Background and career
David Oliver Sacks (born May 25, 1972) is a South African-American entrepreneur, author, and investor in internet technology firms. He is a general partner of Craft Ventures, a venture capital fund he co-founded in late 2017. Additionally, he is a co-host of the All In podcast, alongside Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis and David Friedberg. Previously, Sacks was the COO and product leader of PayPal, and founder and CEO of Yammer. In 2016, he became interim CEO of Zenefits for ten months. In 2017, Sacks co-founded Craft Ventures, an early-stage venture fund. His angel investments include Facebook, Uber, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, and Airbnb. In December 2024, President Donald Trump named Sacks the White House AI and crypto czar for the incoming administration; he stepped down in March 2026.
Sacks was born to a Jewish family in Cape Town, South Africa, and emigrated to Tennessee, United States, with his family when he was five. Though Sacks did not know he wanted to become an entrepreneur, he did not want to work in a profession like his father, who was an endocrinologist. He says he took inspiration from his grandfather, who started a candy factory in the 1920s. Sacks attended Memphis University School in Memphis, Tennessee. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Stanford University in 1994 and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1998.
In 1999, Sacks left his job as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company to join Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek's e-commerce startup Confinity. Later that year, Sacks was the inaugural product leader of Confinity's milestone product, and corporate successor, PayPal. Upon promotion to Paypal COO, he built many of the company's key teams, and was responsible for product management and design, sales and marketing, business development, international, customer service, fraud operations, and human resources functions. PayPal had their initial public offering in February 2002. It was one of the first IPOs after the September 11 attacks. The stock rose more than 54% on the first day. In October 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion. Sacks is a member of the so-called "PayPal Mafia", a group of founders and early employees of PayPal who went on to found a series of other successful technology companies. They are often credited with inspiring Web 2.0 and the re-emergence of consumer-focused Internet companies after the dot-com bubble bust of 2001.
Following PayPal's acquisition, Sacks produced and financed the political satire Thank You for Smoking, which premiered at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival, was acquired by Twentieth Century Fox for theatrical release in 2006, and was nominated for two Golden Globes, including 'Best Motion Picture.' Sacks developed and produced the 2023 biopic Dalíland about artist Salvador Dalí. Dalíland premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival and was acquired by Magnolia Pictures for theatrical release in 2023.
In 2006, Sacks founded Geni.com, a genealogy website. In 2008, Sacks and co-founder Adam Pisoni spun off an internal communications tool created by Geni employees to communicate with each other into a standalone company called Yammer. Geni was acquired by MyHeritage in 2012.
In 2008, Yammer launched the first enterprise social network, a secure solution for internal corporate communication and collaboration, winning the grand prize at TechCrunch50 conference. According to Social Capital, Yammer's viral approach made it among the fastest-growing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies in history, exceeding eight million enterprise users in just four years. Yammer received approximately $142 million in funding from venture capital firms such as Charles River Ventures, Founders Fund, Emergence Capital Partners, and Goldcrest Investments. In July 2012, Microsoft acquired Yammer for $1.2 billion as a core part of its cloud/social strategy.
