At the crown of Roelof Botha’s otherwise perfectly coiffed, light-brown head of hair, there’s a small patch that’s gone completely white. It’s the result of a serious concussion Botha incurred in his twenties while playing rugby, his sport of choice in his native South Africa and in business school at Stanford.

That injury ended his playing days. But spend some time with Botha—who’s now the head of Sequoia Capital, one of the oldest, largest, and most successful firms in venture capital—and rugby will come up again and again. Botha cites lessons from rugby in talks with founders and colleagues, and watches it devotedly while he exercises. The game has provided him with endless analogies about the value of teamwork and resilience—and some decent one-liners.

“Soccer is 90 minutes of pretending to be hurt when you’re not,” Botha tells me. “And rugby is 80 minutes of pretending not to be hurt, with blood spewing on your face.”

While some soccer fans might quibble with the comparison, rugby is, indisputably, not for the faint of heart. Then again, neither is Botha’s other passion: venture capital. The industry that has become a financing pipeline for young, innovative, and risky companies is known for dramatic booms and busts—and it’s coming off a particularly harrowing cycle. A COVID-era bump in demand for all things tech helped VC funds raise and invest record amounts in 2021, as an unprecedented 340 new U.S. startups achieved “unicorn” status, or valuations of $1 billion or more. Then, in 2022, came a correction, triggered by high interest rates and a slumping stock market—a decline that bloodied balance sheets and left many people wondering whether the VC model itself was broken.

It’s against this backdrop that Botha, who appears to be equal parts jock and nerd (a true unicorn) has taken the mantle. The former wunderkind and charter member of the PayPal mafia became senior steward, Sequoia’s term for its top job, in July 2022. (After a reorganization, his title is now just “steward.”) It’s the culmination of a steady rise: Botha, who turns 51 in September, joined the firm in 2003 and had been running Sequoia’s U.S. and Europe business since 2017, scoring lucrative wins over the years with investments in YouTube, Instagram, and Square, among other blockbusters.

All along, Botha has kept a low profile: “My inclination was never to run to the spotlight,” he says. But leading Sequoia comes with certain demands, not just to set strategy internally but to explain it externally. So far, Botha’s run has coincided not just with VC turmoil but with blunders specific to Sequoia (more on that shortly). Still, the firm has ridden out the downturn better than most. It distributed more than $43 billion to its investors over the past five years, including $10 billion in 2023. Its limited partners, largely made up of endowments, charitable foundations, and nonprofits, seem satisfied: Indeed, the base of investors in Sequoia’s primary fund grew slightly from 2022 to 2023, from 354 to 358.

It helps that the Bay Area-based firm has delivered hit after hit, decade after decade. Sequoia has led investments in tech titans including Apple, Cisco, and Google, plus newer names like Nvidia, Airbnb, DoorDash, and WhatsApp, minting billions in returns along the way. More than 25% of the overall market capitalization of the Nasdaq—more than $7 trillion, as of mid-July—is composed of Sequoia-backed companies. Sequoia’s kingmaker position is also evident in less quantifiable ways: Securing dollars from the firm is one of tech’s ultimate seals of approval.

Botha at the café in Sequoia’s headquarters, backed by photos of founders including Elon Musk (second photo from left); Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Alphabet (third from right); and Jensen Huang of Nvidia (far right).

That stellar reputation is precisely what makes Botha’s job so hard. The task isn’t so much to fix what’s broken as it is to keep what works from breaking—and not to be the guy who ends a five-decade winning streak. And what’s kept Sequoia at the top in the past won’t necessarily keep it there—especially in a VC industry that’s scrambling to adapt. “I want Sequoia to thrive,” says Botha. “At an organization that has achieved [so much], this is more daunting. It’s much easier to be the underdog.”

That said, there’s a reason Sequoia is the alpha: Its culture from the get-go has been one of near-paranoid competitiveness, ruthless honesty, and a constant need for change. Botha has become a paragon of these qualities: His probabilistic-thinking acumen and factual recall make him a force at decision-making time; his intense curiosity helps him question old ways of deciding. Partners credit him with reshaping the way Sequoia thinks—just in time for a moment of industrywide reset (not to mention an AI revolution).

“We’re only as good as our next investment,” Botha and his partners like to say. But any fear of failure on Botha’s part is tempered with a relentless drive to master whatever he pursues, something he internalized as a boy in South Africa, and, yes, on the rugby field. Over the course of several interviews that took place at Sequoia’s Menlo Park headquarters, a library in Burlingame, and at his Hillsborough home, Botha kept returning to the ultimate sports aphorism. The steward of Sequoia told me any chance he got: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

In mid-May, Sequoia gathered its partners and founders for a two-day retreat on a cattle ranch in California’s San Benito County. The dusty but picturesque venue was nestled so deep in rolling hills that there’s little cellular reception. There wasn’t even an address—invitees were sent a set of longitude and latitude coordinates and told to download directions before they lost signal.

Dubbed Base Camp, Sequoia’s far-from-Silicon-Valley get-together is a fixture for its portfolio companies. Founders from all over the world attended this year’s event, which featured master classes on “effective founder storytelling” and “clear thinking,” plus a paella dinner under the stars. There were talks from Jensen Huang of Nvidia (a Sequoia investment in 1993), Fidji Simo of Instacart (Sequoia-funded in 2013), and the former captain of South Africa’s rugby team (of course), who bore an uncanny resemblance to Botha.

But Base Camp is also about camping. Just a short walk from the barn where the talks took place was a grassy field dotted with neat rows of cream-colored yurts, the sleeping quarters for attendees. “The first year, it was so cold I thought we were going to die,” says Julia Hartz, cofounder and CEO of ticketing platform Eventbrite, one of Botha’s investments. “It’s so Sequoia to take founders out and try to kill them just to prove a point.”

While this year’s weather was milder, the tone set by Sequoia was similarly ascetic. The message, repeated in toasts and talks and even spelled out in a book given to founders, was clear: Being an entrepreneur, especially one backed by Sequoia, means embarking on a journey that requires intellectual honesty and grueling work. Shared outdoor bathrooms? Sleeping in yurts? These elements were to be embraced, not just endured, in the spirit of building grit and resilience.

Sequoia has long been known for this demanding, direct ethos. The approach isn’t just for founders: Its internal culture is one of radical candor and open disagreement. Partners have veto power over deals. For each funding decision, the process includes a “blind” pre-vote meant to discourage groupthink. Botha sometimes pushes partners to reargue a case if he feels they’re being too positive.

The steward has also welcomed pressure-testing from Sequoia’s own investors. “He’s always looking for critical feedback, which is not something you hear from many firms,” says Eric Doppstadt, chief investment officer of the Ford Foundation, the first LP to invest in Sequoia.

Since taking over, Botha has had ample opportunity to receive such feedback, both solicited and unsolicited. There was the firm’s 2023 decision to decouple from its China business, partly because of deteriorating relations between the U.S. and China—a move some thought was overdue. A boardroom spat last winter at Swedish fintech Klarna, involving former and current Sequoia partners, created embarrassing optics.

But perhaps the biggest blight was the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, in November 2022. Sequoia invested $150 million in FTX, all of which it lost, and critics savaged the firm for failing to better vet the company. (FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was later convicted of a massive fraud.) Botha ran to the fire: He quickly organized a call with investors both to apologize for the massive loss of capital and to offer concrete ways Sequoia would improve its due diligence.

LPs were mollified, and some were impressed. It was yet another twist in a rocky year—and another reminder that the firm can never stop adapting. “It’s not a profession where you master it and you’re done,” he says. “The business keeps changing, and the technologies you invest in keep changing, and you need to constantly reinvent yourself.”

One of the ways Botha has tried to reinvent Sequoia is by departing from the traditional 10-year cycle of VC funds. Such funds usually reap their returns through startup “exits”—IPOs or acquisitions. But they often miss out on the enormous value that can be created after a company goes public. What’s more, funds’ 10-year timelines can induce angst when exits slow down due to short-term market downturns or crackdowns on M&A activity.

That’s why, in February 2022, Sequoia launched the Sequoia Capital Fund, an “open-ended liquid portfolio” whose holdings include post-IPO equity in portfolio companies, along with allocations in more traditional funds. The firm is going all in, reorganizing itself around this new structure. Botha’s timing was unlucky, as tech stocks tanked that year. But in some ways, that was the point: The strategy is meant to help Sequoia capitalize on investments over the long term, whether the market is up or down.

Botha has also had to be creative when it comes to providing more immediate liquidity to investors , due to the current scarcity of opportunities for startup exits on both the IPO and acquisitions fronts—and, in some cases, a slower-than-average timeline for building companies. In mid-July, Sequoia wrote a letter to its LPs, announcing that it would purchase up to $861 million of their shares in Stripe, a fintech investment the firm first made in 2010. The offer was made to those LPs who had invested in Sequoia’s “Legacy Funds,” those raised more than 10 years ago, and the acquiring entities would be newer funds, including the Sequoia Capital Fund. The move, according to Sequoia, was meant to offer LPs looking for liquidity a way to cash out on some of their holdings in Stripe. But it was also a message that the firm was doubling down on its faith in Stripe’s long-term success, which the company’s founders, a pair of Irish brothers whose Bay Area-based startup is now valued at $70 billion, heard loud and clear.

“Maybe Stripe has stayed private for longer than the external world anticipated, but it’s not longer than we anticipated,” says cofounder Patrick Collison, who explains that because Stripe is an “infrastructure” company, providing a new technology platform for payments, it takes longer to build than, say, a stand-alone app. “The good news about infrastructure companies is that they can become very large, and the bad news is that it takes decades for the story to play out.”

While some LPs might want or need liquidity much earlier than that, Botha certainly has the temperament to analyze Sequoia’s investments, and just about every other decision in his life, with an eye for future outcomes. “He very much focuses on passing the marshmallow test of what he wants to accomplish for the long term,” says Alfred Lin, a Sequoia partner who joined the firm in 2010.

Botha is indeed measured, analytical, methodical: He can barely have a conversation without bringing up probability distribution curves. At times, listening to him is like reading the world’s most eclectic encyclopedia. He can break down the impact of cold-water currents on Bay Area microclimates just as easily as he explains the workings of a rugby scrum. Even when telling jokes (he keeps a book of them at his bedside), he delivers humor with a didactic twist.

But everything he says is tinged with the soft accent of Afrikaans, his mother tongue. That’s a reminder of the unusual path that eventually led him to Sequoia—and of the hidden layers of his personality.

“Did you know he makes jerky from exotic meats?” Hartz of Eventbrite tells me. “Seriously, you should ask him what he eats for breakfast.”

The next time I see Botha, I do just that, and he proceeds to rattle off the day’s protein-heavy menu. “This morning, it was some raw salmon and chicken meatballs,” he says. “Yesterday I had bison.” Venison, impala, and whole chickens—we’re talking feet and head still on—are also staples in Botha’s fridge. (A private chef handles the decapitating and cooking.) The avid foodie likes to say that a meal without meat is a snack—a common attitude in his home country.

Botha was born to a pair of star-crossed teenagers in Pretoria in 1973. His parents split when he was 3; he grew up with his mother but remained close to his dad’s side of the family. He is named for his paternal grandfather, an Afrikaans tradition. “At my baptism, there is a photo of four generations of Roelof Bothas,” he says: his dad, his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and himself. (Later, his dad would have another son and name him … Roelof Botha.)

It’s Botha’s grandfather who loomed largest in his life. Nicknamed Pik, the elder Botha served as South Africa’s foreign minister in the last years of the apartheid regime, later joining Nelson Mandela’s government after democratic elections ended apartheid. As a child, Botha had rare exposure to global dignitaries and business leaders who came to meet his grandfather. One of his earliest memories is of walking in his grandfather’s garden with Pik as journalists photographed the two of them. “I had a sense of the impact that somebody can have in the world,” he says of those days.

$43 billion

Distributions to Sequoia investors from 2019 through mid-2024. That’s more than in the previous 45 years combined, a big achievement at a time when “exits” for startup companies have slowed notably.

But that understanding went hand in hand with immense pressure. “It’s a little bit of a burden you carry,” says Botha, “that I’m named after this person, and I have to live up to this person.” There was another downside: Some assumed that any recognition he received was the product of nepotism. “No matter how well he did in something, it must have been because of … well, you can finish that sentence,” says Doug Leone, Sequoia’s former senior steward, whom Botha succeeded in 2022. “And that just drove him crazy.”

It also drove him to distinguish himself. In elementary school, Botha scored so high on an aptitude exam that the district brought in a psychologist for an assessment—and to make sure he wasn’t cheating. He studied up on how to study, reading books about best test- and note-taking tactics. (His handwriting is freakishly neat.) In college, he picked one of the most grueling majors, actuarial science—and earned the best undergraduate grade point average in the history of the University of Cape Town.

“While other kids were spending their spring break surfing, Roelof and I met in ‘nerd camp,’” says Matt Rabinowitz, a fellow South African and the cofounder and CEO of genetic testing company Natera, which became a Sequoia investment in 2007.

Botha applied the same drive to his extracurriculars: playing for the top rugby team at his high school, competing in math and science “Olympiads.” It was around this time that the family doctor approached his mom and stepdad to express concern that Botha would burn out because of his obsessive studying and the intensity with which he approached pretty much everything. His response was to double down. “I was like, I’ll show you,” says Botha.

“I don’t think Roelof has ever had less than 100% on any exam,” says Leone, with hints of both admiration and disgust in his voice.

So straitlaced and focused was he that it was his mom who suggested he get an earring. He refused. To this day, Botha doesn’t curse, saying that profanity is a “sloppy” way of expressing yourself.

Despite his stellar record in South Africa, Botha felt that the only way to truly make a name for himself was to go somewhere where his name didn’t mean anything to anyone. After college, Botha worked for consultant McKinsey’s local office, where one of his managers, a Stanford alum, suggested that Botha apply for its business school. Botha made the cut, packed his bags, and landed in Palo Alto at the age of 24.

Soon enough, he fell in love with Silicon Valley and its seemingly endless opportunities—and with his future wife, Huifen Chan, a fellow Stanford student. True to his track record, Botha graduated at the top of his class—this time without anyone assuming he had received preferential treatment. And yet it was a South African connection that propelled him into the center of the action.

In the fall of 1999, a Stanford classmate introduced Botha to Elon Musk, a fellow South African who was running an online bank called X.com. Musk saw something in Botha and worked hard to persuade him to come to X.com, which was about to merge with another firm to create what would become PayPal.

Botha, who had assumed he’d end up working with something cerebral like exotic derivatives, finally joined the startup in the spring of 2000. “I took the plunge,” says Botha. “And then, two weeks later, the Nasdaq crashed.” But even in those dark moments, there was the thrill of being a part of something potentially big and belonging to a team of intense, opinionated high performers. This was the group that Fortune later christened the PayPal mafia—a cadre of future A-list investors and founders that also included Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Reid Hoffman.

“We all worked very hard and yet he stood out,” says Max Levchin, another PayPal mafioso, who is now cofounder and CEO of a fintech company called Affirm. Botha was distinct not just because, as Levchin recalls, the South African used the word “spectacles” instead of simply saying “glasses.” He had a quiet but fierce drive to win. And he was a team player.

“He didn’t require the center of the stage,” says Levchin.

For all its talent, PayPal faced significant obstacles—including, increasingly, Musk himself. Musk was advocating unpopular moves, like killing off the PayPal brand even though consumers liked it. Botha became part of a core group that campaigned to remove Musk as CEO. “There were a lot of people at the company who thought I was his golden boy,” says Botha. “But he was not running the company well.”

While Musk was on his honeymoon, Botha and other mutineers met with PayPal’s lead investors to make their case. Those investors? Sequoia Capital. Musk was soon ousted, and Botha caught the eye of Sequoia partner Michael Moritz, who sat on PayPal’s board, and was co-head of Sequoia, along with Leone. Botha later became CFO, and working with Sequoia on PayPal’s IPO deepened the relationship.

Sequoia was already a Silicon Valley legend. Don Valentine, a former semiconductor exec famed for his eye for talent, started the firm in 1972. His first investment was in a fledgling video game company called Atari, which eventually sold to Warner Communications for a then unheard-of $28 million, a 3x return. An even better return on that investment was an introduction to a young technician at Atari: Steve Jobs. In 1978, Valentine put $150,000 into Apple, and the rest was tech history.

From the get-go, Sequoia’s culture was unique among a growing crop of fledgling VC firms. While its initial logo more closely resembled a marijuana leaf, its branding was all about longevity and stability—Sequoias, one of the largest trees in existence, can live for thousands of years.

“Don didn’t name it ‘Valentine Ventures,’” says Doppstadt of the Ford Foundation. “He wanted to convey that there was something larger than him involved in the firm.”

Doppstadt refers to Botha as Valentine’s “spiritual grandson,” saying the younger investor exemplifies the “spirit of Sequoia.” But in the earlier days of his career, Botha wasn’t an obvious fit.

In 2003, after a monthslong interview process, Botha was on the verge of getting an offer. But some Sequoia leaders worried that Botha was missing a critical strand in his DNA: a humanity gene, as Leone calls it. Leone recalls partners wondering: “Is he normal? Can we work with him? Can he be part of a team?” Leone says Valentine himself wondered how Botha would handle failure, given that he’d had so much success. (Valentine died in 2019.)

Leone was tasked to suss out what Botha was really like. “When I started going there, we talked a lot about rugby,” says Leone. “I don’t know rugby, but Roelof swears there is no team sport like rugby.” And talking about extreme competition and teamwork, it turned out, uncovered Botha’s emotive side. Indeed, those who know Botha best describe him as unexpectedly sentimental. (During our conversations, Botha teared up several times—once, for example, when talking about his late stepfather, who played a pivotal role in his life.)

Proving his ability to emote was critical to Botha’s hiring; keeping feelings in check eventually proved just as important. Botha hit a home run early on, investing in 2005 in a little-known video-sharing site called YouTube, which Google acquired for $1.65 billion just a year later. But then he entered what VCs call the Valley of Despair—when bets aren’t paying off, or worse, are leading to loss after loss.

Botha credits Leone and Jim Goetz, another senior partner, for supporting him without coddling him. The experience gave Botha empathy for the failures that almost all founders go through. He often talks about “crucible moments” that shape the trajectory of a company or entrepreneur. This was one of his own.

He eventually snapped his losing streak, investing in companies including Instagram, Tumblr, and genetic-testing company Natera, all of which earned substantial exits. For years, Botha wrote “10 to the power of 9” at the right-hand corner of each sheet of paper in his copiously filled, impeccably legible notebooks. It was a reminder of a goal he had set for himself: to produce $1 billion in gains for Sequoia. He hit that milestone in 2015.

He also repaired the relationship that had launched his Silicon Valley career. About a decade ago, Botha and Musk sat down for lunch at Tesla headquarters. For the first time, they spoke about their upbringing in South Africa. “We both felt empathy for each other,” says Botha. “That rekindled our ability to have a conversation.”

It also opened the door to investments in Musk’s new companies. In May 2022, Sequoia announced that it had contributed to Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter, creating the roller-coaster-riding company now known as X. Sequoia was not an early backer of SpaceX, to Botha’s regret, but it placed a late-stage bet on the company in 2019. And this year, it invested in yet another Musk company, participating in a $6 billion round of funding in xAI—part of a focus on artificial intelligence that has become a hallmark of Botha’s stewardship.

Sequoia is no AI newbie. The firm put money in OpenAI in 2021, before ChatGPT was cool. But under Botha, it has increased the intensity of its AI focus: Last year, 60% of Sequoia’s new investments were AI-focused; in 2024 so far, it’s made at least 10 such investments.

When I talk with Botha in mid-June, he’s pondering a new puzzle: AI’s sky-high computing costs. “It’s unsustainable at this level,” he says. But he’s jazzed about a new Sequoia startup called Fireworks. He explains that its goal is to make inference—the process of deploying AI to draw conclusions from new data—“way less expensive.” The company that reaches that goal, he implies, could have Google-like upside.

Whatever tech Sequoia is assessing, Botha wants it to do so with a fresh mindset. Jim Goetz, who was Sequoia’s steward for the U.S. and Europe until he passed the baton to Botha in 2017, says Botha has reshaped the firm’s decision-making strategy in fundamental ways. Botha has rolled out “pre-parades”—thought experiments in which partners imagine not just what can go wrong but the best-case scenario of each potential investment. He’s also brought in learnings from behavioral psychology, including prospect theory, which asserts that people feel losses more deeply than gains, sometimes leading to faulty decisions. “We’ve modified our entire investment process to benefit” from such approaches, Goetz says.

Botha has also emphasized becoming more friendly and transparent with entrepreneurs. Sequoia’s longtime kingmaker status led it to come across as elitist to some. But Botha has helped combat that perception, multiple founders told me.

Sequoia partner Jess Lee speaks with founders at an event for Arc, the firm’s new “immersion program” for very-early stage startups.

Jack Dorsey first pitched Sequoia on his payment player Square in 2010. “They were preachy and condescending,” Dorsey says of the firm; still, he wanted, and eventually got, Botha on his board. “As the former CFO of PayPal, Roelof had a bunch of experience we wanted,” recalls Dorsey. “The most helpful thing that any board member can do is provide context, and he’s done a lot of that.”

Botha, Dorsey adds, remains “the only investor that’s reached out to ask what his firm can do better.” (Dorsey told Botha that Sequoia should encourage more engineers to contribute to open-source code; Botha took it to heart, starting an open-source fellowship program.) Today, Botha remains a director at Block, the company Square eventually became a part of; he also sits on the boards of eight other companies, including MongoDB and Unity Technologies.

Kevin Systrom, the cofounder of Instagram, says his relationship with Sequoia, which joined his series B round in 2012, was also built on rapport with Botha. “He’s not your typical VC sales guy archetype, where he’s schmoozing you and taking you to play golf, and I really found myself drawn to that,” says Systrom.

There’s another way in which Botha does not fit the VC mold, or at least the archetype that’s emerged in recent weeks: While some Silicon Valley investors have come out in support of one presidential candidate or another (a growing number of them, like the founders of Andreessen Horowitz and some of Sequoia’s own partners, are endorsing former President Donald Trump), Botha has doubled down on his neutrality.

“There’s no individual or party that perfectly expresses my opinions, so I just don’t like the idea of so publicly lining up with anybody,” Botha tells me in June. “That’s just not who I am.”

But there’s another reason Botha is staying out of the political fray. While individual Sequoia partners are free to endorse candidates and contribute to political campaigns, the firm itself does not take a position—and it does not donate money to any candidates. As the firm’s steward, Botha is well aware that he’s not just representing himself with both his words and actions.

“What I say is probably more personally associated with Sequoia than it would be for somebody else,” Botha says. “I think me as an individual would have more freedom to speak differently if it was 10 years ago and I wasn’t in a leadership position. And that’s okay.”

To be sure, that sense of brand affiliation with the firm didn’t stop Sequoia’s former chiefs, Leone and Moritz, from expressing their own firmly-held beliefs when they were in charge. (And both still do.) But even then, Botha says it was done in the style of Sequoia—ruthlessly honest, yes, but also practical.

“Michael was a staunch Democratic, Doug was a staunch Republican,” says Botha. “Michael would write articles criticizing Trump, and Doug would publicly support him and donate money to him. And then the two of them would work on something. I think that’s the culture we’ve had.”

Botha’s political neutrality doesn’t mean he’s not opinionated when it comes to regulatory decisions that impact Sequoia. In fact, the current administration’s more aggressive stance on antitrust laws and scrutiny on Big Tech is part of what drives the new approach at the firm.

Today, Botha says his biggest priority is keeping Sequoia involved throughout the life cycle of great companies—getting in on very-early-stage deals and staying invested even as they grow past the startup stage. It’s a huge competitive advantage, he asserts, to be able to partner with companies from concept to long after an IPO.

One initiative with that aim, launched in 2022, is Arc, an “immersion program” for early-stage startups. Entrepreneurs accepted into the five-week program are taught “the Sequoia way to start, build, and scale enduring companies.” They’re also given funding—and the right to say they raised money from Sequoia. “There’s a lot of folks who would probably say, ‘Just don’t do that, just go invest,’ ” says Jess Lee, a partner on Sequoia’s early-stage team. But Botha, she says, “is willing to both fund and invest and believe in those new ideas.”

Innovating is critical, says Botha, given the iffy landscape for startup exits. Historically, slightly more than half of Sequoia’s exits have been through M&A. As regulators have moved to curb Big Tech, however, it has become difficult for companies to get acquired. This concerns Botha, who sees the overall health of the VC sector as vital to the broader economy. “I don’t think you can find a single technology company that is a public company in the last 20 or 30 years that wasn’t VC-backed along the way,” he says.

As for his own success, he’s changed the metrics. It’s no longer his own goals, or the “10 to the power of 9” number in the corner of his notebook: It’s collective success that counts. “For me, it’s not personal winning now,” says Botha. “It’s the winning of us as a team.” And a tight-knit team is invaluable—because in venture capital, just like in rugby, another fiercely competitive scrum is always just around the corner.

A version of this article appears in the August/September 2024 issue of Fortune with the headline, “Sequoia is a VC giant. Can Roelof Botha keep it growing?”

Sequoia’s Global 500 Footprint

The 52-year-old venture capital firm has backed several of what are now the world’s biggest companies by revenue. Among them:

Rank 7: Apple (2023 revenue: $383.3 billion)

Sequoia founder Don Valentine’s first investment was in video game company Atari. Impressed by a young employee at Atari—a guy named Steve Jobs— Valentine put $150,000 into Jobs’ computer startup in 1978. Apple is now worth over $3 trillion.

Rank 17: Alphabet ($307.4 billion)

Sequoia paid about $12 million for a roughly 10% stake in Google in 1999. And Roelof Botha, then relatively new at Sequoia, invested in video service YouTube in 2005, scoring a hefty gain when Google bought it a year later. Google is now the biggest division of Alphabet.

Rank 66: Meta Platforms ($134.9 billion)

While Sequoia didn’t back the company once known as Facebook, it funded two of its most popular services. In 2012, Botha led Sequoia’s Series B investment in Instagram, which Facebook bought for $1 billion later that year. The firm invested in WhatsApp in 2011; Facebook bought it for $19 billion in 2014.

Rank 222: Nvidia ($60.9 billion)

Sequoia was an investor in the GPU chipmaker’s first round of financing in 1993—six years before Nvidia’s IPO and almost three decades before the company became central to the AI economy. Nvidia joined the Global 500 this year after notching 126% year-on-year revenue growth in 2023.

Rank 246: Cisco Systems ($57 billion)

Sequoia bought a reported 30% stake in the net- working and connectivity giant in 1987, three years before it went public. In 2000, Cisco became the first company ever to attain a $500 billion market capitalization.

Sequoia Capital invested early in Google, Nvidia, and Apple. Can Roelof Botha keep the legendary venture capital firm ahead in the AI future?