We call that quantum gravity. 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. shaun maguire sequoia wife It's my Hogwarts. 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. It was still pretty easy for me. I think it might be a similar thing with quantum computing. ZIERLER: What were you doing at Google? ZIERLER: Finally Shaun, going forward, do you have a fluid view about your relationship with academia? MAGUIRE: One of the things that I am proud of in my own life is I've been willing to change course quickly even with limited data when crazy opportunities come up. So, I did this and got to ask a question to the astronauts, and that honestly made space really tangible to me. Many would disagree with me, but I actually think it takes away from the quality of research at Stanford. Shaun to start, will you please tell me your title and institutional affiliation? If Figma grew this quickly, we can grow this quickly." ZIERLER: From your own perspective, do you tend to think of this in somewhat of a horse race metaphor? Championships. Prior to joining Sequoia in 2019, Dr. Maguire was a Partner at GV, where he led their . Shaun Maguire (Sequoia) + Samir Vasavada (Vise) - Yahoo Finance The third thing to say is physics teaches you a way to think. 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. 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. In some cases, they were wildly misunderstood as kids and have chips on their shoulders. Everyone was telling mepeople on both sides didn't understand why I was doing both. r2C is a defensive cybersecurity automation company with an open-source static analysis tool. He just asks really good questions that lead you on a journey. It was really lonely and solitary. The Wire Digital is helping global businesses make smarter decisions. This wasnt necessarily what I thought I would do long term. It took a long time. 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. He was a physics major. 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. Essential Advice for Founders | Shaun Maguire, Sequoia Capital In many ways was the core person that drove it in the beginning, if not the core person. I could explain the technical definition, but that's neither here nor there. It's not a regulated monopoly, but they havenot supposed to say thisbut they have a monopoly on search. Physna codifies 3D models into detailed data for software applications. I've already noticed in the last week, I've had many founders in our portfolio come to me, and it's raised their ambition. MAGUIRE: Yeah, I don't think they're racing toward a singular finish line. Was he a hands-on advisor? We became friends from that. There's some technical definition that gives you that, but you can have negative, zero, or positive curvature. He was also an interesting, out of the box human, so I found him really exciting. ZIERLER: It sounds like it's always exciting for you, no matter what it is though. I had been interested in this field called hyperbolic geometry. The first one was a failure, three of them have been successful, and one is too early to call. It's really easy to go say, "Admit me; I'm going to work really hard." Skip to main content. ZIERLER: To foreshadow to what happened next, were you on a trajectory of pursuing an academic career and then some opportunity came up? ZIERLER: Shaun, with the entrepreneurial culture at Caltech, I wonder if your work has given you a broader perspective of the kinds of ways Caltech ideas, Caltech faculty and students are involved in technology ventures. You don't know where you're going. I am an absolute crypto maxi, but I think there are a lot of things that are misunderstood by the masses today, Maguire said. But I think he's testing people's commitment, which I think is a really smart strategy that not enough people do. Our Founders; Our Companies; On the AdS side, that has a very deep relationship to hyperbolic geometry, which is something mathematicians have studied very deeply. Could you find him? Fast forward a few years, and Google Ventures offered me a job that gave me the flexibility to stay in LA and finish my Ph.D. in quantum gravity. SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches rockets and spacecraft. 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. So, at that point, I wasn't just a beggar anymore. 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.. 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. She recruited me onto a pretty crazy project related to the war in Afghanistan. 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? I'll say something that can get me in trouble. It's close enough to the core business that it's a very smart strategic thing to invest in. With computers, it just seemed like the most important technology of the time. Some of these things are so dependent on so many other variables. 214. 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. Institutionally, is Sequoia involved in the quantum information space at all? By the time I came back to Caltech in 2012 after all this, I had been able to self-study and knew, for example, general relativity on a basic level. ZIERLER: Anything memorable from the defense? 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. One thing that I think is close to Bell Labs from a different direction right now is Deep Mind. I got to know a lot of funds. In all the classical physics, optics, Newtonian mechanics, etc., and classical electromagnetism, that didn't make any sense. So, I went up to the statistics department at Stanford, which is one of the top places in that, and at Stanford is where I fell back in love with physics. Or are they doing something different? Once you get to the cutting edge, it's not that hard to keep up. Those are my heroes, my role models, the people that have done things very differently than other people. 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. When the Figma acquisition happened, it caused a lot of our other portfolio companies to raise their ambition. Mark Wise. ZIERLER: What did you see as your primary contributions and conclusions with your thesis research? Some of it is subconscious. But the crypto theme is so unique that we decided to create a dedicated fund (a first for Sequoia, ed.) I originally joined in the Control and Dynamical Systems Department. 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. Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia, has been on both sides of the table, as an entrepreneur and investor. Do we live in a many worlds thing? BCS national champion ( 2013) Sean Maguire (born March 11, 1994) is an American football quarterback. Where did you see an opportunity to work on your own project, do original research? John was a huge part in this holographic principle idea. As ever with high-earning, high-profile . 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 an interesting thing, because I think John changes many people's lives. Solar starting in the early 2000s2003 to like 2012 got incredible attention both from VCs but also from government subsidies. One is people respect John so much that you don't want to disappoint John. Or is it still premature? MAGUIRE: No. The day I got back, I went to graduation. He is also an angel investor. That happened, and then in 2015 there was this thing called the firewall paradox. Texas A&M (OA) Accomplishments and honors. John rules out of love, and you don't want to disappoint him. MAGUIRE: Sequoia enters shortly thereafter, but basically in the summer of 2019. That then led to a lot of evolutions over time. 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. TipLink enables users to send crypto or NFTs with just a link. Mathematicians have studied hyperbolic geometry to death and have learned incredibly beautiful things. He dropped out of MIT. I was doing projects on the computer, hanging out in hacker forums for 10 hours a day in IRC. So, I think John has a smart system. Aharonov is one of these guys that's always doing things very differently than other people. Shaun Maguire. Lessons from Academia, Entrepreneurship, and Investing featuring Shaun So, we need some better version of physics that can interpolate between quantum mechanics and general relativity and be consistent with these two things, these two points that don't fit the data. It doesn't matter. 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. This is a true story. MAGUIRE: It's one of these weird things. Then the third major area was quantum information in the 90s, and has now been the glue that has tied many things together. Sequoia invested in Rob Schoelkopf's company, QCI, before I joined. A prerequisite to that is special relativity. When I was at GV I invested in Stripe. 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. It's like, some parents rule out of fear; some parents rule out of love. That is basically hyperbolic geometry. When I first went to John's group, it was like 20 people in the meeting, once a week getting together, people having lunch together during the day sharing ideas, people working on many different topics, working on the future of computing, algorithms for that, hardware for that, working on black holes, working on fundamental quantum mechanics, paradoxes in quantum mechanics, things like this, condensed matter physics. I've brought some people from Caltech into companies I've worked with. I had been very lucky to meet this guy, Patrick Collison, who's a pretty famous founder now. Just knowing where that edge is, is enough. Candidly, with my background of 1.8 GPA in high school and an F in algebra 2, beggars can't be choosers. It wouldn't have been relevant in a five year time frame, but relevant in a fifteen year time frame. You want to live up to his name and reputation. Honestly, I kind of blacked out. There's two things. It really is easy to say that, but doing three to six months of repeatedly showing up repeatedly and having something to say every week because you learned something new, that's what actually matters and that's actually hard to do. 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. I'm not talking about on a physics level. It was more helpful for being able to do diligence. I had literally never done one. ZIERLER: What was the process from John inviting you to the meetings to actually becoming his student? Then another fund that was trying to recruit me did a reference call with my friend Patrick Collison. So, I basically made that decision a long time ago that I wouldn't do it. But they were talking about quantum computing. I think a lot of people were always too afraid to even ask him. I transferred to USC, and I was only there for two years. It's almost a minimalist style. Founders Fund, which is another venture capital fund, invested in both of our companies. 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? Alexei is really introverted. 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. The fourth area is I'm super hyperactive. 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. What was some of the work there? Working with Professor Makarov, I was his only student. I love Caltech, etc. Could you have gone back? ZIERLER: Yup. 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. Sorry, not in ninth grade. ZIERLER: [laughs] Shaun, let's establish now some context. Shaun Maguire's Investing Profile - Sequoia Capital Partner | Signal About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators . We met with and got term sheets from pretty much all the top firms in the Valley. So, we raised a bunch of venture capital. Could you talk to him? We would have gotten there later with the different technology. ZIERLER: I meant relative to where it was maybe 20 or 30 years ago, not relative to Stanford of course. I didn't know anything about quantum information. Magic Eden is the leading destination for NFT discovery, expression, and ownership across digital cultures. From the time I was 9, Ive been obsessed with space. They'll build someone up and then they'll tear them down. It's Friday, September 23, 2022. I think that on the grad student level, the evolution from IQI to IQIM wasn't that big of a deal. 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? Shaun Maguire founded Escape Dynamics, Inc. and Expanse, Inc. When did that happen? Thank you so much for joining me today. It's path-dependent over what happens over the next ten, twenty years. Then it led to starting a company, which did DARPA work for the next seven or eight years. He doesn't tell you where you're going. We say they're massless, because if they were at rest, they'd be massless. Before black holes, a prerequisite to understand them is you have to know some general relativity. Shaun Maguire Ph.D Profile: Contact Information & Network | PitchBook It may seem like a really small thing, but it's the only clue we have that there needs to be something new. One of the things they've learnedthere's this famous essay from a guy named Mark Kac where he asked, "Can you hear the shape of a drum?" I literally couldn't sleep as a kid, I would just think about special relativity. 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. Identified as v4.0.2Now with Pre-Seed Investor Lists FAQ While decentralization allows for a certain type of consumer protections, Maguire still contends that the rulebook of traditional investor protections shouldnt be thrown out. Shaun Maguire, Partner, Sequoia Capital - Topio Networks The vast majority of the individual solar companies failed, but the whole category has been incredibly successful. I sent him a picture. I had this unbelievably lucky thing: one of my friends' dad was a local community college professor. It's a universal thing across many different fields. But it's only those two places where we know that quantum mechanics and general relativity make different predictions. It was unbelievably lonely. For months, when I was 13, I couldnt sleep at night because there was a thought experiment I couldnt understand. MAGUIRE: I would say, a long time ago, I had to make the decision that I would go in another direction. People don't really use that as an example. At Caltech there was this guy, Jerry MarsdenJerrold Marsdenwho is an absolute legend in space physics. 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. 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. For a lot of decision making, centralization can be better for certain types of decisions.. Vise, a company founded by two high-school graduates, raises $45 Lenny Susskind, but actually really, based on a lot of John's ideas as well. In business, my two passions wereI would say there were three. For whatever reason, its their life mission to try to revolutionize the industry theyre going after. At Caltech, everyone talks about the science all the time. Shaun Maguire. Social crypto network Bitclout is now listed on Blockchain.com. Anyway, a bit of an aside. It's a tautology, but it's also 100% correct. Before Sequoia I was at Google Ventures. Sequoia Capital's New Crypto Fund - video Dailymotion [laughs] Math is math, and there's a pretty good history of the math becoming reality. 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. Thank you so much. Whereas there's some areas, like in combinatorics, where you can door like today in machine learningyou can do original work in three months. (It turns out space is curved.) When I came to Caltech, I was going to work with Jerry Marsden. That's a global statement about the object for any surface or three dimensional manifold, etc. He was an incredibly brilliant man and had really good technical instincts, but he was really from the sales and marketing side. 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. Quantum computing and AI are existential, and I think a lot of internet research efforts of Google, those are both Bell Lab equivalents. SHAUN MAGUIRE: I'm beyond thrilled to be here. What were people excited about at that point? And some of these founders dont even understand where it comes from, or how deeply ingrained it is in them. I feel like that's what happened with string theory. Another example would be: in quantum there's a guy, Yakir Aharonov, as in the Aharonov-Bohm effect. It was a tiny department. 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. Maguire said that more important than decentralization for its own sake, is the ability of users to be able to leave with their identity and data, an effort which should protect consumers from platform overreach. Presently, he is Partner at Sequoia Capital. There are probably a thousand solar companies started in that ten year window and at most two or three of them that are meaningful today. 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. 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. I won an NSF Graduate Fellowship and NDSEG Graduate Fellowship, and I kind of in my head had this realization that I was only at Stanford doing probability because that's the thing that I got recommendations for. Feynman is the classic Caltech person. It was a really small major for a school that big. 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. Moore's law had to keep running for an extra five years, and no one knew how long it would run for. Bill Thurston was this guy who's workI had just been fascinated by the guy, and I read a lot of his papers. MAGUIRE: I was doing the same thing. In the late 90s, Juan Maldacena had a big breakthrough there. I also think we were living through a pretty incredible period in semiconductor technology. It's too far outside of our tools right now, and we really don't know what direction to go. It's just how I am wired. Maguire focuses on enterprise,. I think maybe on the faculty level it was a bigger deal, because it changed who was on the committees. Gather hosts virtual spaces for work and play. But as a grad student, especially a social one, you already knew a lot of those people. He would say, "Be here at this time and place." ZIERLER: You mentioned on a day to day basis you utilize your expertise in quantum information fairly rarely. Alexei traveled sometimes, and I think he was very protective of his time in that he wanted you to meet him when he would say, but he would always make time for you. I use physics a lot. Shaun Maguire Profiles | Facebook 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 know that's a long answer. ZIERLER: Shaun, do you have a sense of the origin story of Sequoiawhat niche it was looking to fill when it started? 2020-2021. Earlier this year, Sequoia announced a $500 to $600 million sub-fund dedicated exclusively to buying up cryptocurrencies. I think, sure, the volume of companies is greater now, but Caltech had its hand in some pretty legendary companies in the past. When I was getting recruited by other funds, Patrick was aware. The extroverts are the ones who look at your shoes when you're talking. Ive started five companies. 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. From the time I was 9, I've been obsessed with space. 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. ZIERLER: Besides John, who else was on your committee? Knowde is the marketplace for chemicals, polymers and ingredients. MAGUIRE: I would say they're very similar, and with solar, it wasn't as clear. shaun maguire sequoia wife I had to say yes to it on the spot, so I went to DARPA for a year and a half full-time there. You want him to respect you; you don't want to disappoint him. When did that start for you? It took me years after to really understand it. At Sequoia, we have a lot of these flywheels, if I'm honest. I had some aptitude. As an investor, you want to have intuition, but you also need to check your intuition with lots of diligence on things.