ZIERLER: What did you see as your primary contributions and conclusions with your thesis research? I had moved from a full-time operating role to chairman, and I was finishing my PhD. That was one theme. I think I will definitely have more involvement with Caltech at some point in my life. When I was 7 years old, he helped me build my first computer. ZIERLER: So then what happens next? I was really doing a lot. I would almost say in a lot of ways it was similar to Maxwell's demon paradox, which was in the late 1800s. Is that relevant to the kinds of things you do on a day to day basis? MAGUIRE: Yeah, I don't think they're racing toward a singular finish line. The first one was a failure, three of them have been successful, and one is too early to call. John asks incredible questions. I emailed him from Afghanistan and said, "I'm coming back to Caltech. It wasn't as obvious, but it was obvious there would be certain niche applications of solar. 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. You know for the vast majority of compute, you want it to be centralized. Don Valentine, the founder of the firm, he had been at some of the top semiconductor companies of the past, including Fairchild and National. For example, the thing that motivated quantum mechanics, I think there were three main categories of discrepancies. ZIERLER: Does the comparison hold up insofar as with solar startups, we knew what solar would be good for, right? 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. Then, sometime in tenth grade decided I just had to leave school, so I took this thing called the California High School Proficiency Exam which is a GED equivalency, and left, and went to community college for two years while my friends were finishing high school. We met with and got term sheets from pretty much all the top firms in the Valley. Basically, I was investing in companies and taking board seats. They've always been more of an R&D firm and government contractor. Do you mean my job title? I have a fellowship, so I don't need any funding. Prior to GV, Shaun co-founded two companies: Qadium and Escape Dynamics. On the AdS side, that has a very deep relationship to hyperbolic geometry, which is something mathematicians have studied very deeply. We live in a space where photons have a mass. Can the same be said at this point for what quantum information, what quantum computing will be good for? 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. Michael Moritz. The way John works, is it's really a Socratic style. I literally emailed John Preskill from Afghanistan. When I was 7 years old, he helped me build my first computer. ZIERLER: And when does Sequoia enter into the mix? 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. There's always more to learn, so I'm always playing catch-up. I think Bell Labs won nine Nobel Prizes, and there was a lot of stuff that was pretty adjacent to Bell Labs. The day after you defend, are you not looking at postdocs? Founders Fund, which is another venture capital fund, invested in both of our companies. I would say that Caltech is more scientific. They're not that" They're really, really smart, but having that exposure really raises your own personal ambition. I also, though, I think a lot of string theorists have gotten a bad rap. Or was this really a sudden career shift from what you might do otherwise with a PhD in fundamental physics? Shaun, for the last part of our talk, just one retrospective question and then one going forward. MAGUIRE: Honestly, yeah. I'll trust my instincts when something comes up. Apr 26, 2023. 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. 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. So, I didn't really know anyone at Sequoia, but I was getting recruited by other firms. I had a really horrible experience, to be honest. MAGUIRE: It's what Stephen Hawking is famous for, but I didn't understand at all the stuff Hawking had done. That's another area where Google has done an incredible job, is machine learning research. ZIERLER: So, it was in some ways really a purely intellectual pursuit for you, then? MAGUIRE: I never say this, but I guess I'm a doctor. Then another fund that was trying to recruit me did a reference call with my friend Patrick Collison. ZIERLER: [laughs] Shaun, let's establish now some context. In our conversation, Maguire emphasized his belief that plenty of other funds dipping their toes into crypto "are going to pull back" when the market grows less frothy, but he believes that. In all the classical physics, optics, Newtonian mechanics, etc., and classical electromagnetism, that didn't make any sense. That's the way I would describe it. Privy makes Simple APIs to manage user data off-chain. ZIERLER: Besides John, who else was on your committee? 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. He served as Board Member at SpinLaunch and AMP . 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. Moore's law had to keep running for an extra five years, and no one knew how long it would run for. MAGUIRE: I had officially unenrolled from Stanford a long time ago. 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.. View the profiles of people named Shaun Maguire. ZIERLER: In your work on wormholes, just to clarify, are these toy models? Prior to joining Sequoia in 2019, Dr. Maguire was a Partner at GV, where he led their . 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. You need physics to understand that. I've also been fascinated by computers, which I would say is slightly different than science. It doesn't matter. Some of these things are so dependent on so many other variables. I made a lot of my closest friends from Caltech. I don't want to sell for a billion dollars now, I want to sell for $20 billion. So, at that point, I wasn't just a beggar anymore. I think that's a really good thing. One thing: I think a lot of the things they were investing in were not related to their core business. I'd been at Google Ventures for three years, and I had the opportunity to move to Sequoia which is the best venture capital firm in the world, so it was hard to say no to. You can't have spaceships traveling away in a straight line from a Euclidean geometry perspective. Social crypto network Bitclout is now listed on Blockchain.com. You want to live up to his name and reputation. 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. shaun maguire sequoia wifepapa smurf tattoo. How did that play out? 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. Whereas there's some areas, like in combinatorics, where you can door like today in machine learningyou can do original work in three months. Biography. It's basically this idea that somehow wormholes and entanglementso wormholes on the general relativity side, entanglement on the quantum sideare very deeply related to each other. I think it might be a similar thing with quantum computing. MAGUIRE: It's one of these weird things. Where do you see some really new directions? It's kind of the same thing. I also think we were living through a pretty incredible period in semiconductor technology. I kind of stopped going to school. For a lot of decision making, centralization can be better for certain types of decisions.. Basically, starting in eighth grade, I got really disillusioned with school. Another is just the network of people. Five years ago, quantum information was moving way faster than machine learning. I'm so glad we connected. 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. Are you not looking at faculty appointments? There have been a lot of other big breakthroughs related to string theory over the last, like, 40 years. ZIERLER: That's pretty cool. 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? You can interpret that as a lower bound of the masses of particles allowed in the space. With the literature, I am really, really busy. I don't know, I was learning the rest. I had three jobs. It's the first time that information had to be considered in physics. I transferred to USC, and I was only there for two years. I sent him a picture. I didn't know exactly what to do. We still don't know much about quantum gravity but we're making some progress. He taught computer science and astronomy. Maybe five years later the physicists will go learn the math required to talk to him. Those are my heroes, my role models, the people that have done things very differently than other people. What was seen as the holy grail? It's incredibly common in the history of technology. But as a grad student, especially a social one, you already knew a lot of those people. I try to keep up with all those fields. It's an interesting thing, because I think John changes many people's lives. When I was nine years old, I became really passionate about the solar system. Gather hosts virtual spaces for work and play. Another example would be: in quantum there's a guy, Yakir Aharonov, as in the Aharonov-Bohm effect. I'm delighted to be here with Dr. Shaun Maguire. That's kind of the core intuition of behind the holographic principle. Was that a connecting point to Sequoia? Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital, chats with DeSo Founder Nader Al-Naji on a number of topics across crypto, startups, and venture capital. MAGUIRE: No. I sold it for a billion dollars, all of that. Was he a hands-on advisor? MAGUIRE: Sequoia enters shortly thereafter, but basically in the summer of 2019. He serves as a Board Member at Luminar, Knowde & Gather. Physicists say all the time, "Simulating physical systems: quantum computers are clearly going to be important for that." Many would disagree with me, but I actually think it takes away from the quality of research at Stanford. Out of the three you mentioned, I think Google is the only one that has a lot of parallels. I have always, in science, I'm attracted to people that have been out of the box. ZIERLER: What were you doing at Google? Where do you see some of the parallels? It was a tiny department. Physna codifies 3D models into detailed data for software applications. When did that start for you? Rob is another legend of the field. MAGUIRE: Very rarely. Shaun is an entrepreneur, investor, and scientist with a broad and eclectic background. 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. But it's only those two places where we know that quantum mechanics and general relativity make different predictions. [few minutes pause] When you got to the group meetings with John, what were some of the big debates that were happening? MAGUIRE: That's a great question. The big bang one issomehow people don't really talk about that. I viewed that field, the stuff that John was working on, as the absolute top of physics, and I didn't think I had the background yet to be in that world. Another thing too, to be very candid for me, I have very broad interests. I personally believe quantum computing is going to be similar to solar. He told Sequoia, "You guys should hire Shaun." 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. He never tries to make you feel stupid. These things change over time. It's a stable energy source. 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. I spent six months really trying to understand that, and I couldn't understand it. 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. People don't quite give credit, but Caltech's own Arnold Beckman in many ways was maybe the first VC. There's this other thing called holographic entanglement entropy. Patrick called Sequoia and told them they should hire me instead. In many ways was the core person that drove it in the beginning, if not the core person. The way I met Patrick is pretty funny. Shaun Maguire, General Partner, Sequoia Capital, Quantum Information and the Venture Connection. Shaun, it's great to be with you. I really did the PhD for myself. He is also an angel investor. Was it related to what he was doing at the time? It's too far outside of our tools right now, and we really don't know what direction to go. I was born in 1985, so I was always trying to mess around with computers. I had literally never done one. Actually the day I defended, I flew to Israel to get married. For whatever reason, its their life mission to try to revolutionize the industry theyre going after. He would always offer that. It's just how I am wired. They lost a lot of money, but the category has been very successful. Texas A&M (OA) Accomplishments and honors. SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches rockets and spacecraft. His name is Doug Borcoman [?]. 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. Can you make time for me?" We call that quantum gravity. See Shaun Maguire's recent investments in Series A Cloud Infrastructure, other investment areas, and co-investors. He dropped out of MIT. One is people respect John so much that you don't want to disappoint John. So, I went up to the statistics department at Stanford, which is one of the top places in that, and at Stanford is where I fell back in love with physics. I've been reading your notes from Afghanistan." I came back in 2012. Identified as v4.0.2Now with Pre-Seed Investor Lists FAQ Being able to stay on top of it and having a lot of my friends be the ones pushing it forward, it's kind of enough for me. Shaun Maguire is Partner at Sequoia Capital Ltd. See Shaun Maguire's compensation, career history, education, & memberships. The fourth area is I'm super hyperactive. It turns out the answer is no. For what it's worth, I think it's really important for the world to have places like Caltech that are so focused on science. They ebb and flow, so I try to go where the action is. Just think of a few examples. MAGUIRE: One of the things that I am proud of in my own life is I've been willing to change course quickly even with limited data when crazy opportunities come up. View twitter profile View linkedin profile Get in touch with Cornelius Cornelius Menke. I know that's a long answer. 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. ZIERLER: You mentioned on a day to day basis you utilize your expertise in quantum information fairly rarely. AdS, anti-de Sitter space stuff is basically just doing hyperbolic geometry, and there's a bunch of really concrete ways to make that precise. 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.

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