ZIERLER: Yup. 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. 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. Another example would be: in quantum there's a guy, Yakir Aharonov, as in the Aharonov-Bohm effect. 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. ZIERLER: So then what happens next? It took a long time to get to that point. Growing up, I had a cousin who studied computer science at UCLA, who made a huge impact on me. Jerry had just done incredible work in understanding our solar system, orbits, trajectories for space crafts, and things like that. I didn't know exactly what to do. 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. Honestly, after getting to the cutting edge of knowledge there, it's weird. MAGUIRE: I love Alexei and couldn't think more highly of him. Maguire is a former graduate assistant at Texas A&M, were he was working under his FSU coach Jimbo Fisher. It's like, some parents rule out of fear; some parents rule out of love. He is also an angel investor. And what happens, the wave function collapse moment is when you need an advisor to sign somethingthere are certain things at Caltech where you need an advisor's signature, so the first time that happens, when you've been going to his group meetings for a few months, you kind of go to him and say, "So, I need this signature. Ive started five companies. 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. For example, the thing that motivated quantum mechanics, I think there were three main categories of discrepancies. 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?" 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. Vise is an AI-powered portfolio management platform. The platform lets people buy crypto coins attached. 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. It's really easy to go say, "Admit me; I'm going to work really hard." We still don't know much about quantum gravity but we're making some progress. He was always accessible. People were doing references with him. That happened in the early 90s. 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. He dropped out of MIT. Then, we went straight on my honeymoon. I think that's a really good thing. ZIERLER: Did you think about quantum information at all at Stanford? 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. MAGUIRE: Yeah, I don't think they're racing toward a singular finish line. It's not talked about that way, but Shockley Semiconductor was originally a division of Beckman Instruments. Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital, chats with DeSo Founder Nader Al-Naji on a number of topics across crypto, startups, and venture capital. Another is how the universe was formed, like the big bang. Shaun, for the last part of our talk, just one retrospective question and then one going forward. One of the most famous ones was the photoelectric effect that Einstein won the Nobel Prize for his explanation of. It was this weird, internal drive. People don't quite give credit, but Caltech's own Arnold Beckman in many ways was maybe the first VC. I think some of the physicists didn't quite understand the math language that he was using, but Alexei is a path breaker. 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. Dr. Maguire is also on the board of 5 other companies. A few things: one, I think there are many finish lines; two, I think the future is non-deterministic. Basically, I was investing in companies and taking board seats. I didn't really have much of a formal background in it or anything. Sequoia BitClout was both a sensation and a controversial startup when it launched earlier this year. MAGUIRE: Yeah. Whereas there's some areas, like in combinatorics, where you can door like today in machine learningyou can do original work in three months. Shaun Maguire founded Escape Dynamics, Inc. and Expanse, Inc. So, that was one example of something. MAGUIRE: I had officially unenrolled from Stanford a long time ago. A saddle is what we call negatively curved. At Sequoia, we have a lot of these flywheels, if I'm honest. So, I've been absolutely fascinated by business since I was a little kid. In high school, I didn't know about the IMO, USAMO, AIME, or any of these things. I feel like that's what happened with string theory. Was that a connecting point to Sequoia? There are a lot of candidate theories that fit under that umbrella. 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. John was a huge part in this holographic principle idea. By navigating this website you agree to our cookie policy. These things go in waves. Was he a hands-on advisor? MAGUIRE: I would say they're very similar, and with solar, it wasn't as clear. It was more helpful for being able to do diligence. 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. One of the things is Caltech is a very humbling place. He was also a Partner at GV. Ive got to believe that they work incredibly hard in part to make their families proud. He is a Co-Founder and served as Board Member at Expanse. Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia, has been on both sides of the table, as an entrepreneur and investor. In that world, there is a deep relationship between the waves allowed in the space and the geometry allowed of the space. As an investor, you want to have intuition, but you also need to check your intuition with lots of diligence on things. 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. I would almost say in a lot of ways it was similar to Maxwell's demon paradox, which was in the late 1800s. 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. Facebook gives people the power to. MAGUIRE: My read is John is just testing your commitment. What were people excited about? Physics is very powerful. The third thing to say is physics teaches you a way to think. String theory is one. That's another area where Google has done an incredible job, is machine learning research. Seed/Early. It raises your ego in some ways, but it has to lower our ego in others. 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'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. Google will do better than say, Meta or Facebook, but Apple has changed the way ad search works recently and made it a lot harder for their competitors, and they're getting a lot of ad market share, so it'll be interesting to see what happens to Google in that context. He knows where you're going. I was doing projects on the computer, hanging out in hacker forums for 10 hours a day in IRC. 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 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. So, I don't stay up perfectly, but I do try to stay up with the really big results. 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. This wasnt necessarily what I thought I would do long term. It is something I've thought a lot about. At Caltech, everyone talks about the science all the time. Alexei Kitaev. 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. Just think of a few examples. I literally emailed John Preskill from Afghanistan. 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. I received my PhD. These things change over time. Texas A&M (OA) Accomplishments and honors. Social crypto network Bitclout is now listed on Blockchain.com. ZIERLER: Was Alexei accessible? So, I basically made that decision a long time ago that I wouldn't do it. MAGUIRE: I would say, a long time ago, I had to make the decision that I would go in another direction. He emailed Mike Moritz, who's a legend in venture capital, and, Michael Abramson, and they ended up giving me a job. So, that became the most exciting thing by far in quantum gravity, and now the field is on a journey to unite the fields even more closely. Five years ago, quantum information was moving way faster than machine learning. 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. 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. It was just announced last week that Figma is going to be acquired by Adobe for $20 billion. So, we became friends. Then another fund that was trying to recruit me did a reference call with my friend Patrick Collison. 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 don't think it's an accident that John's group has been the central node in quantum information over the last 20 years or so. In my opinion, no question. 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. You can register here. ZIERLER: As you were surveying all of these ideas, where did you see a niche? When I was nine years old, I became really passionate about the solar system. At the time, a recurring theme through the group is that Kitaev had done a lot of really interesting work and people were trying to understand it continuously. The media built them up. View twitter profile View linkedin profile Get in touch with Cornelius Cornelius Menke. He serves as Board Member at Physna and Monad. You have to claw your way from hell to get to the edge. 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. Posted By : / how do i access my talk21 email /; Under :eaglestone village lambertville, mieaglestone village lambertville, mi Alexei is a mathematician. So, now, your default is sitting next to experimentalists as a theorist at events and on committees and all that. Is that relevant to the kinds of things you do on a day to day basis? I've been reading your notes from Afghanistan." That kicked off a whole new passion in space, and that led to learning about black holes and getting absolutely fascinated by black holes. Please dont YOLO your 401(k) into shitcoins. 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. [few minutes pause] When you got to the group meetings with John, what were some of the big debates that were happening? 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. I'll trust my instincts when something comes up. It was a really small major for a school that big. Founders Fund, which is another venture capital fund, invested in both of our companies. Did you know Rob? There are certain shapes that have differentthey have the same eigenvalues, same to the Laplacian, with different geometries. 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. Just in terms of the way you approach business, the way you understand science, the way you think about the world? So, when I was doing that one, yes, sure, having the quantum background was really important, and being able to do diligence on the company and trying to figure out what the roadmap would be and what the biggest bottlenecks would be for scaling and things like that. When I was in sixth grade, NASA had this program called SAREX, Satellite Amateur Radio Experiment. I think it's a good thing. The first one was a failure, three of them have been successful, and one is too early to call. So, they were able to do really amazing work that was not too far away from the core business. 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. I sold it for a billion dollars, all of that. I was kind of doing both: doing the company and grad school. It's actually a directly relevant story, so I'll share it here. I think I will definitely have more involvement with Caltech at some point in my life. 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 a tautology, but it's also 100% correct. I could explain the technical definition, but that's neither here nor there. Because it's an extra three factors of two you had to get. His portfolio includes Stripe, Opendoor, IonQ, Spinlaunch, Lambda School, Dandelion Energy . In some cases, they were wildly misunderstood as kids and have chips on their shoulders. ZIERLER: Anything memorable from the defense? Partner @sequoia // @caltech physics PhD // quantum space crypto security (it's a niche but high impact field) ZIERLER: Besides John, who else was on your committee? Before, there was too much incompatibility in the languages these fields would use, so it was just hard to even communicate. Once you get to the cutting edge, it's not that hard to keep up. 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? When I came back to Caltech, I had started a company in 2012, and it ended up being a relatively successful company. MAGUIRE: My academic background is pretty unusual. MAGUIRE: Of course! So, I did this and got to ask a question to the astronauts, and that honestly made space really tangible to me. It took me years after to really understand it. When the Figma acquisition happened, it caused a lot of our other portfolio companies to raise their ambition. I try to keep up with all those fields. The way John works, is it's really a Socratic style. Honestly, I kind of blacked out. It was basically learning, reading papers, talking to lots of people, going to group meetings for a long time. 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? Imagine having a relationship between the masses of photons and the shape of space. I was the only student in my year that joined that department, the only grad student. So, I tried to bring some of the hyperbolic geometry ideas into this field. 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. But the crypto theme is so unique that we decided to create a dedicated fund (a first for Sequoia, ed.) Then I got recruited to work at DARPA by Regina Dugan. He never tells you you're stupid. Do we live in a many worlds thing? From the time I was 9, Ive been obsessed with space. ZIERLER: I meant relative to where it was maybe 20 or 30 years ago, not relative to Stanford of course. SHAUN MAGUIRE: I'm beyond thrilled to be here. I just kind of knew this thing, the information paradox, and all of that. ZIERLER: When did you first appreciate the connections between black holes and quantum information? Now, power cost per watt generated by solar is roughly one-tenth of fossil fuels at this point, depending on where you are. In the late 90s, Juan Maldacena had a big breakthrough there. He played college football for the Florida State Seminoles. He had founded this tiny little department called Control and Dynamical Systems. My goal with the PhD was just to get to the cutting edge of knowledge in that field, because these things had kept me up in the middle of the night as a little kid, literally, for a long time. shaun maguire sequoia wifepapa smurf tattoo. But once I got there, I got over a 4.0 or whatever in my first year. 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. I didn't know anything about quantum information. I also, though, I think a lot of string theorists have gotten a bad rap. Patrick was talking to an extremely famous founder. He told Sequoia, "You guys should hire Shaun." There's two things. This is a true story. Thank you so much. Candidly, with my background of 1.8 GPA in high school and an F in algebra 2, beggars can't be choosers. Not completely explicitly, but a little bit subconsciously and implicitly. Dr. Maguire previously occupied the position of Member of DRW Trading Group and Partner at GV Management Co. LLC. 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. The extroverts are the ones who look at your shoes when you're talking. It led to this overbuilding phase with fiber, which was actually a prerequisite to have all the internet businesses of the next decade built on top of it. Institutionally, is Sequoia involved in the quantum information space at all? We call that quantum gravity. I was really doing a lot. 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. That's a personal, philosophicalit's like a religious conversation. LayerZero is an omnichain interoperability protocol that enables trustless cross-chain dApp development. I would say it just doesn't matter. 214. It became a program. One of the ways to measure this is, what do people do on their weekends? It was basically a bunch of renegade people that just loved technology and didn't want to go work on Wall Street; they wanted to make their career out of trying to build the future the hard way. But they were talking about quantum computing. Subscribe to Chain Reaction onApple,Spotifyor your alternative podcast platform of choice to keep up with us every week. 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. Just to give you some examples of people from different domains, in mathematics there's this guy, Bill Thurston, who pioneered hyperbolic geometry. Definitely had to learn all that. The other groups I had been in, they weren't groups. ZIERLER: Coming in in 2012, did you recognize the transition from IQI to IQIM? You know for the vast majority of compute, you want it to be centralized. It's the first time that information had to be considered in physics. Working with Professor Makarov, I was his only student. He would always offer that. Or was this really a sudden career shift from what you might do otherwise with a PhD in fundamental physics? It's actually breaking in some ways right now via Apple. If Figma grew this quickly, we can grow this quickly." MAGUIRE: Very rarely. It was really lonely and solitary. At that moment, he becomes your advisor. 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. MAGUIRE: My job title is I'm a general partner at Sequoia Capital. 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. He's a professor I believe now at Chapman University, spent the early part of his career in Israel. ZIERLER: Finally Shaun, going forward, do you have a fluid view about your relationship with academia? DeSo is a layer-1 blockchain custom-built to scale decentralized social applications. Another is this idea that people have called ER = EPREinstein-Rosen equals Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen. 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. We became friends from that. MAGUIRE: John. ZIERLER: In your work on wormholes, just to clarify, are these toy models? I started at Stanford in 2007 and moved to Caltech in 2009. There have been these big evolutions, these big jumping points, and I only mentioned some of the ones related to the information paradox. Mark Wise. MAGUIRE: Yes, I do. One thing that I think is close to Bell Labs from a different direction right now is Deep Mind. Look at solar. Founders Fund had flown us to an island off Vancouver Island in British Columbia. For months, when I was 13, I couldn't sleep at night because there was a thought experiment I couldn't understand. Backstory. Shaun Maguire is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm that helps daring founders build legendary technology companies. MAGUIRE: No. In business, my two passions wereI would say there were three. Another was the way black body radiation happens. Did you talk to him a lot about these things? Robco rethinks how products are made, using modular robot systems. (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 . Could you have gone back? 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. Could you find him? The Wire Digital is helping global businesses make smarter decisions. MAGUIRE: I joined the group in 2012. 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. MAGUIRE: No. He was a physics major. MAGUIRE: I was really into computers as a kid, and really passionate about physics. When I was 7 years old, he helped me build my first computer. Some of the USC faculty had good connections at Stanford and basically got me in on letters of recommendation. MAGUIRE: Many, many things. I was paying pretty close attention back then. I had three jobs. I was randomly walking through the halls of the math department, and there weren't many math undergrads there. Now at this point I'm maybe a 25 year old or something, I think was when I was coming back to Caltech. The Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire. MAGUIRE: I never say this, but I guess I'm a doctor. There's a lot of amazing faculty at Stanford; I'm not trying to knock Stanford. 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. I could go on and on. He showed that in a specific sub-version of string theory, that that holographic principle would hold exactly true, and this result, I think it was in 1998, but in the late 90s became called what's called AdS/CFT, anti-de Sitter space, which is on the general relativity geometry side, and CFT, conformal field theory, which is on the high-energy physics quantum field theory side of the equation. So, if you say, "Hey Alexei, there's something that I would really like to understand that you worked on. Seed/Early + Growth. ZIERLER: What's the connecting point from Stanford to Caltech? One of my deep firsthand experiences that the media often time wants to build people up to tear them down, and I've just seen it. His name is Doug Borcoman [?]. 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. It's an interesting thing, because I think John changes many people's lives. SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches rockets and spacecraft. I've used people from Caltech as expert diligence when I've looked at companies. Actually the day I defended, I flew to Israel to get married. But I think he's testing people's commitment, which I think is a really smart strategy that not enough people do. Just knowing where that edge is, is enough.

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