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Social Networking - Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Ex-PayPal COO David Sachs To Launch Now Funded Wikigenia

David Sacks likes to keep busy. Prior to working up the ladder at PayPal to become COO, he worked as a consultant at McKinsey and was an aid to conservative US Congressman Christopher Cox. After leaving PayPal, he started the film production company Room 9 Entertainment, which made the independent film Thank You For Smoking .

Now Sacks has teamed with Alan Braverman (Xoom co-founder) on Wikigenia, a West Hollywood, CA-based genealogy website. It is pre-launch and has secured $1.5M of a $2.5M Series A round from The Founders Fund, says PE Wire. It's a fairly simple play. Genealogy is popular and wikis are a great way to track family data. Wikis also get traffic and you can monetize that with ads. You are starting to see vertical wikis for travel, shopping, etc so it makes sense to raise money now and become an early leader.

Speaking of Wikis, Wikipedia has this list of where other PayPal execs have landed:
- LinkedIn was founded by Reid Hoffman, a former VP at PayPal.
- Palantir Technologies was founded by Nathan Gettings, who developed PayPal's anti-fraud models. Palantir received funding from Peter Thiel.
- Slide was founded by Max Levchin.
- Yelp was founded by Jeremy Stoppelmann, former VP of Engineering at PayPal, and Russ Simmons, one of the first employees at PayPal. Yelp is funded by Max Levchin.
- YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, all of whom were early employees at PayPal. YouTube is funded by Sequoia Capital. Roelof Botha, the former CFO of PayPal, is a partner of Sequoia Capital who sits on YouTube's board of directors.
- Room 9 Entertainment was founded by David O. Sacks, who founded PayPal's Product Group and later served as Chief of Operations (COO).
- SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk, who founded X.com and served as the CEO following its merger with PayPal.
- HourTown was founded by Ryan Donahue, an early employee at PayPal.