Nearly 600 population have signed an open letter to leaders at mission company Sequoia Capital later one among its companions, Shaun Maguire, posted what the gang described as a “deliberate, inflammatory attack” towards the Muslim Democratic mayoral candidate in Unused York Town.
Maguire, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, posted on X over the weekend that Zohran Mamdani, who gained the Democratic number one extreme year, “comes from a culture that lies about everything” and is out to move “his Islamist agenda.”
The put up had 5.3 million perspectives as of Monday afternoon. Maguire, whose investments come with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and X in addition to synthetic wisdom startup Barricade Superintelligence, additionally printed a video on X explaining the statement.
The ones signing the letter are asking Sequoia to sentence Maguire’s feedback and say sorry to Mamdani and Muslim founders. In addition they need the company to authorize an separate investigation of Maguire’s habits within the pace two years and put up “a zero-tolerance policy on hate speech and religious bigotry.”
They’re asking the company for a society reaction by means of July 14, or “we will proceed with broader public disclosure, media outreach and mobilizing our networks to ensure accountability,” the letter says.
Sequoia declined to remark. Maguire didn’t reply to a request for remark, however wrote in a put up concerning the letter on Wednesday that, “You can try everything you want to silence me, but it will just embolden me.”
Some of the signees are Mudassir Sheikha, CEO of ride-hailing provider Careem, and Amr Awadallah, CEO of AI startup Vectara. Additionally at the checklist is Abubakar Abid, who works in gadget studying Hugging Face, which is subsidized by means of Sequoia, and Ahmed Sabbah, CEO of Telda, a monetary era startup that Sequoia first invested in 4 years in the past.
No less than 3 founders of startups that experience long past via startup accelerator program Y Combinator added their names to the letter.
Sequoia as a company isn’t any stranger to politics. Doug Leone, who led the company till 2022 and residue a spouse, is an established Republican donor, who supported Trump within the 2024 election. Following Trump’s victory in November, Leone posted on X, “To all Trump voters: you no longer have to hide in the shadows…..you’re the majority!!”
Against this, Leone’s predecessor, Mike Moritz, is a Democratic megadonor, who criticized Trump and, in August, slammed his colleagues within the tech business for lining up at the back of the Republican nominee. In a Financial Times opinion piece, Moritz wrote Trump’s tech supporters have been “making a big mistake.”
“I doubt whether any of them would want him as part of an investment syndicate that they organised,” wrote Moritz, who stepped i’m sick from Sequoia in 2023, over a decade later given up a control function on the company. “Why then do they dismiss his recent criminal conviction as nothing more than a politically inspired witch-hunt over a simple book-keeping error?”
Neither Leone nor Moritz returned messages looking for remark.
Roelof Botha, Sequoia’s flow manage spouse, has taken a extra impartial stance. Botha said at an event extreme July that Sequoia as a partnership doesn’t “take a political point of view,” including that he’s “not a registered member of either party.” Boelof stated he’s “proud of the fact that we’ve enabled many of our partners to express their respected individual views along the way, and given them that freedom.”
Maguire has lengthy been revealed together with his political beliefs. He said on X extreme presen that he had “just donated $300k to President Trump.”
Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, has received the ire of many population in tech and within the trade crowd extra widely since defeating former Unused York Gov. Andrew Cuomo within the June number one.
— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this record.
WATCH: SpaceX valuation is possibly even conservative, says Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire
