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How did that play out? Shaun Maguire is Partner at Sequoia Capital Ltd. See Shaun Maguire's compensation, career history, education, & memberships. Alexei is a mathematician. They've lost a lot of the goodwill of public markets. In some of these other fields, it takes years. I am an absolute crypto maxi, but I think there are a lot of things that are misunderstood by the masses today, Maguire said. At my job I'm dealing with incredible rate of change, I'm dealing with incredible amounts of data, and physics gives you frameworks to make sense of all this and try to come up with heuristic laws and ways to think about things which are very powerful for investing. I think it depends on a lot of things that play out. MAGUIRE: John. People don't really use that as an example. 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. I kind of stopped going to school. ZIERLER: On a technical level, I wonder if you can explain, what was the relevance in this field? So, now, your default is sitting next to experimentalists as a theorist at events and on committees and all that. Shaun, for the last part of our talk, just one retrospective question and then one going forward. So, I've always been attracted to people like that. I met Patrick at a Founders Fund event many years ago. I came back in 2012. I think these are actually wormholes, and that's a huge point of disagreement. ZIERLER: That's pretty cool. 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. So, I think that's something that's really powerful about Caltech. It took a long time to get to that point. Can the same be said at this point for what quantum information, what quantum computing will be good for? Imagine having a relationship between the masses of photons and the shape of space. 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. Physicists say all the time, "Simulating physical systems: quantum computers are clearly going to be important for that." Or my Caltech title? Another was the way black body radiation happens. Why Sequoia, Others Bet $40 Million on an Anonymous Crypto Founder Let me tell you, that's one of the lessons of studying either quantum mechanics or general relativity: your instincts are oftentimes wrong, so you have to actually go do the calculations. It was unbelievably lonely. When did that happen? ZIERLER: Finally Shaun, going forward, do you have a fluid view about your relationship with academia? 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. It's a very interesting style. So, we became friends. Shaun Maguire Ph.D General Information. I was lucky enough to work with him. One of the big evolutions in the early 90s was this thing called the holographic principle. I don't even really remember. 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. Honeywell I don't think is a great comp; they don't have the same profit engine that Bell Labs has. Trying to understand these discrepancies led to quantum mechanics. There was oneI think it was shortly after I was 13for about six months I couldn't sleep at night. The best founders are just so obsessed with what theyre doing that they cannot turn off. It took me years after to really understand it. Once you get to the cutting edge, it's not that hard to keep up. He told Sequoia, "You guys should hire Shaun." MAGUIRE: It's what Stephen Hawking is famous for, but I didn't understand at all the stuff Hawking had done. Because it's an extra three factors of two you had to get. Harry Maguire is the world's most expensive centre-back and captain of arguably the world's most famous football club. I really did the PhD for myself. I was probably taking eight classes a quarter. MAGUIRE: It's one of these weird things. Anyway, a bit of an aside. ZIERLER: Did you officially unenroll from Stanford at that point? It was a good investment for governments. We call that quantum gravity. That's another area where Google has done an incredible job, is machine learning research. Before Sequoia I was at Google Ventures. ZIERLER: So then what happens next? It's funny because John has a veryit's maybe not the style you would think. I didn't really have much of a formal background in it or anything. MAGUIRE: We don't know. Before black holes, a prerequisite to understand them is you have to know some general relativity. Another was industrials. Or is it something entirely. I try to keep up with all those fields. Don Valentine, the founder of the firm, he had been at some of the top semiconductor companies of the past, including Fairchild and National. It was more helpful for being able to do diligence. Founders Fund had flown us to an island off Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Vise, a company founded by two high-school graduates, raises $45 There has already been a lot of great results there, and I'm sure there are more to come. My job as a VC is much more about business strategy, hiring people, managing people, understanding human psychology, understanding market psychology, understanding where the puck is going in terms of technological trends, things like that. LayerZero is an omnichain interoperability protocol that enables trustless cross-chain dApp development. Will you be my advisor? It's not a regulated monopoly, but they havenot supposed to say thisbut they have a monopoly on search. shaun maguire sequoia wife https://iccleveland.org/wp-content/themes/icc/images/empty/thumbnail.jpg 150 150 ICC ICC https://iccleveland.org/wp-content/themes/icc . 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. 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. I sent him a picture. There are certain shapes that have differentthey have the same eigenvalues, same to the Laplacian, with different geometries. The third thing to say is physics teaches you a way to think. Maguire focuses on enterprise,. They were investing in flying carsKittyhawkjust two days ago said that they're shutting down. NFL legend JJ Watt and wife Kealia invest in Burnley I'm delighted to be here with Dr. Shaun Maguire. He received an undergraduate degree from the University of Southern . I think it's because it's just in some ways it's unknowable. MAGUIRE: My academic background is pretty unusual. Google will do better than say, Meta or Facebook, but Apple has changed the way ad search works recently and made it a lot harder for their competitors, and they're getting a lot of ad market share, so it'll be interesting to see what happens to Google in that context. My PhD is a very toy regime of three-dimensional gravity, two dimensional quantum sidesAdS, three; CFT, two. Mathematicians know a lot of things; I don't think we're yet well-known enough by the physicists. 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. MAGUIRE: Very rarely. 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.. We still don't know much about quantum gravity but we're making some progress. A spherical drum makes a different sound than an oval drum, which makes a different sound than a square drum. ZIERLER: As you got comfortable in the field, where did you see an opportunity to contribute? 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. From the time I was 9, I've been obsessed with space. It turns out the answer is no. I didn't know anything about quantum information. The big bang one issomehow people don't really talk about that. Just knowing where that edge is, is enough. 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. It became a program. Harry Maguire: What happened? - The Athletic Posted By : / how do i access my talk21 email /; Under :eaglestone village lambertville, mieaglestone village lambertville, mi You have to claw your way from hell to get to the edge. I got A pluses in a lot of my classes. I could go on and on. Another is this idea that people have called ER = EPREinstein-Rosen equals Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen. I've also been fascinated by computers, which I would say is slightly different than science. MAGUIRE: No. 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. 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. He was also a Partner at GV. Now at this point I'm maybe a 25 year old or something, I think was when I was coming back to Caltech. It's my Hogwarts. In all the classical physics, optics, Newtonian mechanics, etc., and classical electromagnetism, that didn't make any sense. It's close enough to the core business that it's a very smart strategic thing to invest in. ZIERLER: Did you think about quantum information at all at Stanford? 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? 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 mean for all intents and purposes, even if it's deterministic, it's such a complex system no one can predict, and I don't think it's yet set onthe fact that humans used rockets instead of some alternative technology to get to space is in part a function on when World War II happened and when the Cold War happened. 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. I still don'tno oneI don't know anything about quantum mechanics. Alexei is really introverted. I don't know, I was learning the rest. Honestly, I kind of blacked out. Some of it is implicit. Everyone was telling mepeople on both sides didn't understand why I was doing both. I was born in 1985, so I was always trying to mess around with computers. Texas A&M (OA) Accomplishments and honors. People would know who he is and know the companies he started. I think that as an investor, it's actually incredibly important. When I was nine years old, I became really passionate about the solar system. This is a true story. Just to give you some examples of people from different domains, in mathematics there's this guy, Bill Thurston, who pioneered hyperbolic geometry. ZIERLER: When did you first appreciate the connections between black holes and quantum information? And theres a lot of wisdom in there, Maguire says. 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. What I was actually most interested was space. What has stayed with you from IQIM and Caltech in general? Skip to main content. They ebb and flow, so I try to go where the action is. I don't want to sell for a billion dollars now, I want to sell for $20 billion. He also serves as Chairman and Advisor at Vise. Sequoia's Shaun Maguire on competition and conviction in - Yahoo! I feel like that's what happened with string theory. MAGUIRE: Yeah. At Sequoia, we have a lot of these flywheels, if I'm honest. I've brought some people from Caltech into companies I've worked with. At Caltech there was this guy, Jerry MarsdenJerrold Marsdenwho is an absolute legend in space physics. They're not that" They're really, really smart, but having that exposure really raises your own personal ambition. I would say a bunch of the other prominent, early investors were really more coming from the technical side. As an investor and adviser, Shaun has worked with companies building everything from quantum computers to self-driving cars. 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. Quantum information not too much. So, I don't stay up perfectly, but I do try to stay up with the really big results. Because I had come from a math background, I found that yes, I could talk to Alexei. 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. That's another example of something where it didn't make sense with the classical treatment. Shaun Maguire, Sequoia Capital Ltd: Profile and Biography A saddle is what we call negatively curved. MAGUIRE: My job title is I'm a general partner at Sequoia Capital. MAGUIRE: First of all, I could not love John more, could not be more grateful to John, could not think more highly of John. Essential Advice for Founders | Shaun Maguire, Sequoia Capital One of the tensions I have in my head is that I think people sometimes forget that a lot of the consumer protections put in place by US law were won out of hard-fought lessons over like a century. String theory is one. She recruited me onto a pretty crazy project related to the war in Afghanistan. He just gives you breadcrumbs along the way when you need them. And that all comes from a huge amount of money that got poured into a basket of approaches, and those things were all able to compete and evolve. Shaun Maguire - The Montgomery Summit He dropped out of MIT. 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. That was the next huge jump in this area. MAGUIRE: I will do my best to explain the arc here. Dr. Shaun Maguire serves as a Partner at Sequoia Capital. 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 fourth area is I'm super hyperactive. The Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire. So, I think John has a smart system. I felt like I just had to get to the cutting edge. MAGUIRE: I would say, a long time ago, I had to make the decision that I would go in another direction. He had, every Wednesday morning, a group of literally three kids that were interested in these things, so we would go and he would teach us some mathematical problem solving. Physics is very powerful. Another is just the network of people. So, we raised a bunch of venture capital. Some of these things are so dependent on so many other variables. Caldera enables dynamic Web3 experiences by enabling developers to launch performant application-specific blockchains. After the fact, I would say my post hoc analysis is that almost anyone that shows up for three to six month, you kind of default become his student. ZIERLER: Relatedly, I wonder where you see all of this investment in quantum information within the broader context of venture capital. 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. My PhD was basically making a bunch of connections between these ideas. He was also an interesting, out of the box human, so I found him really exciting. Lessons from Academia, Entrepreneurship, and Investing featuring Shaun 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. The day I got back, I went to graduation. You can register here. It was a crazy thing, but Jerry, in my first year, had a medical complication and died during my first year. MAGUIRE: Sequoia enters shortly thereafter, but basically in the summer of 2019. With computers, it just seemed like the most important technology of the time. You want to live up to his name and reputation. I think that on the grad student level, the evolution from IQI to IQIM wasn't that big of a deal. Show more Show more But, just by having this incredible profit engine that you can pump into these other ideas, I think there are a lot of similarities. Did you have any interface with that world? When the Figma acquisition happened, it caused a lot of our other portfolio companies to raise their ambition. I left Stanford with a master's degree and went to Caltech. Where did you see an opportunity to work on your own project, do original research? This other founder was saying some things I don't think are correct and saying it in a really arrogant way to Patrick, and Patrick was pushing back and was correct in his understanding of quantum computation. So, at that point, I wasn't just a beggar anymore. ZIERLER: To foreshadow to what happened next, were you on a trajectory of pursuing an academic career and then some opportunity came up? Our Founders; Our Companies; 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. But photons are always moving, and they have a mass when they're actually moving from a relativistic perspective. We live in a space where photons have a mass. 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. 214. 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. The goal of quantum gravity is to reconcile these discrepancies. Shaun Maguire Investor Profile: Portfolio & Exits | PitchBook Seed/Early. He is also an angel investor. So, I did this and got to ask a question to the astronauts, and that honestly made space really tangible to me. What were people excited about? He is a Co-Founder and served as Board Member at Expanse. There are a lot of candidate theories that fit under that umbrella. I had been very lucky to meet this guy, Patrick Collison, who's a pretty famous founder now. It was a tiny department. I was fascinated by what made these numbers go up and down. I had a pretty good intuition about how to solve them and ended up talking to Professor Arratia. But even more important to me is someone thats just irrationally motivated. They'll build someone up and then they'll tear them down. This anti-de Sitter space, it's like living in a space-time where you're stacking a bunch of negatively curved manifolds on top of each other. 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. He would always offer that. Knowde is the marketplace for chemicals, polymers and ingredients. I think everyone that's been at Caltech, it has to lower your ego. I had three jobs. Can you make time for me?" What was seen as the holy grail? It was when I was at DARPA, that's when I got exposed to quantum information. This wasnt necessarily what I thought I would do long term. Shaun Maguire | Sequoia Capital US/Europe Could you have gone back? ZIERLER: Coming in in 2012, did you recognize the transition from IQI to IQIM? I was doing projects on the computer, hanging out in hacker forums for 10 hours a day in IRC. The string theorists weren't asking to have all these articles written about them and get all this hype in a lot of ways. I think Bell Labs, one of the key things, they basically had a regulated monopoly. View the profiles of people named Shaun Maguire. Quantum computing and AI are existential, and I think a lot of internet research efforts of Google, those are both Bell Lab equivalents. What was some of that original work for you? I think there are probably actually wormholes, but it doesn't matter for the sake of the work. Is this like a common narrative in venture capital? Magic Eden is the leading destination for NFT discovery, expression, and ownership across digital cultures. Subscribe to Chain Reaction onApple,Spotifyor your alternative podcast platform of choice to keep up with us every week. Look at solar. John was a huge part in this holographic principle idea. You can interpret that as a lower bound of the masses of particles allowed in the space. Don had mainly been in sales and marketing. By normal human standards, I'm an introvert. The crypto category has dealt with plenty of skeptics, some in the venture capital community, who believe that the sectors benefits are being oversold and that the web3 promise of decentralization is just smoke and mirrors. In high school, I didn't know about the IMO, USAMO, AIME, or any of these things. In many ways was the core person that drove it in the beginning, if not the core person. It wouldn't be relevant to the business model in a parent company. I didn't know exactly what to do. There's so much prerequisite knowledge, it takes so long to get to the point where you can actually make a contribution. 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? SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches rockets and spacecraft. So, John never tells you you're wrong. I think I will definitely have more involvement with Caltech at some point in my life. That's a global statement about the object for any surface or three dimensional manifold, etc. I got lucky in that when I was leaving DARPA, we came up with an idea. Founders Fund, which is another venture capital fund, invested in both of our companies. ZIERLER: What was the process from John inviting you to the meetings to actually becoming his student? I'll pause. 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. These things change over time. He was a physics major. What advice should first-time founders heed? Or did some interesting debates come up? MAGUIRE: The point of connection to Google Ventures was simple. Championships. 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. Robco rethinks how products are made, using modular robot systems. Apr 26, 2023. As ever with high-earning, high-profile . So, I really love academia. One of the things that's a flywheel: because Sequoia has so much historical success and so many legendary companies in our portfolio, when our foundersjust as a very recent example, Sequoia had invested in a company called Figma.