Go “back to your country you poor bastard,” the CFO wrote to Anand Sanwal in a subsequent email.
Anand Sanwal, the Indian American Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of CB Insights, a company that builds software that predicts the next technology trend, received a racist email from one of the CFOs of a US-based venture capital firm, calling him an “Indian Brownie.”
In a blog post published on the website CB Insight, Sanwal said the racist email came as a response to a recent newsletter the company sent to its subscribers.
“With almost 300,000 newsletter subscribers, we get a lot of email replies. Most of them are quite nice. But we get a decent chunk of colorful, angry emails,” Sanwal said in the blog sharing the screenshot of the stinker email that he received.
Interestingly, Sanwal said, the reply email that had explicit racist words such as “brownie” came from the business email id of the CFO at a VC firm, who is a subscriber of the CB Insight newsletter.
Even though Sanwal is aware of the identity of the VC firm and its CFO, in order to maintain the privacy policy, such details were withheld. “Maybe he was hacked? Maybe he was having a bad day at work and lashing out at brown people is how he copes?” Sanwal’s blog has been receiving comments condemning the racist email.
In response to the stinky email, Sanwal wrote to the sender copying the mail to his Co-founder “You work at ____, sent this email from your business account? Love it.”
The racist CFO of the VC was in no mood to apologies, but instead, he continued with his racist rant saying “go back to your country you poor bastard”
After consulting with his co-founder Jon Sherry, Sanwal wrote a reply saying “Thanks for this. My Co-founder is Jewish. Any thoughts on Jewish folks you’d care to share.” No response came for this mail.
Sanwal said in the blog that he contacted the CEO of the VC firm and informed him about the email conversation who in turn said that his CFO might have “clicked on some kind of phishing link that caused a blast email from his account.”