‘Divine Swan’: Sequoia Capital Partner Divya Gupta Resigns After $214 Million Investment Disappears Into FTX
- The Indian American’s departure comes after the company apologized to limited partners about its $214 million investment in the now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX.
Indian American Divyahans “Divya” Gupta, a partner at Sequoia Capital, is leaving the venture capital firm, The Information reported. Gupta worked at the firm for under a year and focused on seed- and early-stage investments in cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. His departure comes just weeks after the company apologized to limited partners about its $214 million investment in the now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX. A Sequoia spokesperson told The Information that Gupta was not involved in making the FTX investments.
Ramnik Arora, head of product and investor relations at FTX, was “the main FTX executive other than founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who interacted with investors such as Sequoia Capital, The Information said, citing investors who worked with him. Sequoia was one of the numerous blue-chip funds that backed FTX before its collapse.
Describing his love for technology as “the wind in my sails,” he said it is what led him to crypto and Ethereum in 2015.
In a blog on Sequoia’s website, Bankman-Fried was praised as a “genius” who would go on to create the “dominant all-in-one financial super-app of the future.” In the now-deleted blog, Arora describes sitting through an important Zoom call between Bankman-Fried and investors at Sequoia. After a successful pitch by Bankman-Fried, Arora walked over to the executive’s desk to find that he had been playing “League” throughout the meeting. “I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, Oh, s—, that was really good,” said Arora, according to the profile. “And it turns out that that f—– was playing ‘League of Legends’ through the entire meeting.”
On the Sequoia website, the Bhopal-born Gupta writes that his name means “divine swan” in Hindi. He said his uncle chose it because he looked “terribly pale” when he was born. “As far as I know, I’m the only person in the world with that name,” he said. “I wear it on my sleeve every day. You can call me Divya.”
In the profile, Gupta goes on to write that his father’s 20-year-career at Cisco Systems, “a Sequoia company,” got his family “from Bhopal to Cary, North Carolina, and from Cary to San Jose, California,” where his mother “started her small business on a Square card reader. I like to say that Sequoia helped bring me from the other side of the world and into their office.”
His sister introduced him to computer science in eighth grade, and he “fell in love with building things and realized that it was the closest thing I had to a superpower.” His time at Stanford was “devoted to exploring every aspect of the field, from systems to machine learning, graphics and more.” After graduation, “I put my degree to use building infrastructure at Airbnb and machine learning products at Databricks,” he wrote.
Describing his love for technology as “the wind in my sails,” he said it is what led him to crypto and Ethereum in 2015. “Crypto instilled in me a deep appreciation for the virtues of decentralization, permission-less innovation, and irrevocable ownership. I’m looking for kindred spirits who are excited to build a new layer on the internet, one that disintermediates rent-seekers, broadens financial inclusion, and empowers stakeholders in communities.”