It was entertaining. Shaun Maguire Ph.D General Information. Thank you so much. The firm has made a number of equity investments in crypto startups over the years including Fireblocks and FTX, but while Andreessen Horowitz was early to commit to a dedicated crypto fund in 2018, Sequoia has continued made its equity investments through its general funds. Did you talk to him a lot about these things? 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. I got lucky in that when I was leaving DARPA, we came up with an idea. View twitter profile View linkedin profile Get in touch with Cornelius Cornelius Menke. I've been reading your notes from Afghanistan." Physics is something I use all the time, because I've invested in a lot of companies that touch atoms. By navigating this website you agree to our cookie policy. I've invested in a lot of companies. 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. MAGUIRE: No. Then the third major area was quantum information in the 90s, and has now been the glue that has tied many things together. This is a true story. 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. I've brought some people from Caltech into companies I've worked with. There are a lot of people in that camp. MAGUIRE: I was really into computers as a kid, and really passionate about physics. They said, "Man, I love Dylan, but like, I can do it, too. 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. Alexei Kitaev. Do you see Google, Microsoft, IBM, and all these companiesare they racing toward a singular finish line? It wasn't as clear that you'd be able to go to cheaper instantaneous power production than natural gas, for example. It became a $110 million program. So, we raised a bunch of venture capital. MAGUIRE: I think I was a little unusual in that I was pretty social. In more recent memory, companies like Stripe, Zoom, Instagram, YouTube, ByteDance in China which created TikTok and many, many other companies across consumer enterprise, hardware, and all these things. Mathematicians know a lot of things; I don't think we're yet well-known enough by the physicists. Or my Caltech title? I think a lot of people were always too afraid to even ask 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. People don't quite give credit, but Caltech's own Arnold Beckman in many ways was maybe the first VC. 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. Michael Moritz. He received an undergraduate degree from the University of Southern . I wasn't really going to school, so I wasn't doing math competitions or anything. What could quantum gravity actually achieve? Where did you see an opportunity to work on your own project, do original research? I don't want to sell for a billion dollars now, I want to sell for $20 billion. I think some of the physicists didn't quite understand the math language that he was using, but Alexei is a path breaker. There are a lot of candidate theories that fit under that umbrella. 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? I was born in 1985, so I was always trying to mess around with computers. Sequoia Capital: "Crypto is one of the two big sectors of the next 10 Now at this point I'm maybe a 25 year old or something, I think was when I was coming back to Caltech. In other words, if all of these companies are pouring billions of dollars into quantum computing without anyone really having a truly well-developed sense of what this technology will be used for, is that common? As an investor and adviser, Shaun has worked with companies building everything from quantum computers to self-driving cars. The best founders are just so obsessed with what theyre doing that they cannot turn off. The Wire Digital is helping global businesses make smarter decisions. There's two things. An Inside Look at Sequoia Capital | Shaun Maguire x Nader Al-Naji At Caltech, everyone talks about the science all the time. That was one theme. I think Bell Labs, one of the key things, they basically had a regulated monopoly. So, I don't stay up perfectly, but I do try to stay up with the really big results. In the late 90s, Juan Maldacena had a big breakthrough there. MAGUIRE: Yeah, I don't think they're racing toward a singular finish line. He knows where you're going. Prior to GV, Shaun co-founded two companies: Qadium and Escape Dynamics. 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? I think it depends on a lot of things that play out. Not completely explicitly, but a little bit subconsciously and implicitly. I started the second company with two friends and I got to know a lot of VCs raising money for it. 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. r2C is a defensive cybersecurity automation company with an open-source static analysis tool. ZIERLER: Yup. Jerry had just done incredible work in understanding our solar system, orbits, trajectories for space crafts, and things like that. Maybe five years later the physicists will go learn the math required to talk to him. Caldera enables dynamic Web3 experiences by enabling developers to launch performant application-specific blockchains. The day after you defend, are you not looking at postdocs? Sequoia Capital's New Crypto Fund - video Dailymotion It's a tautology, but it's also 100% correct. 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. ZIERLER: The point of connection to Sequoia, how did that happen? Patrick is a huge lover of physics. 2020-2021. ZIERLER: As you got comfortable in the field, where did you see an opportunity to contribute? Adam Crafton. I went to public school in Orange County, California. I would do these thought experiments. Honeywell I don't think is a great comp; they don't have the same profit engine that Bell Labs has. 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 was randomly walking through the halls of the math department, and there weren't many math undergrads there. In that toy regime of three dimensional anti-de Sitter space, there's a concrete relationship where the more curved the geometry is, the more tangled the geometry is, the higher a lower bound would be on the masses allowed of particles in there. MAGUIRE: First of all, I could not love John more, could not be more grateful to John, could not think more highly of John. Shaun to start, will you please tell me your title and institutional affiliation? It is something I've thought a lot about. Because I had come from a math background, I found that yes, I could talk to Alexei. 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. 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. 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. He doesn't tell you where you're going. I kind of stopped going to school. So, I think that's something that's really powerful about Caltech. It's an interesting thing, because I think John changes many people's lives. Thank you so much for joining me today. Can the same be said at this point for what quantum information, what quantum computing will be good for? It was still pretty easy for me. I like high-IQ founders. So, that was one example of something. I think Caltech might have produced a comparable number, or maybe even more high-impact companies in the past. 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. MAGUIRE: John. Some of it is subconscious. Shaun Maguire - Partner @ Sequoia Capital - CrunchBase 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. 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. 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. It's almost a minimalist style. It was a crazy thing, but Jerry, in my first year, had a medical complication and died during my first year. 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. Now, power cost per watt generated by solar is roughly one-tenth of fossil fuels at this point, depending on where you are. 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. He was also an interesting, out of the box human, so I found him really exciting. He never tries to make you feel stupid. 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 think it's a good thing. I know that's a long answer. He's a professor I believe now at Chapman University, spent the early part of his career in Israel. Or did some interesting debates come up? Sequoia BitClout was both a sensation and a controversial startup when it launched earlier this year. 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 serves as Board Member at Physna and Monad. Another thing too, to be very candid for me, I have very broad interests. ZIERLER: Shaun, in your day to day role at Sequoia, are you bringing your quantum information expertise? Sequoia's Shaun Maguire on competition and conviction in - Yahoo MAGUIRE: Very rarely. 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. While decentralization allows for a certain type of consumer protections, Maguire still contends that the rulebook of traditional investor protections shouldnt be thrown out. He had founded this tiny little department called Control and Dynamical Systems. Solar starting in the early 2000s2003 to like 2012 got incredible attention both from VCs but also from government subsidies. Shaun Maguire (Sequoia) + Samir Vasavada (Vise) - Yahoo Finance ZIERLER: From your own perspective, do you tend to think of this in somewhat of a horse race metaphor? Will you be my advisor? I didn't even know the prerequisites to be in that world, so it took an extra few 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.
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