It was purely just my curiosity. MAGUIRE: My job title is I'm a general partner at Sequoia Capital. ZIERLER: To foreshadow to what happened next, were you on a trajectory of pursuing an academic career and then some opportunity came up? I viewed that field, the stuff that John was working on, as the absolute top of physics, and I didn't think I had the background yet to be in that world. Shaun Maguire, Sequoia Capital Partner, joins 'Tech Check' to discuss the decision to back the social network, what makes it . MAGUIRE: It's what Stephen Hawking is famous for, but I didn't understand at all the stuff Hawking had done. AMP Robotics is changing the face of recycling with high-speed guided robotics. Shaun Maguire founded Escape Dynamics, Inc. and Expanse, Inc. Shaun Maguire Profiles | Facebook MAGUIRE: Correct. It's the first time that information had to be considered in physics. Mathematicians have studied hyperbolic geometry to death and have learned incredibly beautiful things. You're not supposed to say that these days, but it was important, because when you have that incredible amount of predictable free cash flow, it makes it really easy to go pump tons of money into the R&D. MAGUIRE: I would say, a long time ago, I had to make the decision that I would go in another direction. Solar starting in the early 2000s2003 to like 2012 got incredible attention both from VCs but also from government subsidies. That was one theme. I sold it for a billion dollars, all of that. Was it related to what he was doing at the time? He started mentoring me. I use physics a lot. My passion, especially coming from that background, was in probability and combinatorics, but really theoretical probability I just found absolutely fascinating. Patrick was talking to an extremely famous founder. It's kind of the same thing. I was doing projects on the computer, hanging out in hacker forums for 10 hours a day in IRC. It raises your ego in some ways, but it has to lower our ego in others. ZIERLER: Did you officially unenroll from Stanford at that point? Shaun is an entrepreneur, investor, and scientist with a broad and eclectic background. I am, not quite as much as you, but I'm also a student of history, and I've been a student of Valley history. Shaun Maguire, a crypto partner of Sequoia Capital, one of the venture capital firms most active when it comes to investments in the cryptocurrency space, issued its opinion on the future of many VCs investing in crypto. I originally joined in the Control and Dynamical Systems Department. There was oneI think it was shortly after I was 13for about six months I couldn't sleep at night. Apr 26, 2023. Please dont YOLO your 401(k) into shitcoins. I have incredible energy, so I've always been doing athletics of some kind, because otherwise I just can't think unless I burn my energy. With my cybersecurity companyI really helped start many companies, but the cybersecurity company onewhich was called Qadium, but then we renamed it to Expansethat's the only one where I was really full-time with my company for many years. It wouldn't have been relevant in a five year time frame, but relevant in a fifteen year time frame. Quantum information not too much. Did you talk to him a lot about these things? In my job as a founder of companies and partner at Sequoia and all this, being on lots of boards, I deal with the media a lot. In that world, there is a deep relationship between the waves allowed in the space and the geometry allowed of the space. ZIERLER: Shaun, to zoom out from your specific research, what were people talking about with regard to quantum gravity during this time? He is also an angel investor. Partner @sequoia // @caltech physics PhD // quantum space crypto security (it's a niche but high impact field) The string theorists weren't asking to have all these articles written about them and get all this hype in a lot of ways. It was a tiny department. ZIERLER: Just to clarify, when you came to Caltech, you were already admitted, but it was not certain at that point that you'd be John Preskill's student? ZIERLER: Anything memorable from the defense? Shaun Maguire - Biography The media built them up. I've been reading your notes from Afghanistan." Just to give you some examples of people from different domains, in mathematics there's this guy, Bill Thurston, who pioneered hyperbolic geometry. MAGUIRE: No. While the crypto industry continues to mint new unicorn startups, the rapid cooling of public market tech stocks has threatened to stall growth in the emerging category, which has still proven awfully susceptible to macro conditions. It was this weird, internal drive. I honestly didn't feel like I deserved to be in that world, and I didn't know enough to even know how to get started until I was coming back. It led to this overbuilding phase with fiber, which was actually a prerequisite to have all the internet businesses of the next decade built on top of it. Championships. I literally emailed John Preskill from Afghanistan. ZIERLER: Once you started going to group meetings at IQI, what were your impressions? If we wouldn't have had a world war until 200 years later, we would have gone down a very different technical pathway, and then maybe would have been using something other than rockets to get to space. ZIERLER: Shaun, a question I've been excited to ask you since I first reached out: with your area of expertise, as a student of history, I wonder if you've ever thought about some of the parallels between, for example, a Bell Labs in the 60s, 50s, 70s, the middle part of the 20th centurythe industrial support for fundamental research and how you might compare that with what Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Honeywell are doing with regard to quantum information today. Why Sequoia, Others Bet $40 Million on an Anonymous Crypto Founder When did that start for you? View the profiles of people named Shaun Maguire. Patrick called Sequoia and told them they should hire me instead. Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital, chats with DeSo Founder Nader Al-Naji on a number of topics across crypto, startups, and venture capital.Shaun was. At Caltech there was this guy, Jerry MarsdenJerrold Marsdenwho is an absolute legend in space physics. ZIERLER: Besides John, who else was on your committee? I don't even really remember. I had this unbelievably lucky thing: one of my friends' dad was a local community college professor. I think it might be a similar thing with quantum computing. ZIERLER: Shaun, in your day to day role at Sequoia, are you bringing your quantum information expertise? There's been a bunch of these big ideas that the whole field is unpacking with the goal being to understand nature in a much deeper way. It's a stable energy source. MAGUIRE: I'm actually not so sure about that. MAGUIRE: Very rarely. Right now, machine learning is probably the field that's moving the fastest, so right now I'm actually probably spending more time reading the machine learning literature than, say, the quantum information literature. For what it's worth, I think it's really important for the world to have places like Caltech that are so focused on science. Texas A&M (OA) Accomplishments and honors. Knowde is the marketplace for chemicals, polymers and ingredients. He taught computer science and astronomy. I pitched everyoneexcept Sequoia, because they had a conflict. I try to keep up with all those fields. MAGUIRE: I'm always playing catch-up. I didn't know anything about quantum information. MAGUIRE: That's a great question. It's a little unusual in that on the company side I was doing it becausethe reason why I was doing the company, in a lot of ways, is I got lucky. It gave me a really deep intuition for that, and that led to a passion for black holes, and I came back to it later. Rob is another legend of the field. I went to public school in Orange County, California. Seed/Early + Growth. He played college football for the Florida State Seminoles. I'll trust my instincts when something comes up. He showed that in a specific sub-version of string theory, that that holographic principle would hold exactly true, and this result, I think it was in 1998, but in the late 90s became called what's called AdS/CFT, anti-de Sitter space, which is on the general relativity geometry side, and CFT, conformal field theory, which is on the high-energy physics quantum field theory side of the equation. The third was Silicon Valley, where people are making this technology using physics and other things to bring it forward. And some of these founders dont even understand where it comes from, or how deeply ingrained it is in them. Did you have any interface with that world? There's always more to learn, so I'm always playing catch-up. Jerry was this weird physicist where he had a really elite pedigree, and a lot of people with really elite pedigrees would go into the really cutting edge stuff of quantum gravity, or string theory, or high energy physics in general. Subscribe to Chain Reaction onApple,Spotifyor your alternative podcast platform of choice to keep up with us every week. MAGUIRE: When I was a Stanford and when I first joined Caltech, because I had such a weird background, I didn't have the background yet to actually be able to think about the problem or really understand the problem statement. They lost a lot of money, but the category has been very successful. Alexei Kitaev. When I had thought about itI'm going to tell you, this is the 100% truthful version. That paradox really came from AdS/CFT line of thinking, and for these things like anti-de Sitter space, very intuitively, very naivelyto back up one step, you can think of objects in space, for example, any two dimensional surface: it's either got negative curvature, zero curvature, or positive curvature. When I got to USC, I randomly was walkingI studied math. MAGUIRE: Those are days you don't want to remember. It was a good investment for governments. There's a lot of amazing faculty at Stanford; I'm not trying to knock Stanford. View twitter profile View linkedin profile Get in touch with Cornelius Cornelius Menke. Aharonov is one of these guys that's always doing things very differently than other people. Then I got recruited to work at DARPA by Regina Dugan. Where do you see some really new directions? The only firm that we never pitched was Sequoia, because they had a competing portfolio company, so we didn't want to give them the data on our company or something about us. It doesn't matter. ZIERLER: On a technical level, I wonder if you can explain, what was the relevance in this field? About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators . BCS national champion ( 2013) Sean Maguire (born March 11, 1994) is an American football quarterback. And what happens, the wave function collapse moment is when you need an advisor to sign somethingthere are certain things at Caltech where you need an advisor's signature, so the first time that happens, when you've been going to his group meetings for a few months, you kind of go to him and say, "So, I need this signature. So, they were able to do really amazing work that was not too far away from the core business. MAGUIRE: I would say they're very similar, and with solar, it wasn't as clear. Shaun, it's great to be with you. So, I tried to bring some of the hyperbolic geometry ideas into this field. He had founded this tiny little department called Control and Dynamical Systems. Lenny Susskind, but actually really, based on a lot of John's ideas as well. That is basically hyperbolic geometry. Mathematicians know a lot of things; I don't think we're yet well-known enough by the physicists. There have been a lot of other big breakthroughs related to string theory over the last, like, 40 years. Do you stay on top of the literature? MAGUIRE: That was another thing, is that I am athere's this joke at Caltech (MIT does this too): How do you tell the difference between introverts and extroverts at Caltech? Or was this really a sudden career shift from what you might do otherwise with a PhD in fundamental physics? Many would disagree with me, but I actually think it takes away from the quality of research at Stanford. We say they're massless, because if they were at rest, they'd be massless. It's almost a minimalist style. If I were to guess what would happen, I think it will probably lead to a new set of equations that capture nature on a deeper level than we have today. With quantum computing, I would say there's already a lot of applications that are pretty clear, and then there's also a whole bunch of things that maybe you can't say the precise algorithm, but on the other hand it's pretty obvious quantum computers will be important. We became friends from that. At the time, a recurring theme through the group is that Kitaev had done a lot of really interesting work and people were trying to understand it continuously. Patrick is a huge lover of physics. I think Bell Labs, one of the key things, they basically had a regulated monopoly. One is what happens with the end-state of black holes. I was absolutely fascinated by where things come from, how energy works, oil and gas, chemicals industry, things like that, pharma. There has already been a lot of great results there, and I'm sure there are more to come. When I came back to Caltech, I had started a company in 2012, and it ended up being a relatively successful company. I have a fellowship, so I don't need any funding. Another was industrials. Out of the three you mentioned, I think Google is the only one that has a lot of parallels. Did you know Rob? I would say there are two parts to it. But going back a long ways, going back to when I first started at Caltech, I thought I would probably be a professor, but when I went to DARPA, that was the moment when I had to choose between the two. Shaun Maguire Ph.D Profile: Contact Information & Network | PitchBook It was a really small major for a school that big. Maybe five years later the physicists will go learn the math required to talk to him. What was seen as the holy grail? He doesn't tell you where you're going. Patrick started a company called Stripe. I would say a bunch of the other prominent, early investors were really more coming from the technical side. Stanford does amazing research, but Stanford has a lot of faculty and a lot of money, and I actually think Caltech has higher quality research per capita. As crypto continues its wild rise, storied venture firm Sequoia is not just competing with the a16zs of the world but with a rising crop of crypto native venture funds that are seeing their assets balloon and their influence upend the traditional venture hierarchies. Jerry was one of these rare people that decided, I'm going to go back to the fundamentals, go back to classical mechanics, and try to understand that really, really well and figure out important things there. Moore's law had to keep running for an extra five years, and no one knew how long it would run for. Some of the USC faculty had good connections at Stanford and basically got me in on letters of recommendation. It was entertaining. I've used people from Caltech as expert diligence when I've looked at companies. He would always offer that. Sequoia partners and specialists help outlier founders at every stage bend the arc of the possible. So, I don't stay up perfectly, but I do try to stay up with the really big results. There's this other thing called holographic entanglement entropy. The firm has made a number of equity investments in crypto startups over the years including Fireblocks and FTX, but while Andreessen Horowitz was early to commit to a dedicated crypto fund in 2018, Sequoia has continued made its equity investments through its general funds. I think a lot of people were always too afraid to even ask him. I always had that passion, but I've had the science passion which really started with astronomy. Sequoia is a 50 year old venture capital firm based in Menlo Parkone of the preeminent venture capital firms in the world that backed, in their early days, Apple, Atari, Cisco, Oracle, companies like that. Mark Wise. I admire John as someone who's fearless enough to go be at the top of one thing and then jump and do another field where they're a relative novice. Vise, a company founded by two high-school graduates, raises $45 I'm delighted to be here with Dr. Shaun Maguire. Previously he Co-Founded Expanse which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $800M. Privy makes Simple APIs to manage user data off-chain. In all the classical physics, optics, Newtonian mechanics, etc., and classical electromagnetism, that didn't make any sense. I personally believe quantum computing is going to be similar to solar. The actual edge doesn't move that quickly. One of the things that's interesting about the journey of being a PhD student is that you work so hard to get to the cutting edge. Basically, venture capital has become this huge industry, but back in the day when Don started the firm in 1972, it didn't really exist. I'd been at Google Ventures for three years, and I had the opportunity to move to Sequoia which is the best venture capital firm in the world, so it was hard to say no to. [few minutes pause] When you got to the group meetings with John, what were some of the big debates that were happening? I led the Series A in IonQ, which is one of these first wave quantum hardware companies, which a bunch of people at Caltech knowlike Chris Monroe and Jungsang Kim, the founders of the companywell. I had never seen one of these. Over the course of three years, maybe once every two to three weeks he'll ask you a question that is almost like the series of questions is taking you on a journey that he wants you to go on, but he doesn't tell you explicitly what journey you're going on ahead of time. Shaun Maguire Investor Profile: Portfolio & Exits | PitchBook Harry Maguire is the world's most expensive centre-back and captain of arguably the world's most famous football club. She recruited me onto a pretty crazy project related to the war in Afghanistan. Watershed is a software platform that helps companies get to zero carbon fast. SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches rockets and spacecraft. I didnt even go to class most of the time1.8 GPA in 10th grade and an F in algebra II. We met with and got term sheets from pretty much all the top firms in the Valley. From the time I was 9, Ive been obsessed with space. Founders Fund had flown us to an island off Vancouver Island in British Columbia. From the time I was 9, I've been obsessed with space. I didn't even know about math competitions. It's funny because John has a veryit's maybe not the style you would think. I think I will definitely have more involvement with Caltech at some point in my life. Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia, has been on both sides of the table, as an entrepreneur and investor. I think what were seeing is a lot of the crypto community is actually coming back in 90% of the situations and realizing that, Oh, actually, the way things were done in the past was actually pretty good and got there for an optimal reason, But 10% is like radically different and you can kind of meaningfully improve the whole system by getting some of those things right.. They're human too. Jeongwan was just finishing his PhD at that time, and that was a really exciting result that a lot of people were very interested in. John rules out of love, and you don't want to disappoint him. I would do these thought experiments. What I was actually most interested was space. I do know Rob. I got to know a lot of funds. I don't think it's an accident that John's group has been the central node in quantum information over the last 20 years or so. That's a personal, philosophicalit's like a religious conversation. With computers, it just seemed like the most important technology of the time. We had to have a basket of renewables to fight this thing that was starting to happen with global warming. The way John works, is it's really a Socratic style. I was lucky enough to work with him. Regina was a Caltech alum who was the Director of DARPA. He would say, "Be here at this time and place." Are you not looking at faculty appointments? ZIERLER: What were you doing at Google? Basically, starting in eighth grade, I got really disillusioned with school. Shaun Maguire's Investing Profile - Sequoia Capital Partner | Signal Working with Professor Makarov, I was his only student. In other words, the experimentalists joining matter to the theory, did that register with you at all? ZIERLER: That's pretty cool. ZIERLER: And when does Sequoia enter into the mix? I can't remember the exact other things in the very beginning when I joined the group, but I can tell you the themes over the whole ten years or whatever. I left Stanford with a master's degree and went to Caltech. When I was at GV I invested in Stripe. When did that happen? So, I did this and got to ask a question to the astronauts, and that honestly made space really tangible to me. MAGUIRE: I had officially unenrolled from Stanford a long time ago. MAGUIRE: I think someone doing theoretical work in what I call "hard" fieldsa PhD student doing theoretical work in pure math, or in quantum gravity, or high energy physics, or whatever, those are really hard areas to do original work. Shaun Maguire | Heritage Project Alexei is a mathematician. I came back in 2012. I'm not talking about on a physics level. It's like, some parents rule out of fear; some parents rule out of love. That kicked off a whole new passion in space, and that led to learning about black holes and getting absolutely fascinated by black holes. But as a grad student, especially a social one, you already knew a lot of those people. Because it's an extra three factors of two you had to get. He never tries to make you feel stupid. Vise is an AI-powered portfolio management platform. Deep Mind has basically been going across all of science and trying to apply machine learning in science, so it's a much closer thing to the core business model. Once you get to the cutting edge, it's not that hard to keep up. Shaun Maguire | Sequoia Capital US/Europe I'll pause. I was doing all three. ZIERLER: Finally Shaun, going forward, do you have a fluid view about your relationship with academia? Every week or two, I'd go talk to him, but there was no one else at Caltech I could talk to about the work. I think maybe on the postdoc level it had an impact because we started to have a lot more seminars and all of that, that would have people from both experimental and theory world. ZIERLER: When did you first appreciate the connections between black holes and quantum information? You can listen to the entireinterview with Maguireon our podcast, Chain Reaction. That's a global statement about the object for any surface or three dimensional manifold, etc. I can be a little more concreted if it's helpful, but I'd just say in this field, in quantum gravity, it's really hard to do an original contribution without three to five years of having learned the foundations. One of the big evolutions in the early 90s was this thing called the holographic principle. That's another area where Google has done an incredible job, is machine learning research. I think some of the physicists didn't quite understand the math language that he was using, but Alexei is a path breaker. Shaun Maguire (Sequoia) + Samir Vasavada (Vise) - Yahoo Finance Maxwell's demon was first in the statistical mechanics domain or thermodynamics domain, but it was what first brought the concept of information to physics in a tangible way. It evolved over the next ten years with people like Arthur Rock with Intel and others, and it, around the mid-70s, stabilized in the model that we have today. I saw these 12 questions and sat down outside his office and started thinking through how to solve these. Prior to GV, Shaun co-founded two companies: Qadium and Escape Dynamics. I think another thing that's very powerful about Caltech is thatit's actually something that we have in common at Sequoiais that Caltech forces you to raise your ambition. Prior to joining Sequoia in 2019, Dr. Maguire was a Partner at GV, where he led their . But as an investor, I wasn't doing any calculations. 2020-2021. Or are they doing something different? Adam Crafton. Michael Moritz. The vast majority of the individual solar companies failed, but the whole category has been incredibly successful. I love John. That's another example of something where it didn't make sense with the classical treatment. I had a lot of friends, so I was already hanging out with a lot of the matter people, like Oskar Painter's students, who obviously has been a big part of IQIM. You have to claw your way from hell to get to the edge. Essential Advice for Founders | Shaun Maguire, Sequoia Capital Shaun Maguire is Partner at Sequoia Capital. ZIERLER: Shaun, coming in in so many ways as an autodidact between the math and the physics, what areas did you have to play catch-up for quantum information, and where did you jump right in alongside your cohort? ZIERLER: Did you get any curveball questions? Will you sign this thing for me?" I had moved from a full-time operating role to chairman, and I was finishing my PhD. I felt like I just had to get to the cutting edge. I was born in 1985, so I was always trying to mess around with computers. I tried to do the John Preskill Socratic method: ask some questions that would reveal the other person didn't know what he was talking about. DAVID ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, director of the Caltech Heritage Project. In our conversation, Maguire emphasized his belief that plenty of other funds dipping their toes into crypto "are going to pull back" when the market grows less frothy, but he believes that. For whatever reason, its their life mission to try to revolutionize the industry theyre going after. Being able to stay on top of it and having a lot of my friends be the ones pushing it forward, it's kind of enough for me. MAGUIRE: My job title is I'm a general partner at Sequoia Capital. I was paying pretty close attention back then. I am an absolute crypto maxi, but I think there are a lot of things that are misunderstood by the masses today, Maguire said. It's hard to say no when DARPA is willing to give you money to go build some really advanced technology with really brilliant people. These guys all became my good friends. Decentralization is not a silver bullet that just solves all problems and is better for everything. You need physics to understand that. These things go in waves. My PhD is a very toy regime of three-dimensional gravity, two dimensional quantum sidesAdS, three; CFT, two. Basically, NASA was doing this programyou could learn ham radio and ask astronauts aboard one of the shuttles, ask them a question in ham radio as they orbit the Earth. MAGUIRE: It's super common. Just think of a few examples. Before, there was too much incompatibility in the languages these fields would use, so it was just hard to even communicate. In my opinion, no question. My goal with the PhD was just to get to the cutting edge of knowledge in that field, because these things had kept me up in the middle of the night as a little kid, literally, for a long time. Maguire focuses on enterprise,. It was really lonely and solitary. Skip to main content. I started the second company with two friends and I got to know a lot of VCs raising money for it. I don't even know some of the things that I know are there, but I'll tell you some of the things that I'm aware of. As an investor, you want to have intuition, but you also need to check your intuition with lots of diligence on things. When I was in sixth grade, NASA had this program called SAREX, Satellite Amateur Radio Experiment. He was also an interesting, out of the box human, so I found him really exciting. It was still pretty easy for me. On the other hand, since I was a little kid, my passion was black holes and space. I just had to get to the cutting edge. Or did some interesting debates come up? DeSo is a layer-1 blockchain custom-built to scale decentralized social applications. It's easy to understand the calculations, but it gave me this really deepthe answer here is that space is not flat, and your intuition for flat geometry is completely wrong. The hardware is going to be really valuable. Shaun Maguire's transition from quantum information at Caltech to venture capital at Sequoia makes perfect sense only if one appreciates that in rare cases, the pursuit of a PhD is an expression of pure curiosity, totally disconnected from career ambitions. MAGUIRE: Many, many things. r2C is a defensive cybersecurity automation company with an open-source static analysis tool.
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