shaun maguire sequoia wife
He was an incredibly brilliant man and had really good technical instincts, but he was really from the sales and marketing side. 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. MAGUIRE: I had officially unenrolled from Stanford a long time ago. Rob is another legend of the field. Did you talk to him a lot about these things? There are certain shapes that have differentthey have the same eigenvalues, same to the Laplacian, with different geometries. He knows where you're going. I had three jobs. Another was the way black body radiation happens. The hardware is going to be really valuable. We call that quantum gravity. MAGUIRE: Those are days you don't want to remember. In my opinion, no question. ZIERLER: What kind of role did John play in all of these decisions? because some crypto projects have characteristics and show performance that can't really be measured . He had, every Wednesday morning, a group of literally three kids that were interested in these things, so we would go and he would teach us some mathematical problem solving. So, I basically made that decision a long time ago that I wouldn't do it. That was the next huge jump in this area. I could explain the technical definition, but that's neither here nor there. I'm delighted to be here with Dr. Shaun Maguire. 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. 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: We don't know. I love Caltech, etc. I love John. Bored out of my mind. I sold it for a billion dollars, all of that. (It turns out space is curved.) 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. About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators . 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 started at Stanford in 2007 and moved to Caltech in 2009. It's too far outside of our tools right now, and we really don't know what direction to go. I could go on and on. Quantum computing and AI are existential, and I think a lot of internet research efforts of Google, those are both Bell Lab equivalents. When I came to Caltech, I was going to work with Jerry Marsden. I was doing projects on the computer, hanging out in hacker forums for 10 hours a day in IRC. I met Patrick at a Founders Fund event many years ago. 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. Are you not looking at faculty appointments? ZIERLER: [laughs] Shaun, this has been a great conversation. It's a tautology, but it's also 100% correct. Mathematicians know a lot of things; I don't think we're yet well-known enough by the physicists. Patrick is a huge lover of physics. . ZIERLER: Did you get any curveball questions? Shaun Maguire, General Partner, Sequoia Capital, Quantum Information and the Venture Connection. Why Sequoia, Others Bet $40 Million on an Anonymous Crypto Founder I jumped in the conversation, because honestly I didn't like the way the guy was talking to Patrick, and Patrick was right. Just in terms of the way you approach business, the way you understand science, the way you think about the world? Before, there was too much incompatibility in the languages these fields would use, so it was just hard to even communicate. ZIERLER: On a technical level, I wonder if you can explain, what was the relevance in this field? It's actually a directly relevant story, so I'll share it here. For months, when I was 13, I couldnt sleep at night because there was a thought experiment I couldnt understand. Sorry, not in ninth grade. There are probably a thousand solar companies started in that ten year window and at most two or three of them that are meaningful today. There have been these big evolutions, these big jumping points, and I only mentioned some of the ones related to the information paradox. Will you be my advisor? 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. But they were talking about quantum computing. So, I jumped on that bandwagon, joined that group of people. 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. It led to this overbuilding phase with fiber, which was actually a prerequisite to have all the internet businesses of the next decade built on top of it. Shaun Maguire is Partner at Sequoia Capital Ltd. See Shaun Maguire's compensation, career history, education, & memberships. Maguire is a former graduate assistant at Texas A&M, were he was working under his FSU coach Jimbo Fisher. I just kind of knew this thing, the information paradox, and all of that. ZIERLER: Besides John, who else was on your committee? Michael Moritz. These things go in waves. There's always more to learn, so I'm always playing catch-up. When I was getting recruited by other funds, Patrick was aware. Basically, starting in eighth grade, I got really disillusioned with school. They're human too. It was a tiny department. I think Stanford is the other extreme, where Stanford in a lot of ways is just like, you go to Stanford because you want to start a company, and it's going to be the stepping stone to starting a company or joining a hot startup. 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?" So, I've always been attracted to people like that. At Caltech there was this guy, Jerry MarsdenJerrold Marsdenwho is an absolute legend in space physics. It's like, some parents rule out of fear; some parents rule out of love. It was still pretty easy for me. John asks incredible questions. So, they were able to do really amazing work that was not too far away from the core business. Shaun Maguire is Partner at Sequoia Capital. As a teenager, he played in the world's top league for the video game Counter-Strikeand got an F in Algebra II. The string theorists weren't asking to have all these articles written about them and get all this hype in a lot of ways. Just knowing where that edge is, is enough. 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. ZIERLER: Yup. I didn't even know about math competitions. When I had thought about itI'm going to tell you, this is the 100% truthful version. MAGUIRE: It's what Stephen Hawking is famous for, but I didn't understand at all the stuff Hawking had done. 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. Honestly, I kind of blacked out. I had to say yes to it on the spot, so I went to DARPA for a year and a half full-time there. One was the stock market. Founders Fund, which is another venture capital fund, invested in both of our companies. His name is Doug Borcoman [?]. 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. Thank you so much. He just gives you breadcrumbs along the way when you need them. 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. 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. 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 had been very lucky to meet this guy, Patrick Collison, who's a pretty famous founder now. 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. Physna codifies 3D models into detailed data for software applications. I think Bell Labs won nine Nobel Prizes, and there was a lot of stuff that was pretty adjacent to Bell Labs. It wouldn't be relevant to the business model in a parent company. 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. 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. It was entertaining. MAGUIRE: I wouldn't say that Caltech is the most entrepreneurial place. This other founder was saying some things I don't think are correct and saying it in a really arrogant way to Patrick, and Patrick was pushing back and was correct in his understanding of quantum computation. Will you sign this thing for me?" 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. John was a huge part in this holographic principle idea. It's not talked about that way, but Shockley Semiconductor was originally a division of Beckman Instruments. 214. 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. Those are my heroes, my role models, the people that have done things very differently than other people. 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. Or are you thinking about actual wormholes? Another is that Jeongwan Haah had just done this three dimensional error correcting code work, or was just finishing. MAGUIRE: Honestly, yeah. In some of these other fields, it takes years. Physics is very powerful. I pitched everyoneexcept Sequoia, because they had a conflict. But it's only those two places where we know that quantum mechanics and general relativity make different predictions. Shaun, it's great to be with you. And theres a lot of wisdom in there, Maguire says. The first one was a failure, three of them have been successful, and one is too early to call. While decentralization allows for a certain type of consumer protections, Maguire still contends that the rulebook of traditional investor protections shouldnt be thrown out. As crypto continues its wild rise, storied venture firm Sequoia is not just competing with the a16zs of the world but with a rising crop of crypto native venture funds that are seeing their assets balloon and their influence upend the traditional venture hierarchies.