Storied venture firm Sequoia Capital has named a new leader. South African Roelof Botha, 48, will become the senior steward of the firm, according to a Twitter message from current chief Doug Leone late on Monday.
Botha’s “keen instinct for innovation has made its mark on our partnership and on our industry,” Leone wrote in the statement. It also said that Botha will “set the overall tone and oversee the global centralised functions” of the firm, including its finance and culture, and that Botha will continue to lead Sequoia’s US and Europe business as managing partner.
Leone, 65, said he will remain a general partner in the firm’s existing funds and will keep his board seats.
As part of the announcement, Sequoia said that Neil Shen will continue to lead the firm’s China business as founding and managing partner.
Cape Town-educated Botha, who was born in Pretoria and whose grandfather was the last apartheid-era South African foreign minister Pik Botha (and the first minister of mineral & energy affairs in the Nelson Mandela administration), oversaw several of Sequoia’s key investments, including those in YouTube and Square.
Botha, who relocated to the US from Johannesburg in the late 1990s, was also a key player, along with fellow South African Elon Musk, in PayPal’s formative years.
Botha became the youngest actuary in South Africa’s history at the tender age of 22. But instead of pursuing a job in government or economics like his father and grandfather, his first job was as a door-to-door salesman for Golden Products, selling the local Tupperware equivalent, according to a recent profile interview in Protocol.
PayPal
He later joined McKinsey to open up opportunities for him to work abroad.
By 1998, Botha had registered at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where he met billionaire-to-be Musk.
Musk was at PayPal at the time and had tried to recruit Botha, but was unsuccessful due to Botha not having the required work permits. But he later went on to become chief financial officer of PayPal, taking the company public and eventually helping negotiate its sale to eBay in 2002. — Sarah McBride, (c) 2022 Bloomberg LP, with additional reporting (c) 2022 NewsCentral Media
