Michael Moritz. Just to give you some examples of people from different domains, in mathematics there's this guy, Bill Thurston, who pioneered hyperbolic geometry. ZIERLER: Did you get any curveball questions? Basically, starting in eighth grade, I got really disillusioned with school. I didn't know anything about quantum information. It was a tiny department. It was when I was at DARPA, that's when I got exposed to quantum information. I was so nervous. Where did you see an opportunity to work on your own project, do original research? I don't want to sell for a billion dollars now, I want to sell for $20 billion. 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. ZIERLER: So then what happens next? I originally self-studied quantum mechanics, and I was able to have some intuition. Will you be my advisor? There's some technical definition that gives you that, but you can have negative, zero, or positive curvature. 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. An equivalent thing is in quantum mechanics, people still debate the interpretation around wave function collapse and things like this. They're not that" They're really, really smart, but having that exposure really raises your own personal ambition. SHAUN MAGUIRE: I'm beyond thrilled to be here. 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. ZIERLER: What kind of role did John play in all of these decisions? I like high-IQ founders. Do you mean my job title? Partner @sequoia // @caltech physics PhD // quantum space crypto security (it's a niche but high impact field) In all the classical physics, optics, Newtonian mechanics, etc., and classical electromagnetism, that didn't make any sense. I sold it for a billion dollars, all of that. MAGUIRE: I'm actually not so sure about that. The vast majority of the individual solar companies failed, but the whole category has been incredibly successful. 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. ZIERLER: I meant relative to where it was maybe 20 or 30 years ago, not relative to Stanford of course. 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've also been absolutely fascinated by science. People don't quite give credit, but Caltech's own Arnold Beckman in many ways was maybe the first VC. They'll build someone up and then they'll tear them down. It wasn't as clear actually, if you go back 15, 20 years, that solar would be able to get to the price levels it's at today. Some of it is implicit. Or did you know in the back of your mind that you'd be doing something besides academia? ZIERLER: Shaun, do you have a sense of the origin story of Sequoiawhat niche it was looking to fill when it started? Now, power cost per watt generated by solar is roughly one-tenth of fossil fuels at this point, depending on where you are. Social crypto network Bitclout is now listed on Blockchain.com. 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. In some ways, one way to view whats happening in crypto right now is its almost like throwing all the old rules out and starting with a blank canvas.. [few minutes pause] When you got to the group meetings with John, what were some of the big debates that were happening? 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. MAGUIRE: Sequoia enters shortly thereafter, but basically in the summer of 2019. ZIERLER: And when does Sequoia enter into the mix? So, we became friends. Some of the big ideasone that John was involved in was bringing in the ideas of error correcting codes, that nature might be behaving like a quantum error correcting code on some really fundamental level. Or did some interesting debates come up? So, that was the question. Eventually with where the work went, I didn't know anything at all about quantum field theory or string theory, which I had to learn over the next few years. I took a lot of tough graduate math classes. It doesn't matter. 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. Growing up, I had a cousin who studied computer science at UCLA, who made a huge impact on me. Mathematicians know a lot of things; I don't think we're yet well-known enough by the physicists. 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? 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. 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. 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. So, I did this and got to ask a question to the astronauts, and that honestly made space really tangible to me. That's kind of the core intuition of behind the holographic principle. ZIERLER: Besides John, who else was on your committee? Some of it is subconscious. The goal of quantum gravity is to reconcile these discrepancies. Did you know Rob? MAGUIRE: No. So, that became the most exciting thing by far in quantum gravity, and now the field is on a journey to unite the fields even more closely. He started mentoring me. John rules out of love, and you don't want to disappoint him. 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. View the profiles of people named Shaun Maguire. Shaun Maguire is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm that helps daring founders build legendary technology companies. Ive started five companies. Mark Wise. Apr 26, 2023. I also think we were living through a pretty incredible period in semiconductor technology. They ebb and flow, so I try to go where the action is. But, just by having this incredible profit engine that you can pump into these other ideas, I think there are a lot of similarities. 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. He taught computer science and astronomy. Posted By : / how do i access my talk21 email /; Under :eaglestone village lambertville, mieaglestone village lambertville, mi MAGUIRE: My read is John is just testing your commitment. I literally couldn't sleep as a kid, I would just think about special relativity. The Boring Company creates safe, fast-to-dig, and low-cost transportation, utility, and freight tunnels. LayerZero is an omnichain interoperability protocol that enables trustless cross-chain dApp development. (It turns out space is curved.) So, now, your default is sitting next to experimentalists as a theorist at events and on committees and all that. Ive got to believe that they work incredibly hard in part to make their families proud. The Wire Digital is helping global businesses make smarter decisions. In high school, I didn't know about the IMO, USAMO, AIME, or any of these things. I was chairman of my company. It was a happy accident. Sequoia Capital: "Crypto is one of the two big sectors of the next 10 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. Then the next version of that is to tear them down and make them seem like they were too arrogant, like, "Oh, it's not working." 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 have a degree from Stanford. You know for the vast majority of compute, you want it to be centralized. It was this weird, internal drive. Physna codifies 3D models into detailed data for software applications. I've brought some people from Caltech into companies I've worked with. Presently, he is Partner at Sequoia Capital. I was randomly walking through the halls of the math department, and there weren't many math undergrads there. ZIERLER: Does the comparison hold up insofar as with solar startups, we knew what solar would be good for, right? My PhD is a very toy regime of three-dimensional gravity, two dimensional quantum sidesAdS, three; CFT, two. Astronomy becomes interest in black holes, which leads to people like John Preskill, you know, legends of the field. 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. But photons are always moving, and they have a mass when they're actually moving from a relativistic perspective. ZIERLER: Did you officially unenroll from Stanford at that point? Another example is fiber-optic communication, where in the late 90s, early 2000s, there was an incredible amount of venture capital money and government subsidies that went into building fiber infrastructure. MAGUIRE: It's what Stephen Hawking is famous for, but I didn't understand at all the stuff Hawking had done. A prerequisite to that is special relativity. I think it depends on a lot of things that play out. MAGUIRE: I'm always playing catch-up. Shaun Maguire Ph.D General Information. I emailed him from Afghanistan and said, "I'm coming back to Caltech. He dropped out of MIT. See Shaun Maguire's recent investments in Series A Cloud Infrastructure, other investment areas, and co-investors. You need physics to understand that. 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. In some cases, they were wildly misunderstood as kids and have chips on their shoulders. One of my deep firsthand experiences that the media often time wants to build people up to tear them down, and I've just seen it. He was always accessible. I started the second company with two friends and I got to know a lot of VCs raising money for it. It's like, some parents rule out of fear; some parents rule out of love. It's not a regulated monopoly, but they havenot supposed to say thisbut they have a monopoly on search. But even more important to me is someone thats just irrationally motivated. In many ways was the core person that drove it in the beginning, if not the core person. So, I jumped on that bandwagon, joined that group of people. But I think he's testing people's commitment, which I think is a really smart strategy that not enough people do. Watershed is a software platform that helps companies get to zero carbon fast. What was seen as the holy grail? It wasn't as obvious, but it was obvious there would be certain niche applications of solar. Five years ago, quantum information was moving way faster than machine learning. You have to claw your way from hell to get to the edge. Prior to GV, Shaun co-founded two companies: Qadium and Escape Dynamics. 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. It was purely just my curiosity. So, I don't stay up perfectly, but I do try to stay up with the really big results. ZIERLER: From your own perspective, do you tend to think of this in somewhat of a horse race metaphor? It's a very interesting style. 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. 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 had some aptitude. Honestly, I kind of blacked out. Shaun Maguire | Sequoia Capital US/Europe That's another example of something where it didn't make sense with the classical treatment. Shaun to start, will you please tell me your title and institutional affiliation? [laughs] Math is math, and there's a pretty good history of the math becoming reality. As a teenager, he played in the world's top league for the video game Counter-Strikeand got an F in Algebra II. It became a program. I was fascinated by what made these numbers go up and down. I think that on the grad student level, the evolution from IQI to IQIM wasn't that big of a deal. ZIERLER: What was the process from John inviting you to the meetings to actually becoming his student? What could quantum gravity actually achieve? I didnt even go to class most of the time1.8 GPA in 10th grade and an F in algebra II. He didn't take me as a student, but he told me to come to his group meetings, so I did. I had been interested in this field called hyperbolic geometry. I think everyone that's been at Caltech, it has to lower your ego. Can you make time for me?" She recruited me onto a pretty crazy project related to the war in Afghanistan. I originally joined in the Control and Dynamical Systems Department. In some very crude sense, one says that information is conserved, the other says that information is destroyed. I've been reading your notes from Afghanistan." Twitter View on Twitter. ZIERLER: That's pretty cool. I had to say yes to it on the spot, so I went to DARPA for a year and a half full-time there. What were people excited about at that point? 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. Actually the day I defended, I flew to Israel to get married. I think some of the physicists didn't quite understand the math language that he was using, but Alexei is a path breaker. Is that relevant to the kinds of things you do on a day to day basis? In some ways there's a parallel to the past. 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. For whatever reason, its their life mission to try to revolutionize the industry theyre going after. Another example would be: in quantum there's a guy, Yakir Aharonov, as in the Aharonov-Bohm effect. It's actually a directly relevant story, so I'll share it here. Iron Fish is a Layer 1 blockchain that provides privacy guarantees on every single transaction. Sequoia's Shaun Maguire on competition and conviction in - Yahoo! I'm not talking about on a physics level. Shaun, for the last part of our talk, just one retrospective question and then one going forward. It was basically learning, reading papers, talking to lots of people, going to group meetings for a long time. 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. 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. ZIERLER: Yup. 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? 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. Could you find him? I feel like that's what happened with string theory. It was a good investment for governments. I've invested in a lot of companies. MAGUIRE: By Caltech's standards, I'm an extreme extrovert. I've used people from Caltech as expert diligence when I've looked at companies. Dr. Maguire is also on the board of 5 other companies. MAGUIRE: Yeah, I don't think they're racing toward a singular finish line. You want to live up to his name and reputation. MAGUIRE: Those are days you don't want to remember. Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital, chats with DeSo Founder Nader Al-Naji on a number of topics across crypto, startups, and venture capital. 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. I had the opportunity to win an awardoriginally a $10.5 million contract to go build some of that thing that I helped come up with the idea for. ZIERLER: When did you first appreciate the connections between black holes and quantum information? What was some of the work there? DAVID ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, director of the Caltech Heritage Project. 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. ZIERLER: Finally Shaun, going forward, do you have a fluid view about your relationship with academia? NFL legend JJ Watt and wife Kealia invest in Burnley Mathematicians have studied hyperbolic geometry to death and have learned incredibly beautiful things. I had literally never done one. A spherical drum makes a different sound than an oval drum, which makes a different sound than a square drum. I think there's a second thing. When I was nine years old, I became really passionate about the solar system. 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. I had this strong background in probability, so I went into the math department and started working with someoneNikolai Makarov, who's a legend in mathto do some theoretical probability work. 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. ZIERLER: Did you think about quantum information at all at Stanford? What I was actually most interested was space. ZIERLER: What's the connecting point from Stanford to Caltech? Patrick is a huge lover of physics. It was entertaining. 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 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. There has already been a lot of great results there, and I'm sure there are more to come. 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. So, I didn't really know anyone at Sequoia, but I was getting recruited by other firms. People don't really use that as an example. Adam Crafton. Previously he Co-Founded Expanse which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $800M. As a teenager, he played in the world's top league for the video game Counter-Strikeand got an F in Algebra II. Vise, a company founded by two high-school graduates, raises $45 MAGUIRE: Yes, I do. Shaun Maguire, Partner, Sequoia Capital - Topio Networks 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: Others know this stuff better than I do, but last I checked, there are only two places in nature that we're aware of where quantum mechanics and general relativity make different predictions about what should happen. 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. (Sequoia will have two board seats at the company, held by Gupta, who focuses on later-stage investments, and Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, whose concentration is on investing in early-stage . One of the things is Caltech is a very humbling place. As ever with high-earning, high-profile . I pitched everyoneexcept Sequoia, because they had a conflict. It's obvious that for things like material science, when quantum computers are powerful enough, they will play an important role in material discovery. That day, I was working. For months, when I was 13, I couldnt sleep at night because there was a thought experiment I couldnt understand. 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. He serves as a Board Member at Luminar, Knowde & Gather. Shaun Maguire's Investing Profile - Sequoia Capital Partner | Signal View who can give you a warm intro to Shaun and 30,000+ top startup investors by joining Signal. MAGUIRE: The point of connection to Google Ventures was simple. 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. Sequoia Capital's New Crypto Fund - video Dailymotion I actually think that with Google, they've lost a lot of the goodwill internally. ZIERLER: As you got comfortable in the field, where did you see an opportunity to contribute? 2020-2021. For a lot of decision making, centralization can be better for certain types of decisions.. Deep Mind is now owned by Google, so I think that is a good one. I'm delighted to be here with Dr. Shaun Maguire. I try to keep up with all those fields. Candidly, with my background of 1.8 GPA in high school and an F in algebra 2, beggars can't be choosers. 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. Anyway, a bit of an aside. The hardware is going to be really valuable. For months, when I was 13, I couldn't sleep at night because there was a thought experiment I couldn't understand. Alexei Kitaev. Basically, I was investing in companies and taking board seats. 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. Shaun Maguire's Investing Profile - Sequoia Capital Partner | Signal Definitely had to learn all that. Even within string theory, there are many different branches and ideas. It's too far outside of our tools right now, and we really don't know what direction to go. Founders Fund had flown us to an island off Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Shaun Maguire: Sequoia Capital has historically had several types of technology funds that match the size of the companies we've invested in. MAGUIRE: Yeah. Sequoia partners and specialists help outlier founders at every stage bend the arc of the possible. Where do you see some really new directions? The field has moved so fast. MAGUIRE: Of course! ZIERLER: The point of connection to Sequoia, how did that happen? John was a huge part in this holographic principle idea. He was also a Partner at GV. That's a global statement about the object for any surface or three dimensional manifold, etc. He was also an interesting, out of the box human, so I found him really exciting. ZIERLER: [laughs] Shaun, this has been a great conversation. Not completely explicitly, but a little bit subconsciously and implicitly. 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. ZIERLER: [laughs] Shaun, let's establish now some context. He serves as Board Member at Physna and Monad. Where do you see some of the parallels? 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. The extroverts are the ones who look at your shoes when you're talking. Harry Maguire is the world's most expensive centre-back and captain of arguably the world's most famous football club. I sent him a picture. Another is that Jeongwan Haah had just done this three dimensional error correcting code work, or was just finishing. 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. That's the way I would describe it. We live in a space where photons have a mass. In some of these other fields, it takes years. But as a grad student, especially a social one, you already knew a lot of those people. Thank you so much for joining me today. Physicists say all the time, "Simulating physical systems: quantum computers are clearly going to be important for that." I just kind of knew this thing, the information paradox, and all of that. Shaun Maguire (Sequoia) + Samir Vasavada (Vise) - Yahoo Finance That was one theme. It became a $110 million program. He received an undergraduate degree from the University of Southern . Identified as v4.0.2Now with Pre-Seed Investor Lists FAQ 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. ZIERLER: What were you doing at Google? You can listen to the entireinterview with Maguireon our podcast, Chain Reaction. Gather hosts virtual spaces for work and play. Shaun Maguire Ph.D Profile: Contact Information & Network | PitchBook I think Caltech might have produced a comparable number, or maybe even more high-impact companies in the past. So, John never tells you you're wrong. It's close enough to the core business that it's a very smart strategic thing to invest in. I think that's a really good thing. It took a long time to get to that point. AMP Robotics is changing the face of recycling with high-speed guided robotics. I'll say something that can get me in trouble. 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. So, that's one thing that is really powerful. I also, though, I think a lot of string theorists have gotten a bad rap. I was lucky enough to work with him. 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.
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