The engineer who tracked military cargo with RFID chips is now helping online entrepreneurs sell courses from their kitchen tables. The detour took about three decades.
Somewhere between tracking Lockheed Martin's supply chain with RFID sensors and helping independent course sellers hit six figures on autopilot, Darren Hakeman built one of the more unusual executive resumes in tech. In April 2024 he became CEO of Genesis Digital LLC - the Las Vegas-based company whose software stack, Kartra, WebinarJam, and EverWebinar, quietly powers tens of thousands of online businesses.
The promotion was not a surprise. Hakeman had been running the place as President since March 2022, brought in by founder Sarah Jenkins to bring enterprise discipline to a fast-growing SaaS operation. The question Jenkins needed answered was whether someone with Hakeman's background - defense logistics, then Silicon Valley M&A, then enterprise communications - could translate that experience into something useful for solopreneurs selling digital products. The answer, apparently, was yes.
Genesis Digital's mission: empower entrepreneurs and small business owners to achieve financial freedom with affordable, easy-to-use marketing and sales automation software.
The company Hakeman now leads was founded in 2013 by Sarah Jenkins and spent its first decade building a reputation in the creator economy - a phrase nobody used in 2013 but everyone uses now. Kartra became the all-in-one platform: email funnels, video hosting, shopping cart, membership sites, helpdesk, all wrapped into a single subscription. WebinarJam filled virtual rooms. EverWebinar ran those presentations on a schedule, no presenter required. Together they processed over a billion dollars for their customers' businesses.
What Genesis Digital needed by 2022 was not another product launch. It needed operational infrastructure. Hakeman had spent nine years at 8x8 Inc. doing exactly that - wiring together acquired companies, integrating platforms, scaling revenue. He oversaw the acquisition and integration of eight companies over that period, including the $125 million Wavecell deal that pushed 8x8 into the global CPaaS market. When he joined Genesis Digital, the ARR was a fraction of what he'd managed at 8x8. But the challenge was different, and arguably more interesting.
At 8x8, Hakeman was known as the dealmaker. Eight acquisitions in nine years. The Wavecell deal alone - a Singapore-based CPaaS platform bought for roughly $125 million - repositioned 8x8 in the global enterprise communications market overnight.
Before 8x8, before Genesis Digital, there was a long stretch in defense and logistics. Hakeman graduated from Stanford with a B.S.E.E. and then an M.S.E.E. - electrical engineering, both times. He spent thirteen years at Savi Technology, a company that built active RFID systems for tracking military equipment and cargo in real time. When Lockheed Martin acquired Savi in 2006, Hakeman stayed on as SVP of Operations for a SaaS Business Unit inside one of the world's largest defense contractors. He spent three years in that role before stepping out into the Silicon Valley advisory circuit.
Between 2009 and 2013, he advised early-stage companies, including Authentication Metrics Inc. - later renamed Agari - a cloud-based email security company that eventually sold to HelpSystems. That stint is worth noting. It's the bridge between defense-grade systems and the email-dependent, funnel-heavy world he'd eventually operate in at Genesis Digital. A person who has thought carefully about email security has probably thought carefully about email itself.
Genesis Digital joined the Inc. 5000 in 2023, ranked at #4770 - recognition for a company that had grown significantly without the venture funding rounds or flashy press cycles that usually accompany that kind of growth. The company runs lean: 120 employees, a remote-first structure, and a product suite designed to let a single operator run a sophisticated digital business without a tech team. Hakeman's job is to scale that without breaking what made it work.
The creator economy needed enterprise muscle. Genesis Digital had the products. Hakeman brought the playbook.
The company's headquarters is listed in Las Vegas - a practical choice for a remote-first team that needs a physical address in a business-friendly state. Hakeman works from Palo Alto, close enough to the Bay Area deal culture he spent decades navigating. The distance between where the company is registered and where the CEO sits is itself a kind of statement: this is not a company built on proximity. It's built on tools that make proximity optional.
Genesis Digital's three products occupy different but complementary lanes. Kartra is the everything-platform - the one that tries to replace five or six other subscriptions. WebinarJam is the live room, the digital stage where a solo operator can speak to thousands. EverWebinar is the automation layer that turns yesterday's live event into tomorrow's revenue. Hakeman now sits atop all three, managing a product suite that has collectively generated hundreds of millions of dollars for its customers.
The transition from RFID tags tracking pallets in a Lockheed Martin warehouse to webinar software helping a fitness coach sell a $997 program is not an obvious career path. But the underlying skill - figuring out how to move things from one place to another efficiently, whether those things are military cargo or customer attention spans - might be more transferable than it first appears. Hakeman has spent thirty years making complex systems work. Genesis Digital's customers are grateful someone did.
Empower entrepreneurs and small business owners to achieve financial freedom with affordable, easy-to-use marketing and sales automation software with world-class customer experience.
Genesis Digital Mission Statement - the brief Darren Hakeman inherited, and the one he's building towardGenesis Digital's infrastructure spans cloud hosting, modern JavaScript frameworks, and DevOps tooling that punches above its headcount.