It wasn't as obvious, but it was obvious there would be certain niche applications of solar. There are a lot of different interpretations, and it's more in the realm of philosophy. I went to public school in Orange County, California. That was one thing, Alexei. I was born in 1985, so I was always trying to mess around with computers. DAVID ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, director of the Caltech Heritage Project. Because I had come from a math background, I found that yes, I could talk to Alexei. He was also a Partner at GV. That's how I got to know Google Ventures. I would say there are two parts to it. Texas A&M (OA) Accomplishments and honors. That kicked off a whole new passion in space, and that led to learning about black holes and getting absolutely fascinated by black holes. That's kind of the core intuition of behind the holographic principle. Shaun to start, will you please tell me your title and institutional affiliation? He taught computer science and astronomy. 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. 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. In many ways was the core person that drove it in the beginning, if not the core person. I've used people from Caltech as expert diligence when I've looked at companies. It was when I was at DARPA, that's when I got exposed to quantum information. I was a partner at Google Ventures at the time. When did that start for you? The media built them up. But I think he's testing people's commitment, which I think is a really smart strategy that not enough people do. There's two things. They were investing in flying carsKittyhawkjust two days ago said that they're shutting down. 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. In business, my two passions wereI would say there were three. I spent six months really trying to understand that, and I couldn't understand it. I'm probably making this up, but it felt like 20 kids. Some of it is implicit. It was a crazy thing, but Jerry, in my first year, had a medical complication and died during my first year. I was really doing a lot. Mark Wise. 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. Bill Thurston was this guy who's workI had just been fascinated by the guy, and I read a lot of his papers. Another is that Jeongwan Haah had just done this three dimensional error correcting code work, or was just finishing. String theory is one. It's kind of the same thing. It tied together all of my passions, just all of themblack holes, computers, all of these things. I had this strong background in probability, so I went into the math department and started working with someoneNikolai Makarov, who's a legend in mathto do some theoretical probability work. People would know who he is and know the companies he started. I honestly didn't feel like I deserved to be in that world, and I didn't know enough to even know how to get started until I was coming back. I think it's a good thing. Before, there was too much incompatibility in the languages these fields would use, so it was just hard to even communicate. It was a happy accident. (It turns out space is curved.) I don't even really remember. An equivalent thing is in quantum mechanics, people still debate the interpretation around wave function collapse and things like this. MAGUIRE: Many, many things. Mathematicians have studied hyperbolic geometry to death and have learned incredibly beautiful things. MAGUIRE: It's one of these weird things. By navigating this website you agree to our cookie policy. Do you see Google, Microsoft, IBM, and all these companiesare they racing toward a singular finish line? Deep Mind is now owned by Google, so I think that is a good one. Basically, starting in eighth grade, I got really disillusioned with school. It's a tautology, but it's also 100% correct. Definitely had to learn all that. They're not that" They're really, really smart, but having that exposure really raises your own personal ambition. It was more helpful for being able to do diligence. It's Friday, September 23, 2022. One of the things that's interesting about the journey of being a PhD student is that you work so hard to get to the cutting edge. I could go on and on. Honeywell I don't think is a great comp; they don't have the same profit engine that Bell Labs has. The founder of Figma is an amazing 30 year old kid who also really loves physics and computers. Was he a hands-on advisor? Or are they doing something different? He had a couple PhD students that were about my age or a little older who became good friends. I think these are actually wormholes, and that's a huge point of disagreement. Prior to GV, Shaun co-founded two companies: Qadium and Escape Dynamics. Sequoia invested in Rob Schoelkopf's company, QCI, before I joined. The way I met Patrick is pretty funny. 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. For a lot of decision making, centralization can be better for certain types of decisions.. In an upcoming episode on Wednesday, May 19, we'll sit down with Sequoia's Shaun Maguire and Vise CEO and co-founder Samir Vasavada. MAGUIRE: Of course! Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital, chats with DeSo Founder Nader Al-Naji on a number of topics across crypto, startups, and venture capital. 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. It became a $110 million program. It's the first time that information had to be considered in physics. View the profiles of people named Shaun Maguire. Do you think about one day becoming a professor? Don Valentine, the founder of the firm, he had been at some of the top semiconductor companies of the past, including Fairchild and National. MAGUIRE: Honestly, yeah. It took a long time. It's really easy to go say, "Admit me; I'm going to work really hard." It was a really small major for a school that big. The best founders are just so obsessed with what theyre doing that they cannot turn off. Or are you thinking about actual wormholes? But the crypto theme is so unique that we decided to create a dedicated fund (a first for Sequoia, ed.) It was entertaining. 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. I think that's actually a part of the magic of Caltech: it's the only elite undergraduate and research university in America that is just so focused on science. It gave me a really deep intuition for that, and that led to a passion for black holes, and I came back to it later. I could explain the technical definition, but that's neither here nor there. He was also an interesting, out of the box human, so I found him really exciting. In other words, the experimentalists joining matter to the theory, did that register with you at all? 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. The big bang one issomehow people don't really talk about that. It took a long time to get to that point. Many would disagree with me, but I actually think it takes away from the quality of research at Stanford. Could you talk to him? The third was Silicon Valley, where people are making this technology using physics and other things to bring it forward. 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. Alexei is a mathematician. You can interpret that as a lower bound of the masses of particles allowed in the space. 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. Don had mainly been in sales and marketing. See Shaun Maguire's recent investments in Series A Cloud Infrastructure, other investment areas, and co-investors. When the Figma acquisition happened, it caused a lot of our other portfolio companies to raise their ambition. Iron Fish is a Layer 1 blockchain that provides privacy guarantees on every single transaction. Alexei is not going to just go hang out in the hallway at the blackboard doing his work in a public space, inviting people to come up and start talking to him. I met Patrick at a Founders Fund event many years ago. We became friends from that. People don't quite give credit, but Caltech's own Arnold Beckman in many ways was maybe the first VC. I became really interested in the solar system. MAGUIRE: I had officially unenrolled from Stanford a long time ago. 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. Jerry was this weird physicist where he had a really elite pedigree, and a lot of people with really elite pedigrees would go into the really cutting edge stuff of quantum gravity, or string theory, or high energy physics in general. 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? MAGUIRE: 26 actually. Before Sequoia I was at Google Ventures. MAGUIRE: I would say, a long time ago, I had to make the decision that I would go in another direction. Sequoia is a 50 year old venture capital firm based in Menlo Parkone of the preeminent venture capital firms in the world that backed, in their early days, Apple, Atari, Cisco, Oracle, companies like that. I like high-IQ founders. Privy makes Simple APIs to manage user data off-chain. I personally believe quantum computing is going to be similar to solar. 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. Seed/Early. Identified as v4.0.2Now with Pre-Seed Investor Lists FAQ Look at solar. We had to have a basket of renewables to fight this thing that was starting to happen with global warming. I'm not talking about on a physics level. I felt like I just had to get to the cutting edge. Are you not looking at faculty appointments? Sequoia is a 50 year old venture capital firm based in Menlo Parkone of the preeminent venture capital firms in the world that backed, in their early days, Apple, Atari, Cisco, Oracle, companies like that. Just think of a few examples. I know that's a long answer. I just had to get to the cutting edge. . 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 a very interesting style. I had moved from a full-time operating role to chairman, and I was finishing my PhD. Apr 26, 2023. Magic Eden is the leading destination for NFT discovery, expression, and ownership across digital cultures. LayerZero is an omnichain interoperability protocol that enables trustless cross-chain dApp development. 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. I'll say something that can get me in trouble. 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. [few minutes pause] When you got to the group meetings with John, what were some of the big debates that were happening? TipLink enables users to send crypto or NFTs with just a link. Where do you see some of the parallels? 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. Or did some interesting debates come up? Whereas there's some areas, like in combinatorics, where you can door like today in machine learningyou can do original work in three months. MAGUIRE: I wouldn't say that Caltech is the most entrepreneurial place. I started the second company with two friends and I got to know a lot of VCs raising money for it. At Caltech, everyone talks about the science all the time. When I was at GV I invested in Stripe. So, I don't stay up perfectly, but I do try to stay up with the really big results. That's another area where Google has done an incredible job, is machine learning research. It turns out the answer is no. It's almost a minimalist style. 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: I think I was a little unusual in that I was pretty social. I have been really interested in machine learning, and in cryptocurrencies, and in robots, and in space, and in physics, and other things. Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia, has been on both sides of the table, as an entrepreneur and investor. But as an investor, I wasn't doing any calculations. 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. At that moment, he becomes your advisor. So, I tried to bring some of the hyperbolic geometry ideas into this field. You need physics to understand that. Gather hosts virtual spaces for work and play. ZIERLER: Did you think about quantum information at all at Stanford? 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. There was oneI think it was shortly after I was 13for about six months I couldn't sleep at night. He just gives you breadcrumbs along the way when you need them. The day I got back, I went to graduation. It's like, some parents rule out of fear; some parents rule out of love. I still don'tno oneI don't know anything about quantum mechanics. Institutionally, is Sequoia involved in the quantum information space at all? Even within string theory, there are many different branches and ideas. This is a true story. Shaun, for the last part of our talk, just one retrospective question and then one going forward. MAGUIRE: I would say they're very similar, and with solar, it wasn't as clear. He was an incredibly brilliant man and had really good technical instincts, but he was really from the sales and marketing side. I emailed him from Afghanistan and said, "I'm coming back to Caltech. Where did you see an opportunity to work on your own project, do original research? I was so nervous. ZIERLER: Did you get any curveball questions? While decentralization allows for a certain type of consumer protections, Maguire still contends that the rulebook of traditional investor protections shouldnt be thrown out. Sequoia BitClout was both a sensation and a controversial startup when it launched earlier this year. MAGUIRE: Correct. As a teenager, he played in the world's top league for the video game Counter-Strikeand got an F in Algebra II. They've lost a lot of the goodwill of public markets. I got to know a lot of funds. Prior to joining Sequoia in 2019, Dr. Maguire was a Partner at GV, where he led their . Is this like a common narrative in venture capital? So, I did this and got to ask a question to the astronauts, and that honestly made space really tangible to me. What has stayed with you from IQIM and Caltech in general? That happened in the early 90s. I would almost say in a lot of ways it was similar to Maxwell's demon paradox, which was in the late 1800s. He is also an angel investor. It was still pretty easy for me. MAGUIRE: Very rarely. Honestly, at the end of my PhD I had three full-time jobs. I tried to do the John Preskill Socratic method: ask some questions that would reveal the other person didn't know what he was talking about. ZIERLER: Shaun, in your day to day role at Sequoia, are you bringing your quantum information expertise? 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. ZIERLER: The point of connection to Sequoia, how did that happen? 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. I admire John as someone who's fearless enough to go be at the top of one thing and then jump and do another field where they're a relative novice. Ive started five companies. He played college football for the Florida State Seminoles. I think there's a second thing. Could you find him? What was some of that original work for you? 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 think I will definitely have more involvement with Caltech at some point in my life. MAGUIRE: I was doing the same thing. 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 is a Co-Founder and served as Board Member at Expanse. The day after you defend, are you not looking at postdocs? We met with and got term sheets from pretty much all the top firms in the Valley. He never tries to make you feel stupid. Or did you know in the back of your mind that you'd be doing something besides academia? For what it's worth, I think it's really important for the world to have places like Caltech that are so focused on science. There's this other thing called holographic entanglement entropy. MAGUIRE: My academic background is pretty unusual. 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. I also think we were living through a pretty incredible period in semiconductor technology. MAGUIRE: Yes, I do. MAGUIRE: I joined the group in 2012. The field has moved so fast. Twitter View on Twitter. MAGUIRE: Those are days you don't want to remember. 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. What were people excited about? John was a huge part in this holographic principle idea. MAGUIRE: My read is John is just testing your commitment. So, we became friends. Maybe five years later the physicists will go learn the math required to talk to him. I always had that passion, but I've had the science passion which really started with astronomy. I wasn't really going to school, so I wasn't doing math competitions or anything. Shaun is a Partner at Sequoia Capital. I came back in 2012. In some of these other fields, it takes years. As an investor and adviser, Shaun has worked with companies building everything from quantum computers to self-driving cars. We live in a space where photons have a mass. I've already noticed in the last week, I've had many founders in our portfolio come to me, and it's raised their ambition. I got A pluses in a lot of my classes. A spherical drum makes a different sound than an oval drum, which makes a different sound than a square drum. 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. The way John works, is it's really a Socratic style. 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. What was seen as the holy grail? It's actually a directly relevant story, so I'll share it here. There have been these big evolutions, these big jumping points, and I only mentioned some of the ones related to the information paradox. One is people respect John so much that you don't want to disappoint John. I also, though, I think a lot of string theorists have gotten a bad rap. ZIERLER: So, it was in some ways really a purely intellectual pursuit for you, then? Shaun Maguire, General Partner, Sequoia Capital, Quantum Information and the Venture Connection. Physics is something I use all the time, because I've invested in a lot of companies that touch atoms. Now at this point I'm maybe a 25 year old or something, I think was when I was coming back to Caltech. Candidly, with my background of 1.8 GPA in high school and an F in algebra 2, beggars can't be choosers. From the time I was 9, Ive been obsessed with space. I sold it for a billion dollars, all of that. In high school, I didn't know about the IMO, USAMO, AIME, or any of these things. Patrick is a huge lover of physics. He was always accessible. ZIERLER: Shaun, to zoom out from your specific research, what were people talking about with regard to quantum gravity during this time? Caldera enables dynamic Web3 experiences by enabling developers to launch performant application-specific blockchains. I don't really remember any of it. I was absolutely fascinated by where things come from, how energy works, oil and gas, chemicals industry, things like that, pharma. Harry Maguire is the world's most expensive centre-back and captain of arguably the world's most famous football club. Out of the three you mentioned, I think Google is the only one that has a lot of parallels. ZIERLER: I meant relative to where it was maybe 20 or 30 years ago, not relative to Stanford of course. ZIERLER: From your own perspective, do you tend to think of this in somewhat of a horse race metaphor? And some of these founders dont even understand where it comes from, or how deeply ingrained it is in them. It was basically learning, reading papers, talking to lots of people, going to group meetings for a long time. There's a very similar result in hyperbolic geometry which basically says the eigenvalues that correspond to waves moving in negatively curved space follow these very specific rules, and there's some really beautiful aspect, and there's actually a relationship between those thingsbetween those waves and the eigenvalues that come from the waves, and the geometry in these geometric data. Moore's law had to keep running for an extra five years, and no one knew how long it would run for. ZIERLER: As you got comfortable in the field, where did you see an opportunity to contribute? Our Founders; Our Companies; The extroverts are the ones who look at your shoes when you're talking. Dr. Maguire is also on the board of 5 other companies. ZIERLER: What was the process from John inviting you to the meetings to actually becoming his student? You can't have spaceships traveling away in a straight line from a Euclidean geometry perspective. Anyway, a bit of an aside. Skip to main content. It was a tiny department. Did you have any interface with that world? ZIERLER: What's the connecting point from Stanford to Caltech? We still don't know much about quantum gravity but we're making some progress. Shaun Maguire. 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. It's incredibly common in the history of technology. 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. 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. ZIERLER: So then what happens next? Some of the big ideasone that John was involved in was bringing in the ideas of error correcting codes, that nature might be behaving like a quantum error correcting code on some really fundamental level. Growing up, I had a cousin who studied computer science at UCLA, who made a huge impact on me. That day, I was working. 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. ZIERLER: What did you see as your primary contributions and conclusions with your thesis research? 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. Shaun Maguire founded Escape Dynamics, Inc. and Expanse, Inc. When I was nine years old, I became really passionate about the solar system. His name is Doug Borcoman [?]. But it's only those two places where we know that quantum mechanics and general relativity make different predictions. I use physics a lot. I think it depends on a lot of things that play out. I am an absolute crypto maxi, but I think there are a lot of things that are misunderstood by the masses today, Maguire said. Then the next version of that is to tear them down and make them seem like they were too arrogant, like, "Oh, it's not working." 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. In that world, there is a deep relationship between the waves allowed in the space and the geometry allowed of the space. I've also been absolutely fascinated by science. 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 had never seen one of these. The first one was a failure, three of them have been successful, and one is too early to call. It wasn't as clear actually, if you go back 15, 20 years, that solar would be able to get to the price levels it's at today. 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. MAGUIRE: Yeah. When did that happen? Did you talk to him a lot about these things? I had to say yes to it on the spot, so I went to DARPA for a year and a half full-time there. Quantum information not too much. ZIERLER: In your work on wormholes, just to clarify, are these toy models? I was fascinated by what made these numbers go up and down. For months, when I was 13, I couldn't sleep at night because there was a thought experiment I couldn't understand. What were people excited about at that point? He started mentoring me. Alexei is really introverted. It's not talked about that way, but Shockley Semiconductor was originally a division of Beckman Instruments. Presently, he is Partner at Sequoia Capital. 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. Honestly, I kind of blacked out. Can the same be said at this point for what quantum information, what quantum computing will be good for?