Robert Zakari, ZabaSearch president and co-founder   Contact

Robert Zakari began his career as General Counsel and VP of Business Affairs for 1-800-US-SEARCH shortly after graduating from law school in 1996. Before joining US-SEARCH, Mr. Zakari had believed he would become a litigator defending medical malpractice claims.

A call from a long-time friend who first introduced Mr. Zakari to US-SEARCH's public search service, followed by a twist of fate, combined to change those plans. Within days of relocating to Los Angeles, Mr. Zakari was listening to the John & Ken Show on KFI AM640 when he heard a story about a senior community that refused to allow the fourteen-year-old grandson of one of the residents to live with his grandparents.

Listening as the child, Chaz Kope, recounted his tale of losing touch with his father, Mr. Zakari immediately thought US-SEARCH. He called his friend who worked at US-SEARCH and relayed the boy's story. Within days, US-SEARCH founder Nick Matzorkis arranged to reunite Chaz and his father on the John & Ken Show, paving the way for father and son to meet.

With no prior legal department at US-SEARCH and, for newly graduated Mr. Zakari, no prior on-the-job experience the company presented many challenges from day one. Mr. Zakari rolled up his sleeves and dove in, quickly building the internal structures and policies that eventually led US-SEARCH to an IPO three years later.

With nearly 100 percent of US-SEARCH's revenue in 1996 being generated from television advertising, and at Matzorkis' suggestion, Zakari embarked on a mission to expand the company's reach to the Internet, ultimately landing the service on every major online white-page directly.

By 1999, US-SEARCH ads appeared on every major web presence, including AOL, MSN, Yahoo, LYCOS and INFOSPACE. At the same time, US-SEARCH's TV ad campaign charged on with spots appearing on CNN, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, Montel Williams, and numerous other daytime talk shows.

With so much growing success the company faced increased challenges as public awareness of privacy concerns began to capture interest in news stories which generally asserted that technology was progressing to the point that one's information was being stored and disseminated via the Internet. Zakari was able to fend off numerous Attorneys General inquiries from almost every state wondering whether US-SEARCH was an investigative service. Zakari successfully convinced the states that US-SEARCH was merely providing public record information to consumers and was not an investigative service.

To stay at the forefront, US-SEARCH voluntarily joined the Internal Reference Group (IRSG), an independent trade group comprised of information giants Experian, Trans Union, Equifax, Acxiom, LEXIS-NEXIS and Choicepoint, among others. As such, US-SEARCH committed to upholding to the highest standards in disseminating public record information, earning Price Waterhouse Coopers' seal of approval at the conclusion of an independent audit.

Upon the company's successful IPO in 1999, US-SEARCH began trading on NASDAQ under the symbol SRCH. The milestone marked the culmination of years of work that began when Matzorkis founded the company in 1994 in the closet of his apartment.

In addition to US Search, Mr. Zakari also acted as General Counsel and VP of Business Affairs for several other companies operating under the banner "InterAct Entertainment Group," founded by Mr. Matzorkis in the 1990s. InterAct businesses included web development, television and music productions and distribution, musical and theatrical artist management, and telecommunications, making the company perhaps the first to successfully converge these formerly disparate enterprises into working business models in the heart of the entertainment industry.

One particularly distinguished achievement during Mr. Zakari's stead at InterAct was his involvement in the develoment of "Pre-Madonna," a collection of early demos and songs written and performed by Madonna and executive produced by Mr. Matzorkis. By handling delicate negotiations with Madonna's representatives directly, Mr. Zakari ultimately shepherded to completion the release of the only Madonna CD ever that is not own and controlled by Warner Bros or Madonna. The project was yet another example of how Mr. Zakari's business acumen once again played a crucial role in turning Mr. Matzorkis's creative ideas and conceptions into reality.

Zakari faced his greatest challenge, however, dealing with the media attention and disruption that came in March of 1997 when an employee of US-SEARCH discovered the 39 bodies of the Heaven's Gate group in Rancho Santa Fe. That morning, Zakari was leaving the office to do legal research when he noticed a package for one a US-SEARCH employee.

He handed the package to the employee, left, and later that day learned that the tape contained footage of mass suicides victims, which prompted Matzorkis to give the employee a ride to Rancho Santa Fe, where the employee made the discovery in person.

When Zakari was notified that the San Diego Sheriff's Department wanted to speak with the employee, Zakari represented the employee throughout the investigation. When it was determined that the group had chosen to take their own lives, and that the US-SEARCH employee was not involved in the matter, the media insatiable appetite for more information reached a feverish pitch. Over the next few weeks, Zakari accompanied the employee and Matzorkis to numerous media events, including interviews with Diane Sawyers, Newsweek, CNN Live with Larry King, and other major news outlets.

In 1999, Zakari left US-SEARCH to join a small technology start-up named X:Drive, which delivered technology to allow consumers to store their data online and access it from anywhere in the world via the Internet.

As X:Drive's fifth employee, Zakari was hired as in-house counsel, and VP of Business Development as part of a team of colleagues who would go on to become hugely successful Internet innovators, including Chris DeWolfe, Tom Anderson, and Josh Berman, the trio behind MySpace.

Benefitting from the Internet Boom of the late 90s, X:Drive raised over 100 million dollars in equity as it grew to become the leader in online storage. Zakari was instrumental in helping develop and finalize a Japanese joint venture with Softbank before leaving in 2001 to start his own business. X:Drive is now owned by AOL, and continues to provide online storage services to consumers around the world.

Zakari reunited with Matzorkis in 2001 to found PeopleData, whose philosophy was to utilize technological advances in Internet connection speeds, storage capabilities, and search algorithms to give the public the most powerful and thorough way to locate information about individuals. PeopleData re-invented the way people searched for public records much in the same way US-SEARCH did 1990s. However, there remained one more paradigm shift that Matzorkis had envisioned years earlier when he founded US-SEARCH. It was Matzorkis's longstanding belief that the day would come when the same high-quality public search information would be made available for free.

Though many white-page like services had offered free addresses and phone numbers for years, it was not until the advent of ZabaSearch in 2005 that consumers had access to a the kind of free public record search Matzorkis predicted. And while Google was excelling general Internet searches, there was no search engine solely focused on public records and publicly available information about individuals that offered its services for free.

ZabaSearch was the first step in the democratization of information that had previously been available to attorneys, the government, bill-collectors, and financial institutions for years. With the advent of ZabaSearch, access to that same information was open to everyday citizens.

Twelve years of working together paid off as Zakari and Matzorkis parlayed their experience into the world's number one public records search service that ZabaSearch has become.

Mr. Zakari lives in Southern California with his wife and three young children.