Venture capital's extreme new 'fame game'

Business Insider

10-07-2025

When Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire went scorched-earth on New York City mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani, it marked a new, if familiar, act in tech Twitter theater: a billionaire-adjacent venture capitalist using his megaphone to slam a politician he views as dangerous — and in the process, lighting up both sides of the political spectrum.
In a July 4 post, the California-based Maguire wrote that the NYC candidate "comes from a culture that lies about everything" and now seeks to advance "his Islamist agenda." It racked up more than 5 million views, became national news, and prompted two full-throated open letters: one demanding that Sequoia make a public apology, signed by self-identified employees of Microsoft, Google, and Apple, the other offering support, signed by the likes of tech iconoclasts Josh Wolfe and David Marcus. In the investing world, Maguire may have just claimed the crown as its reigning edgelord.
And yet: no apology. No deleted tweet. To the contrary, Maguire has only doubled and tripled down on his "Islamist" comments with several follow-up posts and a 29-minute video defending his remarks, while dismissing the open letter as an example of "cancel culture." He also clarified that he thinks only a small portion of Muslims are Islamists.
"You only embolden me," he wrote on X. Another post thanks the "haters and losers" among his 10,000 new followers. In another, he wrote, "Just so my enemies understand. I've reverse engineered your entire command structure. I'm going to play nice for now, but am ready to embarrass any of you should you escalate." Maguire and Sequoia did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
Here's the thing: As both tech and politics have become more polarized, incendiary behavior may no longer carry consequences for elite venture capitalists. If anything, it may be good for business.
From an outsider's perspective, Maguire's broadside may seem beyond the pale of content marketing. But it may just be the next turn of the dial in a post-pandemic tech ecosystem where elites have grown ever more brash and unapologetic. Top investors especially have learned they can be loud, bold, and polarizing, and it won't impact their ability to secure deals. In a market where the demand for capital outweighs the supply, VCs can afford to ruffle feathers.
Venture capital is largely "a fame game," says a venture capitalist at a multistage firm with several notable exits. "We all sell the same money. So brand awareness matters a lot, both in seeing and in winning deals."
While that's always been true, in today's attention-based economy, where a viral post has the half-life of a mayfly, some VCs are pushing beyond bland thought leadership into outright provocation. See: Paul Graham's moral screeds about woke culture and "founder mode," David Sacks' grievance-saturated podcasting, Marc Andreessen's manifesto drops. Keith Rabois, the managing director of Khosla Ventures, regularly takes aim at what he sees as liberal overreach in tech companies, slams remote work as lazy, and frames elite universities as indoctrination mills. Garry Tan, who sits at the helm of Y Combinator, posted last year that San Francisco politicians should "die slow" in a profanity-laced rant. Tan deleted the post and apologized, saying it was a reference to a Tupac Shakur diss track.
Maguire's viral tirade may have boosted his profile well beyond the technosphere — and the blowback could end up being a net positive.
Beyond VCs, a broader constellation of "free-speech absolutists" have emerged across tech, chief among them Elon Musk. The X owner's no-holds-barred posting style has given other tech figures implicit permission to say what they really think. And the broader rise of the independent, chest-thumpingly pro-tech media (Pirate Wires, All-In, TBPN) has further emboldened them to launch rhetorical grenades.
In that light, Maguire is a particularly potent case study in what happens when an investor decides to go full agitator. In the past year, he's posted conspiratorial claims that "antifa" was behind the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, accused Hunter Biden of stiffing him on rent for a Venice, California, property, and likened DEI policies to "structural racism."
Controversy isn't just tolerated in the upper ranks of business and politics. It's increasingly rewarded. Trump posted all the way back to the White House. Public company CEOs are getting bolder, too: Palantir's Alex Karp has openly derided higher education, while Meta's Mark Zuckerberg says big companies need more "masculine energy."
But venture capitalists like Maguire operate with even more insulation. They don't need votes or mass-market approval. They need access to deals, institutional capital, and portfolio wins. And so far, none of those seem particularly threatened at Sequoia — social media blow-ups be damned.
In fact, recent financings suggest the opposite: Sequoia remains a top-tier draw for startups like Harvey, Decart, and Mercury, and Maguire still writes big checks. He also serves as the firm's stand-in in the Muskverse, supporting its investments in SpaceX, xAI, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. Just through SpaceX, he's generated oodles of paper wealth for Sequoia's limited partners; Bloomberg reported this week that the company is in talks to raise new funding at a $400 billion valuation.
There are founders and investors who won't want to work with Maguire because of his ideology, said a principal at an early-stage fund. But many are reluctant to say so publicly, for the same reason he asked not to be named. Speaking out risks severing a critical relationship with Sequoia. For early-stage VCs, that relationship can mean the difference between a modest outcome and a breakout win, especially when Sequoia leads a later round and drives up the valuation.
Maguire's viral tirade may have boosted his profile well beyond the technosphere — and the blowback could end up being a net positive. "It might help more than it hurts," said another early-stage investor close to Maguire. "Everybody's talking about him" and "his good investments."
The multistage venture capitalist speculated that Maguire's comments might even bolster his standing in certain circles, particularly among Israeli founders, where he recently closed a defense tech investment. As for the entrepreneurs who just want to steer clear of controversy, they can slide into another Sequoia partner's DMs.
While there may be a hard line in VC, it appears that Maguire has not crossed it. The Sequoia partner can alienate some people without jeopardizing the machine. And the machine is humming along just fine.