shaun maguire sequoia wife

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. I had moved from a full-time operating role to chairman, and I was finishing my PhD. In some cases, they were wildly misunderstood as kids and have chips on their shoulders. For whatever reason, its their life mission to try to revolutionize the industry theyre going after. It's a stable energy source. ZIERLER: What were you doing at Google? My physics passion was in ninth grade. I had literally never done one. BCS national champion ( 2013) Sean Maguire (born March 11, 1994) is an American football quarterback. 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. 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. When I came back to Caltech, I had started a company in 2012, and it ended up being a relatively successful company. 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. 214. He was also an interesting, out of the box human, so I found him really exciting. This wasnt necessarily what I thought I would do long term. I was the only student in my year that joined that department, the only grad student. I left Stanford with a master's degree and went to Caltech. It doesn't matter. Mark Wise. We live in a space where photons have a mass. 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. They ebb and flow, so I try to go where the action is. I'd been at Google Ventures for three years, and I had the opportunity to move to Sequoia which is the best venture capital firm in the world, so it was hard to say no to. These guys all became my good friends. On the AdS side, that has a very deep relationship to hyperbolic geometry, which is something mathematicians have studied very deeply. It was a really small major for a school that big. I have a degree from Stanford. By normal human standards, I'm an introvert. Maguire focuses on enterprise,. I think it depends on a lot of things that play out. Then I got recruited to work at DARPA by Regina Dugan. Honestly, after getting to the cutting edge of knowledge there, it's weird. I think there's a second thing. There have been a lot of other big breakthroughs related to string theory over the last, like, 40 years. 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. He taught computer science and astronomy. 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. Don Valentine, the founder of the firm, he had been at some of the top semiconductor companies of the past, including Fairchild and National. At that moment, he becomes your advisor. Are you not looking at faculty appointments? There are a lot of people in that camp. Sequoia partners and specialists help outlier founders at every stage bend the arc of the possible. From the time I was 9, Ive been obsessed with space. Dr. Shaun Maguire serves as a Partner at Sequoia Capital. You need physics to understand that. MAGUIRE: I never say this, but I guess I'm a doctor. I was randomly walking through the halls of the math department, and there weren't many math undergrads there. I'm delighted to be here with Dr. Shaun Maguire. On the other hand, since I was a little kid, my passion was black holes and space. Another example would be: in quantum there's a guy, Yakir Aharonov, as in the Aharonov-Bohm effect. Harry Maguire is the world's most expensive centre-back and captain of arguably the world's most famous football club. He didn't take me as a student, but he told me to come to his group meetings, so I did. Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia, has been on both sides of the table, as an entrepreneur and investor. MAGUIRE: By Caltech's standards, I'm an extreme extrovert. Honestly, at the end of my PhD I had three full-time jobs. Or is it something entirely. There has already been a lot of great results there, and I'm sure there are more to come. 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. But as an investor, I wasn't doing any calculations. 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. So, I did this and got to ask a question to the astronauts, and that honestly made space really tangible to me. 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 think it's a good thing. This is a true story. What could quantum gravity actually achieve? Honestly, I kind of blacked out. I think these are actually wormholes, and that's a huge point of disagreement. For months, when I was 13, I couldnt sleep at night because there was a thought experiment I couldnt understand. Shaun is a Partner at Sequoia Capital. 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 had a really horrible experience, to be honest. Honeywell I don't think is a great comp; they don't have the same profit engine that Bell Labs has. He started mentoring me. For example, the thing that motivated quantum mechanics, I think there were three main categories of discrepancies. I really did the PhD for myself. It's actually breaking in some ways right now via Apple. Previously he Co-Founded Expanse which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $800M. 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. Was he a hands-on advisor? But it's only those two places where we know that quantum mechanics and general relativity make different predictions. It became a $110 million program. From the time I was 9, I've been obsessed with space. ZIERLER: Shaun, do you have a sense of the origin story of Sequoiawhat niche it was looking to fill when it started? 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. . It's too far outside of our tools right now, and we really don't know what direction to go. You can interpret that as a lower bound of the masses of particles allowed in the space. The big bang one issomehow people don't really talk about that. You need to grab him when he's around and set up a time, but he'll always do that. That's not the fully burdened, fully level-ized cost, but just the instantaneous production cost. My job as a VC is much more about business strategy, hiring people, managing people, understanding human psychology, understanding market psychology, understanding where the puck is going in terms of technological trends, things like that. By navigating this website you agree to our cookie policy. You can't have spaceships traveling away in a straight line from a Euclidean geometry perspective. Eventually with where the work went, I didn't know anything at all about quantum field theory or string theory, which I had to learn over the next few years. I've invested in a lot of companies. (It turns out space is curved.) 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. Not completely explicitly, but a little bit subconsciously and implicitly. The way John works, is it's really a Socratic style. So, I tried to bring some of the hyperbolic geometry ideas into this field. Where do you see some really new directions? 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. It tied together all of my passions, just all of themblack holes, computers, all of these things. Was that a connecting point to Sequoia? 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. View twitter profile View linkedin profile Get in touch with Cornelius Cornelius Menke. 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. Oskar Painter. 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. Skip to main content. In other words, the experimentalists joining matter to the theory, did that register with you at all? Patrick is a huge lover of physics. I still don'tno oneI don't know anything about quantum mechanics. Now, power cost per watt generated by solar is roughly one-tenth of fossil fuels at this point, depending on where you are. That was the next huge jump in this area. One of the most famous ones was the photoelectric effect that Einstein won the Nobel Prize for his explanation of. ZIERLER: Besides John, who else was on your committee? 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. So, that was one example of something. I think I will definitely have more involvement with Caltech at some point in my life. I had never seen one of these. MAGUIRE: Very rarely. I think it's because it's just in some ways it's unknowable. I've brought some people from Caltech into companies I've worked with. One of the ways to measure this is, what do people do on their weekends? I just had to get to the cutting edge. You want to live up to his name and reputation. Sequoia BitClout was both a sensation and a controversial startup when it launched earlier this year. But I think he's testing people's commitment, which I think is a really smart strategy that not enough people do. MAGUIRE: Yes, I do. Patrick was talking to an extremely famous founder. Then that person got mad and left the conversation and left Patrick and me talking. That's another area where Google has done an incredible job, is machine learning research. 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: First of all, I could not love John more, could not be more grateful to John, could not think more highly of John. View the profiles of people named Shaun Maguire. ZIERLER: Once you started going to group meetings at IQI, what were your impressions? I'm probably making this up, but it felt like 20 kids. 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. And some of these founders dont even understand where it comes from, or how deeply ingrained it is in them. I think that's a really good thing. What were people excited about? So, I really love academia. How did that play out? People don't quite give credit, but Caltech's own Arnold Beckman in many ways was maybe the first VC. I feel like that's what happened with string theory. I would say a bunch of the other prominent, early investors were really more coming from the technical side. I didnt even go to class most of the time1.8 GPA in 10th grade and an F in algebra II. They were investing in flying carsKittyhawkjust two days ago said that they're shutting down. I was kind of doing both: doing the company and grad school. It was a tiny department. In high school, I didn't know about the IMO, USAMO, AIME, or any of these things. Mathematicians know a lot of things; I don't think we're yet well-known enough by the physicists. I've also been fascinated by computers, which I would say is slightly different than science. There's so much prerequisite knowledge, it takes so long to get to the point where you can actually make a contribution. ZIERLER: On a technical level, I wonder if you can explain, what was the relevance in this field? One of the things is Caltech is a very humbling place. When I was at GV I invested in Stripe. It's actually a directly relevant story, so I'll share it here. I've been reading your notes from Afghanistan." 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. ZIERLER: So, this was a real vibrant social scene separate from the science? As an investor, you want to have intuition, but you also need to check your intuition with lots of diligence on things. But as a grad student, especially a social one, you already knew a lot of those people. That's another example of something where it didn't make sense with the classical treatment. John rules out of love, and you don't want to disappoint him. Basically, starting in eighth grade, I got really disillusioned with school. I received my PhD. Do we live in a many worlds thing? I don't know, I was learning the rest. Aharonov is one of these guys that's always doing things very differently than other people. I came back in 2012. The best founders are just so obsessed with what theyre doing that they cannot turn off. I could go on and on. It wouldn't have been relevant in a five year time frame, but relevant in a fifteen year time frame. There's some technical definition that gives you that, but you can have negative, zero, or positive curvature. AMP Robotics is changing the face of recycling with high-speed guided robotics. 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. Magic Eden is the leading destination for NFT discovery, expression, and ownership across digital cultures. When I proposed to my wife, I blacked out that day. That's how I got to know Google Ventures. Texas A&M (OA) Accomplishments and honors. MAGUIRE: I'm actually not so sure about that. Alexei is a mathematician. 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. 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. ZIERLER: Did you get any curveball questions? Lenny Susskind, but actually really, based on a lot of John's ideas as well. I'm so glad we connected. 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. When I was in sixth grade, NASA had this program called SAREX, Satellite Amateur Radio Experiment. I love John. Do you think about one day becoming a professor? I have always, in science, I'm attracted to people that have been out of the box. Watershed is a software platform that helps companies get to zero carbon fast. It's obvious that for things like material science, when quantum computers are powerful enough, they will play an important role in material discovery. String theory is one. Basically, venture capital has become this huge industry, but back in the day when Don started the firm in 1972, it didn't really exist. 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 do know Rob. They lost a lot of money, but the category has been very successful. Candidly, with my background of 1.8 GPA in high school and an F in algebra 2, beggars can't be choosers. Feynman is the classic Caltech person. Just in terms of the way you approach business, the way you understand science, the way you think about the world? Shaun is an entrepreneur, investor, and scientist with a broad and eclectic background. Or are you thinking about actual wormholes? 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. 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. The third thing to say is physics teaches you a way to think. It wouldn't be relevant to the business model in a parent company. When the Figma acquisition happened, it caused a lot of our other portfolio companies to raise their ambition. 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. Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital, chats with DeSo Founder Nader Al-Naji on a number of topics across crypto, startups, and venture capital. It is something I've thought a lot about. ZIERLER: So then what happens next? The goal of quantum gravity is to reconcile these discrepancies. MAGUIRE: I was really into computers as a kid, and really passionate about physics. 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. MAGUIRE: I was doing the same thing. 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. It really is easy to say that, but doing three to six months of repeatedly showing up repeatedly and having something to say every week because you learned something new, that's what actually matters and that's actually hard to do. I think some of the physicists didn't quite understand the math language that he was using, but Alexei is a path breaker. 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? Our Founders; Our Companies; Privy makes Simple APIs to manage user data off-chain. ZIERLER: [laughs] Shaun, let's establish now some context. Knowde is the marketplace for chemicals, polymers and ingredients. You have to claw your way from hell to get to the edge. In business, my two passions wereI would say there were three. It took me years after to really understand it. shaun maguire sequoia wifepapa smurf tattoo. Before, there was too much incompatibility in the languages these fields would use, so it was just hard to even communicate. We became friends from that. 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. Iron Fish is a Layer 1 blockchain that provides privacy guarantees on every single transaction. Did you know Rob? I did horribly in high school. Dr. Maguire previously occupied the position of Member of DRW Trading Group and Partner at GV Management Co. LLC. I'll pause. shaun maguire sequoia wife https://iccleveland.org/wp-content/themes/icc/images/empty/thumbnail.jpg 150 150 ICC ICC https://iccleveland.org/wp-content/themes/icc . Quantum information not too much. Bored out of my mind. MAGUIRE: I'm always playing catch-up. So, I didn't really know anyone at Sequoia, but I was getting recruited by other firms. An equivalent thing is in quantum mechanics, people still debate the interpretation around wave function collapse and things like this. Gather hosts virtual spaces for work and play. That day, I was working. I think there are probably actually wormholes, but it doesn't matter for the sake of the work. Then, we went straight on my honeymoon. They've lost a lot of the goodwill of public markets. I started the second company with two friends and I got to know a lot of VCs raising money for it. He is a Director of AMP Robotics, Gather, Physna, and Vise. ZIERLER: And when does Sequoia enter into the mix? In some very crude sense, one says that information is conserved, the other says that information is destroyed. I also, though, I think a lot of string theorists have gotten a bad rap. Because I had come from a math background, I found that yes, I could talk to Alexei. 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. MAGUIRE: My academic background is pretty unusual. Did you have any interface with that world? He was also a Partner at GV. Do you mean my job title? Michael Moritz. 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. ZIERLER: Anything memorable from the defense? Alexei Kitaev. 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 use physics a lot. Adam Crafton. For a lot of decision making, centralization can be better for certain types of decisions.. 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. Jerry had just done incredible work in understanding our solar system, orbits, trajectories for space crafts, and things like that. As an investor and adviser, Shaun has worked with companies building everything from quantum computers to self-driving cars. Shaun, for the last part of our talk, just one retrospective question and then one going forward. 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. 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. MAGUIRE: It's what Stephen Hawking is famous for, but I didn't understand at all the stuff Hawking had done.

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