A rising tech star at Google quits his “woke” company after being told he couldn’t get a promotion because he’s white, only to have the last laugh by selling his prospective startup for $1 billion.
Sean Maguire, who worked at Google’s Mountain View, Calif.-based headquarters from 2016 to 2019, said on social media that his then-boss at Google Ventures told him, following the search giant Gemini’s debacle. He revealed that he was told that his hands were tied. ”
According to Thursday’s post, the manager said that even though Maguire is “one of the highest performers here,” he could not promote him “because of the quota.”
“You really shouldn’t say this. It could get me fired,” Maguire said his then-boss told him in 2019.
During McGuire’s tenure at Google, the company was roiled by the #MeToo scandal, in which Hollywood celebrities and executives from multiple industries were accused of various sex crimes, people close to the situation told The Post. It is said that he was depressed.
The uproar over #MeToo led to the formation of an “employee resource group,” which began meeting regularly on Google’s campus, the people said.
Those groups will then create a list calling on management to hire more women and other diverse candidates across the company, sources said.
His boss had resisted calls to achieve hiring quotas favoring women and minorities, but was forced to backtrack after Google Ventures employees threatened to quit, the people said.
The pressure campaign also extended to the company’s board of directors, including founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the people claimed.
A Google spokesperson said the entire account is “completely false.”
“The founders and the board have never talked to each other.” [Google Ventures] Regarding personnel matters. Sean is a talented investor and we wish him well at Sequoia, but at no time did his race or gender factor into decisions regarding his promotion or career advancement at GV. That has never happened,” the official said.
McGuire fired back Friday when contacted by the Post about Google’s denial.
“My reaction is that they are flat-out lying,” he said.
If promoted, McGuire’s annual salary would more than double from about $500,000 at the time of the interview to “several million dollars” a year, the person said.
The newspaper has contacted Maguire for comment.
McGuire quickly bounced back, selling his cybersecurity company Expanse to Palo Alto Networks in December 2020 for $1.05 billion.
He is currently a partner at venture capital giant Sequoia, which has helped create Silicon Valley unicorns such as Apple, Google, Oracle, PayPal, and WhatsApp.
But Maguire couldn’t escape his anger at the misguided culture that continued to permeate his former company.
“Gemini is just the tip of the iceberg,” Maguire wrote on his X account Thursday.
He slammed Google as an “absolute piece of trash” after it was forced to suspend Gemini, an “absolutely woke” artificial intelligence bot that produced depictions of a black founding father and a Native American pope.
Last week, Maguire teased that he was planning to go public with his claims, posting a poll on X asking, “Should I publish the story of when I was told I couldn’t get a promotion because I’m white?”
The result was overwhelmingly that he spilled dirt.
Maguire wrote in X that since his initial post, at least five former and current Google employees have contacted him to share “similar stories.”
