During an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 on Monday, managing partner Sequoia Capital Roelof Botha responded to questions about his colleague, Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, and the controversial comments Maguire made earlier this year calling Sequoia committed to its partners’ right to “free speech.”
In 4th of July post on X, Maguire attacked New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, calling the politician an “Islamist” who “comes from a culture that lies about everything.” His remarks led to a major online backlash and debate about reputational risk for the VC firm that has backed the likes of Airbnb, Google, Nvidia and Stripe.
Shortly after the event, more than a thousand founders and tech professionals signed an agreement open letter urging Sequoia to take action and make it clear that “silence in the face of hate has consequences.” An open letter later appeared supporting Maguire.
Last week, the the Financial Times reported that Sequoia’s chief operating officer, Sumaiya Balbale, a practicing Muslim, resigned over the company’s decision not to discipline Maguire after his comments.
On stage, Botha declined to comment on the COO’s departure, saying that as a matter of routine, Sequoia does not comment on personnel matters and that he appreciated everything Balbale had contributed to the company.
However, when it came to a question about whether Sequoia had previously seen its partners express their political positions publicly as well as their views on business, Botha argued that Sequoia had always supported a diversity of opinions. Botha noted that, for example, Sequoia VC Michael Moritz has been outspoken in his opposition to President Trump, while former managing partner Doug Leone he was a staunch Trump supporter.
“Internally, we celebrate diversity of opinion and need ‘sharp’ people within Sequoia,” Botha, referring to Maguire, told TechCrunch editor-in-chief Connie Loizos on stage.
The response was surprisingly candid, given the high-profile nature of the remarks and the potential to discourage some founders from working with Sequoia.
“We really have a huge range of views within our partnership and we celebrate the fact that some people just choose to express it differently,” Botha continued.
“We have some of our partners who are very active in philanthropy or some of the private dealings, and they’re just not as vocal as Shaun on social media. And we’ve always respected the right to free speech of each of our individual partners,” Botha said.
Botha also argued that Maguire had a “specific profile” that appealed to a specific set of founders. Maguire, for example, has deep ties to Elon Musk’s companies, managing Sequoia’s investments in Neuralink, SpaceX, The Boring Company, X and xAI. Botha said it’s also attracting founders in one of the other hot industries besides artificial intelligence these days: defense technology. For example, it supports autonomous weapons rising star Mach Industries.
“He’s a physics PhD who dropped out of high school,” Botha said, noting that Maguire was “very technical.”
However, Botha admitted that Maguire’s candor is not entirely without consequence. “So does it come with compromises? Yes, it does,” he said.
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