- General
- July 7, 2019
- 6 minutes read
A Look At David Sacks
David Sacks Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch You likely know PayPal, well what of Yammer?, Zenefits?. If you…
 |
| David Sacks
Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch
|
You likely know PayPal, well what of Yammer?, Zenefits?. If you know these three, good, if you’re not familiar, they’re three successful companies of which two have exited for billions. The last, Zenefits — although with its troubles — is valued at $2 billion (CB Insights data) even though that’s down from a previous $4.5 billion pre-money valuation.
If you scoop into these three companies, you’ll find something common; David Sacks, a veteran in the tech industry. Sacks served as founding COO of PayPal and stayed at the company through an IPO and a $1.5 billion acquisition by eBay several months later. After PayPal, he founded Geni.com, a genealogy website that sold to MyHeritage in 2012. Post-Geni, Sacks had a big break by launching Yammer, an enterprise collaboration startup that Microsoft paid $1.2 billion for in 2012.
On the heels of Yammer’s success, Sacks — in 2014 — acquired a stake in HR startup Zenefits and was later asked to step in as interim CEO after the company ran into legal troubles with the SEC. Zenefits along with its founder Parker Conrad were later fined roughly $1 million [$534,000 from Conrad and $450,000 from Zenefits] by the SEC. Both parties neither admitted or denied violations of federal securities laws as accused by the SEC.
 |
| Zenefits ex-CEO Parker Conrad
Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch
|
After getting Zenefits in shape for a while, Sacks stepped down as CEO less than a year into the job. Post-Zenefits, Sacks — in 2017 — co-founded VC firm Craft Ventures. Craft Ventures raised $350 million for its debut fund and was reported to be looking to raise up to $500 million for a second fund.
Craft Ventures’ investments include Bird, Addepar, CloudKitchens, Reddit, SpaceX, Swarm Technologies and more. Sacks serves as general partner at the firm. His long tech career makes for an interesting read. Sacks is a member of the “PayPal Mafia“, the early team behind PayPal that have gone on to launch other super-successful companies. Members of the early PayPal team later launched companies like SpaceX, Yelp, LinkedIn, Affirm, Youtube and more.
Several of them also joined top VCs like Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund [launched by Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder].
