I was paying pretty close attention back then. Maybe five years later the physicists will go learn the math required to talk to him. Please dont YOLO your 401(k) into shitcoins. There has already been a lot of great results there, and I'm sure there are more to come. View the profiles of people named Shaun Maguire. The founder of Figma is an amazing 30 year old kid who also really loves physics and computers. Before, there was too much incompatibility in the languages these fields would use, so it was just hard to even communicate. Another Sequoia Partner, Michelle Bailhe, said that the firm believes it's still "day one for . 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. 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. 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. Where do you see some really new directions? Then I got recruited to work at DARPA by Regina Dugan. Honeywell I don't think is a great comp; they don't have the same profit engine that Bell Labs has. What I was actually most interested was space. 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. I think there are probably actually wormholes, but it doesn't matter for the sake of the work. Biography. I did know Rob, but it was not a connecting point for me. It's obvious that for things like material science, when quantum computers are powerful enough, they will play an important role in material discovery. There are a lot of people in that camp. I had this unbelievably lucky thing: one of my friends' dad was a local community college professor. I have always, in science, I'm attracted to people that have been out of the box. What were people excited about? On the AdS side, that has a very deep relationship to hyperbolic geometry, which is something mathematicians have studied very deeply. MAGUIRE: I joined the group in 2012. It was a tiny department. Did you talk to him a lot about these things? Alexei Kitaev. So, that was one example of something. 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: John. So, I went up to the statistics department at Stanford, which is one of the top places in that, and at Stanford is where I fell back in love with physics. I had moved from a full-time operating role to chairman, and I was finishing my PhD. You can interpret that as a lower bound of the masses of particles allowed in the space. It was really lonely and solitary. It tied together all of my passions, just all of themblack holes, computers, all of these things. Sequoia Partner, Shaun Maguire, said, "We have a long-term view on crypto that it's a megatrend over the next 20 years." In the same interview, Maguire said that the crypto fund would invest in tokens like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin. 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. That's kind of the core intuition of behind the holographic principle. Previously he Co-Founded Expanse which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $800M. It is something I've thought a lot about. MAGUIRE: My job title is I'm a general partner at Sequoia Capital. I didn't really have much of a formal background in it or anything. At that moment, he becomes your advisor. You can register here. I just had to get to the cutting edge. 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. I would say a bunch of the other prominent, early investors were really more coming from the technical side. I'll pause. 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. People were doing references with him. 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. It doesn't matter. When I was nine years old, I became really passionate about the solar system. These guys all became my good friends. As an investor, you want to have intuition, but you also need to check your intuition with lots of diligence on things. LayerZero is an omnichain interoperability protocol that enables trustless cross-chain dApp development. 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 other words, the experimentalists joining matter to the theory, did that register with you at all? Physics is very powerful. 214. I always had that passion, but I've had the science passion which really started with astronomy. 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. I didnt even go to class most of the time1.8 GPA in 10th grade and an F in algebra II. NFL hero JJ Watt and his wife, former United States international Kealia, have invested in English football team Burnley as they bid to usher in a new era of success at the club.. Burnley, coached . Feynman is the classic Caltech person. Could you have gone back? I came back in 2012. I received my PhD. Will you be my advisor? 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 way I met Patrick is pretty funny. ZIERLER: Anything memorable from the defense? Patrick started a company called Stripe. 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? ZIERLER: To foreshadow to what happened next, were you on a trajectory of pursuing an academic career and then some opportunity came up? I think Bell Labs won nine Nobel Prizes, and there was a lot of stuff that was pretty adjacent to Bell Labs. 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. For example, the thing that motivated quantum mechanics, I think there were three main categories of discrepancies. MAGUIRE: I was at Stanford for a year and a half. They said, "Man, I love Dylan, but like, I can do it, too. ZIERLER: Just to clarify, when you came to Caltech, you were already admitted, but it was not certain at that point that you'd be John Preskill's student? They'll build someone up and then they'll tear them down. I made a lot of my closest friends from Caltech. The platform lets people buy crypto coins attached. In my job as a founder of companies and partner at Sequoia and all this, being on lots of boards, I deal with the media a lot. I've invested in a lot of companies. They're not that" They're really, really smart, but having that exposure really raises your own personal ambition. As ever with high-earning, high-profile . 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. Seed/Early. ZIERLER: Once you started going to group meetings at IQI, what were your impressions? Maguire is a former graduate assistant at Texas A&M, were he was working under his FSU coach Jimbo Fisher. MAGUIRE: It was simply in having a stronger math background than some people. It took a long time to get to that point. I had to say yes to it on the spot, so I went to DARPA for a year and a half full-time there. He was also an interesting, out of the box human, so I found him really exciting. So, I did this and got to ask a question to the astronauts, and that honestly made space really tangible to me. String theory is one. 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. MAGUIRE: My academic background is pretty unusual. The professors at USC told me I should graduate and go somewhere better, so I went up to Stanford and started grad school there, actually in the statistics department. Thank you so much. Where do you see some of the parallels? What was some of that original work for you? ZIERLER: What were you doing at Google? He served as Board Member at SpinLaunch and AMP . In that world, there is a deep relationship between the waves allowed in the space and the geometry allowed of the space. There was this incredible energy and camaraderie there, and it was addicting, especially for me coming fromI had only been exposed to solitary research before that. DAVID ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, director of the Caltech Heritage Project. It was this weird, internal drive. This all happened in a curved space, a Minkowski space. MAGUIRE: I would say, a long time ago, I had to make the decision that I would go in another direction. It's a tautology, but it's also 100% correct. 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. 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. Sequoia partners and specialists help outlier founders at every stage bend the arc of the possible. Founders Fund, which is another venture capital fund, invested in both of our companies. 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. Another is this idea that people have called ER = EPREinstein-Rosen equals Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen. Then that person got mad and left the conversation and left Patrick and me talking. Honestly, at the end of my PhD I had three full-time jobs. That kicked off a whole new passion in space, and that led to learning about black holes and getting absolutely fascinated by black holes. I have been really interested in machine learning, and in cryptocurrencies, and in robots, and in space, and in physics, and other things. So, we raised a bunch of venture capital. It's going to be fun. It was entertaining. What has stayed with you from IQIM and Caltech in general? Over the course of three years, maybe once every two to three weeks he'll ask you a question that is almost like the series of questions is taking you on a journey that he wants you to go on, but he doesn't tell you explicitly what journey you're going on ahead of time. I was the only student in my year that joined that department, the only grad student. 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. Don Valentine, the founder of the firm, he had been at some of the top semiconductor companies of the past, including Fairchild and National. I got lucky in that when I was leaving DARPA, we came up with an idea. We live in a space where photons have a mass. 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. Whereas there's some areas, like in combinatorics, where you can door like today in machine learningyou can do original work in three months. I think, sure, the volume of companies is greater now, but Caltech had its hand in some pretty legendary companies in the past. 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. I had a pretty good intuition about how to solve them and ended up talking to Professor Arratia. 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. It wouldn't be relevant to the business model in a parent company. As an investor and adviser, Shaun has worked with companies building everything from quantum computers to self-driving cars. My physics passion was in ninth grade. So, now, your default is sitting next to experimentalists as a theorist at events and on committees and all that. I would do these thought experiments. ZIERLER: It sounds like it's always exciting for you, no matter what it is though. Gather hosts virtual spaces for work and play. Ive started five companies. I didn't know exactly what to do. 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. 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. It's really easy to go say, "Admit me; I'm going to work really hard." As someone who loves quantum information, I'll be thrilled with that. When I had thought about itI'm going to tell you, this is the 100% truthful version. So, John never tells you you're wrong. Shaun Maguire. But, just by having this incredible profit engine that you can pump into these other ideas, I think there are a lot of similarities. 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. 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. Because it's an extra three factors of two you had to get. Shaun Maguire: Sequoia Capital has historically had several types of technology funds that match the size of the companies we've invested in. My PhD was basically making a bunch of connections between these ideas. When I came back to Caltech, I had started a company in 2012, and it ended up being a relatively successful company. Caldera enables dynamic Web3 experiences by enabling developers to launch performant application-specific blockchains. I think what were seeing is a lot of the crypto community is actually coming back in 90% of the situations and realizing that, Oh, actually, the way things were done in the past was actually pretty good and got there for an optimal reason, But 10% is like radically different and you can kind of meaningfully improve the whole system by getting some of those things right.. MAGUIRE: The point of connection to Google Ventures was simple. ZIERLER: Shaun, to zoom out from your specific research, what were people talking about with regard to quantum gravity during this time? MAGUIRE: Honestly, yeah. ZIERLER: Was Alexei accessible? ZIERLER: As you were surveying all of these ideas, where did you see a niche? 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. I actually think that with Google, they've lost a lot of the goodwill internally. What could quantum gravity actually achieve? One of the ways to measure this is, what do people do on their weekends? I would say it just doesn't matter. ZIERLER: Shaun, do you have a sense of the origin story of Sequoiawhat niche it was looking to fill when it started? There's two things. He received an undergraduate degree from the University of Southern . I personally believe quantum computing is going to be similar to solar. Candidly, with my background of 1.8 GPA in high school and an F in algebra 2, beggars can't be choosers. MAGUIRE: By Caltech's standards, I'm an extreme extrovert. While decentralization allows for a certain type of consumer protections, Maguire still contends that the rulebook of traditional investor protections shouldnt be thrown out. I don't even really remember. Show more Show more It's almost a minimalist style. If I were to guess what would happen, I think it will probably lead to a new set of equations that capture nature on a deeper level than we have today. Another was the way black body radiation happens. ZIERLER: So then what happens next? At my job I'm dealing with incredible rate of change, I'm dealing with incredible amounts of data, and physics gives you frameworks to make sense of all this and try to come up with heuristic laws and ways to think about things which are very powerful for investing. MAGUIRE: Yeah. He played college football for the Florida State Seminoles. It turns out the answer is no. You don't know where you're going. I'm delighted to be here with Dr. Shaun Maguire. Mathematicians know a lot of things; I don't think we're yet well-known enough by the physicists. 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? TipLink enables users to send crypto or NFTs with just a link. That then led to a lot of evolutions over time. The field has moved so fast. Out of the three you mentioned, I think Google is the only one that has a lot of parallels. I was chairman of my company. So, I really love academia. Shaun to start, will you please tell me your title and institutional affiliation? I love Caltech, etc. I was really doing a lot. I think it's because it's just in some ways it's unknowable. 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. MAGUIRE: I was doing the same thing. 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? I don't really remember any of it. Shaun Maguire is Partner at Sequoia Capital Ltd. See Shaun Maguire's compensation, career history, education, & memberships. 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. 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? That day, I was working. There's this other thing called holographic entanglement entropy. I spent six months really trying to understand that, and I couldn't understand it. There have been these big evolutions, these big jumping points, and I only mentioned some of the ones related to the information paradox. r2C is a defensive cybersecurity automation company with an open-source static analysis tool. The extroverts are the ones who look at your shoes when you're talking. He is a Co-Founder and served as Board Member at Expanse. For months, when I was 13, I couldnt sleep at night because there was a thought experiment I couldnt understand. 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. 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. It took a long time. ZIERLER: Finally Shaun, going forward, do you have a fluid view about your relationship with academia? On the other hand, since I was a little kid, my passion was black holes and space. Did you have any interface with that world? It's my Hogwarts. It's a universal thing across many different fields. I could go on and on. Ive got to believe that they work incredibly hard in part to make their families proud. They've always been more of an R&D firm and government contractor. One was the stock market. MAGUIRE: Very rarely. Mathematicians have studied hyperbolic geometry to death and have learned incredibly beautiful things. She recruited me onto a pretty crazy project related to the war in Afghanistan. I have incredible energy, so I've always been doing athletics of some kind, because otherwise I just can't think unless I burn my energy. 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. I met Patrick at a Founders Fund event many years ago. The day I got back, I went to graduation. The media built them up. 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. I've backed some people I knew from Caltech's companies. See Shaun Maguire's recent investments in Series A Cloud Infrastructure, other investment areas, and co-investors. 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. They ebb and flow, so I try to go where the action is. I love John. I was randomly walking through the halls of the math department, and there weren't many math undergrads there. They lost a lot of money, but the category has been very successful. Do we live in a many worlds thing? I think maybe on the faculty level it was a bigger deal, because it changed who was on the committees. MAGUIRE: Many, many things. I was so nervous. 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. 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. Shaun Maguire founded Escape Dynamics, Inc. and Expanse, Inc. MAGUIRE: My read is John is just testing your commitment. I led the Series A in IonQ, which is one of these first wave quantum hardware companies, which a bunch of people at Caltech knowlike Chris Monroe and Jungsang Kim, the founders of the companywell. So, we became friends. It's an interesting thing, because I think John changes many people's lives. ZIERLER: Yup. It gets us off fossil fuels. It gave me intuition for the distances and the speeds. I didn't know anything about quantum information. We call that quantum gravity. Prior to GV, Shaun co-founded two companies: Qadium and Escape Dynamics. Even within string theory, there are many different branches and ideas. I still don'tno oneI don't know anything about quantum mechanics. The actual edge doesn't move that quickly. I started at Stanford in 2007 and moved to Caltech in 2009. But I think he's testing people's commitment, which I think is a really smart strategy that not enough people do. I kind of stopped going to school. Growing up, I had a cousin who studied computer science at UCLA, who made a huge impact on me. This is a true story. 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. MAGUIRE: First of all, I could not love John more, could not be more grateful to John, could not think more highly of John. 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. A lot of people, their intuition for space or geometry is that we live in flat space, but if you live on a sphere, that sphere is what we would call positively curved. I had some aptitude. ZIERLER: You mentioned on a day to day basis you utilize your expertise in quantum information fairly rarely. Will you sign this thing for me?" I was probably taking eight classes a quarter. I was absolutely fascinated by where things come from, how energy works, oil and gas, chemicals industry, things like that, pharma. 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. Adam Crafton. I left Stanford with a master's degree and went to Caltech. I would say there are two parts to it. I emailed him from Afghanistan and said, "I'm coming back to Caltech. 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. Working with Professor Makarov, I was his only student. That sort of developed over time? He was a physics major. Then it led to starting a company, which did DARPA work for the next seven or eight years. It was just announced last week that Figma is going to be acquired by Adobe for $20 billion. By normal human standards, I'm an introvert. And theres a lot of wisdom in there, Maguire says. I am an absolute crypto maxi, but I think there are a lot of things that are misunderstood by the masses today, Maguire said. It took me years after to really understand it. When you're looking at light, there are certain ways where light very clearly behaves as a wave, and there are certain ways where it very clearly behaves as a particle. We would have gotten there later with the different technology. I think some of the physicists didn't quite understand the math language that he was using, but Alexei is a path breaker. I've also been absolutely fascinated by science. Bill Thurston was this guy who's workI had just been fascinated by the guy, and I read a lot of his papers. Subscribe to Chain Reaction onApple,Spotifyor your alternative podcast platform of choice to keep up with us every week. That happened in the early 90s. I feel like that's what happened with string theory. That was my passion, so I went to Caltech to work with Jerry. While the crypto industry continues to mint new unicorn startups, the rapid cooling of public market tech stocks has threatened to stall growth in the emerging category, which has still proven awfully susceptible to macro conditions. 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. Then the third major area was quantum information in the 90s, and has now been the glue that has tied many things together.
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