User:Wjmanzon/sandbox

= Paul Brent Allen =

Education
Paul attended Cascade Elementary and Orem High School. He studied B.A. Russian in Brigham Young University from June 1983 to December 1990. He also began a masters program in Library Science at BYU, but dropped out to build first company.

Family
Paul married Christy Allen in 1988. They have eight children and four grandchildren. Christy is a Certified Strengths Coach at Gallup, working with married couples and families to them understand each other’s strengths. She was born and raised Provo, Utah. She studied piano performance, music, dance, and theater at BYU. She sang in the BYU Concert Choir under Mack Wilberg, and is now a member of the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square.

First Work
In June 1988 to August 1990, Paul worked at Folio Corporation (a company of his brother Curt Allen and brother-in-law Brad Pelo)  as a Data Engineer. There, he ran a $40,000 Kurzweil (OCR) scanner and scanned professional reference information for large publishing companies and for internal use. He was also hired to do data preparation to build info bases for Folio's large publishing clients. He learned WordPerfect macros, Turbo Pascal, and Basic programming, as well as Folio's markup language. He used FSR, a GREP-like utility for doing massive searches and replacing huge files. At Folio, he built dozens of huge info bases for major legal and accounting publishers.

Infobases, Inc. 1990-1997
After working at Folio, Paul Allen co-founded Infobases, Inc. with his BYU colleague, Dan Taggart. Paul served as the CEO and Dan was the President. Their company sold publications of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on floppy disks and CD ROM. Using the Folio search engine, they published religious texts on CD ROM, then added historical source documents, and later branched out into genealogy. By 1995 Infobases’ revenue had grown to $3.9 million and made the Inc. 500 list in 1996.

Infobases later acquired Bookcraft in 1997. Bookcraft was then acquired by Deseret Management Corporation in 1999.

Alan Ashton of WordPerfect, Joe Cannon of Geneva Steel, and the founders of NuSkin Enterprises, invested in Infobases, Inc.

Ancestry.com
In May 1996, Infobases, Inc. invested in Ancestry, a print publishing company, and became its managing shareholder. In January 1997, Infobases acquired the rest of Ancestry from its original founder, John Sittner. In July 1997, Ancestry separated from Infobases. Paul’s goal with Ancestry was to build the largest online genealogy database and subscription service in the world.

When the company was cash flow positive by July 1998, they began to raise outside funding.

Paul served as the CEO from July 1997 to July 1998. His brother, Curt Allen, was then hired to run the company and help raise capital. Later, after launching MyFamily.com, they were able to raise more than $90 million in venture capital. In 1999, they changed its name to MyFamily.com. Paul left Ancestry in February 2002.

Ancestry became a publicly-traded company on November 5, 2009.

The Blackstone Group purchased a majority stake in Ancestry.com for $4.7 billion in August 2020.

MyFamily.Com
In December 1998, Paul launched MyFamily.com, a social networking site designed for families. MyFamily.com gained 1 million registered users in its first 140 days. Led by CEO Curt Allen, the company raised more than $90 million in venture capital from investors such as Intel, CMGI, AOL, Kodak, Compaq, Sorenson, Esnet, Vspring and Tango Partners.. According to the New York Times, the subscription revenue as of 140 million dollars in 2005.

10x Marketing
Paul founded 10x Marketing in 2002 to provide full-service internet marketing services to other companies. He had cataloged about 200 marketing tactics that he used at Ancestry.com and MyFamily.com to generate traffic to the said sites and to convert visitors to customers. The company’s clients included FranklinCovey, Relative Genetics, Frontline Phonics, One Minute Millionaire, and Power Glide. In early 2003, he hired Curt Porritt to run the company as CEO, while Paul stepped down to serve as Chairman. 10x Marketing then focused its services on search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, and affiliate marketing. The company was acquired by Vista.com (now Innuity, a publicly traded company) in June 2005.

LDSAudio.com
Dan Taggart and Paul Allen also founded LDSAudio.com to serve a niche market in the mp3 audio market. They provided audiobooks and religious recordings for portable, personal use. LDSAudio.com provided biblical and other scriptural texts, a free audio Book of Mormon download, and religious music of more than 5,000 LDS songs in audio format for iPods and other mp3 players. They raised $1.15 million in funding in October 2004. They changed our name to LDS Media after partnering with Deseret Book.

LDS MEDIA
In partnership with Deseret Book, LDS Media operated a search engine at LDSMedia.com. The site indexed more than 3,300 searchable full text books as well as images and audio. The company also owned LDSAudio.com, an mp3 download site for LDS music, talks, and audiobooks. The company was managed by RoMay Allen.

Funding Universe
FundingUniverse.com is a network of 50 websites that match investors with entrepreneurs at a local level. The company’s mission is to help entrepreneurs build teams that are fundable, and then to recruit investors to join our sites so they find companies that are seeking capital. Paul teamed up with web developer Trent Miskin to launch the original service for Utah (FundingUtah.com) with financial backing from David Bradford, former General Counsel for Novell. Brock Blake joined as CEO in mid-2005 and Grow Utah Ventures and Provo Labs invested in the Series A round in 2006. The company had almost 1,000 registered angel investors and more than 8,000 entrepreneurs. The company had websites in all 50 states and offered speed-pitching events in many locations. Organized angel groups used FundingUniverse technology to attract business plans and rate them.

Provo Labs
Provo Labs was formed in December 2005 as an internet business incubator. With funding from a private angel investor, the company helped form or fund several startup companies, including 10Speed Media, World Vital Records, WebEvident, Corporate Alliance, YackPack, LDS Audio, 10x Media, FundingUniverse and Packard Mobile.

At Provo Labs, Paul trained the students about internet marketing strategies, discussed business topics taught by experts, and held brainstorming sessions.

For Paul, the incubator was the “most difficult and unsuccessful experience in his 17-year business career”. Several of the companies have been shut down, and the hopes of the incubator are now resting with just 3 or 4 portfolio companies.

World Vital Records / FamilyLink.com
Paul became the CEO of World Vital Records in January 2007. His team included the two original engineers at Ancestry.com, the original designer of MyFamily.com, and other individuals.

At World Vital Records, his team uploaded five hundred billion genealogy records online for subscription services as of October 2007. They also built FamilyLink.com, a social network for family history, that connects researchers around the world with each other and with the top sources of content for every location in the world.

Their Facebook app We're Related has attracted more than 53,000 new users in its first five days.

Soar.com, Inc.
In 2018, together with Clint Carlos, also a BYU graduate, Paul co-founded Soar.com, Inc. As an AI-powered human development platform, Soar's mission is to uplift humanity, unleashing and maximizing every person's strengths, helping them reach their full potential.

Gallup Strengths Evangelist
Since 2007, Paul has been working for the polling and strategy company, Gallup, helping individuals and organizations identify and develop their strengths.

Global Peter Drucker Forum
Paul was a panelist at the 12th Global Peter Drucker forum.

Entrepreneur of the Year
Issued By MarketingSherpa on May 2008

Fellow
Issued By Utah Genealogical Association on September 2007

Entrepreneur of the Year
Issued By Ernst & Young on October 2000

Patents
Systems and methods for displaying statistical information on a web page