A rising tech star at Google left the “woke” company after being told he wouldn’t get promoted because he is a white man – only to get the last laugh by occurring to sell his future startup for $1 billion.
Shaun Maguire, who worked at Google’s Mountain View, Calif.-based headquarters from 2016 to 2019, took to social media within the aftermath of the search giant’s Gemini fiasco to disclose that his then-boss at Google Ventures told him his “hands were tied.”
The supervisor said that despite Maguire being “one among the best performing people here,” he couldn’t promote him “because I even have a quota,” in response to his post on Thursday.
“I’m really not purported to let you know this. It could get me fired,” Maguire quoted his then-boss as telling him in 2019.
A source near the situation told The Post that in Maguire’s tenure at Google, the corporate was roiled by the #MeToo scandals that engulfed Hollywood figures and senior executives in several industries who were accused of a range of sex crimes.
The tumult surrounding #MeToo led to the formation of “worker resource groups” that began meeting repeatedly on Google’s campus, the source said.
These groups would then draw up a list of demands for management to rent more women and other diverse candidates throughout the corporate, in response to the source.
His boss had resisted calls to fulfill hiring quotas that favored women and minorities but was forced to back down after employees at Google Ventures threatened to quit, in response to the source,
The pressure campaign prolonged to the corporate’s board, including founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the source claimed.
A spokesman for Google called the complete account “completely unfaithful.”
“The founders and Board have never spoken to [Google Ventures] about personnel matters. Shaun is a talented investor and we wish him well at Sequoia, but decisions about his promotion and profession advancement at GV not once ever involved consideration of his race or gender,” the rep said.
Maguire fired back when reached by The Post on Friday about Google’s denial.
“My response is that they’re lying through their teeth,” he said.
A promotion would have greater than doubled Maguire’s salary from around $500,000 a yr on the time he was interviewed to “thousands and thousands” annually, the insider said.
The Post has sought comment from Maguire.
Maguire would quickly rebound, selling his cybersecurity company, Expanse, to Palo Alto Networks for $1.05 billion in December 2020.
He’s currently a partner at Sequoia, the enterprise capital giant that has helped spawn Silicon Valley unicorns akin to Apple, Google, Oracle, PayPal and WhatsApp.
But Maguire didn’t spare his wrath over the misguided culture that continues to permeate his former company.
“Gemini is the tip of the iceberg,” Maguire wrote on his X account on Thursday.
He blasted Google as an “absolute trash can dumpster” after it was forced to pause its “absolutely woke” artificial intelligence bot Gemini, which produced depictions of black founding fathers and a Native American pope.
Last week, Maguire teased that he would go public together with his claim, posting a poll on X which read: “Should I’m going public with the story in regards to the time I was told I can’t be promoted for being a white man?”
The outcomes were overwhelmingly for him to spill the dirt.
Maguire wrote on X that at the least five former and current Google employees reached out to him since his original post and shared “similar stories.”