This Entrepreneur Saw His 100-Year-Old Family Store Go Under, Then Built a $1.5 Billion Tech Empire AppDirect co-founder Daniel Saks shares how he reinvented himself in the age of AI.

Daniel Saks seems like the last guy on earth who should be at the forefront of technology. The product of a tight-knit family from Niagara Falls, his great-great-grandparents started a furniture store that sponsored local hockey teams. His grandfather was born in the store's attic, and Daniel grew up jumping on the store's mattresses with his cousins.

Then the Great Recession of 2009 hit, and all the businesses on Main Street in Niagara Falls closed.

But rather than lamenting the situation, Saks focused on what he believed could have kept the store in business. "I really attributed the closing to the lack of technology and capital that would have allowed us to compete with some of the big box stores like IKEA," he says.

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Getting to the forefront of the technological revolution

If Saks hadn't visited his friend (and future business partner) Nicolas Desmarais in San Francisco, the thought process might have ended there. Upon landing at the San Francisco Airport, Saks was given a free ticket to the Web 2.0 Conference, where he discovered the early days of the cloud and software as a service.

At the time, the future of entrepreneurship looked bleak. "I thought that maybe there wouldn't even be small businesses anymore—it would just be big box stores or big enterprises," Saks says.

But Saks and Desmarais wondered if they could bring tools and technologies to both small and big businesses. So, when they were both 23, they started AppDirect, a B2B subscription commerce platform that allows companies to sell physical or digital products via any channel or platform as a service.

In the ensuing decades, AppDirect has sold technology solutions, including Microsoft Office 365, AT&T Mobility, and Amazon Web Services, to over five million business subscribers.

Bringing old-world values to the modern world

Having that kind of success out of the gate isn't exactly the norm, but Saks had something many entrepreneurs don't: a front-row seat while his family was establishing trust with their customers. Back in the day, Saks Furniture did it by sponsoring the local hockey team, but Saks inherently understood that the modern-day equivalent was to showcase that sort of trustworthiness virtually.

This led Saks to his next company: Landbase, an Agent AI Action Model for Go-To-Market that helps businesses generate leads. To non-technologists, this means that the software takes action based on data and learns from experiences to get smarter over time.

So how does this relate to a piece of furniture started in 1908? It prioritizes people.

Agentic AI is about people first

Saks started Landbase by analyzing 40 million sales and marketing campaigns to uncover the "secret sauce" that separated successful companies from the ones that ultimately failed. The research uncovered the shockingly depressing statistic that 45% of business campaigns fail to generate even one lead.

They also discovered that the problem wasn't the message or how they communicated. "It's that they didn't have credibility in the eyes of the buyer," Saks explains. "They hadn't positioned themselves to be relevant or credible or trusted to the buyers they were targeting."

Examining everything from business' online case studies to company website speed to the overall virtual sentiment about the company, Landbase is able to use its interactive AI to help these companies take active, specific steps to improve their trustability—and therefore their campaigns.

The anti-technology technologist

Despite being an undeniable techy, Saks sees technology as a tool to get people away from their computers. "Agentic AI makes you more human because it's technology that does the mundane tasks for you so you can reclaim your day," he says, "whether that's hiking or horseback riding or being in nature or taking your clients out to dinner."

Despite occasional "dark moments" where he thinks about climate change or the potential that people could "become cyborgs," Saks remains an optimist.

"I'm blown away by the speed and the technical reality of what's happening, and that can be inherently so scary," he says. "But if you look at the promise, we can harness technologies to solve the world's greatest problems, and if people are forced to be more human—more in nature—hopefully there'll be a better understanding to of how to have breakthroughs in these areas."

His great-great grandparents would be proud.