SEQUOIA IS A VC GIANT. CAN ROELOF BOTHA KEEP IT GROWING?

The low-key investor leads the famed venture capital firm that helped launch Apple, Google, and Nvidia. To keep Sequoia's 50-year winning streak alive in a changing industry, he's uprooting old habits and planting new seeds.

- Michal Lev-Ram

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.