CEO of Geni; movie producer
Greater Los Angeles Area
CEO of Geni; movie producer
Greater Los Angeles Area
I love making creative products, particularly internet websites and movies, which are America's two great global exports. The first I do at Geni, which is creating a global family tree/network; the latter I do through Room 9 Entertainment. I could not do all this myself so I am fortunate to have a lot of great people helping me at these companies!
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)
June 2006 — Present (2 years 2 months)
Geni's mission is to create a family tree of the whole world and layer family networking on top of that. My CTO/co-founder is Alan Braverman, an outstanding technologist who previously co-founded Xoom. We are always looking to hire rockstar programmers. This represents a great opportunity to get a meaningful founding stake in a startup with significant VC backing and a strong founder track record building consumer internet products.
(Media Production industry)
2002 — Present (6 years)
Room 9 is an independent film production/financing company in Los Angeles. We recently produced and financed the indie hit THANK YOU FOR SMOKING, based on Christopher Buckley's best-selling novel and starring Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello, Adam Brody, Sam Elliott, Katie Holmes, Rob Lowe, William H. Macy, and Robert Duvall. Recognizing the two years David spent doggedly pursuing the rights to THANK YOU FOR SMOKING and that he put his money where his mouth is by co-financing the movie, Variety named him one of the year’s “Top 10 Producers to Watch.” Sacks was nominated for a Golden Globe for producing the movie.
(Public Company; Internet industry)
1999 — 2002 (3 years)
Managed 700 employees and was responsible for product management and design, sales and marketing, business development, international, customer service, fraud operations, and human resources functions at PayPal.
These are some of the milestones we achieved during that time:
Made PayPal the #1 financial website in the world through a combination of viral marketing, intuitive design, and continuous iteration on the feature set;
Led the effort to win the auction payments market despite fierce competition from eBay;
Introduced business accounts, which provided the basis for PayPals business model, in one of the webs few successful conversions of a free to fee-paying user base;
Expanded PayPal into multiple currencies and over 80 countries;
Integrated the front-end website with back-end customer service tools to create a more seamless user experience; and
Grew payment volume from $0 to $500 million/month and revenue from $0 to $240 million/year.
(Management Consulting industry)
1999 — 1999 (less than a year)
J.D., 1995 — 1998
1990 — 1994