Sequoia Still Has a Shaun Maguire Problem
In anticipation of Zohran Mamdani's victory, Hard Reset spoke to 3 signatories of an open letter condemning Maguire's bigoted rhetoric about Muslims and NYC's likely next mayor.
According to polling, early turnout figures, and vibes, Zohran Mamdani is very likely to win the New York City mayoral race this Tuesday, November 4. In the event of a Mamdani victory, expect a Chicken Little-style freakout from a familiar cast of characters.
That includes Shaun Maguire, a multi-millionaire who does not appear to live in New York. Maguire is a highly influential partner at the Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital, though he was somewhat anonymous outside of tech circles until the last few years, when he began firing off grotesque posts about Muslims, the genocide in Gaza, and Mamdani—all topics that are ripe for engagement on X, Elon Musk’s revamped right-wing hotspot. Maguire has also directly allied himself with Israel and the IDF: he “helped arrange Elon Musk’s visit to Israel shortly after the October 7 attacks,” according to the Israeli outlet Ctech; he bragged that he helped the IDF obtain access to Musk’s Starlink within days of October 7, according to Wired; and he also bragged that he and Sequoia have “only accelerated investments” in Israeli companies and startups of late.
In July, Maguire stirred up controversy with an offensive post that Mamdani “comes from a culture that lies about everything,” adding that “it’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances [Mamdani’s] Islamist agenda. The West will learn this lesson the hard way.” In response to Maguire’s bigoted, bizarre remarks, more than 1,000 tech founders and entrepreneurs signed an open letter calling for disciplinary action and an apology, among other requests. “Maguire’s conduct not only tarnishes Sequoia’s reputation, it also undermines your ability to serve a global, diverse founder ecosystem,” the letter stated.
Though the letter received robust media coverage, Sequoia dismissed it as a bluff, opting not to reprimand Maguire or say much of anything. In the Trump 2.0 era of no consequences, it seemed Sequoia was making a savvy (and morally compromised) bet: ignore the criticisms, no matter how well-founded they are, and wait for someone else to emerge as the internet’s next main character.
But Sequoia underestimated how much Maguire yearns to be the internet’s main character over and over again. Unlike Sequoia, Maguire did not stay mum. He put out a sweaty 30-minute video defending his silly smear that Mamdani is an “Islamist,” apologizing only to Muslims who do not meet his definition of that term. After a job well done (I’m joking, more people got mad at him), Maguire continued posting a steady stream of gross commentary about his pet subjects.
Lo and behold, a second round of somewhat belated blowback came on October 21, when the Financial Times reported that Sequoia COO Sumaiya Balbale, a practicing Muslim, resigned from her prestigious position because her complaints to senior partners about Maguire’s social media posts went unheeded. The FT article included another juicy update: Maguire’s rhetoric reportedly also “led to private complaints from executives at Sequoia’s portfolio companies and institutional investors,” and “soured Sequoia’s relationship with some top Middle Eastern investors.”
As details of the latest report garnered widespread attention, Maguire’s typically aggro musings temporarily took on a meeker tone. “Never a dull moment,” he posted on October 22, the day after the FT article dropped, which is the sort of thing a millennial might have set as their AIM “away message” when they were a teenager.
On October 27, during an interview at a TechCrunch conference, Sequoia managing partner Roelof Botha gave a rare public statement about Maguire. “Internally, we celebrate diversity of opinions, and we need ‘spiky’ people inside Sequoia,” Botha said of Maguire. Botha’s company-speak was insultingly banal, but the fact that he said anything is notable. A few days later, on October 29, Maguire posted something approaching a self-deprecating joke: “I know it’s surprising to many, but I still have a job,” he wrote, linking to a podcast he was set to appear on that day.
Hoping to better understand the ebbs and flows of this saga, I interviewed three signatories of the open letter that condemned Maguire’s comments about Mamdani. I was curious what they made of the initial controversy, and how they’re absorbing more recent developments, including Balbale’s resignation.
Abdellatif Abdelfattah spoke to me from Norway, where he’s lived for a few years with his family. He previously studied and worked in the Bay Area, first for Twitter, then as the founder of Tarteel AI, an app for Quran memorization that he said has reached 15 million users. He’s started to dabble with AI startups, including one called Agentset that he said is “picking up a little bit.”
Abdelfattah admitted that in July, he thought Sequoia would part ways with Maguire. He was disappointed when nothing happened, but has taken solace in the groundswell of pushback against Maguire. “I have a lot of friends on the open letter, and many of them have raised money,” Abdelfattah said. “I know for a fact they will never raise from Sequoia, and now Sequoia comes with public shame. In the past, raising from Sequoia was purely a good sign. Now, it comes with baggage.”
Abdelfattah compared the situation to what a top-tier software engineer might take into account when they’re presented with competing job offers. “You wouldn’t work with a company that’s against your ethical principles,” Abdelfattah said. “There’s now a pseudo-blacklist for certain VCs and certain companies.”
Zuhayeer Musa—the co-founder of Levels.FYI, a popular platform that provides salary and compensation data as well as other tools—has heard much of the same. Musa grew up in the Bay Area and still lives there. When he was in high school, he said he attended a dinner event hosted by Sequoia. He distinctly remembers the firm’s partners talking about wanting to build “durable, long-lasting companies, things that transcend the lifetime of other organizations,” he said. He finds that mission statement to be incongruent with how Sequoia has handled legitimate criticisms of Maguire: “It doesn’t make sense to cast out a whole section of folks who can come up with one of those durable ideas.”
Musa has been aware of Maguire for a while, having objected to other posts of his. One such example: In November 2023, Maguire tried to refute Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, who lamented on X that thousands of Palestinian children were being killed by the IDF. Maguire countered that Graham was presenting “Hamas statistics” where “anyone under 18 is a ‘child,’ even if a militant”; Maguire then spent hours arguing with social media respondents who were disturbed by what he deemed as “nuance” around whether children should be considered militants.
“When you’re debating that kind of thing, that’s so far gone from basic humanity,” Musa said. “The killing of children is just a hard line.”
Maguire’s “Islamist” post in July was the last straw for Musa, who’s Muslim. “Our faith encourages us to tell the truth,” he said. “We’re not trying to lie. That really struck a chord because it really felt like an attack on the faith and the community that we have.” Musa told me he has friends who are Sequoia-funded and involved with the firm, and “they were telling me they felt targeted by that post too.” Even still, Musa told me he didn’t have any explicit expectations about what might come from the letter: “It was more of, hey, will we be able to even solicit a response from the firm? Are the feelings of this segment of founders something they care about?”
So far the answer is no, which is unsurprising to Paul Biggar, the co-founder of CircleCI, a continuous integration and continuous delivery platform with a $1.7 billion valuation as of 2021. “I had no expectation that Sequoia would do the right thing,” Biggar said. In December 2023, Biggar penned a blog about the unfolding atrocities in Gaza, and how ashamed he was of colleagues in the tech sector who were actively and passively supporting genocide. The blog was the “root cause” of his dismissal from the CircleCI board, he told me. Biggar rededicated his efforts to Tech for Palestine, a nonprofit that launched in January 2024 as an “incubator for advocacy” in that space, he said.
Biggar’s outspokenness aroused suspicion from Maguire: “You may not know this… but I’ve been watching you,” was the creepy message Maguire directed at Biggar as the open letter to Sequoia gathered more names. Maguire believed (and presumably still believes) that Biggar created the letter, but Biggar told me that’s not the case—though he’s fine with Maguire thinking otherwise. “I run a pro-Palestine advocacy nonprofit,” Biggar said. “Being pinpointed by the enemy is amazing. Couldn’t be better. I’m not being facetious here. It was great. Thank you, Shaun.”
As Biggar sees it, Sequoia is stuck in an untenable position, which is the firm’s own fault. “If they fire him, it doesn’t look great for them,” he said. “But if they don’t fire him, it’s also pretty bad, except that ‘pretty bad’ becomes toxic the longer they don’t do it.”
Balbale’s resignation has only exacerbated Sequoia’s conundrum. “I have friends who say that we need people to stay in that position and effect change from within,” Musa said, “but I personally think [Balbale] voting with her feet and leaving the firm is brave. She did what she had to do to live up to her principles.”
Biggar noted that there’s a tricky financial component to these decisions, because in tech, “everyone has ownership of their company,” he said. “Often, a significant amount of their net worth is in the company that they hate because of the policies they take.”
For that reason, all three signatories I spoke with expect large swaths of founders to be much more cautious about working with Sequoia. “Founders do a lot of due diligence on these VCs and partners,” Abdelfattah said. “If I’m going to work with Sequoia, I’m going to ask my other friends, ‘Hey, what do you think of this partner? What is it like having them on the board? What is it like working with them?’ It’s very, very rare for someone on the founder’s side to raise money without doing due diligence on the partner and the VC.”
Added Biggar: “Sequoia’s deal flow is already materially harmed. I know tons of people who will not raise money from Sequoia, who won’t even talk to them. I know LPs who won’t touch them either.”
It’s unclear whether Maguire is capable of causing even more problems for Sequoia, or whether there’s any sort of line in the sand for the firm, rhetorically and/or fiscally. But rest assured, if that line exists, Maguire will test it, and probably very soon. As in this Tuesday, if and when Mamdani secures the New York City mayorship. Stay tuned.