It's a universal thing across many different fields. I also think we were living through a pretty incredible period in semiconductor technology. It's actually a directly relevant story, so I'll share it here. You have to claw your way from hell to get to the edge. I'm probably making this up, but it felt like 20 kids. Then I got recruited to work at DARPA by Regina Dugan. You can interpret that as a lower bound of the masses of particles allowed in the space. String theory is one. Shaun Maguire Profiles | Facebook Decentralization is not a silver bullet that just solves all problems and is better for everything. MAGUIRE: I gave you the whole long story, but to give you the very simple story, the simple story is that AdS/CFT has been this really interesting thing in physics the last 20, almost 25 years. I missed more than the legal number of days in the state of California due to three or four factors, so I was just kind of sat on my computer and doing my own things. Basically, starting in eighth grade, I got really disillusioned with school. MAGUIRE: I was at Stanford for a year and a half. So, when I was doing that one, yes, sure, having the quantum background was really important, and being able to do diligence on the company and trying to figure out what the roadmap would be and what the biggest bottlenecks would be for scaling and things like that. On the AdS side, that has a very deep relationship to hyperbolic geometry, which is something mathematicians have studied very deeply. When did that happen? First of all, I don't think it's racing toward the same goal, but even if it was, I don't think anyone knows what that goal is, and I don't even think it's set. ZIERLER: Was Alexei accessible? Was he a hands-on advisor? Jerry had just done incredible work in understanding our solar system, orbits, trajectories for space crafts, and things like that. [few minutes pause] When you got to the group meetings with John, what were some of the big debates that were happening? I was thinking about if you had three space ships that were traveling in a line, so spaceship A, B, and C. If the two ends were traveling away from the one in the center, each at the speed of lightso A is traveling away from B at the speed of light, and B from C at the speed of lighthow the hell could A and C not be traveling away from each other at more than the speed of light? 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. Whereas there's some areas, like in combinatorics, where you can door like today in machine learningyou can do original work in three months. You need to grab him when he's around and set up a time, but he'll always do that. A few things: one, I think there are many finish lines; two, I think the future is non-deterministic. Shaun Maguire's Investing Profile - Sequoia Capital Partner | Signal Anyway, a bit of an aside. MAGUIRE: My job title is I'm a general partner at Sequoia Capital. He serves as Board Member at Physna and Monad. The way I met Patrick is pretty funny. I went to public school in Orange County, California. The Boring Company creates safe, fast-to-dig, and low-cost transportation, utility, and freight tunnels. ZIERLER: I meant relative to where it was maybe 20 or 30 years ago, not relative to Stanford of course. In some ways there's a parallel to the past. Sequoia's Maguire on decision to back social crypto network BitClout - CNBC Sequoia's Shaun Maguire on competition and conviction in - Yahoo! When I was at GV I invested in Stripe. What I was actually most interested was space. Seed/Early. Alexei is really introverted. It's actually breaking in some ways right now via Apple. It wasn't as obvious, but it was obvious there would be certain niche applications of solar. The Wire Digital is helping global businesses make smarter decisions. MAGUIRE: Correct. John rules out of love, and you don't want to disappoint him. At that moment, he becomes your advisor. MAGUIRE: Yes, I do. They're investing in a lot of things that were notbiology, life sciencesI actually think it might be bad to invest in things that are so far away from what you're doing since you don't have the core expertise. Do we live in a many worlds thing? I saw these 12 questions and sat down outside his office and started thinking through how to solve these. I was paying pretty close attention back then. He received an undergraduate degree from the University of Southern . One thing: I think a lot of the things they were investing in were not related to their core business. Thank you so much. It took me years after to really understand it. Shaun Maguire. I think that on the grad student level, the evolution from IQI to IQIM wasn't that big of a deal. MAGUIRE: I'm always playing catch-up. I don't really remember any of it. Shaun, it's great to be with you. Founders Fund had flown us to an island off Vancouver Island in British Columbia. I came back in 2012. So, that's one thing that is really powerful. But even more important to me is someone thats just irrationally motivated. ZIERLER: Shaun, I'm curious in graduate school if you interfaced at all with string theorists who of course are convinced that string theory is the likeliest path to developing a theory of quantum gravity. ZIERLER: What kind of role did John play in all of these decisions? They've lost a lot of the goodwill of public markets. It's a very interesting style. The media built them up. I think most string theorists have beenmost, not all, some of them have been very arrogantbut the vast majority have been very measured in how they've thought about string theory and the current state of string theory and all that. And some of these founders dont even understand where it comes from, or how deeply ingrained it is in them. 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. Honestly, I kind of blacked out. This firewall paradox really sharply showed that quantum information will play a fundamental role in resolving, in terms of understanding the nuance between general relativity and quantum mechanics, just in a really sharp way. How did that play out? I think some people would be different than me, but I don't feel like I have to be the one to push it forward. I try to keep up with all those fields. Alexei is not going to just go hang out in the hallway at the blackboard doing his work in a public space, inviting people to come up and start talking to him. I was kind of doing both: doing the company and grad school. MAGUIRE: It's what Stephen Hawking is famous for, but I didn't understand at all the stuff Hawking had done. Watershed is a software platform that helps companies get to zero carbon fast. It was unbelievably lonely. I got to know a lot of funds. I had some aptitude. ZIERLER: And when does Sequoia enter into the mix? I had been interested in this field called hyperbolic geometry. What were people excited about at that point? Rob is another legend of the field. The vast majority of the individual solar companies failed, but the whole category has been incredibly successful. But as a grad student, especially a social one, you already knew a lot of those people. It was a small event, call it 50 people. I would say that Caltech is more scientific. Iron Fish is a Layer 1 blockchain that provides privacy guarantees on every single transaction. I think maybe on the faculty level it was a bigger deal, because it changed who was on the committees. I would almost say in a lot of ways it was similar to Maxwell's demon paradox, which was in the late 1800s. Thank you so much for joining me today. Shaun Maguire is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm that helps daring founders build legendary technology companies. They ebb and flow, so I try to go where the action is. ZIERLER: Shaun, do you have a sense of the origin story of Sequoiawhat niche it was looking to fill when it started? 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. I don't know what shape or form that will take. You can't have spaceships traveling away in a straight line from a Euclidean geometry perspective. When you go and you're around such incredible, brilliant people that go on to do such amazing thingsbeing around so many Nobel Prize winners for example, or knowing that a couple people in your class are going to go win Nobel Prizes, it forces you to say, "Well, if they can do it, what's holding me back? Dr. Shaun Maguire serves as a Partner at Sequoia Capital. Bored out of my mind. View twitter profile View linkedin profile Get in touch with Cornelius Cornelius Menke. In more recent memory, companies like Stripe, Zoom, Instagram, YouTube, ByteDance in China which created TikTok and many, many other companies across consumer enterprise, hardware, and all these things. He was an amateur astronomer, and sometimes with my friend Brandon, he had like an eight inch telescope, and we'd go look at stuff in the sky. My passion, especially coming from that background, was in probability and combinatorics, but really theoretical probability I just found absolutely fascinating. It wouldn't have been relevant in a five year time frame, but relevant in a fifteen year time frame. When you're looking at light, there are certain ways where light very clearly behaves as a wave, and there are certain ways where it very clearly behaves as a particle. It was more helpful for being able to do diligence. 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. Magic Eden is the leading destination for NFT discovery, expression, and ownership across digital cultures. shaun maguire sequoia wife It wasn't as clear that you'd be able to go to cheaper instantaneous power production than natural gas, for example. I didn't even know the prerequisites to be in that world, so it took an extra few years. It's going to be fun. This wasnt necessarily what I thought I would do long term. We say they're massless, because if they were at rest, they'd be massless. I love John. One of the most famous ones was the photoelectric effect that Einstein won the Nobel Prize for his explanation of. Mathematicians have studied hyperbolic geometry to death and have learned incredibly beautiful things. 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. Honeywell I don't think is a great comp; they don't have the same profit engine that Bell Labs has. shaun maguire sequoia wifepapa smurf tattoo. It gets us off fossil fuels. I'll trust my instincts when something comes up. I've been reading your notes from Afghanistan." He was an incredibly brilliant man and had really good technical instincts, but he was really from the sales and marketing side. MAGUIRE: I think something that's hard for people to understand about me is that I've always been doing multiple things in parallel my whole life. Some of the USC faculty had good connections at Stanford and basically got me in on letters of recommendation. When the Figma acquisition happened, it caused a lot of our other portfolio companies to raise their ambition. Join Facebook to connect with Shaun Maguire and others you may know. Sequoia partners and specialists help outlier founders at every stage bend the arc of the possible. MAGUIRE: Very rarely. He would always offer that. I think Caltech might have produced a comparable number, or maybe even more high-impact companies in the past. Subscribe to Chain Reaction onApple,Spotifyor your alternative podcast platform of choice to keep up with us every week. In that world, there is a deep relationship between the waves allowed in the space and the geometry allowed of the space. Before, there was too much incompatibility in the languages these fields would use, so it was just hard to even communicate. Did you have any interface with that world? You can register here. ZIERLER: Once you started going to group meetings at IQI, what were your impressions? They said, "Man, I love Dylan, but like, I can do it, too. 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. 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. I got lucky in that when I was leaving DARPA, we came up with an idea. I think Stanford is the other extreme, where Stanford in a lot of ways is just like, you go to Stanford because you want to start a company, and it's going to be the stepping stone to starting a company or joining a hot startup. Facebook gives people the power to. Patrick started a company called Stripe. I didn't know anything about quantum information. MAGUIRE: The point of connection to Google Ventures was simple. Sequoia invested in Rob Schoelkopf's company, QCI, before I joined. 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. One of the most high-profile ones was Global Crossing, which was this company that was the fastest company ever at the time to get a billion dollar valuation. I think that for a lot of people that come from a pure physics background, it's hard for them to talk to Alexei because he really is talking as a mathematician. He didn't take me as a student, but he told me to come to his group meetings, so I did. ZIERLER: From your own perspective, do you tend to think of this in somewhat of a horse race metaphor? NFL legend JJ Watt and wife Kealia invest in Burnley What were people excited about? MAGUIRE: My job title is I'm a general partner at Sequoia Capital. I had this unbelievably lucky thing: one of my friends' dad was a local community college professor. I think a lot of people were always too afraid to even ask him. Another is this idea that people have called ER = EPREinstein-Rosen equals Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen. Do you mean my job title? Dr. Maguire previously occupied the position of Member of DRW Trading Group and Partner at GV Management Co. LLC. Show more Show more Or my Caltech title? ZIERLER: Anything memorable from the defense? Those are things that Google should be investing like crazy into, because those are existential risks to their core business on a 20 year time frame. I felt like I just had to get to the cutting edge. Maguire is a former graduate assistant at Texas A&M, were he was working under his FSU coach Jimbo Fisher. We had to have a basket of renewables to fight this thing that was starting to happen with global warming. I think the key lesson here is that there can be certain industries where almost all of the VCs lose almost all their money on the investments because there's too much competition and the science is moving too fast, but that actually is an important part of getting the future to arrive faster. Lessons from Academia, Entrepreneurship, and Investing featuring Shaun There's this guy Amir Safavi Naeini who's a professor at Stanford now, and Alex Krause, and Simon Grblacher who's a professor at TU Delft. Alexei is a mathematician. And theres a lot of wisdom in there, Maguire says. 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. Shaun Maguire - Biography The other groups I had been in, they weren't groups. When I had thought about itI'm going to tell you, this is the 100% truthful version. I didn't know exactly what to do. That's how I got to know Google Ventures. Where were you for your undergrad? One is people respect John so much that you don't want to disappoint John. MAGUIRE: John. ZIERLER: Shaun, we'll get to this in real time, but did you always have a business streak, an entrepreneurial streak that you always wanted to actualize? These things change over time. Essential Advice for Founders | Shaun Maguire, Sequoia Capital DAVID ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, director of the Caltech Heritage Project. Candidly, with my background of 1.8 GPA in high school and an F in algebra 2, beggars can't be choosers. There was this incredible energy and camaraderie there, and it was addicting, especially for me coming fromI had only been exposed to solitary research before that. Patrick is a huge lover of physics. I kind of stopped going to school. Shaun Maguire is a partner at Sequoia, has founded two companies (one in space technologies and another in global internet security) and holds a PhD in physics from Caltech. Or are you thinking about actual wormholes? Backstory. So, I tried to bring some of the hyperbolic geometry ideas into this field. That's a global statement about the object for any surface or three dimensional manifold, etc. That sort of developed over time? Maybe five years later the physicists will go learn the math required to talk to him. I don't know, I was learning the rest. Another thing too, to be very candid for me, I have very broad interests. I took a lot of tough graduate math classes. But as an investor, I wasn't doing any calculations. But in 2015, this firewall paradox was a huge jump, because it created a bridge for the quantum information people to talk very precisely to the high-energy physics people. ZIERLER: Does the comparison hold up insofar as with solar startups, we knew what solar would be good for, right? Shaun Maguire - The Montgomery Summit Five years ago, quantum information was moving way faster than machine learning. That happened in the early 90s. That day, I was working. One of the big evolutions in the early 90s was this thing called the holographic principle. We're so nascent in those fields that if you're just really smart, IQ will get you far, and in three months you can do some original work. It took a long time. I've also been fascinated by computers, which I would say is slightly different than science. ZIERLER: On a technical level, I wonder if you can explain, what was the relevance in this field? In all the classical physics, optics, Newtonian mechanics, etc., and classical electromagnetism, that didn't make any sense. He doesn't tell you where you're going. Shaun Maguire (PhD '18), Quantum Researcher and Venture Capitalist There are some videos of this online; it's pretty hilarious. His name is Doug Borcoman [?]. The day I got back, I went to graduation. ZIERLER: Shaun, to zoom out from your specific research, what were people talking about with regard to quantum gravity during this time? I think it's because it's just in some ways it's unknowable. You can listen to the entireinterview with Maguireon our podcast, Chain Reaction. That was the question, and what he meant by that was if you could take boundary measurements around the sounds you'd be hearing on a drum, or the heights of waves moving through a drum, could you uniquely figure out the shape inside? They'll build someone up and then they'll tear them down. In a conversation on TechCrunch's new web3 podcast Chain Reaction, Sequoia crypto partner Shaun Maguire talked about the firm's commitment to the sector, regulatory challenges and what plenty. A saddle is what we call negatively curved. He is also an angel investor. There's not one moment in my life where I wasn't doing three or four things, all at a relatively high level completely in parallel. It's too far outside of our tools right now, and we really don't know what direction to go. That was my passion, so I went to Caltech to work with Jerry. 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. Sequoia Capital Partner Believes Lots of VCs Will Pull Back From Crypto (It turns out space is curved.) Some of these things are so dependent on so many other variables. There's a very similar result in hyperbolic geometry which basically says the eigenvalues that correspond to waves moving in negatively curved space follow these very specific rules, and there's some really beautiful aspect, and there's actually a relationship between those thingsbetween those waves and the eigenvalues that come from the waves, and the geometry in these geometric data. I was born in 1985, so I was always trying to mess around with computers. It was a good investment for governments. Could you talk to him? Shaun is an entrepreneur, investor, and scientist with a broad and eclectic background. My PhD is a very toy regime of three-dimensional gravity, two dimensional quantum sidesAdS, three; CFT, two. My physics passion was in ninth grade. It's like, some parents rule out of fear; some parents rule out of love. Don had mainly been in sales and marketing. One is what happens with the end-state of black holes. It was this weird, internal drive. He played college football for the Florida State Seminoles. The hardware is going to be really valuable. He is a Director of AMP Robotics, Gather, Physna, and Vise. So, that was one example of something. In many ways was the core person that drove it in the beginning, if not the core person. Out of the three you mentioned, I think Google is the only one that has a lot of parallels. It's Friday, September 23, 2022. Look at solar. In an upcoming episode on Wednesday, May 19, we'll sit down with Sequoia's Shaun Maguire and Vise CEO and co-founder Samir Vasavada. Bill Thurston was this guy who's workI had just been fascinated by the guy, and I read a lot of his papers. ZIERLER: Yup. I started at Stanford in 2007 and moved to Caltech in 2009. He said that maybe nature has this weird property that sometimes you know the physics of what's happening in some region of space, maybe all you need to know is what's happening on the boundary of that space. ZIERLER: What did you see as your primary contributions and conclusions with your thesis research? 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. He emailed Mike Moritz, who's a legend in venture capital, and, Michael Abramson, and they ended up giving me a job. When I was 7 years old, he helped me build my first computer. MAGUIRE: I never say this, but I guess I'm a doctor. 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. It raises your ego in some ways, but it has to lower our ego in others. I think that's actually a part of the magic of Caltech: it's the only elite undergraduate and research university in America that is just so focused on science. ZIERLER: Besides John, who else was on your committee? MAGUIRE: By Caltech's standards, I'm an extreme extrovert. Solar starting in the early 2000s2003 to like 2012 got incredible attention both from VCs but also from government subsidies. ZIERLER: As you got comfortable in the field, where did you see an opportunity to contribute? MAGUIRE: My academic background is pretty unusual. It's not a regulated monopoly, but they havenot supposed to say thisbut they have a monopoly on search. With computers, it just seemed like the most important technology of the time. Once you get to the cutting edge, it's not that hard to keep up. I had never seen one of these. The way John works, is it's really a Socratic style. MAGUIRE: It's super common. What advice should first-time founders heed? I think these are actually wormholes, and that's a huge point of disagreement. The model was evolving, basically from the time thatShockley was the first semiconductor company in the Valley, and there wasn't a venture capital model yet, so Shockley was basically a division of Beckman Instruments, a wholly owned division with a bunch of incentives. So thats what youve seen get unleashed with crypto over the last 18 months, we went from it being some people with really, strong positive views, to the whole firm being completely behind it., Why a bipartisan embrace of crypto might never touch Bitcoin. As an investor, you want to have intuition, but you also need to check your intuition with lots of diligence on things. One of the things is Caltech is a very humbling place. NFL hero JJ Watt and his wife, former United States international Kealia, have invested in English football team Burnley as they bid to usher in a new era of success at the club.. Burnley, coached . Sequoia Capital: "Crypto is one of the two big sectors of the next 10 Or did some interesting debates come up? 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. ZIERLER: Finally Shaun, going forward, do you have a fluid view about your relationship with academia? That's another area where Google has done an incredible job, is machine learning research. It was really lonely and solitary. MAGUIRE: I joined the group in 2012. Shaun Maguire, Sequoia Capital Ltd: Profile and Biography MAGUIRE: Sequoia enters shortly thereafter, but basically in the summer of 2019. Monad's platform unites security data silos and builds effective security and compliance workflows. It was just announced last week that Figma is going to be acquired by Adobe for $20 billion. I'll say something that can get me in trouble. I've brought some people from Caltech into companies I've worked with. Our Founders; Our Companies; I would say it just doesn't matter. 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. So, I felt like if I'm ever going to do something in business, I'm never going to get a shot this good, so I kind of had to do that in my mind. The goal of quantum gravity is to reconcile these discrepancies. There have been a lot of other big breakthroughs related to string theory over the last, like, 40 years. I think that as an investor, it's actually incredibly important. So, John never tells you you're wrong. I'm so glad we connected. Adam Crafton. ZIERLER: To foreshadow to what happened next, were you on a trajectory of pursuing an academic career and then some opportunity came up? Before black holes, a prerequisite to understand them is you have to know some general relativity. Those are my heroes, my role models, the people that have done things very differently than other people. The only area where I actually knew something was probability, which was an area that I had spent five years or whatever, so that was an area where I knew something. 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. ZIERLER: Did you think about quantum information at all at Stanford? What could quantum gravity actually achieve? They lost a lot of money, but the category has been very successful. Dr. Maguire is also on the board of 5 other companies. That was the next huge jump in this area. Don Valentine, the founder of the firm, he had been at some of the top semiconductor companies of the past, including Fairchild and National.

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