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Most influential South African VC – Roelof Botha

Posted by on Mar 30, 2008 in Entrepreneurship, South Africa, Technology, Venture Capital | 0 comments

Roelof Frederik Botha is a partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the most influential VC firms in the world. Sequoia has the highest rating on TheFunded website of 3.9. Here is his bio from the Sequoia website:

Roelof Botha is a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital focusing on services and software investments. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 2003, Roelof served as the Chief Financial Officer of PayPal (EBAY). Earlier, he worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company. Roelof is a certified actuary (Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries), and has a BS in Actuarial Science, Economics, and Statistics from the University of Cape Town and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.                                     

Botha is the grandson of Pik Botha (not to be confused with PW Botha), South Africa’s former minister of foreign affairs. He was born in South Africa and completed his Actuarial Science degree at the University of Cape Town. Botha also graduated with an MBA from the Stanford Business School in 2000. He received 3 MBA awards including the Henry Ford II award for being the top scholar.

Elon Musk, then CEO of Paypal, hired Botha in 2001 and 7 months before Paypal’s IPO he became its CFO. After Paypal’s acquisition by eBay for a cool $1.5bn he joined Sequoia Capital. According to the Mercury News Botha is one of a few VCs to turn its first deal into a billion dollar deal. That’s exactly what Botha did with Sequoia’s small investment in YouTube in 2006. The following SiliconBeat Q&A with Botha provides insight regarding YouTube before the Google acquisition.Botha is #22 on the 2008 Forbes Midas List, moving up one position from 2007. The Midas List chronicles the top deal makers in the world. He is also listed as one of the PayPal Mafia in a 2007 Fortune article.

 Here is Kara Swisher’s July 2007 interview with Botha at the Sequioa’s offices on Sand Hill Road: 

Botha is involved in the following Sequoia investments:

Not a lot is known about Botha’s personal life. He is married and has two sons aged 2 and 5 years old. He likes to play chess. Here is his LinkedIn profile.

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Elon Musk of SpaceX

Posted by on Aug 29, 2007 in Business, Entrepreneurship, Green Energy, South Africa | 0 comments

I’m finally getting round to blogging about successful South African businesspeople.At 36 and with a net worth of over $300 million, Elon Musk is one of America’s richest people under the age of 40. After two extremely successful ventures in the dot-com world, he is now focusing on space exploration and earth-friendly technology. Musk was born in South Africa in 1971. His father is a South African engineer; his mother, a Canadian nutritionist. At age 17 Elon left home. He enrolled at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, but his goal was the United States. “It is where great things are possible. I am nauseatingly pro-American,” he is quoted as saying.He got his chance through a scholarship to The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned two undergraduate degrees, first in economics, then in physics. He was accepted at Stanford, but quickly left to start Zip2, the company that created the technology to put newspaper-style ads and city directories on the Internet. After selling Zip2 to Compaq for $307 million, Musk, in 1999, helped launch and build PayPal (formed as a merger between PayPal and Musk’s X.com venture). The monster online payment system was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.Now Musk has put his money and efforts into two enterprises: building low-cost rockets to advance space exploration, and producing electric cars that are both environmentally clean and fast. His Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, builds the Falcon, a reusable, two-stage rocket, and the Dragon, a spaceship for carrying cargo and later, humans, to the International Space Station. Musk serves as chief engineer at SpaceX and designed much of the Falcon himself. The rockets are simpler and cost a fraction of the price of most other rockets. The Malaysian government and an arm of the Pentagon are in line to use the Falcon for launching their satellites into orbit. In addition, NASA signed a $278 million contract with SpaceX for services. A recent Wired article provides a great overview of entrepreneurs like Musk and Jeff Bezos (of Amazon) entering commercial space exploration. Musk is also the primary investor in Tesla Motors, enabling the company to develop its Tesla Roadster. The automobile has no tail pipe or gas tank, and runs on 7,000 lithium ion batteries the size of a tube of lipstick. The car can go from 0-60 mph in less than four seconds and has a price tag of $100,000.Musk is also on the board of Everdream, and Solacity and well as being a trustee of the X Prize Foundation. He is willing to invest up to $4mm in next generation battery, especially ultra capacitors, ventures. Search for his name in the CNN Money article.Considering that Musk once told a friend he wished he could find a way not to eat so he could work all the time, hobbies don’t seem to be a priority in life, but he is married, to author Justine Musk. The couple lives in Bel Air, Calif., with their five boys: a set of twins and a set of triplets. He also has a $1.2 million McLaren F1 car to drive to work in and a L-39 Russian jet that he pilots.Musk was a voracious reader as a child and by his teens was studying philosophers such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, but came to the conclusion that they didn’t have much to say and considers much of what they believed as “rubbish.” He does, however, view Douglas Adams, the author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, as one of the great philosophers of all time.Nov 16, 2007 update: Interesting story in ValleyWag regarding the PayPal mafia article in Fortune.

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