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. Basically, starting in eighth grade, I got really disillusioned with school. Can the same be said at this point for what quantum information, what quantum computing will be good for? Another example would be: in quantum there's a guy, Yakir Aharonov, as in the Aharonov-Bohm effect. He serves as a Board Member at Luminar, Knowde & Gather. We had to have a basket of renewables to fight this thing that was starting to happen with global warming. ZIERLER: What were you doing at Google? 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: Did you officially unenroll from Stanford at that point? The day I got back, I went to graduation. I've invested in a lot of companies. because some crypto projects have characteristics and show performance that can't really be measured . I like high-IQ founders. I literally emailed John Preskill from Afghanistan. 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. That was one theme. It wouldn't have been relevant in a five year time frame, but relevant in a fifteen year time frame. I always had that passion, but I've had the science passion which really started with astronomy. That's how I got to know Google Ventures. Posted By : / how do i access my talk21 email /; Under :eaglestone village lambertville, mieaglestone village lambertville, mi 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. I think another thing that's very powerful about Caltech is thatit's actually something that we have in common at Sequoiais that Caltech forces you to raise your ambition. 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 think there's a second thing. Physna codifies 3D models into detailed data for software applications. Another is how the universe was formed, like the big bang. It became a $110 million program. I didnt even go to class most of the time1.8 GPA in 10th grade and an F in algebra II. I was randomly walking through the halls of the math department, and there weren't many math undergrads there. 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. Prior to joining Sequoia in 2019, Dr. Maguire was a Partner at GV, where he led their . ZIERLER: Shaun, to zoom out from your specific research, what were people talking about with regard to quantum gravity during this time? The actual edge doesn't move that quickly. When I was 7 years old, he helped me build my first computer. There are certain shapes that have differentthey have the same eigenvalues, same to the Laplacian, with different geometries. Shaun Maguire is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm that helps daring founders build legendary technology companies. Physics is very powerful. Physics is something I use all the time, because I've invested in a lot of companies that touch atoms. One of the things is Caltech is a very humbling place. 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. ZIERLER: So, this was a real vibrant social scene separate from the science? Many would disagree with me, but I actually think it takes away from the quality of research at Stanford. Shaun is an entrepreneur, investor, and scientist with a broad and eclectic background. It's close enough to the core business that it's a very smart strategic thing to invest in. 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. Actually the day I defended, I flew to Israel to get married. ZIERLER: As you got comfortable in the field, where did you see an opportunity to contribute? I think these are actually wormholes, and that's a huge point of disagreement. Our Founders; Our Companies; MAGUIRE: My academic background is pretty unusual. 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 have always, in science, I'm attracted to people that have been out of the box. 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. MAGUIRE: I think I was a little unusual in that I was pretty social. Astronomy becomes interest in black holes, which leads to people like John Preskill, you know, legends of the field. In my opinion, no question. So, now, your default is sitting next to experimentalists as a theorist at events and on committees and all that. He told Sequoia, "You guys should hire Shaun." When the Figma acquisition happened, it caused a lot of our other portfolio companies to raise their ambition. Those are my heroes, my role models, the people that have done things very differently than other people. Seed/Early. It was a really small major for a school that big. What could quantum gravity actually achieve? Is this like a common narrative in venture capital? SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches rockets and spacecraft. They said, "Man, I love Dylan, but like, I can do it, too. For example, the thing that motivated quantum mechanics, I think there were three main categories of discrepancies. It's almost a minimalist style. A few things: one, I think there are many finish lines; two, I think the future is non-deterministic. I didn't know anything about quantum information. The best founders are just so obsessed with what theyre doing that they cannot turn off. MAGUIRE: It's what Stephen Hawking is famous for, but I didn't understand at all the stuff Hawking had done. ZIERLER: So, it was in some ways really a purely intellectual pursuit for you, then? He is a Co-Founder and served as Board Member at Expanse. 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 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. Or did some interesting debates come up? As ever with high-earning, high-profile . Shaun Maguire: Sequoia Capital has historically had several types of technology funds that match the size of the companies we've invested in. Seed/Early + Growth. That's the way I would describe it. BCS national champion ( 2013) Sean Maguire (born March 11, 1994) is an American football quarterback. MAGUIRE: The day after I defended, I flew to Israel to get married, literally. 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. 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. Now at this point I'm maybe a 25 year old or something, I think was when I was coming back to Caltech. I started at Stanford in 2007 and moved to Caltech in 2009. MAGUIRE: Those are days you don't want to remember. You have to claw your way from hell to get to the edge. 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.. That's kind of the core intuition of behind the holographic principle. MAGUIRE: First of all, I could not love John more, could not be more grateful to John, could not think more highly of John. 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 also serves as Chairman and Advisor at Vise. 214. 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. Candidly, with my background of 1.8 GPA in high school and an F in algebra 2, beggars can't be choosers. . MAGUIRE: By Caltech's standards, I'm an extreme extrovert. 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. 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. It was a good investment for governments. 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. MAGUIRE: I was really into computers as a kid, and really passionate about physics. We don't need to know the exact algorithms that are going to run. It was still pretty easy for me. ZIERLER: Shaun, do you have a sense of the origin story of Sequoiawhat niche it was looking to fill when it started? He was an incredibly brilliant man and had really good technical instincts, but he was really from the sales and marketing side. The arc was that Hawking and others had come up with this information paradox that was basically saying that the general relativity and quantum mechanics make different predictions about the end-state of a black hole. Deep Mind is now owned by Google, so I think that is a good one. Another was the way black body radiation happens. What I was actually most interested was space. I still don'tno oneI don't know anything about quantum mechanics. Or my Caltech title? I had never seen one of these. I don't even really remember. Or is it still premature? MAGUIRE: Very rarely. 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. MAGUIRE: John. I think it's because it's just in some ways it's unknowable. Shaun Maguire's transition from quantum information at Caltech to venture capital at Sequoia makes perfect sense only if one appreciates that in rare cases, the pursuit of a PhD is an expression of pure curiosity, totally disconnected from career ambitions. 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. So, I've been absolutely fascinated by business since I was a little kid. Because it's an extra three factors of two you had to get. MAGUIRE: My read is John is just testing your commitment. ZIERLER: From your own perspective, do you tend to think of this in somewhat of a horse race metaphor? By normal human standards, I'm an introvert. 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. You know for the vast majority of compute, you want it to be centralized. Then I got recruited to work at DARPA by Regina Dugan. That day, I was working. The third thing to say is physics teaches you a way to think. I think everyone that's been at Caltech, it has to lower your ego. I saw these 12 questions and sat down outside his office and started thinking through how to solve these. Five years ago, quantum information was moving way faster than machine learning. ZIERLER: Awesome. Was he a hands-on advisor? 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. At Caltech there was this guy, Jerry MarsdenJerrold Marsdenwho is an absolute legend in space physics. There's so much prerequisite knowledge, it takes so long to get to the point where you can actually make a contribution. 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. ZIERLER: It sounds like it's always exciting for you, no matter what it is though. I didn't really have much of a formal background in it or anything. Vise is an AI-powered portfolio management platform. I kind of stopped going to school. A lot of people, their intuition for space or geometry is that we live in flat space, but if you live on a sphere, that sphere is what we would call positively curved. It was this weird, internal drive. Or are you thinking about actual wormholes? ZIERLER: What's the connecting point from Stanford to Caltech? I'm probably making this up, but it felt like 20 kids. 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. Partner @sequoia // @caltech physics PhD // quantum space crypto security (it's a niche but high impact field) 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. In many ways was the core person that drove it in the beginning, if not the core person. I do know Rob. One is people respect John so much that you don't want to disappoint John. It was when I was at DARPA, that's when I got exposed to quantum information. I think that's actually a part of the magic of Caltech: it's the only elite undergraduate and research university in America that is just so focused on science. (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 . MAGUIRE: It was simply in having a stronger math background than some people. I received my PhD. Or is it something entirely. Are you not looking at faculty appointments? MAGUIRE: It's one of these weird things. As an investor, you want to have intuition, but you also need to check your intuition with lots of diligence on things. Oskar Painter. People don't really use that as an example. MAGUIRE: I had officially unenrolled from Stanford a long time ago. Social crypto network Bitclout is now listed on Blockchain.com. We live in a space where photons have a mass. There has already been a lot of great results there, and I'm sure there are more to come. Everyone was telling mepeople on both sides didn't understand why I was doing both. Quantum computing and AI are existential, and I think a lot of internet research efforts of Google, those are both Bell Lab equivalents. So, we raised a bunch of venture capital. 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. A prerequisite to that is special relativity. Jerry had just done incredible work in understanding our solar system, orbits, trajectories for space crafts, and things like that. Not completely explicitly, but a little bit subconsciously and implicitly. One of the big evolutions in the early 90s was this thing called the holographic principle. Shaun, for the last part of our talk, just one retrospective question and then one going forward. 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 Sequoia, we have a lot of these flywheels, if I'm honest. When I was 7 years old, he helped me build my first computer. I don't want to sell for a billion dollars now, I want to sell for $20 billion. Previously he Co-Founded Expanse which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $800M. 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: Honestly, yeah. I was lucky enough to work with him. Skip to main content. He serves as Board Member at Physna and Monad. It's not talked about that way, but Shockley Semiconductor was originally a division of Beckman Instruments. I met Patrick at a Founders Fund event many years ago. I have been really interested in machine learning, and in cryptocurrencies, and in robots, and in space, and in physics, and other things. So, they were able to do really amazing work that was not too far away from the core business. 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. I think that, to put John in that category, one of the things I always really admired about John is he had changed fields many times and risen to the top of many different fields, like, started off in really high-energy physics, dark matter work, hardcore high-energy physics, and then he moved to Stephen Hawking style quantum aspects of black holes I would say was the second major area. 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. That happened, and then in 2015 there was this thing called the firewall paradox. Anyway, a bit of an aside. 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. They're human too. 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. He would always offer that. It's obvious that for things like material science, when quantum computers are powerful enough, they will play an important role in material discovery. I've also been absolutely fascinated by science. I personally believe quantum computing is going to be similar to solar. It turns out the answer is no. Thank you so much for joining me today. MAGUIRE: I will do my best to explain the arc here. Caltech means a lot to me. There's always more to learn, so I'm always playing catch-up. One of the most famous ones was the photoelectric effect that Einstein won the Nobel Prize for his explanation of. John rules out of love, and you don't want to disappoint him. So, that's one thing that is really powerful. Honestly, after getting to the cutting edge of knowledge there, it's weird. It was unbelievably lonely. 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. I don't really remember any of it. I got A pluses in a lot of my classes. It wasn't as clear that you'd be able to go to cheaper instantaneous power production than natural gas, for example. On the AdS side, that has a very deep relationship to hyperbolic geometry, which is something mathematicians have studied very deeply. You need to grab him when he's around and set up a time, but he'll always do that. When I was nine years old, I became really passionate about the solar system. I think that on the grad student level, the evolution from IQI to IQIM wasn't that big of a deal. That then led to a lot of evolutions over time. ZIERLER: Shaun, in your day to day role at Sequoia, are you bringing your quantum information expertise? In the late 90s, Juan Maldacena had a big breakthrough there. Then that person got mad and left the conversation and left Patrick and me talking.
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