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Sequoia COO quit over Shaun Maguire's comments about Mamdani

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Re: Sequoia COO quit over Shaun Maguire's comments about Mamdani

#101

Post by cholantesh »

energy123 wrote: post #90
whycome wrote: post #18

> Maguire, an outspoken and high-profile investor who is close to Elon Musk, wrote on X in July that New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani “comes from a culture that lies about everything. It’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda. The West will learn this lesson the hard way.” Balbale complained to other senior partners at the firm, who declined to take action against Maguire, arguing he…

Islamism isn't a faith. Islam is a faith.

Islamism is also neither a 'culture' nor a reasonable characterization of Mamdani's political programme.

Re: Sequoia COO quit over Shaun Maguire's comments about Mamdani

#102

Post by jaybrendansmith »

cholantesh wrote: post #101
energy123 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Islamism isn't a faith. Islam is a faith.

Islamism is also neither a 'culture' nor a reasonable characterization of Mamdani's political programme.

His program is actually pretty Christian imo.

Re: Sequoia COO quit over Shaun Maguire's comments about Mamdani

#103

Post by yowlingcat »

almostgotcaught wrote: post #46
yowlingcat wrote: post #16

I'm not sure this direct departure matters that much to Sequoia. The COO Balbale was an operating partner who was CMO of Sequoia for 2 years and then COO for another 2 years and to my understanding did not write checks. The real elephant in the room question was whether Balbale was in a role getting carry or not. If not, then that effectively isn't different from an incentive level than an associate with a higher sal…

> I view his controversy as being most likely a calculated marketing maneuver to improve or maximize the signal to noise in his deal flow. It's hard for me as an outsider to say whether that's working for him or not why is it that tech bros will bend over backwards to find "good-faith" interpretations of the most obviously stupid shit. like bro have you literally never heard the phrase "confirmation bias"? you know i…

After the sentence you quoted, what does the very next sentence say?

Re: Sequoia COO quit over Shaun Maguire's comments about Mamdani

#104

Post by inshard »

yowlingcat wrote: post #16

I'm not sure this direct departure matters that much to Sequoia. The COO Balbale was an operating partner who was CMO of Sequoia for 2 years and then COO for another 2 years and to my understanding did not write checks. The real elephant in the room question was whether Balbale was in a role getting carry or not. If not, then that effectively isn't different from an incentive level than an associate with a higher sal…

Funding a seed stage VC with a record of picking winners like Sequoia is probably very easy even without the few sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East. Sequoia’s checks are mainly in the early rounds where the sizes are relatively smaller to series C+. The American university endowments would oversubscribe their rounds multiple times over.

Re: Sequoia COO quit over Shaun Maguire's comments about Mamdani

#105

Post by inshard »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #93
inshard wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This tactic is known as “whataboutism”. Edit: First address the wrong in question. And a phobia is an irrational fear. What’s the sentence for apostasy or blasphemy in this faith? It’s death. That’s a very valid, rational fear.

That's not a whataboutism. OP brought up the topic that saying these things about Islam is as valid as saying these things about other religions. You're trying to make the point that Islam is uniquely bad ("Except you can't [replace Islam in that quote with another religion].") in the ways that Maguire said. It is therefore on topic for someone to then point out passages from other holy texts which suggest that those…

It is whataboutism if the reply was a reply to my post about the UN resolution denouncing the sexual slavery and exploitation of minors in the Quran. Which seems to be the case as the argument was specific to the UN resolution statement that I made in my comment. Not the OP’s argument.

Re: Sequoia COO quit over Shaun Maguire's comments about Mamdani

#106

Post by 762236 »

croes wrote: post #76
762236 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

So you think the immigrants are eating pets, the No-Kings demonstrations were Hate America rallied, Antifa is an organization, Portland and Washington are out of control crime cities and that Tylenol caused autism? And that’s only the lies that came to my mind while typing.

[flagged]

Re: Sequoia COO quit over Shaun Maguire's comments about Mamdani

#107

Post by acdha »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #98
teachrdan wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Virtually every Christian I know aspires to be as Christ like as they can. You may not see that in their actions, but in their beliefs they definitely aspire to that. This is a nonsense statement. It's trivially obvious how to be "Christ like": Live poor, help the disenfranchised, feed the hungry, heal the wounded, don't marry, don't have kids, and preach the gospel, if only to a small number of people. If the Chri…

The Quran is held by Muslims as 'the perfect word of God'. It is treated much differently than the Christian bible which gets somewhat loosely translated into many languages. As the perfect word of God, quotations from it ARE THE PERFECT WORD OF GOD. How is talking about what someone believes is the exact and perfect words of God off limits/racist/bigoted? How is saying that 'Gods perfect representative on earth' hav…

> The Quran is held by Muslims as 'the perfect word of God'. It is treated much differently than the Christian bible which gets somewhat loosely translated into many languages.

Biblical literalism isn't exactly common, too, and people who self-identify as Christian use it to justify things like killing gay people, corporal punishment, not allowing divorce except in certain cases, denying scientific consensus on things like biology or climate change, unconditionally back the actions of the Israeli government based on eschatological theories, etc.

I think there’s an argument that mainstream Christianity is less stringent than mainstream Islam on this but it’s very much a question of degree and appears to be moving backwards. We just had a rather heated national debate over what exactly Charlie Kirk meant by using a very similar phrase (“God's perfect law”) in a negative context so it’s very hard for me to see this as a Muslim problem rather than a problem common to all fundamentalist religious traditions.

Re: Sequoia COO quit over Shaun Maguire's comments about Mamdani

#108

Post by acdha »

thaw13579 wrote: post #75
einszwei wrote: post #43

Looked at Shaun Maguire's twitter page and I find it appalling. Maybe I was naive about people in tech being more tolerant (as they both work with and build for diverse people).

That was previously the case from my perspective as well, but it seems to be rapidly changing.

I think there’s an argument that the pandemic era caused a lot of resentment in tech executives. They didn’t like employees having better negotiating power, resenting the pay increases and also things like support for BLM or trans rights, and stuff like RTO factored into that showing people who’s the boss. There was also a successful outreach attempt which went under the radar until Semafor published this:

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t...

Re: Sequoia COO quit over Shaun Maguire's comments about Mamdani

#109

Post by prewett »

keeda wrote: post #85
reactordev wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s New Yorker shit There’s a big fuss over a potential mayor of New York that has the right losing their minds. To the point where people are quitting over other peoples opinions. Truly bizarro world stuff.

> To the point where people are quitting over other peoples opinions. Isn't that rational? If you found that a colleague had views you found personally abhorrent AND you had the luxury of being able to walk away from the job, wouldn't you? The tragedy of modern work life (and the current job market!) is that the vast majority of people do not have that luxury, and hence are stuck in the jobs they hate. But I expect t…

> Isn't that rational? If you found that a colleague had views you found personally abhorrent AND you had the luxury of being able to walk away from the job, wouldn't you?

I consider that to be immature and highly unprofessional.

It used to be that professionalism considered the realm of private opinion to have no bearing on whether you could work with someone. It also used to be that we might abhor your opinion but defend your right to say it. Now we cannot even work with someone who has impure opinions. Nor do we have any barrier between our private lives and work now, apparently.

Re: Sequoia COO quit over Shaun Maguire's comments about Mamdani

#110

Post by prewett »

einszwei wrote: post #43

Looked at Shaun Maguire's twitter page and I find it appalling. Maybe I was naive about people in tech being more tolerant (as they both work with and build for diverse people).

I note this "tolerance" seems to only go one way. Tolerance means supporting the people I like (e.g. "diverse" people), but it never seems to mean tolerating people I don't like. True tolerance is the reverse: tolerating people whose views you find abhorrent.
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