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

ABOUT THE GUEST

Deb Liu is 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.

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PULL QUOTES

"I made myself smaller and smaller and quieter and quieter over the years. I just thought — if I just play along, it's going to be okay."

"You outgrow the systems of coping that you have and then they actually work against you."

"I said, well, I'm an introvert, I can't do that. Right? So you're playing against yourself. Instead, I said — I'm going to treat this like a skill, like learning pickleball or playing piano or learning a foreign language."

"The secret bias no one talks about is that those who speak the fastest, speak the most, and show up are given disproportionate influence."

"If we never make it awkward, if we never raise our hand and say actually — then we're doing a disservice to everyone who comes after. Because no one updates their priors."

"It's not for you. It's not self-advocacy, it's not self-promotion. It is paying it forward to the next generation of people who would otherwise be in the same situation."

"Every woman in America has a 13% lifetime chance of getting diagnosed with breast cancer. That is one in eight. Catching it a year or two early can make the difference between a very complicated outcome and a very good outcome."

"I never let myself sit in the silence. And that's where you find who you really are — in that uncomfortable space."

"Often the stories we tell ourselves are the wrong version. And then that affects our behavior in a negative way. I give you the permission to rewrite the story."

CHAPTERS

00:00 — Cold open: "I made myself smaller and smaller and quieter and quieter"

00:30 — Welcome + episode setup

02:15 — Growing up in South Carolina: the only Chinese family in town 04:00 — What Deb tells her own children about belonging

04:35 — When "playing small" starts holding you back 06:30 — Extroversion as a skill: the pickleball framework

08:45 — The Secret Bias No One Talks About

09:30 — Money 2020: the "Make It Awkward" pact

11:15 — When the CEO across the table doesn't realize you're the buyer

12:45 — Supreme Court research on female justices being interrupted

15:10 — Why staying silent is a disservice to the next woman in the room

16:00 — Reframing self-advocacy as an act of generosity

18:10 — Coming from betterment, not anger

19:50 — The moment Deb was mistaken for the assistant — as CEO of Ancestry

21:15 — The breast cancer diagnosis and why Deb chose to share it

23:40 — "Drawing the Cancer Card" — 100K LinkedIn reactions and the ripple effect

25:20 — Leaving Ancestry while going through cancer treatment

27:15 — The origin of the Blank Name Tag Club

28:45 — Why the unmooring is the whole point

30:35 — Sitting in the silence: why you don't need to sprint to the next thing

32:00 — Writing a mother-daughter column with her 17-year-old

34:00 — The moving story: kids and grief and why they wouldn't pack

35:45 — What matters most to Deb right now

37:20 — The permission slip: rewrite the story before it rewrites you

39:20 — Where to find Deb 

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Deb's TEDx talk, Let's Make It Awkward
• Deb's article, Drawing the Cancer Card
• Deb's book, Take Back Your Power: 10 New Rules for Women at Work

Companion Substack pieces :

• Deb's essay: The Blank Name Tag Club
• Meghan's essay: Why Your Title's The Least Interesting Thing About You 

CONNECT WITH MEGHAN + UNBEHAVED

• Subscribe to the Unbehaved Substack: meghanfrenchdunbar.substack.com
• Meghan on LinkedIn: Meghan French Dunbar
• Meghan on Instagram: @meghanfrenchdunbar
• The Book — This Isn't Working: meghanfrenchdunbar.com/book

FULL TRANSCRIPT (CLEANED)

Lightly edited for readability. Filler words, false starts, and transcription artifacts removed. Deb's and Meghan's voices preserved throughout.

Meghan French Dunbar: All right, Deb. So you and I met in September through TEDx San Diego — we were in the same speaker cohort. You gave an incredible talk that I still think about to this day about owning your awkward. Let's Make It Awkward. We're going to get into that. But the thing I want to start with is the origin story — growing up in the South and the ways you learned how to be safe and protect yourself by staying small. Can you take us there? Help us understand where the story came from.

Deborah Liu: Yeah. I was born in New York City. My parents were immigrants — they'd come to the US for college, met here, and we lived in Queens. And then, inexplicably, when I was six years old, my parents decided to move to South Carolina. I later found out it was because my dad was being discriminated against at work, and his friend and colleague had moved south and worked for the government and said, I can get you a job with the US government.

It turned out they were the only Indian family and we were the only Chinese family in the town we moved to. You can only imagine the shock of growing up in a place like that. It was just being so different. I kept playing small because I thought, if people just don't see me, maybe they'll stop making comments. People would walk up to my parents in the street or the mall and say, go back to where you came from. It was a very different place. At the time it was maybe half a percent Asian — less than one percent. We were like aliens that had landed on a different planet.

I just remember feeling like I need to hide, and no one would comment. So I made myself smaller and smaller and quieter and quieter over the years. I just thought — if I just play along, it's going to be okay.

Meghan: And was that behavior something you just picked up, or was that what you were told to do by your parents?

Deb: My parents said, just ignore them. They're just ignorant. They lived an American dream that was really hard for me to reconcile. They came from Hong Kong, where it was very crowded, and here they had a big house with a big yard. For them, the price of the American dream was just not belonging — and that was okay.

I really struggled with that because I was like, I was born in America. I'm just as American as any of these kids. Why am I seen as a foreigner? The forever outsider, the forever foreigner — it was such a piece of who I was growing up. And it was so hard for me to reconcile. So they just said, ignore them, just don't pay attention. And I tried to do that. But it's not like people are silent because you're quieter. I realized that strategy was just not working — but I didn't know what else to do.

Meghan: I'm curious about your own children — we were just talking about them. It's a very different day and age, but I assume they've experienced some level of exclusion, whether based on marginalized identity or something else. What do you say to them versus what your parents told you?

Deb: What's really interesting is I live in the Bay Area now, and my kids go to a high school that's 40% Asian, 40% white, and 20% everybody else. So they live a very different life. My daughter, we