Despite Losing 40% of His Savings, This South African is Now one of the World’s Top Investors

The 2019 Midas list prepared by Forbes is already out. This list captures the world’s most successful venture capitalist.

To come up with the list, Forbes ranks individuals if the company they represent has gone public or has been acquired for an amount not less than $200 million over the last five years or it has gathered a total of $400 million in funding or more.

To make a fair list, Forbes said it does not discriminate, but it examines all the partners submitted each year across all the firms

As with previous ones, the 2019 Midas list was dominated by Americans and Chinese investors with Neil Shen remaining the top. Neil Shen (Chinese) controls Alibaba, Pinduoduo, and JD.com. Another Chinese investor, Kathy Xu (Xu Xin), is also top ranked in this year’s Midas list.

Peter Fenton (Benchmark chairman) is ranked second while Bill Gurley (one of Uber’s investors) is ranked third. Look at the list below.

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Top 10 venture capitalist.

Top South African Investor

According to Forbes ranking and as reported by Businesstech, Roelof Botha – a South African, was ranked 23rd. He is a former PayPal CFO, and has since put his fingers in many tech jars.

One of his largest investment was in popular event platform Eventbrite, which went public in September 2018. Others are MongoDB, which he exited in October 2017 and Square in November 2015. As at March 2018, Square platform had a market capitalization of more the $30 billion.

In January 2019, Botha decided to invest in another company by buying Weebly (a website builder,) for $365 million.

Botha has also invested in companies like 23andMe and a bio company called BridgeBio.

In his efforts to help other investors, he launched Sequoia AMP, which aims were to bring investors together to exchange their ideas in order to accelerate their company’s growth.

Botha went to the US in 1998 after losing 40% of his saving due to the emergence of a market currency crisis at that time. He started his entrepreneurial journey while still a student at Stanford University. He became CFO at PayPal while doing his masters at Stanford and afterward, he negotiated its sale to eBay for $1.5 billion.

Since then, Roelof Botha has never looked back.

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