In my opinion, no question. 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. 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. Physics is something I use all the time, because I've invested in a lot of companies that touch atoms. The first one was a failure, three of them have been successful, and one is too early to call. MAGUIRE: Of course! Harry Maguire is the world's most expensive centre-back and captain of arguably the world's most famous football club. 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. 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. What advice should first-time founders heed? You need physics to understand that. Will you be my advisor? I'm probably making this up, but it felt like 20 kids. He serves as a Board Member at Luminar, Knowde & Gather. What was seen as the holy grail? It's actually a directly relevant story, so I'll share it here. I originally self-studied quantum mechanics, and I was able to have some intuition. Founders Fund had flown us to an island off Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Do you see Google, Microsoft, IBM, and all these companiesare they racing toward a singular finish line? ZIERLER: Did you think about quantum information at all at Stanford? MAGUIRE: I love Alexei and couldn't think more highly of him. Institutionally, is Sequoia involved in the quantum information space at all? As an investor, you want to have intuition, but you also need to check your intuition with lots of diligence on things. It was really lonely and solitary.
Shaun Maguire | Sequoia Capital US/Europe 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. 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. The fourth area is I'm super hyperactive. Michael Moritz. 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. Another thing too, to be very candid for me, I have very broad interests. I don't really remember any of it. That was the next huge jump in this area. 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'm delighted to be here with Dr. Shaun Maguire. 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. ZIERLER: Shaun, we'll get to this in real time, but did you always have a business streak, an entrepreneurial streak that you always wanted to actualize? People were doing references with him. I'm not talking about on a physics level. I was chairman of my company. One of the big evolutions in the early 90s was this thing called the holographic principle. So, that's one thing that is really powerful. When I was nine years old, I became really passionate about the solar system. When did that start for you? 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. Prior to joining Sequoia in 2019, Dr. Maguire was a Partner at GV, where he led their . That was one thing, Alexei. They said, "Man, I love Dylan, but like, I can do it, too. ZIERLER: Shaun, a question I've been excited to ask you since I first reached out: with your area of expertise, as a student of history, I wonder if you've ever thought about some of the parallels between, for example, a Bell Labs in the 60s, 50s, 70s, the middle part of the 20th centurythe industrial support for fundamental research and how you might compare that with what Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Honeywell are doing with regard to quantum information today. He started mentoring me. Or did some interesting debates come up? Shaun Maguire. He played college football for the Florida State Seminoles. 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. Do you think about one day becoming a professor? Another is just the network of people. Social crypto network Bitclout is now listed on Blockchain.com. Join Facebook to connect with Shaun Maguire and others you may know. For months, when I was 13, I couldnt sleep at night because there was a thought experiment I couldnt understand. Texas A&M (OA) Accomplishments and honors. ZIERLER: Relatedly, I wonder where you see all of this investment in quantum information within the broader context of venture capital. Alexei is really introverted. He is a Co-Founder and served as Board Member at Expanse. I think everyone that's been at Caltech, it has to lower your ego.
Shaun Maguire (PhD '18), Quantum Researcher and Venture Capitalist . I also think we were living through a pretty incredible period in semiconductor technology. It's almost a minimalist style. We say they're massless, because if they were at rest, they'd be massless. Patrick is a huge lover of physics. It was a good investment for governments. 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. 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. 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. 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. Previously he Co-Founded Expanse which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $800M.
Sequoia Capital's New Crypto Fund - video Dailymotion So, we became friends. We became friends from that. Bored out of my mind. Another example would be: in quantum there's a guy, Yakir Aharonov, as in the Aharonov-Bohm effect. Show more Show more 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. At Caltech there was this guy, Jerry MarsdenJerrold Marsdenwho is an absolute legend in space physics. Seed/Early + Growth. It was when I was at DARPA, that's when I got exposed to quantum information. 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?" It's hard to say no when DARPA is willing to give you money to go build some really advanced technology with really brilliant people. Presently, he is Partner at Sequoia Capital. SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches rockets and spacecraft. So, I don't stay up perfectly, but I do try to stay up with the really big results. It may seem like a really small thing, but it's the only clue we have that there needs to be something new. We still don't know much about quantum gravity but we're making some progress. MAGUIRE: I was doing the same thing. He serves as Board Member at Physna and Monad. There's this guy Amir Safavi Naeini who's a professor at Stanford now, and Alex Krause, and Simon Grblacher who's a professor at TU Delft. I literally emailed John Preskill from Afghanistan. That's the way I would describe it. He was also an interesting, out of the box human, so I found him really exciting. I think a lot of people were always too afraid to even ask him. Sequoia BitClout was both a sensation and a controversial startup when it launched earlier this year. There are a lot of candidate theories that fit under that umbrella. On the other hand, since I was a little kid, my passion was black holes and space. Another is how the universe was formed, like the big bang. Ive got to believe that they work incredibly hard in part to make their families proud. I think Bell Labs won nine Nobel Prizes, and there was a lot of stuff that was pretty adjacent to Bell Labs. It was a small event, call it 50 people. The founder of Figma is an amazing 30 year old kid who also really loves physics and computers. I didn't know exactly what to do. It was just announced last week that Figma is going to be acquired by Adobe for $20 billion. One of the ways to measure this is, what do people do on their weekends? There have been a lot of other big breakthroughs related to string theory over the last, like, 40 years. It's not talked about that way, but Shockley Semiconductor was originally a division of Beckman Instruments. I feel like that's what happened with string theory. 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. 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. It was a tiny department. 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.
Shaun Maguire Ph.D Profile: Contact Information & Network | PitchBook 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. The media built them up. I am, not quite as much as you, but I'm also a student of history, and I've been a student of Valley history. Aharonov is one of these guys that's always doing things very differently than other people. You know for the vast majority of compute, you want it to be centralized. Another is this idea that people have called ER = EPREinstein-Rosen equals Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen. Shaun Maguire is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm that helps daring founders build legendary technology companies. When I was in sixth grade, NASA had this program called SAREX, Satellite Amateur Radio Experiment. I didn't even know the prerequisites to be in that world, so it took an extra few years. About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators . MAGUIRE: It was simply in having a stronger math background than some people. The extroverts are the ones who look at your shoes when you're talking. 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. It is something I've thought a lot about. I've backed some people I knew from Caltech's companies. Whereas there's some areas, like in combinatorics, where you can door like today in machine learningyou can do original work in three months. Backstory. When I got to USC, I randomly was walkingI studied math. One of the things is Caltech is a very humbling place. ZIERLER: Finally Shaun, going forward, do you have a fluid view about your relationship with academia? In high school, I didn't know about the IMO, USAMO, AIME, or any of these things. It was a crazy thing, but Jerry, in my first year, had a medical complication and died during my first year. I think Caltech might have produced a comparable number, or maybe even more high-impact companies in the past. There are certain shapes that have differentthey have the same eigenvalues, same to the Laplacian, with different geometries. The goal of quantum gravity is to reconcile these discrepancies. Lenny Susskind, but actually really, based on a lot of John's ideas as well. Physna codifies 3D models into detailed data for software applications. Physicists say all the time, "Simulating physical systems: quantum computers are clearly going to be important for that." r2C is a defensive cybersecurity automation company with an open-source static analysis tool. There's always more to learn, so I'm always playing catch-up. 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. Did you talk to him a lot about these things? They've always been more of an R&D firm and government contractor. 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. Quantum computing and AI are existential, and I think a lot of internet research efforts of Google, those are both Bell Lab equivalents. Another was industrials. Before black holes, a prerequisite to understand them is you have to know some general relativity. There's a very similar result in hyperbolic geometry which basically says the eigenvalues that correspond to waves moving in negatively curved space follow these very specific rules, and there's some really beautiful aspect, and there's actually a relationship between those thingsbetween those waves and the eigenvalues that come from the waves, and the geometry in these geometric data. I came back in 2012. [laughs] Math is math, and there's a pretty good history of the math becoming reality. The model was evolving, basically from the time thatShockley was the first semiconductor company in the Valley, and there wasn't a venture capital model yet, so Shockley was basically a division of Beckman Instruments, a wholly owned division with a bunch of incentives. Shaun to start, will you please tell me your title and institutional affiliation?
Shaun Maguire - The Montgomery Summit 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.
Shaun Maguire - Partner - Sequoia Capital | LinkedIn 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. People don't really use that as an example. 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. 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. Growing up, I had a cousin who studied computer science at UCLA, who made a huge impact on me. That's how I got to know Google Ventures. How did that play out? Our Founders; Our Companies; Before Sequoia I was at Google Ventures. Skip to main content. He taught computer science and astronomy. Then another fund that was trying to recruit me did a reference call with my friend Patrick Collison. He said that maybe nature has this weird property that sometimes you know the physics of what's happening in some region of space, maybe all you need to know is what's happening on the boundary of that space. They ebb and flow, so I try to go where the action is. In business, my two passions wereI would say there were three. I originally joined in the Control and Dynamical Systems Department. I had this unbelievably lucky thing: one of my friends' dad was a local community college professor. I had never seen one of these. Or my Caltech title? A prerequisite to that is special relativity. 2020-2021. So, I basically made that decision a long time ago that I wouldn't do it. ZIERLER: I meant relative to where it was maybe 20 or 30 years ago, not relative to Stanford of course. It's incredibly common in the history of technology. That was one theme. 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. Out of the three you mentioned, I think Google is the only one that has a lot of parallels. 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. Decentralization is not a silver bullet that just solves all problems and is better for everything. 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. MAGUIRE: No. View the profiles of people named Shaun Maguire.
Why Sequoia, Others Bet $40 Million on an Anonymous Crypto Founder Dr. Maguire previously occupied the position of Member of DRW Trading Group and Partner at GV Management Co. LLC. A few things: one, I think there are many finish lines; two, I think the future is non-deterministic. At that moment, he becomes your advisor. It's a universal thing across many different fields.
Just to give you some examples of people from different domains, in mathematics there's this guy, Bill Thurston, who pioneered hyperbolic geometry. As someone who loves quantum information, I'll be thrilled with that. I'll pause. 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. He would always offer that. Seed/Early. It's actually breaking in some ways right now via Apple. 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. Quantum information not too much.
Shaun Maguire, Sequoia Capital Ltd: Profile and Biography In some of these other fields, it takes years. I was doing projects on the computer, hanging out in hacker forums for 10 hours a day in IRC. The way John works, is it's really a Socratic style. Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital, chats with DeSo Founder Nader Al-Naji on a number of topics across crypto, startups, and venture capital. ZIERLER: Yeah, your job title, where you work, and what your title is there.
Seven Questions with Shaun Maguire - Sequoia Capital I think it's a good thing. (It turns out space is curved.) Shaun Maguire Partner at Sequoia Capital San Francisco Bay Area 3K followers 500+ connections Join to view profile Sequoia Capital Caltech Activity Below is a great article in Forbes. Robco rethinks how products are made, using modular robot systems. MAGUIRE: Correct. The third thing to say is physics teaches you a way to think. 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. I emailed him from Afghanistan and said, "I'm coming back to Caltech. DeSo is a layer-1 blockchain custom-built to scale decentralized social applications. With the literature, I am really, really busy. I did know Rob, but it was not a connecting point for me. Alexei is a mathematician. ZIERLER: [laughs] Shaun, this has been a great conversation. Anyway, a bit of an aside. ZIERLER: So, this was a real vibrant social scene separate from the science? 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's obvious that for things like material science, when quantum computers are powerful enough, they will play an important role in material discovery. Thank you so much. He told Sequoia, "You guys should hire Shaun."
Harry Maguire: What happened? - The Athletic Earlier this year, Sequoia announced a $500 to $600 million sub-fund dedicated exclusively to buying up cryptocurrencies. He doesn't tell you where you're going.
Sean Maguire (American football) - Wikipedia Moore's law had to keep running for an extra five years, and no one knew how long it would run for. Rob is another legend of the field. I met Patrick at a Founders Fund event many years ago. He never tries to make you feel stupid. The day after you defend, are you not looking at postdocs? There was oneI think it was shortly after I was 13for about six months I couldn't sleep at night. It was still pretty easy for me. I was absolutely fascinated by where things come from, how energy works, oil and gas, chemicals industry, things like that, pharma. 214. Shaun, it's great to be with you. Astronomy becomes interest in black holes, which leads to people like John Preskill, you know, legends of the field. 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. Sequoia partners and specialists help outlier founders at every stage bend the arc of the possible. Please dont YOLO your 401(k) into shitcoins. 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. 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. Honestly, at the end of my PhD I had three full-time jobs. So, I really love academia. 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. Oskar Painter. I got to know a lot of funds. It's just how I am wired. When I proposed to my wife, I blacked out that day. He has a PhD in Physics from Caltech and Masters degrees in Statistics from Stanford and "Control and Dynamical Systems" from Caltech.
Our Team | Sequoia Capital US/Europe 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. By navigating this website you agree to our cookie policy. I love John. LayerZero is an omnichain interoperability protocol that enables trustless cross-chain dApp development. Basically, I was investing in companies and taking board seats. It was a tiny department. Could you find him? 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. In other words, if all of these companies are pouring billions of dollars into quantum computing without anyone really having a truly well-developed sense of what this technology will be used for, is that common? He would say, "Be here at this time and place." I wasn't really going to school, so I wasn't doing math competitions or anything. Regina was a Caltech alum who was the Director of DARPA. For example, the thing that motivated quantum mechanics, I think there were three main categories of discrepancies. They're investing in a lot of things that were notbiology, life sciencesI actually think it might be bad to invest in things that are so far away from what you're doing since you don't have the core expertise. I made a lot of my closest friends from Caltech. It was a really small major for a school that big. 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. 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.. He just gives you breadcrumbs along the way when you need them. It was more helpful for being able to do diligence. In that toy regime of three dimensional anti-de Sitter space, there's a concrete relationship where the more curved the geometry is, the more tangled the geometry is, the higher a lower bound would be on the masses allowed of particles in there.
Shaun Maguire's Investing Profile - Sequoia Capital Partner | Signal 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. Solar starting in the early 2000s2003 to like 2012 got incredible attention both from VCs but also from government subsidies. This all happened in a curved space, a Minkowski space. I am an absolute crypto maxi, but I think there are a lot of things that are misunderstood by the masses today, Maguire said. Magic Eden is the leading destination for NFT discovery, expression, and ownership across digital cultures. 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. One is people respect John so much that you don't want to disappoint John. But photons are always moving, and they have a mass when they're actually moving from a relativistic perspective. 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's not a regulated monopoly, but they havenot supposed to say thisbut they have a monopoly on search. So, I didn't really know anyone at Sequoia, but I was getting recruited by other firms.
Sequoia's Maguire on decision to back social crypto network BitClout - CNBC 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? Sorry, not in ninth grade. 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 was walking through the halls, and there was a professor who had a math competition sheet on his doorthis guy, Richard Arratiathe competition was the Putnam competition, which is the North American college math competition.
Vise, a company founded by two high-school graduates, raises $45 The other groups I had been in, they weren't groups. I'll say something that can get me in trouble. That is basically hyperbolic geometry. They're not that" They're really, really smart, but having that exposure really raises your own personal ambition. 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?
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