Ep. 19 — How to Stop Playing Small and Start Owning the Room with Deb Liu

Deb Liu — former CEO of Ancestry, creator of Facebook Marketplace, and a household name in the tech industry — spent decades being underestimated in every room she walked into.

In this episode of Unbehaved, she shares exactly how she unlearned the "play small, stay safe" survival strategy that shaped her early career, and the deliberate practices she used to become a leader who now owns the room.

If you've ever been talked over in a meeting, struggled to speak up for yourself, or watched someone else get credit for your idea, this episode is for you.

 

WHAT WE COVER:

• Why "playing small" starts as a survival strategy but stops working at a certain point
• How anyone can learn to own a room, regardless of their personality
• What happened when a room of women in tech decided to "make it awkward" and stop being ignored 
• The Secret Bias no one talks about — and how it silences the smartest people in the room
• Why self-advocacy is actually an act of generosity (not self-promotion)
• The Supreme Court research on female justices being interrupted — and how they fixed it
• Why Deb went public about her breast cancer diagnosis (and the 100K-reaction LinkedIn post that followed)
• The origin of "The Blank Name Tag Club" and Deb's Reset / Reflect / Reimagine framework for career transitions
• The permission slip: rewriting the story before it rewrites you

Deb is also the author of Take Back Your Power and is currently writing her next book about navigating career and life transitions. Her companion Substack piece for this episode dropped today at debliu.substack.com.