“PayPal Mafia” member David Sacks linked to $23M Venetian Islands sale

David Sacks, a venture capitalist and member of the so-called “PayPal Mafia,” is linked to the sale of a Venetian Islands home for $22.5 million.

Records show 100 West San Marino Drive LLC, a Florida entity tied to Sacks’ San Francisco-based Craft Ventures, sold the house at 100 West San Marino Drive to Hela Properties, a firm managed by Bulgarian fintech entrepreneur Christo Georgiev. 

Dina Goldentayer of Douglas Elliman had the listing and declined to comment on the deal. Cris Soares of Brown Harris Stevens represented the buyer, and declined to comment on the buyer’s identity. 

“They plan on living there,” he said, noting the house’s downtown views were a significant draw for the buyer.

Sacks bought the waterfront Venetian Islands house for $17.1 million in 2021, records show. Built in 2020, it spans 5,200 square feet, with five bedrooms and seven bathrooms. The quarter-acre property has a pool and a dock. He listed it for $22.9 million in October, Redfin shows.  

Sacks joined PayPal in 1999 as the company’s first COO. When eBay bought the online payments platform for $1.5 billion in 2002, it birthed the “PayPal Mafia” –– a group of founders and early employees with newly minted fortunes and ambitions to explore the new tech frontier. Other prominent “PayPal Mafia” members include Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Keith Rabois, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. They went on to create YouTube, LinkedIn, Palantir, Tesla, and Square, among other ventures. Thiel and Rabois own homes on the Venetian Islands.

Sacks founded the genealogy website Geni.com, then Yammer, an early internal corporate communication service. Microsoft bought it for $1.2 billion in 2012, according to published reports. He launched Craft Ventures in 2017, which has invested in firms like Reddit, Slack, Uber and Lyft.

While Miami is still coming to terms with its perhaps dashed visions of becoming the “Silicon Valley of the South,” many of the tech industry’s biggest names have bought homes in the area in recent years. PayPal founder Thiel bought a pair of Venetian Islands homes for $18 million in 2020. Rabois bought a waterfront Venetian Islands mansion for $28.9 million that same year. Jim Goetz, a legendary venture capitalist in Silicon Valley for his early bid on WhatsApp, dropped a combined $29.6 million on two adjacent Venetian Islands homes in 2017 and 2019. 

More recently, billionaire Jeff Bezos bought two Indian Creek Village estates for $147 million in the fall.