it was a huge important advancement as well And then continuous delivery. I mean this again, I think probably core to the theme of this conference The idea that we really needed to begin to automate the rollout of new Delivery of technology breaking roles into smaller pieces and really Enabling teams to be able to push content push new features out Sort of at the time that they think is right rather than waiting for you know our once a month or every two week roll So now fast forward to a project that we took on last year And this was the the launch of an incredibly important content collection in ancestry The 1940 census and so a little bit of context as to why you know 1940 was important to us at the time So the 1940 census obviously is something or a census something's taken every ten years held by the National Archives of Census Bureau in fact for 72 years and then released to the public And so we hadn't released a u.s. Census in ten years Ten years ago. We were a very different company. There really weren't a lot of competitors this time around The category had developed there were we knew there were going to be multiple players in our space also alongside ancestry Releasing indexing and digitizing that census and releasing it to the public and from a you know Defensive perspective we felt like this was the first time in a long time that you know small disruptive competitors might be able to make a little bit of noise in the space and chip away at What is a you know very very strong market position here in the United States? So we realized we really needed to do something awesome and do a lot of awesome things for the 1940 census so I Think this was I think the first time that we Really implemented sort of continuous deployment of a whole host of systems, and I think there were something like 40 individual services That were rolled out over a period of four months a lot of them behind the scenes in advance of the release of this 1940 census I Think there was one team in fact that was able to make You know five updates to their system in the course of one day thanks to the continuous delivery Adoption so I'd say this was incredibly successful for us and Really I think in a lot of ways cemented The commitment to this way of operating at ancestry so What are the lessons that I think we have learned at a company so or at our company? First and foremost, I think it is really about culture and it is about sort of the emotional and psychological commitment to Operating in a very very different way to Our goal as I said at the very beginning is to build a lot of great stuff and build it roll out new features and Radically transform How people do family history the way to do that? small bits at a time right the I the the the the the idea that we can on paper design You know the new ancestry ancestry 3.0 and roll it out and all once is now in our past To we've gotten really good at this of rolling out, you know small bits of Innovation having customers react to it further moving further down the road map if they like it and course correcting if they don't and You know importantly much less risk We're now, you know significantly larger significantly more complex than we were even seven years ago when we were rolling out cobalt and we can't afford frankly to Make giant roles that break ancestry and have us go down For you know any period of time and then I would say perhaps, you know most importantly and this Echoes what I said a moment ago about the enthusiasm the energy that I think we observed as you know individual teams Got the agile thing right and really started working together More innovation which comes from being able to actually realize a technology or product vision faster at the company Has led to a you know massively happier company. I think one of the huge frustrations Circa 2006 was how hard it was to get anything done at ancestry how long it took to get anything done and Look, we have a lot of incredibly smart passionate people at ancestry and to shackle them and not allow not enable them to You know push out their vision and bring new features to customers was incredibly frustrating at the time today You know, I think it's safe to say There's probably as there's more energy more enthusiasm for the company than there ever has been frankly because we're just able to do more stuff We're able to move from initial vision of something to it's in front of consumers faster because of these changes But we're not out of the woods. We have oops. I think I just turned that off. There we go wrong button We but we still have challenges. We have not Fixed we have not repaid all of our code debt to Move off of some of our level legacy technologies. There's still some major systems that That that are you know sort of old code that really need to be updated fix And now we're a company with lots and lots of brands and everything I've been talking about is ancestry calm But as we've acquired a number of services over the years and as we've launched new ones We're left with Not quite a hodgepodge, but certainly a great number of brands and great number of systems Many of which are not operating in this manner. So this is one of our great challenges going forward is to Is to is to push out this the discipline of this way of operating to the rest of our company? And that's it. So thank you, and I think we have a few minutes for questions or an extended break