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About Me

No, I am not the Microsoft Paul Allen. I am Paul Allen The Lesser.

I’ve been an entrepreneur since 1990 when I co-founded Infobases along with Dan Taggart. Infobases was a successful CD-ROM publisher of religious and educational CD ROMs. We made the Inc. 500 in 1996.

My biggest claim to fame comes from co-founding Ancestry.com in 1997 (again with Dan Taggart) and launching the MyFamily.com web site in 1998. I was the company CEO for the first year, where we actually achieve positive cash flow as an internet subscription company before raising outside capital. Then we hired my brother Curt Allen, who led the company as we raised $90.5 million in venture capital.

I stayed on with the company in various roles, my last one being VP of Marketing, until we became profitable once again in late 2001.

I enjoy internet marketing, web analytics, and business development. I love the genealogy industry. I often miss my association with the MyFamily.com company and its wonderful customers. I left the company in February 2002.

Next, I started 10x Marketing, an internet marketing agency specializing in search engine marketing and affiliate marketing. I ran it for a year and then hired a CEO who led us to several successive profitable quarters. 10x Marketing was acquired by Innuity in June 2005.

I enjoy blogging, teaching, lecturing and writing for Connect Magazine. I am working on my first book outlines. I taught Internet Marketing at BYU for two years, and I used to teach Business Formation at Utah Valley State College.

I have an B.A. in Russian from Brigham Young University, and started a Masters Program in Library Science back in 1990. I dropped out to run Infobases, which became successful rather quickly. I often think about pursuing a Ph.D. in history or entrepreneurship.

When I lived in Silicon Valley in 1999-2000 I grew to love Stanford University, and would love to study there someday.

My goals in life are most closely connected to my faith, which I sometimes blog about, and to my family, which I never blog about, for privacy reasons.

Next to that, I hope to create enterprises that will improve the world, and promote entrepreneurship and philanthropy.

I sometimes worry that my enthusiasm for business will be misinterpreted. I think entrepreneurship is a great way to create prosperity and improve the world at the same time, but I don’t ever want anyone to think that it is worth sacrificing their faith or family to have financial success.

My heroes include Alexander Graham Bell, an amazing innovator with incredible breadth, Bill Gross, the founder of Idealab! for his relentless energy in starting companies, Jim Clark, for successfully founding multiple billion dollar companies, Pierre Omidyar, who will give most of his eBay fortune away for social entrepreneurship, Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google for providing the world with unprecendented access to knowledge and for trying to not be evil, and Warren Buffett, the world’s greatest investor, who believes in making only a very small number of investment decisions in life, and sticking with them. Most investors seem to want to get rich quick. Buffett’s philosophy is so different. And now, he has promised $31 billion to philanthropy via the Gates Foundation.

More important than my business heroes are my heroes of faith, including ancient and modern prophets, and most of all, Jesus Christ, the Savior of the World. I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and believe wholeheartedly in this faith. Mormonism simply claims to be original Christianity restored to earth in modern times, though it is widely misunderstood.

I hope to start blogs on politics and my faith, in addition to this internet marketing blog, but I think keeping them separate is a good idea.

I respect and admire people of many faiths and backgrounds. As CEO of FamilyLink.com, a company that builds social networking sitess and applications for extended families, I’ve been able to travel to nearly a dozen countries in the past year, searching for genealogical content and partners. I love meeting people from all over the world and learning about different countries, cultures, and religions. I respect good people everywhere and try to look for good in everyone.

So enough about me … now I invite you to read my blog and drop me a line. Thanks for visiting.