Geni: Addictive, Yes, BUT $100 Million Valuation?

George Zachary just invested $10 Million in Geni at a $100 Million valuation. Geni has already received a lot of coverage, so instead of reiterating its basics, let me just point you to a few: Venturebeat, NextNet, Techcrunch .

It’s certainly not first to market. Acc. to Venturebeat, “Geni is the latest in a long list of genealogy sites. One of the biggest is The Generations Network, which last week changed its name from MyFamily.com. That company owns Rootsweb.com and Ancestry.com. There are also TribalPages.com, OneGreatFamily.com, Genealogy.com and Allfamilytree.com. Some of these, like Ancestry.com, have built impressive record databases. If you type in an ancestor, they’ll search census, birth, death and immigration records.”

I played with it a bit, and found it quite a time-sink, and very addictive. I would like to come back to it, especially because, we’ve had a lot of deaths in our family in the last 3 years. Capturing some family history, stories, family-tree information has certainly been on my mind.

I happen to come from a very old, and very large family in Calcutta, and frankly, as I took a first crack at filling out the Geni tree, I could not even recollect the names of a number of my family members. The most telling one was that I could not remember the name of a grand uncle who lived in the house I grew up in. I could remember what I called him by, but not his real name. The same was true for so many others from our clan.

It was quite scary!

Anyway, it’s a good service, and quite user-friendly. I have sent invites to a number of my cousins. We’ll see if they engage in collaborating on filling the gaps in our geni tree.

BUT.

George, what’s the $100 Million dollar valuation all about?