It's really easy to go say, "Admit me; I'm going to work really hard." MAGUIRE: Yes, I do. Sequoia Capital's New Crypto Fund - video Dailymotion We call that quantum gravity. Biography. I spent six months really trying to understand that, and I couldn't understand it. They're human too. Will you be my advisor? One of the most famous ones was the photoelectric effect that Einstein won the Nobel Prize for his explanation of. TipLink enables users to send crypto or NFTs with just a link. It was a happy accident. Mathematicians know a lot of things; I don't think we're yet well-known enough by the physicists. His portfolio includes Stripe, Opendoor, IonQ, Spinlaunch, Lambda School, Dandelion Energy . An equivalent thing is in quantum mechanics, people still debate the interpretation around wave function collapse and things like this. Very few VCs made any money on solar. Shaun Maguire (Sequoia) + Samir Vasavada (Vise) - Yahoo Finance 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. I literally couldn't sleep as a kid, I would just think about special relativity. Shaun Maguire | Sequoia Capital US/Europe Trying to understand these discrepancies led to quantum mechanics. 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. Sequoia Capital: "Crypto is one of the two big sectors of the next 10 Physics is something I use all the time, because I've invested in a lot of companies that touch atoms. As an investor and adviser, Shaun has worked with companies building everything from quantum computers to self-driving cars. Shaun Maguire's Investing Profile - Sequoia Capital Partner | Signal I was really doing a lot. It was a tiny department. He would say, "Be here at this time and place." It's a stable energy source. ZIERLER: It sounds like it's always exciting for you, no matter what it is though. Shaun Maguire - The Montgomery Summit That's not the fully burdened, fully level-ized cost, but just the instantaneous production cost. 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. ZIERLER: Did you think about quantum information at all at Stanford? Caltech means a lot to me. Imagine having a relationship between the masses of photons and the shape of space. It tied together all of my passions, just all of themblack holes, computers, all of these things. 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. He received an undergraduate degree from the University of Southern . I got A pluses in a lot of my classes. I could explain the technical definition, but that's neither here nor there. I was kind of doing both: doing the company and grad school. I try to keep up with all those fields. 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. There's two things. It's too far outside of our tools right now, and we really don't know what direction to go. MAGUIRE: I'm always playing catch-up. You can't have spaceships traveling away in a straight line from a Euclidean geometry perspective. MAGUIRE: I had officially unenrolled from Stanford a long time ago. 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. 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. Our Team | Sequoia Capital US/Europe As ever with high-earning, high-profile . I had some aptitude. I've invested in a lot of companies. In business, my two passions wereI would say there were three. When I proposed to my wife, I blacked out that day. The big bang one issomehow people don't really talk about that. So, at that point, I wasn't just a beggar anymore. Whereas there's some areas, like in combinatorics, where you can door like today in machine learningyou can do original work in three months. 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. I would say it just doesn't matter. 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. Shaun Maguire, General Partner, Sequoia Capital, Quantum Information and the Venture Connection. MAGUIRE: I never say this, but I guess I'm a doctor. Did you have any interface with that world? I had three jobs. I didn't really have much of a formal background in it or anything. Working with Professor Makarov, I was his only student. When did that happen? The third thing to say is physics teaches you a way to think. 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 way I met Patrick is pretty funny. I had a pretty good intuition about how to solve them and ended up talking to Professor Arratia. 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. I don't really remember any of it. We became friends from that. It took me years after to really understand it. A prerequisite to that is special relativity. I wasn't really going to school, so I wasn't doing math competitions or anything. MAGUIRE: I wouldn't say that Caltech is the most entrepreneurial place. I did know Rob, but it was not a connecting point for me. He served as Board Member at SpinLaunch and AMP . The fourth area is I'm super hyperactive. Identified as v4.0.2Now with Pre-Seed Investor Lists FAQ I received my PhD. That's a global statement about the object for any surface or three dimensional manifold, etc. Another is how the universe was formed, like the big bang. 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. But they were talking about quantum computing. Patrick called Sequoia and told them they should hire me instead. Facebook gives people the power to. Another example would be: in quantum there's a guy, Yakir Aharonov, as in the Aharonov-Bohm effect. It's a universal thing across many different fields. I love Caltech, etc. 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. MAGUIRE: I love Alexei and couldn't think more highly of him. 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. 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. This wasnt necessarily what I thought I would do long term. I didn't even know about math competitions. It gave me intuition for the distances and the speeds. Shaun Maguire - Partner - Sequoia Capital | LinkedIn 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. It took a long time to get to that point. 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? An Inside Look at Sequoia Capital | Shaun Maguire x Nader Al-Naji Alexei is really introverted. It was basically a bunch of renegade people that just loved technology and didn't want to go work on Wall Street; they wanted to make their career out of trying to build the future the hard way. Definitely had to learn all that. MAGUIRE: My academic background is pretty unusual. When we make a decision to do something, it doesnt happen unless the whole team is behind the decision. I think it depends on a lot of things that play out. Regina was a Caltech alum who was the Director of DARPA. The founder of Figma is an amazing 30 year old kid who also really loves physics and computers. Will you sign this thing for me?" 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. It's close enough to the core business that it's a very smart strategic thing to invest in. It became a $110 million program. He was an amateur astronomer, and sometimes with my friend Brandon, he had like an eight inch telescope, and we'd go look at stuff in the sky. There are some videos of this online; it's pretty hilarious. I know that's a long answer. There are certain shapes that have differentthey have the same eigenvalues, same to the Laplacian, with different geometries. It wasn't as clear that you'd be able to go to cheaper instantaneous power production than natural gas, for example. ZIERLER: Anything memorable from the defense? Just knowing where that edge is, is enough. ZIERLER: The point of connection to Sequoia, how did that happen? It was entertaining. Another is this idea that people have called ER = EPREinstein-Rosen equals Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen. 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. He was also a Partner at GV. ZIERLER: Does the comparison hold up insofar as with solar startups, we knew what solar would be good for, right? It wouldn't be relevant to the business model in a parent company. Rob is another legend of the field. I sent him a picture. They said, "Man, I love Dylan, but like, I can do it, too. Shaun Maguire founded Escape Dynamics, Inc. and Expanse, Inc. ZIERLER: Besides John, who else was on your committee? ZIERLER: Coming in in 2012, did you recognize the transition from IQI to IQIM? ZIERLER: What did you see as your primary contributions and conclusions with your thesis research? He was also an interesting, out of the box human, so I found him really exciting. They're investing in a lot of things that were notbiology, life sciencesI actually think it might be bad to invest in things that are so far away from what you're doing since you don't have the core expertise. 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. 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. You don't know where you're going. Shaun Maguire, Partner, Sequoia Capital - Topio Networks Shaun Maguire Investor Profile: Portfolio & Exits | PitchBook So, they were able to do really amazing work that was not too far away from the core business. The way John works, is it's really a Socratic style. But I think he's testing people's commitment, which I think is a really smart strategy that not enough people do. I was so nervous. 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. I emailed him from Afghanistan and said, "I'm coming back to Caltech. These things change over time. In all the classical physics, optics, Newtonian mechanics, etc., and classical electromagnetism, that didn't make any sense. Adam Crafton. Is this like a common narrative in venture capital? 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. But as a grad student, especially a social one, you already knew a lot of those people. There are a lot of different interpretations, and it's more in the realm of philosophy. In some of these other fields, it takes years. Could you talk to him? 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. That was my passion, so I went to Caltech to work with Jerry. Quantum information not too much. At Caltech, everyone talks about the science all the time. He also serves as Chairman and Advisor at Vise. There has already been a lot of great results there, and I'm sure there are more to come. The day after you defend, are you not looking at postdocs? I was randomly walking through the halls of the math department, and there weren't many math undergrads there. 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. It was just announced last week that Figma is going to be acquired by Adobe for $20 billion. He doesn't tell you where you're going. Lessons from Academia, Entrepreneurship, and Investing featuring Shaun Twitter View on Twitter. Are you not looking at faculty appointments? I think these are actually wormholes, and that's a huge point of disagreement. I jumped in the conversation, because honestly I didn't like the way the guy was talking to Patrick, and Patrick was right. What was seen as the holy grail? Knowde is the marketplace for chemicals, polymers and ingredients. Mark Wise. I think it's because it's just in some ways it's unknowable. MAGUIRE: Of course! ZIERLER: What were you doing at Google? 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. They lost a lot of money, but the category has been very successful. As a teenager, he played in the world's top league for the video game Counter-Strikeand got an F in Algebra II. ZIERLER: So, it was in some ways really a purely intellectual pursuit for you, then? 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. I was paying pretty close attention back then. But as an investor, I wasn't doing any calculations.