In a few short years, Roelof Botha, grandson of former foreign affairs minister Pik Botha, has become one of the movers and shakers in Silicon Valley. But the Pretoria-born Botha has not forgotten his roots and, an avid Blue Bulls supporter, still follows the Currie Cup on satellite TV.
Botha, a partner at high-profile venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, was intimately involved in the sale of e-commerce firm PayPal, where he was chief financial officer, to eBay in 2002 in a US$1,5bn deal. At Sequoia, he played a central role in the $1,6bn sale a year ago of online video pioneer YouTube to Google. YouTube had been founded by three of his former colleagues at PayPal, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim.
It seems Botha was always destined for great things. Born in Pretoria, he moved to Cape Town with his parents - his father, also Roelof, is a well-known economist - when he was six. He grew up in Hout Bay and went to Hoërskool Jan van Riebeeck. At high school, he showed the discipline and smarts that would take him far - he matriculated with straight As and was named the top pupil in the-then Cape province.
After school, he enrolled at the University of Cape Town for a bachelor of business science degree, focusing on actuarial science, economics and statistics. He completed it with the highest grade point average in the history of the university's commerce faculty, with distinctions in every subject. Eighteen months later, at 22, he became the youngest person in SA to qualify as an actuary.
Then, in 1996, Botha joined the Johannesburg office of international management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. He says the experience he gained at the firm was invaluable. "I got to work with the best and brightest from around the world," he says.
But Botha would go on to even greater things. In 1998, he relocated to San Francisco, the heart of the US technology industry, and enrolled for an MBA at Stanford University. "I couldn't get into Harvard," he jokes. "Seriously, I didn't think I'd do an MBA but was convinced of the merits of Stanford in particular. It seemed like San Francisco was a great place to be and I felt I needed to be there. Getting into a business school was a gracious way of getting in the door."
Botha was appointed director of corporate development for PayPal before he graduated. He quickly became vice-president of finance - and graduated from Stanford - and, in September 2001, was named chief financial officer. On September 27, barely two weeks after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, PayPal filed to list on the Nasdaq.
The company went public on February 14 2002. Botha was 28 and one of the youngest finance chiefs of a listed US company. "It was an enormous weight on my shoulders," he says of the post-Enron regulatory environment in the US.
PayPal didn't stay listed long, though. Five months after its Nasdaq debut, the company's board agreed to eBay's $1,5bn offer to buy the company. The deal was concluded that October and Botha stayed on for a further three months to see through the first post-acquisition earnings release.
In January 2003, he left to join Sequoia Capital. The company, founded in 1972, has provided seed funding to some of the biggest names in hi-tech, including Apple, Oracle, Google, Cisco and Nvidia. The companies it has provided funding to account for 14% of the market capitalisation of the Nasdaq.
Botha, who has led a number of key investments for Sequoia - including YouTube - hasn't visited SA since 2002. But he is considering a holiday here next year with his Singaporean wife and two young children. Perhaps he'll get a chance to go to Loftus to cheer on the Blue Bulls.
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