MAGUIRE: I joined the group in 2012. That happened in the early 90s. Did you have any interface with that world? 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. That's kind of the core intuition of behind the holographic principle. At Sequoia, we have a lot of these flywheels, if I'm honest. 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. When did that happen? The vast majority of the individual solar companies failed, but the whole category has been incredibly successful. What were people excited about at that point? ZIERLER: Besides John, who else was on your committee? Physics is very powerful. The fourth area is I'm super hyperactive. Candidly, with my background of 1.8 GPA in high school and an F in algebra 2, beggars can't be choosers. So, I tried to bring some of the hyperbolic geometry ideas into this field. 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. So, I've always been attracted to people like that. It was really lonely and solitary. 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. Identified as v4.0.2Now with Pre-Seed Investor Lists FAQ But going back a long ways, going back to when I first started at Caltech, I thought I would probably be a professor, but when I went to DARPA, that was the moment when I had to choose between the two. I 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. On the other hand, since I was a little kid, my passion was black holes and space. I have always, in science, I'm attracted to people that have been out of the box. I try to keep up with all those fields. You know for the vast majority of compute, you want it to be centralized. Another was industrials. Backstory. My PhD was basically making a bunch of connections between these ideas. There are a lot of people in that camp. He started mentoring me. That's the way I would describe it. 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. Patrick is a huge lover of physics. ZIERLER: Anything memorable from the defense? He just gives you breadcrumbs along the way when you need them. Honestly, I kind of blacked out. Caltech means a lot to me. Vise, a company founded by two high-school graduates, raises $45 What was some of that original work for you? I literally emailed John Preskill from Afghanistan. Seven Questions with Shaun Maguire - Sequoia Capital When I first went to John's group, it was like 20 people in the meeting, once a week getting together, people having lunch together during the day sharing ideas, people working on many different topics, working on the future of computing, algorithms for that, hardware for that, working on black holes, working on fundamental quantum mechanics, paradoxes in quantum mechanics, things like this, condensed matter physics. ZIERLER: I meant relative to where it was maybe 20 or 30 years ago, not relative to Stanford of course. Rob is another legend of the field. 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. Mathematicians have studied hyperbolic geometry to death and have learned incredibly beautiful things. I spent six months really trying to understand that, and I couldn't understand it. We don't need to know the exact algorithms that are going to run. MAGUIRE: Others know this stuff better than I do, but last I checked, there are only two places in nature that we're aware of where quantum mechanics and general relativity make different predictions about what should happen. Ive got to believe that they work incredibly hard in part to make their families proud. You can listen to the entireinterview with Maguireon our podcast, Chain Reaction. It was still pretty easy for me. We still don't know much about quantum gravity but we're making some progress. I'll say something that can get me in trouble. Could you have gone back? My passion, especially coming from that background, was in probability and combinatorics, but really theoretical probability I just found absolutely fascinating. When I was nine years old, I became really passionate about the solar system. 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. So, we raised a bunch of venture capital. But the crypto theme is so unique that we decided to create a dedicated fund (a first for Sequoia, ed.) I'm delighted to be here with Dr. Shaun Maguire. 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. because some crypto projects have characteristics and show performance that can't really be measured . Shaun Maguire Investor Profile: Portfolio & Exits | PitchBook Or did some interesting debates come up? I can't remember the exact other things in the very beginning when I joined the group, but I can tell you the themes over the whole ten years or whatever. John was a huge part in this holographic principle idea. Then I got recruited to work at DARPA by Regina Dugan. That's another example of something where it didn't make sense with the classical treatment. So, that was the question. I really did the PhD for myself. Shaun Maguire. ZIERLER: So, it was in some ways really a purely intellectual pursuit for you, then? There has already been a lot of great results there, and I'm sure there are more to come. I transferred to USC, and I was only there for two years. Moore's law had to keep running for an extra five years, and no one knew how long it would run for. It was a tiny department. What I was actually most interested was space. I've used people from Caltech as expert diligence when I've looked at companies. But it's only those two places where we know that quantum mechanics and general relativity make different predictions. About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators . 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. It wouldn't have been relevant in a five year time frame, but relevant in a fifteen year time frame. That's how I got to know Google Ventures. 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. 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. 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. Caldera enables dynamic Web3 experiences by enabling developers to launch performant application-specific blockchains. It's almost a minimalist style. I have a fellowship, so I don't need any funding. Sequoia's Shaun Maguire on competition and conviction in - Yahoo 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. We live in a space where photons have a mass. Prior to GV, Shaun co-founded two companies: Qadium and Escape Dynamics. A prerequisite to that is special relativity. The Boring Company creates safe, fast-to-dig, and low-cost transportation, utility, and freight tunnels. Physicists say all the time, "Simulating physical systems: quantum computers are clearly going to be important for that." Sequoia Capital's New Crypto Fund - video Dailymotion Are you not looking at faculty appointments? ZIERLER: Shaun, I'm curious in graduate school if you interfaced at all with string theorists who of course are convinced that string theory is the likeliest path to developing a theory of quantum gravity. Honeywell I don't think is a great comp; they don't have the same profit engine that Bell Labs has. It was a tiny department. Shaun is a Partner at Sequoia Capital. MAGUIRE: I was doing the same thing. . I also think we were living through a pretty incredible period in semiconductor technology. They'll build someone up and then they'll tear them down. 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. Basically, starting in eighth grade, I got really disillusioned with school. MAGUIRE: I think something that's hard for people to understand about me is that I've always been doing multiple things in parallel my whole life. The media built them up. He has a PhD in Physics from Caltech and Masters degrees in Statistics from Stanford and "Control and Dynamical Systems" from Caltech. Where do you see some of the parallels? MAGUIRE: 26 actually. That kicked off a whole new passion in space, and that led to learning about black holes and getting absolutely fascinated by black holes. At Caltech there was this guy, Jerry MarsdenJerrold Marsdenwho is an absolute legend in space physics. The extroverts are the ones who look at your shoes when you're talking. It's kind of the same thing. String theory is one. Maguire is a former graduate assistant at Texas A&M, were he was working under his FSU coach Jimbo Fisher. That then led to a lot of evolutions over time. Whereas there's some areas, like in combinatorics, where you can door like today in machine learningyou can do original work in three months. 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. It wasn't as obvious, but it was obvious there would be certain niche applications of solar. I feel like that's what happened with string theory. I didn't really have much of a formal background in it or anything. I was really doing a lot. MAGUIRE: Yes, I do. It was a really small major for a school that big. So thats what youve seen get unleashed with crypto over the last 18 months, we went from it being some people with really, strong positive views, to the whole firm being completely behind it., Why a bipartisan embrace of crypto might never touch Bitcoin. I think a lot of people were always too afraid to even ask him. 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?

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