Roelof Botha

Roelof Frederik Botha (born 19 September 1973)[1][2] is a South African-American venture capitalist. He was a partner at Sequoia Capital for 24 years, from 2003 to 2026, and led the firm from 2022 to 2025. He joined the firm as a general partner, later taking over their U.S. and European early-stage investment franchises in 2017. Botha was the chief financial officer (CFO) of PayPal from 2000 to 2003, taking the company public in 2002. Botha has influenced a variety of private and public American companies since the early 2000s. His involvement as a board director, as of 2022, has spanned MongoDB,[3] Evernote,[4] Bird,[5] Natera,[6] Square, Unity,[7] Xoom,[8] and SpaceX.[9] He has worked with AssureRX, FutureAdvisor, Instagram, Mixpanel and Mu Sigma.[10] Botha was previously on the boards of Meebo and YouTube before they were each acquired by Google, Weebly before they were acquired by Square,[11] and Tumblr before they were acquired by Yahoo!.[7] He was involved with 23andMe,[12] Eventbrite,[7] Jawbone, Mahalo,[8] Nimbula,[13] Tokbox,[14] and Whisper.[8] He has appeared on Forbes' annual ranking of venture capitalists, the Midas List, 22nd in 2008,[15] 9th in 2021,[16] 36th in 2022,[17] and 13th in 2025.[18] Botha was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and at the age of six he moved to Cape Town with his parents. His grandfather was Pik Botha, who was the country's foreign minister in the last years of the apartheid era.[19] 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, earning the best undergraduate grade point average in the history of the university. He worked as a business analyst at McKinsey & Company in Johannesburg from 1996 through 1998. He then moved to the United States, where he received an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, again graduating as valedictorian.[2][20