3 posts and columns on Roelof Botha

Square Confirms $27.5 Million in New Round of Funding

in Commerce on January 10, 2011 at 11:36 am PT

Square, the mobile payments service that’s taking on Visa and MasterCard, has confirmed it has raised a $27.5 million round of funding led by Sequoia Capital.

Mahalo's Jason Calacanis in Better Days

in News on October 23, 2008 at 2:13 am PT

As usual, colorful serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis makes lemonade from lemons–or is it vice versa?–touting cost-cutting at his human-powered search engine start-up and newest venture, Mahalo, almost as much as he touted its prospects when he started it up a year ago with $20 million in funding. But in a blog post yesterday, Calacanis sang perfectly in tune with the new, decidedly grimmer, times. But BoomTown has videos of when things were sunnier for Mahalo.

Kara Visits Sequoia's Roelof Botha

in News on July 9, 2007 at 4:03 am PT

I first ran into Sequoia venture capitalist Roelof Botha in the green room of our recent D5 conference, where he was there to see the demo being done by Jason Calacanis for Mahalo, a “human-powered” search service that Botha had recently invested in. Though I jokingly congratulated Calacanis on the investment from a “toddler VC,” because of the 33-year-old Botha’s freshly-scrubbed and youthful looks, I’d be pretty pleased if my two sons–2 and 5 years old–could be involved in a multibillion deal after only a few years on the job.