Right, there’s a lot to unpack here.

Roelof Botha is the grandson of Pik Botha, who served as the country’s foreign minister in the last years of the apartheid era, although he’s probably keen to leave that association behind.

Raised in Hout Bay, he attended Hoërskool Jan van Riebeeck and then graduated from UCT.

He has since gone from strength to strength over in Silicon Valley, and featured on Forbes’ ‘Top 100 Venture Capitalists In The World’ list back in 2017.

That’s due in large part to his success at famed venture capitalist firm Sequoia Capital, where he has become a partner after joining back in 2003. The firm has become the stuff of legend, sometimes going to extraordinary measures to stand out from the rest, which is where the Buzz Lightyear outfit comes in.

Over to Business Insider SA for the details:

In an interview with Bloomberg, Jess Lee [below], now a partner at the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm, recounted exactly how she received her offer.

Lee told Bloomberg that Sequoia partners Jim Goetz and Roelof Botha offered to meet her at a cafe in Mountain View. When she showed up, she noticed two cafe patrons were in full Toy Story cosplay as characters Woody and Buzz Lightyear. Turns out they were Goetz and Botha, who took off their headpieces to reveal themselves and extend the offer to Lee, an avid devotee of cosplay.

The cosplay theatrics are apparently part of Sequoia’s schtick to stand out in a competitive market.

I will make two points in defence of dressing up. It wasn’t an interview, so Lee couldn’t be thrown off her game, and at least they didn’t dress up as Minions.

If you are dressed as a Minion, you’re making a fool of yourself.

Here are a few more details on how that scene played out, via this tweet:

All’s well that ends well.

It’s not the first time that Sequoia Capital has gone above and beyond (to infinity and beyond, a lame person might say) to stand out in the cutthroat Silicon Valley market.

Here’s another example via a Forbes story from 2018:

When Front CEO Mathilde Collin decided she wanted to raise more venture capital, she made a rule for herself: keep all the investor meetings to one week. “I hate raising, and I thought it would be better for my health,” she says. “So I gave them no choice.”

…The week before Thanksgiving, Collin heard out the firms that were willing to meet her on her terms. By that Friday, she had twelve term sheets, offers from the partnerships to invest. One firm stood out: Sequoia Capital…

Collin’s love of Legos is well known to employees, fellow founders and her Twitter followers. But only Sequoia sent one of its top partners on a mission to the mall in nearby San Bruno, Calif. to scavenge for the right Lego pieces. And before Sequoia made its pitch to Collin, Schreier sat with the firm’s leader, Doug Leone, and partner Jess Lee to build a custom set, one showing the Front logo with Sequoia’s logo in front of the Golden Gate bridge.

Sometimes it’s the little things, hey?

Thus far, Sequoia has backed companies that now control around $1,4 trillion of combined stock market value, so it must be doing something right.

[sources:businsidersa&forbes]