South African among the top venture capitalists in the world

South African native Roelof Botha has been ranked among the best venture capitalists in the world.

The Forbes’ annual ‘Midas List‘ puts Botha at 35th among a ranking of 100 top VCs around the globe.

Botha became chief financial officer at PayPal while earning his M.B.A. at Stanford University. He negotiated PayPal’s sale to eBay for $1.5 billion and then jumped ship to Sequoia Capital.

According to Forbes, Botha’s most notable deal at Sequoia, is Square Inc, the listed mobile payment company headed up by co-founder and CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. The financial services company has a market cap of more than $4 billion.

“Roelof Botha, a card-carrying member of the PayPal Mafia, still has a keen eye for payments companies. Last year, he steered mobile payments powerhouse Square, where he’s on the board, through its IPO and helped orchestrate the sale of Xoom to PayPal for $890 million,” Forbes said.

It noted that Botha’s portfolio also ranges from databases – MongoDB – to popular apps like QuizUp and Whisper and genetic testing company Natera.

Botha, according to Forbes, was an early backer of YouTube, which Google acquired for $1.65 billion, and managed firm investments in Tumblr – acquired by Yahoo in 2013 for $1.1 billion, and Instagram – acquired by Facebook in 2012 for about $700 million.

New projects include a billion-dollar ticketing site, Eventbrite, while Forbes said that ‘Botha has a bit more work to do finding an enviable exit for slightly troubled portfolio companies Evernote and Jawbone’.

Evernote is a cross-platform, freemium app designed for note taking, organizing, and archiving, while Jawbone is a consumer technology and wearable products company.

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