shaun maguire sequoia wiferandy edwards obituary
ZIERLER: In your work on wormholes, just to clarify, are these toy models? The extroverts are the ones who look at your shoes when you're talking. DeSo is a layer-1 blockchain custom-built to scale decentralized social applications. That was the next huge jump in this area. That day, I was working. You want him to respect you; you don't want to disappoint him. John was a huge part in this holographic principle idea. r2C is a defensive cybersecurity automation company with an open-source static analysis tool. I was lucky enough to work with him. MAGUIRE: I would say they're very similar, and with solar, it wasn't as clear. If Figma grew this quickly, we can grow this quickly." He was also a Partner at GV. Another thing too, to be very candid for me, I have very broad interests. I've used people from Caltech as expert diligence when I've looked at companies. That sort of developed over time? Another example would be: in quantum there's a guy, Yakir Aharonov, as in the Aharonov-Bohm effect. Subscribe to Chain Reaction onApple,Spotifyor your alternative podcast platform of choice to keep up with us every week. Just to give you some examples of people from different domains, in mathematics there's this guy, Bill Thurston, who pioneered hyperbolic geometry. It was a tiny department. Just in terms of the way you approach business, the way you understand science, the way you think about the world? One thing: I think a lot of the things they were investing in were not related to their core business. That's a personal, philosophicalit's like a religious conversation. So, we became friends. They ebb and flow, so I try to go where the action is. It's kind of the same thing. I had a lot of friends, so I was already hanging out with a lot of the matter people, like Oskar Painter's students, who obviously has been a big part of IQIM. ZIERLER: Shaun, coming in in so many ways as an autodidact between the math and the physics, what areas did you have to play catch-up for quantum information, and where did you jump right in alongside your cohort? 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. It was a tiny department. ZIERLER: And when does Sequoia enter into the mix? Caldera enables dynamic Web3 experiences by enabling developers to launch performant application-specific blockchains. 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?" 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. Championships. ZIERLER: Yup. We don't need to know the exact algorithms that are going to run. I've also been fascinated by computers, which I would say is slightly different than science. When I had thought about itI'm going to tell you, this is the 100% truthful version. Physna codifies 3D models into detailed data for software applications. There are a lot of candidate theories that fit under that umbrella. We live in a space where photons have a mass. Alexei traveled sometimes, and I think he was very protective of his time in that he wanted you to meet him when he would say, but he would always make time for you. These guys all became my good friends. I think the key lesson here is that there can be certain industries where almost all of the VCs lose almost all their money on the investments because there's too much competition and the science is moving too fast, but that actually is an important part of getting the future to arrive faster. I didn't even know the prerequisites to be in that world, so it took an extra few years. In some very crude sense, one says that information is conserved, the other says that information is destroyed. I didn't know anything about quantum information. ZIERLER: On a technical level, I wonder if you can explain, what was the relevance in this field? 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. Jerry had just done incredible work in understanding our solar system, orbits, trajectories for space crafts, and things like that. Growing up, I had a cousin who studied computer science at UCLA, who made a huge impact on me. 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. He serves as Board Member at Physna and Monad. In our conversation, Maguire emphasized his belief that plenty of other funds dipping their toes into crypto "are going to pull back" when the market grows less frothy, but he believes that. I had been very lucky to meet this guy, Patrick Collison, who's a pretty famous founder now. One of the most famous ones was the photoelectric effect that Einstein won the Nobel Prize for his explanation of. 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. When I was nine years old, I became really passionate about the solar system. It became a program. 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. (It turns out space is curved.) One of the ways to measure this is, what do people do on their weekends? Another is that Jeongwan Haah had just done this three dimensional error correcting code work, or was just finishing. Actually the day I defended, I flew to Israel to get married. 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. Is that relevant to the kinds of things you do on a day to day basis? Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia, has been on both sides of the table, as an entrepreneur and investor. Was it related to what he was doing at the time? He was always accessible. Don Valentine, the founder of the firm, he had been at some of the top semiconductor companies of the past, including Fairchild and National. There are a lot of people in that camp. Facebook gives people the power to. He was an incredibly brilliant man and had really good technical instincts, but he was really from the sales and marketing side. The string theorists weren't asking to have all these articles written about them and get all this hype in a lot of ways. There are certain shapes that have differentthey have the same eigenvalues, same to the Laplacian, with different geometries. MAGUIRE: Those are days you don't want to remember. The field has moved so fast. I think it might be a similar thing with quantum computing. Don had mainly been in sales and marketing. Will you be my advisor? ZIERLER: That's pretty cool. It's an interesting thing, because I think John changes many people's lives. Or are you a lifer in business and VC at this point? Join Facebook to connect with Shaun Maguire and others you may know. Everyone was telling mepeople on both sides didn't understand why I was doing both. Moore's law had to keep running for an extra five years, and no one knew how long it would run for. 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. A prerequisite to that is special relativity. 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. I originally joined in the Control and Dynamical Systems Department. Because I had come from a math background, I found that yes, I could talk to Alexei. In our conversation, Maguire emphasized his belief that plenty of other funds dipping their toes into crypto are going to pull back when the market grows less frothy, but he believes that Sequoia has already committed to a lengthy relationship with the sector we have permanent intentions., Sequoia is very deliberate with everything we do and we spend huge amounts of time debating every strategy change, everything, we debate every seed investment to sometimes excruciating detail, but it helps us make really good decisions and make decisions as a team rather than as individuals, Maguire tells us. What was some of the work there? ZIERLER: Was Alexei accessible? MAGUIRE: Sequoia enters shortly thereafter, but basically in the summer of 2019. You can listen to the entireinterview with Maguireon our podcast, Chain Reaction. ZIERLER: As you got comfortable in the field, where did you see an opportunity to contribute? Five years ago, quantum information was moving way faster than machine learning. He knows where you're going. Iron Fish is a Layer 1 blockchain that provides privacy guarantees on every single transaction. The vast majority of the individual solar companies failed, but the whole category has been incredibly successful. You have to claw your way from hell to get to the edge. 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. I would do these thought experiments. One is people respect John so much that you don't want to disappoint John. I think most string theorists have beenmost, not all, some of them have been very arrogantbut the vast majority have been very measured in how they've thought about string theory and the current state of string theory and all that. Patrick started a company called Stripe. We say they're massless, because if they were at rest, they'd be massless. Dr. Maguire previously occupied the position of Member of DRW Trading Group and Partner at GV Management Co. LLC. Another is how the universe was formed, like the big bang. The way I met Patrick is pretty funny. I was a partner at Google Ventures at the time. That paradox really came from AdS/CFT line of thinking, and for these things like anti-de Sitter space, very intuitively, very naivelyto back up one step, you can think of objects in space, for example, any two dimensional surface: it's either got negative curvature, zero curvature, or positive curvature. 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. He started mentoring me. ZIERLER: As you were surveying all of these ideas, where did you see a niche? 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. Definitely had to learn all that. 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. MAGUIRE: We don't know. 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 transferred to USC, and I was only there for two years. LayerZero is an omnichain interoperability protocol that enables trustless cross-chain dApp development. It's path-dependent over what happens over the next ten, twenty years. MAGUIRE: I never say this, but I guess I'm a doctor. You need to grab him when he's around and set up a time, but he'll always do that. Skip to main content. Regina was a Caltech alum who was the Director of DARPA. Gather hosts virtual spaces for work and play. I don't want to sell for a billion dollars now, I want to sell for $20 billion. He is also an angel investor. He also serves as Chairman and Advisor at Vise. Is this like a common narrative in venture capital? Shaun, it's great to be with you. So, if you say, "Hey Alexei, there's something that I would really like to understand that you worked on. I think it's because it's just in some ways it's unknowable. 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. Vise is an AI-powered portfolio management platform. Do you think about one day becoming a professor? I had moved from a full-time operating role to chairman, and I was finishing my PhD. I went to public school in Orange County, California. 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. I am an absolute crypto maxi, but I think there are a lot of things that are misunderstood by the masses today, Maguire said. I think Caltech might have produced a comparable number, or maybe even more high-impact companies in the past. I was absolutely fascinated by where things come from, how energy works, oil and gas, chemicals industry, things like that, pharma. I'm probably making this up, but it felt like 20 kids. ZIERLER: Shaun, we'll get to this in real time, but did you always have a business streak, an entrepreneurial streak that you always wanted to actualize? It was unbelievably lonely. Texas A&M (OA) Accomplishments and honors. He is a Director of AMP Robotics, Gather, Physna, and Vise. Mathematicians know a lot of things; I don't think we're yet well-known enough by the physicists. I've invested in a lot of companies. I could explain the technical definition, but that's neither here nor there. There have been these big evolutions, these big jumping points, and I only mentioned some of the ones related to the information paradox. [few minutes pause] When you got to the group meetings with John, what were some of the big debates that were happening? So, I think that's something that's really powerful about Caltech. Could you have gone back? I've brought some people from Caltech into companies I've worked with. Or are you thinking about actual wormholes? It was a small event, call it 50 people. 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. In many ways was the core person that drove it in the beginning, if not the core person. I think what were seeing is a lot of the crypto community is actually coming back in 90% of the situations and realizing that, Oh, actually, the way things were done in the past was actually pretty good and got there for an optimal reason, But 10% is like radically different and you can kind of meaningfully improve the whole system by getting some of those things right.. . Prior to joining Sequoia in 2019, Dr. Maguire was a Partner at GV, where he led their . 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. 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. 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. ZIERLER: Awesome. I'll pause. Alexei is really introverted. It was a really small major for a school that big. Out of the three you mentioned, I think Google is the only one that has a lot of parallels. That happened, and then in 2015 there was this thing called the firewall paradox. 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. The first one was a failure, three of them have been successful, and one is too early to call. Shaun is a Partner at Sequoia Capital. Physics is very powerful. I started at Stanford in 2007 and moved to Caltech in 2009. ZIERLER: What kind of role did John play in all of these decisions? You want to live up to his name and reputation. Michael Moritz. I think that's a really good thing. So, that was the question. Feynman is the classic Caltech person. Another is this idea that people have called ER = EPREinstein-Rosen equals Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen. 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. I do know Rob. 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. There's this guy Amir Safavi Naeini who's a professor at Stanford now, and Alex Krause, and Simon Grblacher who's a professor at TU Delft. Shaun is an entrepreneur, investor, and scientist with a broad and eclectic background. The hardware is going to be really valuable. At Caltech there was this guy, Jerry MarsdenJerrold Marsdenwho is an absolute legend in space physics. In some ways there's a parallel to the past. While decentralization allows for a certain type of consumer protections, Maguire still contends that the rulebook of traditional investor protections shouldnt be thrown out. And some of these founders dont even understand where it comes from, or how deeply ingrained it is in them. People don't really use that as an example. He would say, "Be here at this time and place." ZIERLER: The point of connection to Sequoia, how did that happen? ZIERLER: Shaun, do you have a sense of the origin story of Sequoiawhat niche it was looking to fill when it started? 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. You know for the vast majority of compute, you want it to be centralized. It's not a regulated monopoly, but they havenot supposed to say thisbut they have a monopoly on search. There was oneI think it was shortly after I was 13for about six months I couldn't sleep at night. Dr. Shaun Maguire serves as a Partner at Sequoia Capital. 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 took a lot of tough graduate math classes. 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's the first time that information had to be considered in physics. ZIERLER: Finally Shaun, going forward, do you have a fluid view about your relationship with academia? Or was this really a sudden career shift from what you might do otherwise with a PhD in fundamental physics? Founders Fund had flown us to an island off Vancouver Island in British Columbia. ZIERLER: Did you get any curveball questions? 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 that all comes from a huge amount of money that got poured into a basket of approaches, and those things were all able to compete and evolve. Maguire focuses on enterprise,. His name is Doug Borcoman [?]. I've been reading your notes from Afghanistan." Maguire is a former graduate assistant at Texas A&M, were he was working under his FSU coach Jimbo Fisher. He didn't take me as a student, but he told me to come to his group meetings, so I did. Shaun Maguire, Sequoia Capital Partner, joins 'Tech Check' to discuss the decision to back the social network, what makes it . I was doing projects on the computer, hanging out in hacker forums for 10 hours a day in IRC. ZIERLER: Yeah, your job title, where you work, and what your title is there. But they were talking about quantum computing. 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. They'll build someone up and then they'll tear them down. MAGUIRE: The day after I defended, I flew to Israel to get married, literally. Jerry was one of these rare people that decided, I'm going to go back to the fundamentals, go back to classical mechanics, and try to understand that really, really well and figure out important things there. Mark Wise. Just knowing where that edge is, is enough. I was really doing a lot. Did you talk to him a lot about these things? In business, my two passions wereI would say there were three. You can register here. I feel like that's what happened with string theory. In that world, there is a deep relationship between the waves allowed in the space and the geometry allowed of the space. It was more helpful for being able to do diligence. I had a pretty good intuition about how to solve them and ended up talking to Professor Arratia. At Sequoia, we have a lot of these flywheels, if I'm honest. This is a true story. 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. We still don't know much about quantum gravity but we're making some progress. I was so nervous. As ever with high-earning, high-profile . It tied together all of my passions, just all of themblack holes, computers, all of these things. So, I've always been attracted to people like that. Prior to GV, Shaun co-founded two companies: Qadium and Escape Dynamics. Before black holes, a prerequisite to understand them is you have to know some general relativity. MAGUIRE: My academic background is pretty unusual. Some of these things are so dependent on so many other variables. Sequoia BitClout was both a sensation and a controversial startup when it launched earlier this year. It was purely just my curiosity. I have a degree from Stanford. ZIERLER: [laughs] Shaun, let's establish now some context. It's a very interesting style. And theres a lot of wisdom in there, Maguire says. I think it depends on a lot of things that play out. Patrick called Sequoia and told them they should hire me instead. 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 would say a bunch of the other prominent, early investors were really more coming from the technical side. ZIERLER: When did you first appreciate the connections between black holes and quantum information? Seed/Early. ZIERLER: Shaun, to zoom out from your specific research, what were people talking about with regard to quantum gravity during this time? View twitter profile View linkedin profile Get in touch with Cornelius Cornelius Menke. There are a lot of different interpretations, and it's more in the realm of philosophy. We met with and got term sheets from pretty much all the top firms in the Valley. Harry Maguire is the world's most expensive centre-back and captain of arguably the world's most famous football club. It may seem like a really small thing, but it's the only clue we have that there needs to be something new. I think another thing that's very powerful about Caltech is thatit's actually something that we have in common at Sequoiais that Caltech forces you to raise your ambition. Not completely explicitly, but a little bit subconsciously and implicitly. He served as Board Member at SpinLaunch and AMP . The platform lets people buy crypto coins attached. When you go and you're around such incredible, brilliant people that go on to do such amazing thingsbeing around so many Nobel Prize winners for example, or knowing that a couple people in your class are going to go win Nobel Prizes, it forces you to say, "Well, if they can do it, what's holding me back? So, I tried to bring some of the hyperbolic geometry ideas into this field. Seed/Early + Growth. I have a fellowship, so I don't need any funding. The other groups I had been in, they weren't groups. For whatever reason, its their life mission to try to revolutionize the industry theyre going after. It's hard to say no when DARPA is willing to give you money to go build some really advanced technology with really brilliant people. That's another area where Google has done an incredible job, is machine learning research. MAGUIRE: I would say, a long time ago, I had to make the decision that I would go in another direction. Fast forward a few years, and Google Ventures offered me a job that gave me the flexibility to stay in LA and finish my Ph.D. in quantum gravity. ZIERLER: Besides John, who else was on your committee? 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. 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. 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's actually a directly relevant story, so I'll share it here. In a conversation on TechCrunch's new web3 podcast Chain Reaction, Sequoia crypto partner Shaun Maguire talked about the firm's commitment to the sector, regulatory challenges and what plenty. 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.