I didn't even know about math competitions. Was that a connecting point to Sequoia? My physics passion was in ninth grade. Shaun Maguire. MAGUIRE: No. Some of these things are so dependent on so many other variables. I think, sure, the volume of companies is greater now, but Caltech had its hand in some pretty legendary companies in the past. So, I didn't really know anyone at Sequoia, but I was getting recruited by other firms. He serves as a Board Member at Luminar, Knowde & Gather. The day I got back, I went to graduation. ZIERLER: So, it was in some ways really a purely intellectual pursuit for you, then? There have been a lot of other big breakthroughs related to string theory over the last, like, 40 years. 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. MAGUIRE: Yeah. I had literally never done one. In some ways there's a parallel to the past. Not completely explicitly, but a little bit subconsciously and implicitly. Ive got to believe that they work incredibly hard in part to make their families proud. The founder of Figma is an amazing 30 year old kid who also really loves physics and computers. 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. Caldera enables dynamic Web3 experiences by enabling developers to launch performant application-specific blockchains. 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. Partner @sequoia // @caltech physics PhD // quantum space crypto security (it's a niche but high impact field) 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? 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. 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. I could explain the technical definition, but that's neither here nor there. 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. shaun maguire sequoia wife https://iccleveland.org/wp-content/themes/icc/images/empty/thumbnail.jpg 150 150 ICC ICC https://iccleveland.org/wp-content/themes/icc . ZIERLER: And when does Sequoia enter into the mix? The day after you defend, are you not looking at postdocs? 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. It was when I was at DARPA, that's when I got exposed to quantum information. I've brought some people from Caltech into companies I've worked with. SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches rockets and spacecraft. ZIERLER: Once you started going to group meetings at IQI, what were your impressions? It's not a regulated monopoly, but they havenot supposed to say thisbut they have a monopoly on search. I think it's a good thing. 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. Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia, has been on both sides of the table, as an entrepreneur and investor. 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. Join Facebook to connect with Shaun Maguire and others you may know. I was born in 1985, so I was always trying to mess around with computers. 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. I have been really interested in machine learning, and in cryptocurrencies, and in robots, and in space, and in physics, and other things. AMP Robotics is changing the face of recycling with high-speed guided robotics. The fourth area is I'm super hyperactive. 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: That's pretty cool. Was it related to what he was doing at the time? ZIERLER: As you got comfortable in the field, where did you see an opportunity to contribute? That's not the fully burdened, fully level-ized cost, but just the instantaneous production cost. String theory is one. Presently, he is Partner at Sequoia Capital. My PhD is a very toy regime of three-dimensional gravity, two dimensional quantum sidesAdS, three; CFT, two. Social crypto network Bitclout is now listed on Blockchain.com. It raises your ego in some ways, but it has to lower our ego in others. MAGUIRE: I never say this, but I guess I'm a doctor. 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. When did that start for you? My passion, especially coming from that background, was in probability and combinatorics, but really theoretical probability I just found absolutely fascinating. They said, "Man, I love Dylan, but like, I can do it, too. 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. Could you find him? So, I've always been attracted to people like that. When you're looking at light, there are certain ways where light very clearly behaves as a wave, and there are certain ways where it very clearly behaves as a particle. It became a program. MAGUIRE: 26 actually. ZIERLER: Did you officially unenroll from Stanford at that point? Before black holes, a prerequisite to understand them is you have to know some general relativity. That happened, and then in 2015 there was this thing called the firewall paradox. There are a lot of candidate theories that fit under that umbrella. Caltech means a lot to me. 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. Definitely had to learn all that. 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. Do you mean my job title? Alexei Kitaev. So, I did this and got to ask a question to the astronauts, and that honestly made space really tangible to me. I was really doing a lot. It's Friday, September 23, 2022. By the time I came back to Caltech in 2012 after all this, I had been able to self-study and knew, for example, general relativity on a basic level. MAGUIRE: I will do my best to explain the arc here. Jerry had just done incredible work in understanding our solar system, orbits, trajectories for space crafts, and things like that. In some ways, one way to view whats happening in crypto right now is its almost like throwing all the old rules out and starting with a blank canvas.. So, I really love academia. What I was actually most interested was space. He never tries to make you feel stupid. Shaun is an entrepreneur, investor, and scientist with a broad and eclectic background. His name is Doug Borcoman [?]. He dropped out of MIT. He also serves as Chairman and Advisor at Vise. You can interpret that as a lower bound of the masses of particles allowed in the space. In some of these other fields, it takes years. I also, though, I think a lot of string theorists have gotten a bad rap. 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. From the time I was 9, I've been obsessed with space. He knows where you're going. They've lost a lot of the goodwill of public markets. 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. DAVID ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, director of the Caltech Heritage Project. Subscribe to Chain Reaction onApple,Spotifyor your alternative podcast platform of choice to keep up with us every week. I don't even really remember. I actually think that with Google, they've lost a lot of the goodwill internally. Deep Mind has basically been going across all of science and trying to apply machine learning in science, so it's a much closer thing to the core business model. Seed/Early + Growth. So, that's one thing that is really powerful. In my opinion, no question. Jeongwan was just finishing his PhD at that time, and that was a really exciting result that a lot of people were very interested in. Before, there was too much incompatibility in the languages these fields would use, so it was just hard to even communicate. The Wire Digital is helping global businesses make smarter decisions. 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. I have a fellowship, so I don't need any funding. 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. I think it depends on a lot of things that play out. Shaun Maguire is Partner at Sequoia Capital. I've invested in a lot of companies. Shaun Maguire Ph.D General Information. ZIERLER: Finally Shaun, going forward, do you have a fluid view about your relationship with academia? I think there are probably actually wormholes, but it doesn't matter for the sake of the work. I've been reading your notes from Afghanistan." 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. I think some of the physicists didn't quite understand the math language that he was using, but Alexei is a path breaker. Lenny Susskind, but actually really, based on a lot of John's ideas as well. He was always accessible. ZIERLER: Was Alexei accessible? I wasn't really going to school, so I wasn't doing math competitions or anything. They lost a lot of money, but the category has been very successful. It wouldn't be relevant to the business model in a parent company. MAGUIRE: It's what Stephen Hawking is famous for, but I didn't understand at all the stuff Hawking had done. The extroverts are the ones who look at your shoes when you're talking. 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. Then that person got mad and left the conversation and left Patrick and me talking. 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 use physics a lot. I still don'tno oneI don't know anything about quantum mechanics. Earlier this year, Sequoia announced a $500 to $600 million sub-fund dedicated exclusively to buying up cryptocurrencies. 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. We had to have a basket of renewables to fight this thing that was starting to happen with global warming. ZIERLER: What's the connecting point from Stanford to Caltech? I originally self-studied quantum mechanics, and I was able to have some intuition. So, I basically made that decision a long time ago that I wouldn't do it. I transferred to USC, and I was only there for two years. He serves as Board Member at Physna and Monad. 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. He told Sequoia, "You guys should hire Shaun." MAGUIRE: I love Alexei and couldn't think more highly of him. We live in a space where photons have a mass. First of all, I don't think it's racing toward the same goal, but even if it was, I don't think anyone knows what that goal is, and I don't even think it's set. But once I got there, I got over a 4.0 or whatever in my first year. because some crypto projects have characteristics and show performance that can't really be measured . Another example would be: in quantum there's a guy, Yakir Aharonov, as in the Aharonov-Bohm effect. I have a degree from Stanford. 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. The way John works, is it's really a Socratic style. Eventually with where the work went, I didn't know anything at all about quantum field theory or string theory, which I had to learn over the next few years. To answer the question: bachelor's degree from USC, University of Southern California, but there's a lot more to the story. Shaun Maguire is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm that helps daring founders build legendary technology companies. One of the most famous ones was the photoelectric effect that Einstein won the Nobel Prize for his explanation of. Thank you so much. If Figma grew this quickly, we can grow this quickly." It's close enough to the core business that it's a very smart strategic thing to invest in. Patrick is a huge lover of physics. At that moment, he becomes your advisor. One of the ways to measure this is, what do people do on their weekends? You want to live up to his name and reputation. This all happened in a curved space, a Minkowski space. 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. People don't quite give credit, but Caltech's own Arnold Beckman in many ways was maybe the first VC. Alexei is a mathematician. 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: 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've also been absolutely fascinated by science. From the time I was 9, Ive been obsessed with space. Identified as v4.0.2Now with Pre-Seed Investor Lists FAQ I love John. It's funny because John has a veryit's maybe not the style you would think. Or my Caltech title? These guys all became my good friends. It's path-dependent over what happens over the next ten, twenty years. 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. Mark Wise. The model was evolving, basically from the time thatShockley was the first semiconductor company in the Valley, and there wasn't a venture capital model yet, so Shockley was basically a division of Beckman Instruments, a wholly owned division with a bunch of incentives.
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