Inside the Creative Mind of Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com and Soar.com
I had a chance to sit down with Paul Allen, CEO of Soar and founder of Ancestry, and ask him about what makes him creatively tick. As a PhD student in BYU IP&T’s Creativity and Educational Entrepreneurship Fall 2021 class, we were asked to interview the most creative person we knew. We were given a set of prompts. Paul answered these prompts in a series of eight short videos.
What about your environment enabled you to be so creative?
In this video, Paul talks about how his invention of games for his siblings when he was young and his two-year obsession with Dungeons & Dragons helped spur his creativity. Fun fact: Yvette and Paul share 304 connections on LinkedIn. Special note: Paul is photo-bombed by his cat during the interview.
What personal characteristics contribute to your creativity?
In this video, Paul talks about how his seemingly disparate interests lead him to be creative. Fun fact: Both Paul and Yvette love to read books and articles from many different fields of knowledge.
What barriers did you have to overcome?
In this video, Paul talks about how to better communicate the power of an idea and scale the execution. Fun fact: Both Paul and Yvette like open source and business process outsourcing.
Did the constraints help or hinder your creativity? How?
In this video, Paul talks about his experience as head of a start-up company and how entrepreneurs face “amazing” constraints. Fun fact: Both Paul and Yvette were employees of start-up companies.
What has helped your creativity? What is the future of creativity?
In this video, Paul talks about how his creativity is enhanced as he goes to conferences to hear new ideas. As for the future of inspirational creative works, he is voting for humans over AI since he feels that there should be personal “reasons” behind creativity that come from the soul of the creator. Fun fact: Yvette and Paul each have eight children.
How does your mind and thinking process work?
In this video, Paul reveals how his creativity is based on the “messiness” of visual stimulation. Fun fact: Yvette and Paul had extraordinary obsessions with their Blackberry phones before iPhones hit the market.
What is your best piece of advice in encouraging others to be more creative?
In this video, Paul talks about how a creative team needs “non-creative” team members. Fun fact: Both Paul and Yvette were part of a team that built a Facebook app that brought 90 million users to Facebook.
What did you do (what was the product of your creativity)?
In this video, Paul talks about his career as an entrepreneur and how he created products and companies by just moving forward in his ideas. Fun fact: Both Paul and Yvette have worked for start-up companies that monetized search engines to generate results for subscribers.
