Four Foes of Scrappiness

Deb Liu, Ancestry
In conversation with: Ravi Belani, Stanford University

Deb Liu, CEO of Ancestry, shares her “Four Horsemen of Anti-Scrappiness,” or practices that keep people within a company from iterating, learning, and growing: impeding progress through processes, allowing too many vetoes, hanging onto institutional memories of battles lost, and not knowing how to fail. She gives examples from her time at PayPal, eBay, and Facebook.