David Sacks, who was born in Cape Town, sold his workplace social network Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion in July 2012. That was about R10.16 billion at the time, MyBroadband reported.
Sacks was one of three South Africans in the group known as the PayPal Mafia. The other two were Elon Musk and Roelof Botha.
“Yammer, the first Enterprise Social Network, was a pioneer in bottom-up software-as-a-service (SaaS) and workplace collaboration,” Sacks wrote on LinkedIn.
Sacks was born on 25 May 1972. His family moved to the United States when he was five years old. They settled in Memphis, Tennessee, where he finished school.
His father was an endocrinologist. According to the report, his love of business came from his grandfather, who started a candy factory in the 1920s.
Sacks studied economics at Stanford University from 1990 to 1994. He then earned a law degree at the University of Chicago Law School in 1998. After that, he worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company.
In 1999 he joined Confinity, a startup launched by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel and Luke Nosek. Its payment product later became PayPal.
Sacks was PayPal’s first head of product. He was later promoted to chief operating officer. He built teams for product design, marketing, customer service and fraud prevention.
PayPal listed on the stock market in 2002. Its shares rose 54% on the first day of trading. A few months later, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion.
Sacks used his PayPal money to start new businesses. He founded Yammer in September 2008. The platform let workers talk and share work safely inside their companies.
Within four years, Yammer had more than eight million business users. Sacks led the company as CEO from 2008 to 2014, including two years after the Microsoft deal.
In 2017 he co-founded Craft Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests mainly in SaaS companies. It started with a $350 million fund and raised a $500 million fund in 2019.
The firm raised another $1.3 billion across two funding rounds in 2021. By 2023, it managed assets worth $3.3 billion, the report said.
In 2024, US President Donald Trump appointed Sacks as the White House artificial intelligence and crypto czar. The role was created to build legal rules for the cryptocurrency industry.
“A reign of terror against crypto is over, and the beginning of innovation in America for crypto has just begun,” Sacks said at the Crypto Ball after Trump’s inauguration.
According to Bloomberg, Sacks worked as a special government employee. This allowed him to work for the administration for up to 130 days a year without Senate confirmation or financial disclosure.
To meet ethics rules, Sacks and Craft Ventures sold their direct crypto holdings. They kept stakes in startups linked to crypto.
Sacks stepped down as AI and crypto czar on 26 March 2026 after reaching the 130-day limit. He still advises Trump as co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Source: this article is based on reporting by MyBroadband. Image: MyBroadband. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice Technology desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Werner Jacobs covers technology for Tzaneen Voice. Werner reports on mobile networks, data prices, internet access, smartphones, apps, AI, cybersecurity and South African tech companies. Each story explains what a new product, price change or policy means for ordinary users in South Africa.