Roelof F. Botha born 19 September 1973 is a South African actuary, venture capitalist and company director.
Botha is a partner at Sequoia Capital and currently sits on the boards of MongoDB, Jawbone, Eventbrite, Evernote, Bird, Ethos, Mahalo, Natera, Nimbula, Square, Tokbox, Tumblr, Unity, Whisper and Xoom. He also works with AssureRX, FutureAdvisor, Instagram, Mixpanel and MuSigma. He previously sat on the board of directors of Meebo and YouTube before they were each acquired by Google, as well as Weebly before they were acquired by Square.
On Forbes’ Midas List, an annual ranking of venture capital professionals, he ranked 22nd in 2008 and 26th in 2009. He is a regular member of the Midas List and has continued to move up the ranks to #14 in 2018.
Education and career
Botha was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and at the age of six he moved to Cape Town with his parents. He was raised in Hout Bay, a suburb of Cape Town, and attended Hoërskool Jan van Riebeeck. Botha earned a BSc in Actuarial Science, Economics, and Statistics from the University of Cape Town, graduating in 1996 with the highest GPA in the history of the program. Botha worked as a business analyst at McKinsey & Co., Johannesburg, from August 1996 through June 1998. He then moved to the United States, where he attended the Stanford University Graduate School of Business from 1998 through 2000 and received an MBA, where he was the Henry Ford II Scholar as Stanford GSB valedictorian.
In 2000, prior to his graduation from Stanford, Botha became director of corporate development for PayPal. He moved on to vice-president of finance and was named CFO in September 2001. Botha was 28 when PayPal went public in February 2002. The company was purchased by eBay in October 2002. Despite Meg Whitman offering Botha the opportunity to stay on as CFO post acquisition, Roelof left to join Sequoia Capital in January 2003.
At Sequoia, Botha oversaw the firm’s investment in YouTube, Instagram, and Square, among others. He also helped to plan the acquisition of Xoom by PayPal. In 2017, Botha took over lead responsibility for Sequoia’s US operations from Jim Goetz.
Family
Botha’s father, also named Roelof, is an economist. His grandfather was Roelof Frederik “Pik” Botha, a South African politician who served as the country’s foreign minister for the Apartheid government, a role he reprised for over a decade. His role as an Apartheid foreign affairs minister was primarily centered on justifying South Africa’s Apartheid policy of separate development (declared a Crime Against Humanity in the 1970s) between mainly black and white countrymen. This included an effort to counter efforts of anti-Apartheid activism mainly from the then liberation movement ANC.
His uncle was the rock musician Piet Botha.A