David Sobie
CEO
at Happy Returns
David Sobie is the co-founder and CEO of Happy Returns in Santa Monica, CA.
Happy Returns was founded in 2015 and pioneered box-free returns for e-commerce retailers, speeding customer refunds and reducing return shipping costs. The company was acquired by PayPal in 2021. After a period of exponential growth, UPS acquired the company in 2023. Happy Returns now operates as a subsidiary of UPS, accepting millions of returns each month on behalf of thousands of retailers, at a network of over 8,000 Return Bar locations around the country.
Prior to co-founding Happy Returns, David served as the Chief Marketing Officer of REVOLVE and the SVP of Marketing & Business Development for HauteLook, a Nordstrom company.
He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and holds an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
Articles by David Sobie
7 Steps to Build a Product That Sells Itself
The Founder’s Mental Health Playbook: What I Learned After Nearly Burning Out
A hard-won guide to staying mentally healthy while building a startup I founded Stitcher, the podcast platform, in 2007 and ran it for seven years until we sold in 2014....
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) for Early Stage Companies
In our latest session from the Mucker Growth Series featuring Ethan Smith from Graphite, we explored AEO, a significant new approach for optimizing visibility in AI-driven search, particularly relevant as...
Startup Guide to AI Visibility: Be the Brand ChatGPT Recommends
Introduction Today, users aren’t just searching on Google. They’re asking ChatGPT, Claude, Google’s Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI systems for advice. AI visibility is the new frontier of brand awareness....
Practical Uses of AI & Automation for Startup Operations
In a recent Mucker Growth Series session, we invited Rock Vitale, Founder & CEO of Easie, to share how he’s helped early-stage teams move from manual, fragmented workflows to streamlined,...
2025 New York Tech Week Recap Of Mucker Sessions
Last week during New York Tech Week 2025, we joined more than 1,000 events hosted by founders, investors, and VCs. This post is a full Mucker recap of the three...