shaun maguire sequoia wife

I don't know what shape or form that will take. I use physics a lot. I just kind of knew this thing, the information paradox, and all of that. Was he a hands-on advisor? There's so much prerequisite knowledge, it takes so long to get to the point where you can actually make a contribution. ZIERLER: Shaun, do you have a sense of the origin story of Sequoiawhat niche it was looking to fill when it started? At Caltech, everyone talks about the science all the time. As ever with high-earning, high-profile . This all happened in a curved space, a Minkowski space. The Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire. 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. It's just how I am wired. I think it's because it's just in some ways it's unknowable. I transferred to USC, and I was only there for two years. Shaun Maguire is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm that helps daring founders build legendary technology companies. You can register here. I didn't even know about math competitions. An equivalent thing is in quantum mechanics, people still debate the interpretation around wave function collapse and things like this. Thank you so much for joining me today. Caldera enables dynamic Web3 experiences by enabling developers to launch performant application-specific blockchains. Or is it still premature? The goal of quantum gravity is to reconcile these discrepancies. It gets us off fossil fuels. The way I met Patrick is pretty funny. It may seem like a really small thing, but it's the only clue we have that there needs to be something new. I'm probably making this up, but it felt like 20 kids. I was so nervous. Some of the USC faculty had good connections at Stanford and basically got me in on letters of recommendation. I was really doing a lot. ZIERLER: In your work on wormholes, just to clarify, are these toy models? Some of these things are so dependent on so many other variables. I was lucky enough to work with him. Alexei Kitaev. That was a very exciting time, so a lot of people both in quantum information and also in high-energy physics, people all came from those two extremes and all came to the same problem. Now at this point I'm maybe a 25 year old or something, I think was when I was coming back to Caltech. I think Caltech might have produced a comparable number, or maybe even more high-impact companies in the past. It was a really small major for a school that big. So, that was one example of something. Then it led to starting a company, which did DARPA work for the next seven or eight years. I've backed some people I knew from Caltech's companies. But they were talking about quantum computing. MAGUIRE: No. Imagine having a relationship between the masses of photons and the shape of space. MAGUIRE: Very rarely. 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 Sequoia has already committed to a lengthy relationship with the sector we have permanent intentions., Sequoia is very deliberate with everything we do and we spend huge amounts of time debating every strategy change, everything, we debate every seed investment to sometimes excruciating detail, but it helps us make really good decisions and make decisions as a team rather than as individuals, Maguire tells us. Where were you for your undergrad? MAGUIRE: 26 actually. 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. 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. By navigating this website you agree to our cookie policy. Before Sequoia I was at Google Ventures. If Figma grew this quickly, we can grow this quickly." ZIERLER: I meant relative to where it was maybe 20 or 30 years ago, not relative to Stanford of course. MAGUIRE: My job title is I'm a general partner at Sequoia Capital. The third was Silicon Valley, where people are making this technology using physics and other things to bring it forward. There's some technical definition that gives you that, but you can have negative, zero, or positive curvature. I was a partner at Google Ventures at the time. The Wire Digital is helping global businesses make smarter decisions. MAGUIRE: Yeah, I don't think they're racing toward a singular finish line. I didn't really have much of a formal background in it or anything. SHAUN MAGUIRE: I'm beyond thrilled to be here. When did that happen? I jumped in the conversation, because honestly I didn't like the way the guy was talking to Patrick, and Patrick was right. As an investor, you want to have intuition, but you also need to check your intuition with lots of diligence on 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. 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. I literally emailed John Preskill from Afghanistan. You can interpret that as a lower bound of the masses of particles allowed in the space. 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. People would know who he is and know the companies he started. I saw these 12 questions and sat down outside his office and started thinking through how to solve these. Skip to main content. Michael Moritz. 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. I took a lot of tough graduate math classes. 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. About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators . ZIERLER: Relatedly, I wonder where you see all of this investment in quantum information within the broader context of venture capital. In some very crude sense, one says that information is conserved, the other says that information is destroyed. I was doing all three. I think Bell Labs, one of the key things, they basically had a regulated monopoly. Or are they doing something different? ZIERLER: So, it was in some ways really a purely intellectual pursuit for you, then? 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. It's my Hogwarts. I actually think that with Google, they've lost a lot of the goodwill internally. Then that person got mad and left the conversation and left Patrick and me talking. In some ways there's a parallel to the past. Patrick is a huge lover of physics. Harry Maguire is the world's most expensive centre-back and captain of arguably the world's most famous football club. It gave me intuition for the distances and the speeds. Those are my heroes, my role models, the people that have done things very differently than other people. Are you not looking at faculty appointments? Just in terms of the way you approach business, the way you understand science, the way you think about the world? He has a PhD in Physics from Caltech and Masters degrees in Statistics from Stanford and "Control and Dynamical Systems" from Caltech. ZIERLER: It sounds like it's always exciting for you, no matter what it is though. ZIERLER: The point of connection to Sequoia, how did that happen? 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. While decentralization allows for a certain type of consumer protections, Maguire still contends that the rulebook of traditional investor protections shouldnt be thrown out. Just to give you some examples of people from different domains, in mathematics there's this guy, Bill Thurston, who pioneered hyperbolic geometry. The extroverts are the ones who look at your shoes when you're talking. Mathematicians have studied hyperbolic geometry to death and have learned incredibly beautiful things. I wasn't really going to school, so I wasn't doing math competitions or anything. I don't even know some of the things that I know are there, but I'll tell you some of the things that I'm aware of. I got to know a lot of funds. MAGUIRE: It's super common. I sold it for a billion dollars, all of that. In business, my two passions wereI would say there were three. My PhD was basically making a bunch of connections between these ideas. When did that start for you? He would say, "Be here at this time and place." 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. 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. So, I really love academia. Posted By : / how do i access my talk21 email /; Under :eaglestone village lambertville, mieaglestone village lambertville, mi I got lucky in that when I was leaving DARPA, we came up with an idea. 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. But photons are always moving, and they have a mass when they're actually moving from a relativistic perspective. 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. It wasn't as clear that you'd be able to go to cheaper instantaneous power production than natural gas, for example. Is that relevant to the kinds of things you do on a day to day basis? It became a program. Or my Caltech title? MAGUIRE: I was at Stanford for a year and a half. 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. That is basically hyperbolic geometry. Sequoia BitClout was both a sensation and a controversial startup when it launched earlier this year. Texas A&M (OA) Accomplishments and honors. I love John. I also, though, I think a lot of string theorists have gotten a bad rap. When I proposed to my wife, I blacked out that day. He would always offer that. I personally believe quantum computing is going to be similar to solar. because some crypto projects have characteristics and show performance that can't really be measured . MAGUIRE: Many, many things. 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. 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. 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." Maguire focuses on enterprise,. Before black holes, a prerequisite to understand them is you have to know some general relativity. Twitter View on Twitter. John rules out of love, and you don't want to disappoint him. It was a crazy thing, but Jerry, in my first year, had a medical complication and died during my first year. It's an interesting thing, because I think John changes many people's lives. I do know Rob. 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. ZIERLER: What was the process from John inviting you to the meetings to actually becoming his student? I think everyone that's been at Caltech, it has to lower your ego. DAVID ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, director of the Caltech Heritage Project. How did that play out? I think, sure, the volume of companies is greater now, but Caltech had its hand in some pretty legendary companies in the past. As a teenager, he played in the world's top league for the video game Counter-Strikeand got an F in Algebra II. When I was 7 years old, he helped me build my first computer. Prior to joining Sequoia in 2019, Dr. Maguire was a Partner at GV, where he led their . So, I did this and got to ask a question to the astronauts, and that honestly made space really tangible to me. Will you be my advisor? Lenny Susskind, but actually really, based on a lot of John's ideas as well. 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. As a teenager, he played in the world's top league for the video game Counter-Strikeand got an F in Algebra II. MAGUIRE: We don't know. I could go on and on. 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. I've also been fascinated by computers, which I would say is slightly different than science. I know that's a long answer. Could you talk to him? But even more important to me is someone thats just irrationally motivated. 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.. One of the most high-profile ones was Global Crossing, which was this company that was the fastest company ever at the time to get a billion dollar valuation. Shaun is an entrepreneur, investor, and scientist with a broad and eclectic background. MAGUIRE: That was another thing, is that I am athere's this joke at Caltech (MIT does this too): How do you tell the difference between introverts and extroverts at Caltech? Another Sequoia Partner, Michelle Bailhe, said that the firm believes it's still "day one for . Feynman is the classic Caltech person. Please dont YOLO your 401(k) into shitcoins. 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. I would almost say in a lot of ways it was similar to Maxwell's demon paradox, which was in the late 1800s. What advice should first-time founders heed? MAGUIRE: My academic background is pretty unusual. So, I think that's something that's really powerful about Caltech. One thing that I think is close to Bell Labs from a different direction right now is Deep Mind. 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. I think that on the grad student level, the evolution from IQI to IQIM wasn't that big of a deal. But the crypto theme is so unique that we decided to create a dedicated fund (a first for Sequoia, ed.) In all the classical physics, optics, Newtonian mechanics, etc., and classical electromagnetism, that didn't make any sense. 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. shaun maguire sequoia wifepapa smurf tattoo. r2C is a defensive cybersecurity automation company with an open-source static analysis tool. Partner @sequoia // @caltech physics PhD // quantum space crypto security (it's a niche but high impact field) Regina was a Caltech alum who was the Director of DARPA. It raises your ego in some ways, but it has to lower our ego in others. The field has moved so fast. For example, the thing that motivated quantum mechanics, I think there were three main categories of discrepancies. 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. Ive got to believe that they work incredibly hard in part to make their families proud. It's kind of the same thing. Monad's platform unites security data silos and builds effective security and compliance workflows. Trying to understand these discrepancies led to quantum mechanics. One of the things is Caltech is a very humbling place. I'm so glad we connected. MAGUIRE: The point of connection to Google Ventures was simple. You can listen to the entireinterview with Maguireon our podcast, Chain Reaction. One thing: I think a lot of the things they were investing in were not related to their core business. When we make a decision to do something, it doesnt happen unless the whole team is behind the decision. What has stayed with you from IQIM and Caltech in general? Robco rethinks how products are made, using modular robot systems. When I was 7 years old, he helped me build my first computer. I originally self-studied quantum mechanics, and I was able to have some intuition. It was just announced last week that Figma is going to be acquired by Adobe for $20 billion. With the literature, I am really, really busy. In some of these other fields, it takes years. Knowde is the marketplace for chemicals, polymers and ingredients. That was my passion, so I went to Caltech to work with Jerry. I would say it just doesn't matter. 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. 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. 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. I had literally never done one. Dr. Shaun Maguire serves as a Partner at Sequoia Capital. I've been reading your notes from Afghanistan." MAGUIRE: I never say this, but I guess I'm a doctor. Deep Mind is now owned by Google, so I think that is a good one. Physicists say all the time, "Simulating physical systems: quantum computers are clearly going to be important for that." Where do you see some of the parallels? They said, "Man, I love Dylan, but like, I can do it, too. It wouldn't be relevant to the business model in a parent company. (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 . The fourth area is I'm super hyperactive. MAGUIRE: I wouldn't say that Caltech is the most entrepreneurial place. So, we raised a bunch of venture capital. 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. So, we became friends. You need physics to understand that. I was doing projects on the computer, hanging out in hacker forums for 10 hours a day in IRC. To answer the question: bachelor's degree from USC, University of Southern California, but there's a lot more to the story. It was unbelievably lonely. The day after you defend, are you not looking at postdocs? TipLink enables users to send crypto or NFTs with just a link. I did horribly in high school. I think that as an investor, it's actually incredibly important. He told Sequoia, "You guys should hire Shaun." ZIERLER: Anything memorable from the defense? I would do these thought experiments. ZIERLER: Did you think about quantum information at all at Stanford? I was absolutely fascinated by where things come from, how energy works, oil and gas, chemicals industry, things like that, pharma. In the late 90s, Juan Maldacena had a big breakthrough there. I was thinking about if you had three space ships that were traveling in a line, so spaceship A, B, and C. If the two ends were traveling away from the one in the center, each at the speed of lightso A is traveling away from B at the speed of light, and B from C at the speed of lighthow the hell could A and C not be traveling away from each other at more than the speed of light? This is a true story. When I came back to Caltech, I had started a company in 2012, and it ended up being a relatively successful company. Another was the way black body radiation happens. MAGUIRE: I will do my best to explain the arc here. 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. I have always, in science, I'm attracted to people that have been out of the box. A prerequisite to that is special relativity. I just had to get to the cutting edge. One of the most famous ones was the photoelectric effect that Einstein won the Nobel Prize for his explanation of. They ebb and flow, so I try to go where the action is. In many ways was the core person that drove it in the beginning, if not the core person. Jerry had just done incredible work in understanding our solar system, orbits, trajectories for space crafts, and things like that. Very few VCs made any money on solar. The firm has made a number of equity investments in crypto startups over the years including Fireblocks and FTX, but while Andreessen Horowitz was early to commit to a dedicated crypto fund in 2018, Sequoia has continued made its equity investments through its general funds. Subscribe to Chain Reaction onApple,Spotifyor your alternative podcast platform of choice to keep up with us every week. John asks incredible questions. ZIERLER: When did you first appreciate the connections between black holes and quantum information? Shaun Maguire, General Partner, Sequoia Capital, Quantum Information and the Venture Connection. I went to public school in Orange County, California. 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. 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. It's like, some parents rule out of fear; some parents rule out of love. View the profiles of people named Shaun Maguire. ZIERLER: What kind of role did John play in all of these decisions? Or did you know in the back of your mind that you'd be doing something besides academia? Some of it is subconscious. 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. It's the first time that information had to be considered in physics. I left Stanford with a master's degree and went to Caltech. 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. He is also an angel investor. It was really lonely and solitary. At Sequoia, we have a lot of these flywheels, if I'm honest. He played college football for the Florida State Seminoles. He serves as a Board Member at Luminar, Knowde & Gather. The other groups I had been in, they weren't groups. I feel like that's what happened with string theory. See Shaun Maguire's recent investments in Series A Cloud Infrastructure, other investment areas, and co-investors. ZIERLER: [laughs] Shaun, let's establish now some context. 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. 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. So, I think John has a smart system. With computers, it just seemed like the most important technology of the time. So, I didn't really know anyone at Sequoia, but I was getting recruited by other firms. ZIERLER: Did you officially unenroll from Stanford at that point? Vise is an AI-powered portfolio management platform. 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. In high school, I didn't know about the IMO, USAMO, AIME, or any of these things. For months, when I was 13, I couldnt sleep at night because there was a thought experiment I couldnt understand. Astronomy becomes interest in black holes, which leads to people like John Preskill, you know, legends of the field. Jeongwan was just finishing his PhD at that time, and that was a really exciting result that a lot of people were very interested in. I sent him a picture. That happened in the early 90s. The only firm that we never pitched was Sequoia, because they had a competing portfolio company, so we didn't want to give them the data on our company or something about us. 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. Moore's law had to keep running for an extra five years, and no one knew how long it would run for. Honestly, I kind of blacked out. I really did the PhD for myself. In some cases, they were wildly misunderstood as kids and have chips on their shoulders. What were people excited about at that point? I think some of the physicists didn't quite understand the math language that he was using, but Alexei is a path breaker. 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.

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