My high school, Memphis University School, honored David Sacks this week and EmergeMemphis was fortunate to grab him to get him to speak to our entrepreneurs. It was really great to see him again, as David has had a nice ride, so far....and I was glad he was able to tell his story to a few folks here in Memphis. The whole Paypal story is an amazing one, where David rose to COO, bf they unloaded to eBay for 1.5B. Hearing how Peter Thiel recruited him and all the other rockstars that Paypal subsequently 'incubated' ie Max Levchin of Slide, Reid Hoffman of Linked In, Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp, Elon Musk are all worthwhile individual home run case studies worth reading about. Something genetic about Paypal has produced what every place strives for with' recycled entrepreneurship'.
Geni www.geni.com and yammer www.yammer.com are David's more recent exploits and im particularly interested in watching yammer, the private social network for enterprises which seems to be gaining a lot of momentum. He made some other remarks about the importance of relationships in silicon valley and how it is hard to tap into those without a referral, as that is how deals get both looked at initially and executed. Without that, it is hard to garner the attention of influencers and funders....unless you have a product that is so unique and differentiated with a high barrier to entry that everyone wants to be part of it. It is tough to argue with those points. Having a product go viral and generating/acquiring an exponential user base each month, are both models that he has tried to position his companies of replicating.
Kudos to Scott Brown of Marks Menus for asking if David would briefly hear his pitch. Maybe there is funding opportunity there!
We look forward to keeping up with David's progress and in hearing more great news come out of his early stage companies.
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