{"id":84215,"date":"2015-04-04T00:05:24","date_gmt":"2015-04-03T22:05:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=84215"},"modified":"2015-04-02T18:15:37","modified_gmt":"2015-04-02T16:15:37","slug":"south-africans-that-have-made-it-big-abroad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/trending\/84215\/south-africans-that-have-made-it-big-abroad\/","title":{"rendered":"South Africans that have made it big abroad"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many countries around the world are benefiting from brilliant South Africans who have gone in search\u00a0of better opportunities or a safer, more stable place to live.<\/p>\n

Thousands of highly-skilled South Africans, including doctors and engineers, have emigrated to English-speaking countries over the last two decades.<\/p>\n

Research consultancy Trade and Industrial Policy Strategies estimated<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0there were up to 700,000 South Africans living overseas in 2010.<\/p>\n

The biggest beneficiaries of skilled South Africans were the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States.<\/p>\n

This trend is so significant there is a running joke that South Africa\u2019s biggest export is not its natural resources, but rather skilled South Africans.<\/p>\n

South Africans doing great things in the United States<\/h3>\n

While many South Africans have left the country because of security and stability concerns, this is not the case for everyone.<\/p>\n

Many South African entrepreneurs and entertainers have left our shores in search of fame and fortune in the world\u2019s biggest economy \u2013 the United States.<\/p>\n

What is extraordinary is that many have been very successful in the competitive fields of business, entertainment, and technology, despite strong competition\u00a0in the States.<\/p>\n

So significant was the impact of South Africans on the US technology industry that a large proportion of the Silicon Valley Business Journal\u2019s Executive of the Year award winners were South African.<\/p>\n

The Silicon Valley Business Journal even remarked<\/strong><\/a> that there was \u201csomething interesting about our Executive of the Year awards \u2013 Maritz, Musk, and Rive [previous winners] all share the same native heritage \u2013 they are all originally from South Africa\u201d.<\/p>\n

Here are ten South Africans who rose to the top of their field in the United States (also see\u00a0Born in the RSA \u2013 and big in the USA<\/strong><\/a>).<\/p>\n

Many of the short descriptions come from Wikipedia.<\/p>\n

Elon Musk<\/h3>\n

Elon Musk was born in South Africa in 1971 and moved to the United States soon after completing his matric at Pretoria Boys High School. Musk co-founded Paypal and Zip2, and is currently the CEO and CTO of SpaceX, the CEO of Tesla Motors, and the chairman of SolarCity.<\/p>\n

\"Elon<\/a>

Elon Musk<\/p><\/div>\n

Roelof Botha<\/h3>\n

Roelof Botha was born in Pretoria on 19 September 1973. Botha is one of the top venture capital professionals in the United States, and is a partner at Sequoia Capital.<\/p>\n

He sits on the board of numerous companies, including Jawbone, Eventbrite, Evernote, Tumblr, Weebly, Unity, and Xoom. Botha was also vice-president of finance and CFO of Paypal.<\/p>\n

\"Roelof<\/a>

Roelof Botha<\/p><\/div>\n

Paul Maritz<\/h3>\n

Paul Maritz is a computer scientist and software executive who co-founded Pi Corporation and served as CEO of VMWare and as president and GM of EMC Corporation\u2019s cloud computing division.<\/p>\n

Maritz was born in Zimbabwe in 1955, but his family later moved to South Africa where he was schooled at Hilton College. In 2010 Maritz was named CRN Magazine\u2019s Most Influential Executive of 2010, and won the Morgan Stanley Leadership Award for Global Commerce in 2011.<\/p>\n

\"Paul<\/a>

Paul Maritz<\/p><\/div>\n

Lyndon Rive<\/h3>\n

Lyndon Rive is the co-founder and CEO of SolarCity, one of the most recognizable brands in clean energy in the United States. He is from South Africa, but left the country shortly after he started his first business at age 17.<\/p>\n

\"Lyndon<\/a>

Lyndon Rive<\/p><\/div>\n

Vinny Lingham<\/h3>\n

Vinny Lingham was born in East London on 7 February 1979. He is a South African Internet entrepreneur and is the CEO and co-founder of Gyft, which was recently acquired by First Data in a multi-million dollar deal.<\/p>\n

Lingham was also founder and CEO of Yola, a San Francisco-based Web start-up.<\/p>\n

\"Vinny<\/a>

Vinny Lingham<\/p><\/div>\n

Pieter de Villiers<\/h3>\n

Pieter de Villiers is a South African-born, Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur. He is the CEO and co-founder of Clickatell, one of the leading global providers of Application-2-Person (A2P) mobile messaging and mobile transactional services.<\/p>\n

\"Pieter<\/a>

Pieter de Villiers<\/p><\/div>\n

Charlize Theron<\/h3>\n

Charlize Theron was born on 7 August 1975 in Benoni. She is an Oscar winning actress who starred in The Devil\u2019s Advocate, The Cider House Rules, and Monster. After her Oscar win she became one of the highest paid and most desirable actresses in Hollywood.<\/p>\n

\"Charlize<\/a>

Charlize Theron<\/p><\/div>\n

Trevor Noah<\/h3>\n

Trevor Noah is the latest South Africa to hit the big time in the United States after he was named as the host for Comedy Central\u2019s The Daily Show, replacing Jon Stewart.<\/p>\n

Noah was born on 20 February 1984 in South Africa, and rose to fame with his excellent comedy routines.<\/p>\n

\"Trevor<\/a>

Trevor Noah<\/p><\/div>\n

Liam Pedersen<\/h3>\n

Liam Pedersen is leading Nissan\u2019s autonomous vehicle research program in California.<\/p>\n

Liam was born in Cape Town, and is best known for being a robotics researcher at the NASA Ames Research Center \u2013 building intelligent robot systems to look for life on Mars.<\/p>\n

\"Liam<\/a>

Liam Pedersen<\/p><\/div>\n

Willem Van Biljon (the one who\u00a0came back)<\/h3>\n

Willem Van Biljon is an entrepreneur and technologist who was born (1961), raised, and educated in South Africa. He co-founded Mosaic Software, which built the Postilion payment system that\u00a0was sold to S1 Corp in 2004.<\/p>\n

He then joined Amazon, where he led the team that developed Amazon\u2019s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).<\/p>\n

After van Biljon left Amazon he started a venture with Chris Pinkham called Nimbula, which was focused on cloud computing software.<\/p>\n

In March 2013, Nimbula was acquired by Oracle. In 2014 van Biljon joined Takealot as co-CEO.<\/p>\n

\"Willem<\/a>

Willem van Biljon<\/p><\/div>\n

This article was republished with permission from MyBroadband<\/a>.<\/p>\n

More on South Africans<\/h3>\n

South Africa\u2019s greatest tech exports<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Richest South Africans<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

South Africans are lazy: Zuma<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

South Africans are addicted to the Internet<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many countries are benefitting from brilliant South Africans who are doing extraordinary things overseas<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":51640,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[9689,2662,26,9687,9691],"class_list":["post-84215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trending","tag-charlize-theron","tag-elon-musk","tag-headline","tag-south-africans","tag-trevor-noah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84215"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":84259,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84215\/revisions\/84259"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}