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Rachel Finley
574 TNRB
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
(801) 422-3598
prspecialist@byu.edu

Advisory Board Member Named One of Utah’s Top Twenty-five People Best Driving Business

As a member of the advisory board, Paul Allen is a familiar face at the Rollins Center for eBusiness. And readers of Connect, a Utah business magazine, find him and his contributions to Utah business equally recognizable.

Allen was recently named one of Utah’s Top Twenty-five People Best Driving Business in 2006. The reader’s choice award was announced in the December 2006 issue.

“I laughed when I heard the news,” he says. “It’s an honor, but I don’t even hold a candle to some of the other people listed. It’s nice to have that recognition, but I take it with a grain of salt.”

But Allen’s work would convince even the toughest critic. Everywhere he goes, he leaves a trail of new businesses in his wake. Not long after earning a degree in Russian from BYU in 1990, Allen founded and served as CEO of Ancestry.com, now MyFamily.com. Then came Infobases, a publisher of religious CD-ROMs, and 10x Marketing, an Internet marketing agency.

“I wanted to go back to graduate school, but things just got too busy,” he recalls.

And they’ve stayed that way. Allen still associates with two of those three companies. In addition, he went on to become CEO of Provo Labs, an internet business incubator. Provo Labs promotes and markets companies such as LDS Media, and World Vital Records. Provo Labs also offers an Academy for Entrepreneurs that provides office space, technology, training, and networking opportunities for start-up companies.

Associating with World Vital Records has opened a new professional door for Allen. He is transitioning from Provo Labs to CEO of World Vital Records and returning to his first business love: family history.

“World Vital Records is acquiring genealogy records throughout the world and making them available online,” he says. “We want to help people find their ancestors and connect with their relatives online. It’s a mission-driven company.”

Overall, Allen’s personal mission is help budding companies, business, and people.

“It’s been a good experience helping companies try new things, grow, and find new customers,” he says. “Helping entrepreneurs is very satisfying.”

Aside from the satisfaction of entrepreneurship, Allen finds fulfillment in sharing his experience and knowledge with the next generation of businesspeople. He does so by maintaining an entrepreneurship-based blog that is read by about three thousand people a month. In addition, Allen teaches an Internet marketing class at BYU and is a regular at the eBusiness and Entrepreneurship Lecture Series.

“If you learn or find a key to success you just want to share it and help other people,” Allen says. “I’ve loved meeting BYU students and sharing with them things that helped me. The potential is sky high for these students who want to change the world for the better.”

Technology, he says, will play a role in that change.

“Technology has the ability to connect, strengthen, and bless everyone,” Allen says. “Sure, there are a lot of bad uses, but what I’ve found is that millions of people care more about family and the good things associated with technology than anything else.”