In my opinion, no question. You want him to respect you; you don't want to disappoint him. For a lot of decision making, centralization can be better for certain types of decisions.. So, I don't stay up perfectly, but I do try to stay up with the really big results. Facebook gives people the power to. Honeywell I don't think is a great comp; they don't have the same profit engine that Bell Labs has. I am an absolute crypto maxi, but I think there are a lot of things that are misunderstood by the masses today, Maguire said. ZIERLER: [laughs] Shaun, let's establish now some context. ZIERLER: What did you see as your primary contributions and conclusions with your thesis research? But it's only those two places where we know that quantum mechanics and general relativity make different predictions. Every week or two, I'd go talk to him, but there was no one else at Caltech I could talk to about the work. Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital, chats with DeSo Founder Nader Al-Naji on a number of topics across crypto, startups, and venture capital.Shaun was. 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. My PhD is a very toy regime of three-dimensional gravity, two dimensional quantum sidesAdS, three; CFT, two. In the late 90s, Juan Maldacena had a big breakthrough there. When I was in sixth grade, NASA had this program called SAREX, Satellite Amateur Radio Experiment. He has a PhD in Physics from Caltech and Masters degrees in Statistics from Stanford and "Control and Dynamical Systems" from Caltech. I would say that Caltech is more scientific. MAGUIRE: I gave you the whole long story, but to give you the very simple story, the simple story is that AdS/CFT has been this really interesting thing in physics the last 20, almost 25 years. One of the things is Caltech is a very humbling place. It doesn't matter. Physna codifies 3D models into detailed data for software applications. ZIERLER: What were you doing at Google? That sort of developed over time? Those are things that Google should be investing like crazy into, because those are existential risks to their core business on a 20 year time frame. At Sequoia, we have a lot of these flywheels, if I'm honest. MAGUIRE: It's super common. That was one theme. I had a really horrible experience, to be honest. As a teenager, he played in the world's top league for the video game Counter-Strikeand got an F in Algebra II. I don't know what shape or form that will take. Some of it is subconscious. The only area where I actually knew something was probability, which was an area that I had spent five years or whatever, so that was an area where I knew something. Bill Thurston was this guy who's workI had just been fascinated by the guy, and I read a lot of his papers. I always had that passion, but I've had the science passion which really started with astronomy. Will you be my advisor? 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. People were doing references with him. Where were you for your undergrad? AMP Robotics is changing the face of recycling with high-speed guided robotics. View the profiles of people named Shaun Maguire. I got to know a lot of funds. I took a lot of tough graduate math classes. I still don'tno oneI don't know anything about quantum mechanics. I didn't really have much of a formal background in it or anything. I spent six months really trying to understand that, and I couldn't understand it. The third was Silicon Valley, where people are making this technology using physics and other things to bring it forward. Dr. Maguire is also on the board of 5 other companies. I think Caltech might have produced a comparable number, or maybe even more high-impact companies in the past. I think it's because it's just in some ways it's unknowable. He was an incredibly brilliant man and had really good technical instincts, but he was really from the sales and marketing side. It's obvious that for things like material science, when quantum computers are powerful enough, they will play an important role in material discovery. When I had thought about itI'm going to tell you, this is the 100% truthful version. I was doing all three. To answer the question: bachelor's degree from USC, University of Southern California, but there's a lot more to the story. Seed/Early. Growing up, I had a cousin who studied computer science at UCLA, who made a huge impact on me. 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. ZIERLER: Did you get any curveball questions? You're not supposed to say that these days, but it was important, because when you have that incredible amount of predictable free cash flow, it makes it really easy to go pump tons of money into the R&D. MAGUIRE: No. ZIERLER: Anything memorable from the defense? John rules out of love, and you don't want to disappoint him. 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. When I was getting recruited by other funds, Patrick was aware. Then another fund that was trying to recruit me did a reference call with my friend Patrick Collison. Look at solar. 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. 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. There's some technical definition that gives you that, but you can have negative, zero, or positive curvature. MAGUIRE: My academic background is pretty unusual. Moore's law had to keep running for an extra five years, and no one knew how long it would run for. DAVID ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, director of the Caltech Heritage Project. When I came back to Caltech, I had started a company in 2012, and it ended up being a relatively successful company. I'm delighted to be here with Dr. Shaun Maguire. That happened, and then in 2015 there was this thing called the firewall paradox. 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. In high school, I didn't know about the IMO, USAMO, AIME, or any of these things. Founders Fund had flown us to an island off Vancouver Island in British Columbia. 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's like, some parents rule out of fear; some parents rule out of love. MAGUIRE: I was really into computers as a kid, and really passionate about physics. Jerry had just done incredible work in understanding our solar system, orbits, trajectories for space crafts, and things like that. There are a lot of different interpretations, and it's more in the realm of philosophy. 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. It's really easy to go say, "Admit me; I'm going to work really hard." Can you make time for me?" That is basically hyperbolic geometry. 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. For months, when I was 13, I couldn't sleep at night because there was a thought experiment I couldn't understand. 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. Physicists say all the time, "Simulating physical systems: quantum computers are clearly going to be important for that." 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. Candidly, with my background of 1.8 GPA in high school and an F in algebra 2, beggars can't be choosers. Seed/Early. Basically, starting in eighth grade, I got really disillusioned with school. Do we live in a many worlds thing? DeSo is a layer-1 blockchain custom-built to scale decentralized social applications. 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. MAGUIRE: I wouldn't say that Caltech is the most entrepreneurial place. It's Friday, September 23, 2022. In other words, the experimentalists joining matter to the theory, did that register with you at all? I met Patrick at a Founders Fund event many years ago. Shaun Maguire, General Partner, Sequoia Capital, Quantum Information and the Venture Connection. In some very crude sense, one says that information is conserved, the other says that information is destroyed. 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. From the time I was 9, Ive been obsessed with space. Vise is an AI-powered portfolio management platform. MAGUIRE: It's one of these weird things. MAGUIRE: My job title is I'm a general partner at Sequoia Capital. . There have been a lot of other big breakthroughs related to string theory over the last, like, 40 years. I left Stanford with a master's degree and went to Caltech. ZIERLER: So, this was a real vibrant social scene separate from the science? My physics passion was in ninth grade. As a teenager, he played in the world's top league for the video game Counter-Strikeand got an F in Algebra II. A saddle is what we call negatively curved. It's almost a minimalist style. They've lost a lot of the goodwill of public markets. Caltech means a lot to me. It was more helpful for being able to do diligence. He dropped out of MIT. I started the second company with two friends and I got to know a lot of VCs raising money for it. We became friends from that. Do you stay on top of the literature? And theres a lot of wisdom in there, Maguire says. Physics is something I use all the time, because I've invested in a lot of companies that touch atoms. When I was at GV I invested in Stripe. 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. I was lucky enough to work with him. 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. I viewed that field, the stuff that John was working on, as the absolute top of physics, and I didn't think I had the background yet to be in that world. I think it's a good thing. It's a tautology, but it's also 100% correct. I love Caltech, etc. Then, sometime in tenth grade decided I just had to leave school, so I took this thing called the California High School Proficiency Exam which is a GED equivalency, and left, and went to community college for two years while my friends were finishing high school. The media built them up. I got A pluses in a lot of my classes. ZIERLER: So then what happens next? Now, power cost per watt generated by solar is roughly one-tenth of fossil fuels at this point, depending on where you are. ZIERLER: Relatedly, I wonder where you see all of this investment in quantum information within the broader context of venture capital. Some of these things are so dependent on so many other variables. I don't want to sell for a billion dollars now, I want to sell for $20 billion. Sorry, not in ninth grade. It's actually a directly relevant story, so I'll share it here. 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. Decentralization is not a silver bullet that just solves all problems and is better for everything. One of the things they've learnedthere's this famous essay from a guy named Mark Kac where he asked, "Can you hear the shape of a drum?" He didn't take me as a student, but he told me to come to his group meetings, so I did. There are some videos of this online; it's pretty hilarious. I had been very lucky to meet this guy, Patrick Collison, who's a pretty famous founder now. I think there's a second thing. He serves as a Board Member at Luminar, Knowde & Gather. MAGUIRE: I joined the group in 2012. ZIERLER: Coming in in 2012, did you recognize the transition from IQI to IQIM? One is what happens with the end-state of black holes. ZIERLER: Does the comparison hold up insofar as with solar startups, we knew what solar would be good for, right? I had three jobs. With computers, it just seemed like the most important technology of the time. Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital, chats with DeSo Founder Nader Al-Naji on a number of topics across crypto, startups, and venture capital. He was also a Partner at GV. You need physics to understand that. When did that happen? It took me years after to really understand it. I have been really interested in machine learning, and in cryptocurrencies, and in robots, and in space, and in physics, and other things. It turns out the answer is no. Our Founders; Our Companies; So, I jumped on that bandwagon, joined that group of people. The big bang one issomehow people don't really talk about that. One thing: I think a lot of the things they were investing in were not related to their core business. My PhD was basically making a bunch of connections between these ideas. For whatever reason, its their life mission to try to revolutionize the industry theyre going after. They lost a lot of money, but the category has been very successful. After the fact, I would say my post hoc analysis is that almost anyone that shows up for three to six month, you kind of default become his student. I literally emailed John Preskill from Afghanistan. (It turns out space is curved.) This is a true story. MAGUIRE: Very rarely. I have always, in science, I'm attracted to people that have been out of the box. Or did some interesting debates come up? Being able to stay on top of it and having a lot of my friends be the ones pushing it forward, it's kind of enough for me. People don't quite give credit, but Caltech's own Arnold Beckman in many ways was maybe the first VC. ZIERLER: And when does Sequoia enter into the mix? I love John. It's going to be fun. 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. By navigating this website you agree to our cookie policy. I don't know, I was learning the rest. Patrick is a huge lover of physics. Lenny Susskind, but actually really, based on a lot of John's ideas as well. That's kind of the core intuition of behind the holographic principle. 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. Out of the three you mentioned, I think Google is the only one that has a lot of parallels. He never tries to make you feel stupid. Previously he Co-Founded Expanse which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $800M. It gave me intuition for the distances and the speeds. Harry Maguire is the world's most expensive centre-back and captain of arguably the world's most famous football club. Before Sequoia I was at Google Ventures. 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. There are certain shapes that have differentthey have the same eigenvalues, same to the Laplacian, with different geometries. So, I think John has a smart system. One is people respect John so much that you don't want to disappoint John. These things go in waves. 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. Just to give you some examples of people from different domains, in mathematics there's this guy, Bill Thurston, who pioneered hyperbolic geometry. 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. If we wouldn't have had a world war until 200 years later, we would have gone down a very different technical pathway, and then maybe would have been using something other than rockets to get to space. I think a lot of people were always too afraid to even ask him. There are a lot of candidate theories that fit under that umbrella. I won an NSF Graduate Fellowship and NDSEG Graduate Fellowship, and I kind of in my head had this realization that I was only at Stanford doing probability because that's the thing that I got recommendations for. It's funny because John has a veryit's maybe not the style you would think. What were people excited about at that point? Alexei is a mathematician. She recruited me onto a pretty crazy project related to the war in Afghanistan. I was paying pretty close attention back then. I'm not talking about on a physics level. Then that person got mad and left the conversation and left Patrick and me talking. The founder of Figma is an amazing 30 year old kid who also really loves physics and computers. You have to claw your way from hell to get to the edge. I'll trust my instincts when something comes up. 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. He emailed Mike Moritz, who's a legend in venture capital, and, Michael Abramson, and they ended up giving me a job. My passion, especially coming from that background, was in probability and combinatorics, but really theoretical probability I just found absolutely fascinating. Subscribe to Chain Reaction onApple,Spotifyor your alternative podcast platform of choice to keep up with us every week. John was a huge part in this holographic principle idea. Was he a hands-on advisor? We're so nascent in those fields that if you're just really smart, IQ will get you far, and in three months you can do some original work. So, I basically made that decision a long time ago that I wouldn't do it. ZIERLER: Besides John, who else was on your committee? 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. Please dont YOLO your 401(k) into shitcoins. MAGUIRE: Of course! 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. Shaun Maguire is Partner at Sequoia Capital Ltd. See Shaun Maguire's compensation, career history, education, & memberships. I was absolutely fascinated by where things come from, how energy works, oil and gas, chemicals industry, things like that, pharma. 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? I think some of the physicists didn't quite understand the math language that he was using, but Alexei is a path breaker. He serves as Board Member at Physna and Monad. 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. Maguire said that more important than decentralization for its own sake, is the ability of users to be able to leave with their identity and data, an effort which should protect consumers from platform overreach. I've backed some people I knew from Caltech's companies. That kicked off a whole new passion in space, and that led to learning about black holes and getting absolutely fascinated by black holes. There's so much prerequisite knowledge, it takes so long to get to the point where you can actually make a contribution. Another is just the network of people. Another is this idea that people have called ER = EPREinstein-Rosen equals Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen. ZIERLER: That's pretty cool. Do you mean my job title? We call that quantum gravity. MAGUIRE: 26 actually. 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. One was the stock market. People would know who he is and know the companies he started. Founders Fund, which is another venture capital fund, invested in both of our companies. Did you know Rob? I think that as an investor, it's actually incredibly important. I transferred to USC, and I was only there for two years. I've used people from Caltech as expert diligence when I've looked at companies. It's too far outside of our tools right now, and we really don't know what direction to go. Now at this point I'm maybe a 25 year old or something, I think was when I was coming back to Caltech. 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. I think I will definitely have more involvement with Caltech at some point in my life. MAGUIRE: The point of connection to Google Ventures was simple. While decentralization allows for a certain type of consumer protections, Maguire still contends that the rulebook of traditional investor protections shouldnt be thrown out. Do you think about one day becoming a professor? Shaun Maguire: Sequoia Capital has historically had several types of technology funds that match the size of the companies we've invested in. I think these are actually wormholes, and that's a huge point of disagreement. Michael Moritz. It's just how I am wired. Shaun Maguire is Partner at Sequoia Capital. It's not a regulated monopoly, but they havenot supposed to say thisbut they have a monopoly on search. I had been interested in this field called hyperbolic geometry. I would almost say in a lot of ways it was similar to Maxwell's demon paradox, which was in the late 1800s. He said that maybe nature has this weird property that sometimes you know the physics of what's happening in some region of space, maybe all you need to know is what's happening on the boundary of that space. What advice should first-time founders heed? It was a good investment for governments. I could explain the technical definition, but that's neither here nor there. Basically, NASA was doing this programyou could learn ham radio and ask astronauts aboard one of the shuttles, ask them a question in ham radio as they orbit the Earth. View twitter profile View linkedin profile Get in touch with Cornelius Cornelius Menke. 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.
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