A battle over a venture capitalist’s Mamdani posts

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for New York City mayor, has drawn heated opposition from many business elites for his policy positions, including higher taxes on businesses and the wealthy.

But comments by a leading figure at Sequoia, the venture capital giant, calling Mamdani an “Islamist” have drawn backlash — and put the institution at odds with some of the founders it has backed.

TL;DR: Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia and a prominent Silicon Valley conservative, referred on social media last week to the news that Mamdani had checked boxes in his application to Columbia in 2009 indicating his ethnicity as “Asian” and “Black or African American.” (His parents are of Indian origin and he was born in Uganda, and he told The Times that he had sought to represent his complex background, and had noted his Ugandan origins in the application.)

Maguire wrote on X that the news showed that Mamdani “comes from a culture that lies about everything” and added, “It’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda.”

Entrepreneurs and others have censured Maguire’s comments. An online petition went up over this weekend calling the investor’s posts “a deliberate, inflammatory attack that promotes dangerous anti-Muslim stereotypes and stokes division.”

It had more than 700 signatories as of Tuesday. Among them were several founders of companies that have been backed by Sequoia or investment teams that have since been spun off from the firm. One, Hisham Al-Falih of Lean Technologies, told Bloomberg that Maguire’s post was “not only a sweeping and harmful generalization of Muslims, but part of a broader pattern of Islamophobic rhetoric that has no place in our industry.”