Rumors of the new startup by former PayPal COO David Sacks to be called Geni started a couple of weeks ago. A few days later, on January 16, Geni launched. It allows people to create quick and beautiful family trees, got a flood of early attention and started to spread virally at a blistering pace. One commenter said “this site could be greater than facebook.” Hyperbole? Yes. But that kind of early enthusiasm is worth, literally, millions. But all of the early attention has led to some very unhappy customers. I wrote a post a year ago called Don’t Blow Your Beta where I shared some of the pitfalls that startups often fall into when launching their products. The advice I included was simple: make a great first impression, think about your Firefox and Mac strategies (and have one), don’t ask for too much personal information, etc. Geni did all of those things right. But it created whole new categories of things to do wrong. They ignored the fact that not everyone is English-speaking, heterosexual and comes from a 1950′s era unbroken American-style family. They won’t let email addresses go once they have them. Other issues. They failed to anticipate early traffic levels and the site went down repeatedly. And, worst of all, a lot of data that people painstakingly entered into Geni just disappeared. Deleted. (Correction: See update below) All those early adopters, pissed off. Geni has been diligent about fixing bugs over time and communicating with users on its blog, which is the best way of handling this stuff. But the biggest issue, the deleted data, is being ignored completely so far. I still think this will be a wildly successful product. It’s a strong enough offering to overcome even the deleted data issue. But other new startups should take note, and add this to their list of “don’t do.” Update & Correction: I spoke to David Sacks, who says that the only some uploaded pictures were deleted, and that no other family tree information was lost. My own data, which appeared to be lost, is still there. The issue I was having was around cookies – the site previously allowed auto login via a browser cookie. That was removed (it was actually a bug David tells me), and so I was being taken back to the sign up page when I went to the site. So apart → Read More

David Sacks’ new startup Geni, which we wrote about last week, has gone live. The initial product is a very easy to use Flash tool to create a profile and a family tree – including siblings, spouses, cousins, aunts and uncles, and their families. When you add a relative, there is an option to add their email address and have the tree sent to them as well. They can add their own data, extending the tree, and Geni will launch tools to merge overlapping trees. There is more information on the About page. The company has raised a round of financing from Founders Fund. I’ve started my family tree and have added a few email addresses. It will be cool to see my relatives further expand the tree. And it will be really interesting to take a look at Geni a few years from now, as more and more trees are merged together. Update: Geni is viral. In my test tree, I added my dad’s email address but didn’t otherwise mention the site to him. I just went back to Geni and noticed the tree has been extended significantly (see image below). And now some of those people have been emailed as well. → Read More

David Sacks apparently has something left to prove. He was an executive at PayPal. After their $1.5 billion acquisition by eBay in 2002, he then went on to create Room 9 Entertainment, a production company that produced and financed the (really excellent) movie Thank You For Smoking. He purchased the Uma Thurman overdose house from the movie Pulp Fiction a while back. And now he has a new startup called Geni, with the audacious goal of “creating a family tree of the whole world.” From his LinkedIn profile: David O. Sacks’s Experience Founder/CEO Geni, Inc. (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry) June 2006 – Present (8 months) This is a new internet company I’ve founded. Our mission is to solve the problem of genealogy (the question of how everyone is related) by creating a family tree of the whole world. My CTO/co-founder is Alan Braverman, an outstanding technologist who most recently co-founded Xoom. We are always looking to hire rockstar programmers. This represents a great opportunity to get a meaningful founding stake in a startup with significant VC backing and a strong founder track record building consumer internet products. The site itself is just a standard landing page asking for email addresses. We have no other details yet. → Read More