Shaun Maguire, a partner at the blue-chip venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, is under fire for his comments about New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani — and his past remarks suggest he’s not afraid of controversy.
In response to a New York Times story about Mamdani marking his ethnicity as both “Asian” and “Black or African American” on his 2009 application to Columbia University, Maguire wrote on X that the candidate “comes from a culture that lies about everything.”
“It’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda,” he said.
The comments have ignited backlash from some in the tech world, including some founders backed by Sequoia. An online petition calling for the firm to take disciplinary action against Maguire and establish an avenue for Sequoia’s founders to report discrimination and hate speech has more than 900 signatories who self-identified as founders, executives, or tech workers.
Meanwhile, others in the tech world, like Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, have expressed support for Maguire, and an open letter in his defense has begun circulating on X.
Sequoia declined to comment to Business Insider. When asked for comment, Maguire looped in Sequoia’s communications team.
He previously pointed to posts he made on X in response to the backlash, including a video in which he defended his comments.
“To any Muslim that is not an Islamist, and to any Indian that took offense to this tweet, I am very, very sorry,” he said in the video.
This is not Maguire’s first time wading into political waters. The investor has become known for his outspoken conservative bent and is emblematic of a shift to the right in Silicon Valley.
From high school dropout to Silicon Valley big shot
Maguire followed a slightly unconventional path to venture capital.
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After a lackluster high school performance — his GPA was 1.8 and he failed Algebra 2 — he dropped out of school in 10th grade and earned the equivalent of a GED, he said in a 2022 interview with the Caltech Heritage Project. He went on to enroll in community college and then graduate from the University of Southern California, where he was a member of the math team.
His interest in math took him to Stanford University, where he earned a Master’s in statistics, and then to Caltech, where he earned a Ph.D. in physics.
While at the latter, he started working for DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in Afghanistan. His work there led him to cofound Expanse (formerly Qadium), a network security company, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2020 for about $800 million.
He became a partner at Google Ventures in 2016, according to his LinkedIn profile. His investments there included Dandelion Energy, a geothermal heating and cooling company, IonQ, a quantum computing company, and Lambda School, a coding boot camp.
In 2019, Maguire joined Sequoia. He’s led or co-led more than two dozen investments for the firm, including in AI upstarts Decart and Foundry, and several of Elon Musk’s companies, like tunneling venture The Boring Company, AI platform xAI, and rocket builder SpaceX.
He’s also interested in investments that support President Donald Trump’s ambitions to “reshore the supply chain” through drones and silicon photonics, he told CNBC last month.
An outspoken Trump supporter: ‘I was willing to face any consequences’
As his profile has risen in Silicon Valley, so has his political one.
Maguire, who went from supporting Hillary Clinton to embracing the Make America Great Again movement, has become one of the most prominent GOP supporters in Silicon Valley.
Following Trump’s felony conviction last year, Maguire announced he’d back Trump in the 2024 election and would write his campaign a $300,000 check. In total, he donated about $800,000 to Republican causes last year, according to data from Open Secrets. Once Trump was elected, Maguire aided in the transition by interviewing candidates for positions in the defense department, The New York Times reported.
In a lengthy screed on X, Maguire, a staunch supporter of Israel, outlined the reasoning behind his political change of heart.
Part of his disillusionment with the Democrats hinged on foreign policy, including the fact that Joe Biden pulled US troops out of Afghanistan, he said. In contrast, he praised Trump as a “master of foreign policy” and described the myriad lawsuits against him as “double standards and lawfare.”
His ideological shift extends beyond diplomatics. Over the past year, he’s been posting near-daily diatribes on his politics.
He’s criticized diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, claiming he wasn’t promoted because he was a white man, and dabbled in conspiracy theories, including posting about how “antifa” is responsible for voter fraud.
“I had made enough money to where, if I got fired, I wasn’t going to starve to death,” he said earlier this year of his decision to be more outspoken on the “Uncapped” podcast. “I was at a point in my life where I was willing to face any consequences, as crazy as it sounds, even death.”
His points of view have made him some enemies. He told Fortune that he “lost lots of friends and disappointed family.”
The blowback following his comments on Mamdani, though, marks a new level.
Maguire isn’t backing down, though.
In response to critics, he said on X, “You only embolden me.”
