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. I think it's because it's just in some ways it's unknowable. It was unbelievably lonely. To answer the question: bachelor's degree from USC, University of Southern California, but there's a lot more to the story. But as a grad student, especially a social one, you already knew a lot of those people. I was fascinated by what made these numbers go up and down. Where do you see some of the parallels? Solar starting in the early 2000s2003 to like 2012 got incredible attention both from VCs but also from government subsidies. Then another fund that was trying to recruit me did a reference call with my friend Patrick Collison. The third was Silicon Valley, where people are making this technology using physics and other things to bring it forward. But they were talking about quantum computing. 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. That day, I was working. Shaun Maguire is Partner at Sequoia Capital. Or did you know in the back of your mind that you'd be doing something besides academia? Are you not looking at faculty appointments? Caltech means a lot to me. The vast majority of the individual solar companies failed, but the whole category has been incredibly successful. One thing: I think a lot of the things they were investing in were not related to their core business. Then, we went straight on my honeymoon. He serves as a Board Member at Luminar, Knowde & Gather. Do you stay on top of the literature? In the late 90s, Juan Maldacena had a big breakthrough there. Skip to main content. Backstory. Everyone was telling mepeople on both sides didn't understand why I was doing both. As an investor and adviser, Shaun has worked with companies building everything from quantum computers to self-driving cars. 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. 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. The Boring Company creates safe, fast-to-dig, and low-cost transportation, utility, and freight tunnels. Because it's an extra three factors of two you had to get. I sent him a picture. In a conversation on TechCrunchs new web3 podcast Chain Reaction, Sequoia crypto partner Shaun Maguire talked about the firms commitment to the sector, regulatory challenges and what plenty of crypto investors still dont understand. I don't know what shape or form that will take. ZIERLER: Shaun, to zoom out from your specific research, what were people talking about with regard to quantum gravity during this time? Was that a connecting point to Sequoia? So, I've always been attracted to people like that. Championships. Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital, chats with DeSo Founder Nader Al-Naji on a number of topics across crypto, startups, and venture capital.Shaun was. Shaun Maguire is Partner at Sequoia Capital Ltd. See Shaun Maguire's compensation, career history, education, & memberships. When I proposed to my wife, I blacked out that day. It turns out the answer is no. He would always offer that. The Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire. ZIERLER: Did you think about quantum information at all at Stanford? Before, there was too much incompatibility in the languages these fields would use, so it was just hard to even communicate. When the Figma acquisition happened, it caused a lot of our other portfolio companies to raise their ambition. 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. I got A pluses in a lot of my classes. Feynman is the classic Caltech person. Posted By : / how do i access my talk21 email /; Under :eaglestone village lambertville, mieaglestone village lambertville, mi Is this like a common narrative in venture capital? MAGUIRE: I would say, a long time ago, I had to make the decision that I would go in another direction. When did that happen? There are a lot of candidate theories that fit under that umbrella. 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. Another is how the universe was formed, like the big bang. 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. 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. It was when I was at DARPA, that's when I got exposed to quantum information. He would say, "Be here at this time and place." Shaun Maguire, a crypto partner of Sequoia Capital, one of the venture capital firms most active when it comes to investments in the cryptocurrency space, issued its opinion on the future of many VCs investing in crypto. I didn't even know the prerequisites to be in that world, so it took an extra few years. Jerry had just done incredible work in understanding our solar system, orbits, trajectories for space crafts, and things like that. I would say it just doesn't matter. My physics passion was in ninth grade. I actually think that with Google, they've lost a lot of the goodwill internally. Honeywell I don't think is a great comp; they don't have the same profit engine that Bell Labs has. I literally emailed John Preskill from Afghanistan. Ive got to believe that they work incredibly hard in part to make their families proud. 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?" 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 . I don't really remember any of it. It's not talked about that way, but Shockley Semiconductor was originally a division of Beckman Instruments. 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. Did you know Rob? I was chairman of my company. I don't know, I was learning the rest. 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. Now at this point I'm maybe a 25 year old or something, I think was when I was coming back to Caltech. ZIERLER: In your work on wormholes, just to clarify, are these toy models? I would say a bunch of the other prominent, early investors were really more coming from the technical side. He is a Director of AMP Robotics, Gather, Physna, and Vise. It's too far outside of our tools right now, and we really don't know what direction to go. What were people excited about? 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 felt like I just had to get to the cutting edge. He serves as Board Member at Physna and Monad. It was purely just my curiosity. 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. The media built them up. 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. 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? 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. It wouldn't be relevant to the business model in a parent company. MAGUIRE: The day after I defended, I flew to Israel to get married, literally. I've brought some people from Caltech into companies I've worked with. Where do you see some really new directions? I literally couldn't sleep as a kid, I would just think about special relativity. It was entertaining. So, they were able to do really amazing work that was not too far away from the core business. 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. Did you have any interface with that world? MAGUIRE: First of all, I could not love John more, could not be more grateful to John, could not think more highly of John. I didn't really have much of a formal background in it or anything. AMP Robotics is changing the face of recycling with high-speed guided robotics. That's a global statement about the object for any surface or three dimensional manifold, etc. One of the ways to measure this is, what do people do on their weekends? The first one was a failure, three of them have been successful, and one is too early to call. Another thing too, to be very candid for me, I have very broad interests. I like high-IQ founders. I went to public school in Orange County, California. Was it related to what he was doing at the time? MAGUIRE: By Caltech's standards, I'm an extreme extrovert. Imagine having a relationship between the masses of photons and the shape of space. Patrick was talking to an extremely famous founder. Or was this really a sudden career shift from what you might do otherwise with a PhD in fundamental physics? They were investing in flying carsKittyhawkjust two days ago said that they're shutting down. 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. Could you have gone back? I sold it for a billion dollars, all of that. ZIERLER: Awesome. He dropped out of MIT. A saddle is what we call negatively curved. It gets us off fossil fuels. I've been reading your notes from Afghanistan." I could go on and on. Some of it is subconscious. 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. It was a tiny department. Growing up, I had a cousin who studied computer science at UCLA, who made a huge impact on me. There's some technical definition that gives you that, but you can have negative, zero, or positive curvature. Presently, he is Partner at Sequoia Capital. Whereas there's some areas, like in combinatorics, where you can door like today in machine learningyou can do original work in three months. Sequoia partners and specialists help outlier founders at every stage bend the arc of the possible. 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. I received my PhD. I would say there are two parts to it. Another was industrials. With my cybersecurity companyI really helped start many companies, but the cybersecurity company onewhich was called Qadium, but then we renamed it to Expansethat's the only one where I was really full-time with my company for many years. It took a long time to get to that point. So, we became friends. Physicists say all the time, "Simulating physical systems: quantum computers are clearly going to be important for that." MAGUIRE: It was simply in having a stronger math background than some people. For example, the thing that motivated quantum mechanics, I think there were three main categories of discrepancies. 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. Knowde is the marketplace for chemicals, polymers and ingredients. That was the next huge jump in this area. There are a lot of people in that camp. You don't know where you're going. 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? The best founders are just so obsessed with what theyre doing that they cannot turn off. Or my Caltech title? 2020-2021. Not completely explicitly, but a little bit subconsciously and implicitly. By navigating this website you agree to our cookie policy. I just had to get to the cutting edge. He had a couple PhD students that were about my age or a little older who became good friends. So, I've been absolutely fascinated by business since I was a little kid. There was oneI think it was shortly after I was 13for about six months I couldn't sleep at night. That was my passion, so I went to Caltech to work with Jerry. The way John works, is it's really a Socratic style. I think there are probably actually wormholes, but it doesn't matter for the sake of the work. ZIERLER: Did you officially unenroll from Stanford at that point? Deep Mind is now owned by Google, so I think that is a good one. As a teenager, he played in the world's top league for the video game Counter-Strikeand got an F in Algebra II. I had some aptitude. 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. What was some of the work there? 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. shaun maguire sequoia wifepapa smurf tattoo. Subscribe to Chain Reaction onApple,Spotifyor your alternative podcast platform of choice to keep up with us every week. Thank you so much for joining me today. What I was actually most interested was space. Basically, I was investing in companies and taking board seats. As a teenager, he played in the world's top league for the video game Counter-Strikeand got an F in Algebra II. Five years ago, quantum information was moving way faster than machine learning. Because I had come from a math background, I found that yes, I could talk to Alexei. ZIERLER: The point of connection to Sequoia, how did that happen? The way I met Patrick is pretty funny. It was a happy accident. At that moment, he becomes your advisor. It was more helpful for being able to do diligence. SHAUN MAGUIRE: I'm beyond thrilled to be here. He served as Board Member at SpinLaunch and AMP . That's kind of the core intuition of behind the holographic principle. 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. I was lucky enough to work with him. You can register here. MAGUIRE: Correct. I feel like that's what happened with string theory. Don had mainly been in sales and marketing. Just think of a few examples. I think everyone that's been at Caltech, it has to lower your ego. One was the stock market. I didnt even go to class most of the time1.8 GPA in 10th grade and an F in algebra II. String theory is one. It's path-dependent over what happens over the next ten, twenty years. I think it depends on a lot of things that play out. He is a Co-Founder and served as Board Member at Expanse. It was basically learning, reading papers, talking to lots of people, going to group meetings for a long time. With computers, it just seemed like the most important technology of the time. 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. 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. When I was getting recruited by other funds, Patrick was aware. Honestly, at the end of my PhD I had three full-time jobs. MAGUIRE: That's a great question. Identified as v4.0.2Now with Pre-Seed Investor Lists FAQ I met Patrick at a Founders Fund event many years ago. I have a degree from Stanford. But it's only those two places where we know that quantum mechanics and general relativity make different predictions. In that world, there is a deep relationship between the waves allowed in the space and the geometry allowed of the space. Or is it something entirely. Sequoia invested in Rob Schoelkopf's company, QCI, before I joined. I originally joined in the Control and Dynamical Systems Department. 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. The founder of Figma is an amazing 30 year old kid who also really loves physics and computers. MAGUIRE: Yes, I do. I pitched everyoneexcept Sequoia, because they had a conflict. ZIERLER: Besides John, who else was on your committee? 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. Do you think about one day becoming a professor? Shaun Maguire founded Escape Dynamics, Inc. and Expanse, Inc. I also think we were living through a pretty incredible period in semiconductor technology. It became a $110 million program. 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. For whatever reason, its their life mission to try to revolutionize the industry theyre going after.

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