David Sacks

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1972, David Oliver Sacks immigrated to Tennessee, USA, with his family at the age of five. He pursued his higher education at Stanford University, earning a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1994, and later obtained a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1998. His early career included a stint as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company before he transitioned into the burgeoning internet technology sector.

In 1999, Sacks joined Confinity, which later became PayPal, alongside a group of individuals who would become known as the “PayPal Mafia.” He served as PayPal’s inaugural product leader and later as its Chief Operating Officer (COO), playing a crucial role in building key teams and overseeing product management, sales, marketing, business development, and international operations. Under his leadership, PayPal went public in February 2002 and was subsequently acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in October 2002. Following PayPal, Sacks ventured into film production, financing and producing the political satire “Thank You for Smoking” in 2005, which received two Golden Globe nominations.

Sacks continued his entrepreneurial journey by founding Geni.com in 2006, a genealogy website, and then co-founding Yammer in 2008, an enterprise social network that gained significant traction, winning the grand prize at the TechCrunch 50 conference. Yammer was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion in July 2012. David Sacks later took on the role of interim CEO at Zenefits in 2016, where he navigated regulatory challenges and revamped its product line. In late 2017, he co-founded Craft Ventures, a venture capital fund, and later launched the podcast platform Callin in 2021, which was acquired by Rumble in 2023. In December 2024, he was named the White House AI and Crypto Czar for the incoming administration, a role focused on establishing a legal framework for the cryptocurrency industry.