South African investor headhunted by Elon Musk steps down from top job in Silicon Valley

Roelof Botha, grandson of former Foreign Minister Pik Botha, has stepped down as the managing partner of one of the largest venture capital firms in the world, Sequoia Capital. 

During his short stint as Sequoia’s top boss from 2022 to November 2025, the South African-born investor oversaw tremendous change at the company and some well-publicised investment missteps. 

Botha famously personally apologised to investors on whose behalf Sequoia invested millions into crypto exchange FTX, which collapsed in November 2022.

He also had to navigate another crisis soon after FTX’s collapse, when Silicon Valley Bank folded, threatening around $1 billion of Sequoia’s deposits. 

In 2023, Botha oversaw the split of Sequoia’s business into three distinct entities to make it easier to manage and more efficient. It also helped to avoid any negative consequences from the geopolitical tension between the United States and China. 

Sequoia remained focused on investments in the United States and Europe, while its Chinese business morphed into HongShan and its Indian business became Peak XV Partners. 

Later that year, Sequoia’s historic investments in China were investigated by the United States House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. 

Since then, Botha enjoyed a relatively more stable two years leading Sequoia, which has over $55 billion in assets under management. 

“Whenever I interview people, I ask about those key moments in somebody’s life where they’ve made career decisions,” Botha says on the company’s website. 

“And I think about companies in the same way – there are these crucible moments that have an enormous bearing on ultimate outcomes.For me, 2023 was a crucible moment for the new Sequoia.”

Founded in 1972 by Don Valentine, Sequoia was one of the earliest investors in Apple, with other notable wins including Reddit, YouTube, Airbnb, and PayPal.It currently holds stakes in SpaceX, Square, and Stripe.

After stepping down as managing partner of the firm, Botha will transition into a new role as an adviser to the partnership and will continue to represent Sequoia on the boards of portfolio companies. 

Botha first became a steward of the Sequoia Partnership in 2017 when he led the American and European business for Sequoia, before stepping up to manage the firm’s global operations.

“I am confident that Sequoia’s ethos will endure and that the deep bench of talent at Sequoia will thrive under Pat and Alfred’s leadership,” Botha said in a letter announcing his change in role.

He revealed in the letter that investing veterans Alfred Lin and Pat Grady will become the company’s new stewards. 

From UCT to Silicon Valley and the PayPal Mafia

Botha was born in Pretoria to renowned economist Dr Roelof Botha and soon moved to Cape Town to be raised in Hout Bay. 

He is the grandson of the late Minister of Foreign Affairs, Roelof Frederik “Pik” Botha. The youngest Roelof shares his grandfather’s middle name.

The young Botha always had his eyes overseas, with his dislike of never speaking English at home setting him firmly on course to attend an English university that would enable him to go overseas to pursue his career. 

Attending Hoërskool Jan van Riebeeck, Botha flourished academically and graduated from the University of Cape Town with a BSc in Actuarial Science, Economics, and Statistics. 

Moving to Johannesburg to seek out employment, Botha landed a job as a business analyst at McKinsey & Co., where he began to learn about Silicon Valley. 

Botha read all he could find about the American technology utopia and was set on challenging himself against the world’s best and capturing some of the value from the invention of the internet. 

He said he never even knew what venture capital was or that he would work at a tech start-up. “I just had an intuition that I needed to be here,” he says. 

After two years at McKinsey, Botha enrolled at Stanford University for an MBA and finished top of his class. Job offers flooded in after that.

An offer from Elon Musk stood out, with Botha being introduced to the entrepreneur by a mutual friend. Musk convinced Botha to join X.com, which was set on revolutionising the financial system. 

Botha stayed at X.com through its various guises. It merged with Confinity to form PayPal, after which Musk was forced out of the company, with Botha rising to become its CFO. 

The South African would lead the company’s IPO in 2000 and its sale to eBay for $1.5 billion, making Botha a millionaire overnight. 

In 2007, Fortune published a photo of thirteen former PayPal employees in gangster attire, creating the moniker ‘PayPal Mafia’. Botha was among them, but Musk was absent. 

Botha received an offer to stay on at PayPal, but Sequoia’s Michael Mortiz offered him a chance to enter the venture capital world. 

“When Mike Moritz asked me to come interview at Sequoia, that was just another door opening. Where might this one lead?” he recalls on the firm’s website.

Investing success

Botha has been tremendously successful as an early-stage venture capitalist, growing Sequoia’s assets under management and his own wealth. 

He led the firm’s early investments in YouTube, Instagram, and Square – netting the company hundreds of millions of dollars. 

Botha attributes this success to his focus on the unconventional and his lack of shame in being made fun of by other investors, forged by his South African background.

“In America, there are many people who attended one of the top high schools in the world and who’ve studied at one of the top universities, and there is always this question mark at the back of your mind – Can I compete with these people?”

“But immigrants have a lot to prove, and of course, there’s the fact that the immigrants had to overcome many things just to be here in the first place.”

“How many of the South Africans who apply are accepted at Stanford? It’s a small percentage. So the people who come here are already a tiny fraction of the population of their home countries.”

“Because you don’t have this established network, you have to work hard. It’s not just a given that you’re going to be successful; it’s not through your family connections or friends that you will get a job or something. You have to roll up your sleeves and get to work.”

In making early, contrarian bets on YouTube and Instagram, Botha said there is some pleasure and defiance in saying, “We’ll show you!”. 

He recalled an article in 2001 titled Earth to Palo Alto, which called PayPal’s executives deranged. A few years later, they became millionaires when PayPal was bought by eBay. 

“There’s something intriguing to me about somebody who’s an original thinker, who is quirky, and maybe an outsider. I love spending time with people like that.” 

“Often, I judge based on how I feel when I meet someone the second time. With most people, you can have a pretty interesting conversation once. The real test is the second conversation – do I lose interest?”