Sequoia Capital Partner Believes Lots of VCs Will Pull Back From Crypto He was also an interesting, out of the box human, so I found him really exciting. Another is this idea that people have called ER = EPREinstein-Rosen equals Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen. What were people excited about at that point? Shaun Maguire (smc.eth) (@shaunmmaguire) / Twitter Aharonov is one of these guys that's always doing things very differently than other people. I also, though, I think a lot of string theorists have gotten a bad rap. Just in terms of the way you approach business, the way you understand science, the way you think about the world? Actually the day I defended, I flew to Israel to get married. He would always offer that. I viewed that field, the stuff that John was working on, as the absolute top of physics, and I didn't think I had the background yet to be in that world. 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. MAGUIRE: I wouldn't say that Caltech is the most entrepreneurial place. I got lucky in that when I was leaving DARPA, we came up with an idea. I'm probably making this up, but it felt like 20 kids. It took me years after to really understand it. They've lost a lot of the goodwill of public markets. He is also an angel investor. They lost a lot of money, but the category has been very successful. Harry Maguire: What happened? - The Athletic A prerequisite to that is special relativity. They ebb and flow, so I try to go where the action is. We still don't know much about quantum gravity but we're making some progress. 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. ZIERLER: As you got comfortable in the field, where did you see an opportunity to contribute? 2020-2021. If I were to guess what would happen, I think it will probably lead to a new set of equations that capture nature on a deeper level than we have today. Did you know Rob? In a conversation on TechCrunchs new web3 podcast Chain Reaction, Sequoia crypto partner Shaun Maguire talked about the firms commitment to the sector, regulatory challenges and what plenty of crypto investors still dont understand. 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. Ive started five companies. MAGUIRE: I think I was a little unusual in that I was pretty social. [laughs] Math is math, and there's a pretty good history of the math becoming reality. Shaun, it's great to be with you. The actual edge doesn't move that quickly. People were doing references with him. From the time I was 9, I've been obsessed with space. He had a couple PhD students that were about my age or a little older who became good friends. Then the next version of that is to tear them down and make them seem like they were too arrogant, like, "Oh, it's not working." He started mentoring me. So, they were able to do really amazing work that was not too far away from the core business. Shaun Maguire is a partner at Sequoia, has founded two companies (one in space technologies and another in global internet security) and holds a PhD in physics from Caltech. Honestly, I kind of blacked out. MAGUIRE: I had officially unenrolled from Stanford a long time ago. That's not the fully burdened, fully level-ized cost, but just the instantaneous production cost. 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. You can register here. Skip to main content. Institutionally, is Sequoia involved in the quantum information space at all? About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators . Or are they doing something different? Bill Thurston was this guy who's workI had just been fascinated by the guy, and I read a lot of his papers. It raises your ego in some ways, but it has to lower our ego in others. I went to public school in Orange County, California. The crypto category has dealt with plenty of skeptics, some in the venture capital community, who believe that the sectors benefits are being oversold and that the web3 promise of decentralization is just smoke and mirrors. Definitely had to learn all that. I'm so glad we connected. So, I tried to bring some of the hyperbolic geometry ideas into this field. It's just how I am wired. I could go on and on. Shaun Maguire. 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 had some aptitude. 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?" Or was this really a sudden career shift from what you might do otherwise with a PhD in fundamental physics? My passion, especially coming from that background, was in probability and combinatorics, but really theoretical probability I just found absolutely fascinating. I just had to get to the cutting edge. Quantum information not too much. He is a Director of AMP Robotics, Gather, Physna, and Vise. 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. 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. ZIERLER: I meant relative to where it was maybe 20 or 30 years ago, not relative to Stanford of course. One of the things is Caltech is a very humbling place. ZIERLER: What was the process from John inviting you to the meetings to actually becoming his student? Another example would be: in quantum there's a guy, Yakir Aharonov, as in the Aharonov-Bohm effect. 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. People don't really use that as an example. 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. He's a professor I believe now at Chapman University, spent the early part of his career in Israel. Oskar Painter. Shaun Maguire - Biography That happened, and then in 2015 there was this thing called the firewall paradox. Presently, he is Partner at Sequoia Capital. 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. John was a huge part in this holographic principle idea. I was doing projects on the computer, hanging out in hacker forums for 10 hours a day in IRC. I did know Rob, but it was not a connecting point for me. ZIERLER: What's the connecting point from Stanford to Caltech? 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 try to keep up with all those fields. He was an incredibly brilliant man and had really good technical instincts, but he was really from the sales and marketing side. It was more helpful for being able to do diligence. You can't have spaceships traveling away in a straight line from a Euclidean geometry perspective. It wouldn't be relevant to the business model in a parent company. Sequoia BitClout was both a sensation and a controversial startup when it launched earlier this year. Just knowing where that edge is, is enough. ZIERLER: Did you officially unenroll from Stanford at that point? I had three jobs. What was some of that original work for you? It tied together all of my passions, just all of themblack holes, computers, all of these things. But they were talking about quantum computing. 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. MAGUIRE: My read is John is just testing your commitment. ZIERLER: What kind of role did John play in all of these decisions? Was it related to what he was doing at the time? I think maybe on the faculty level it was a bigger deal, because it changed who was on the committees. There have been a lot of other big breakthroughs related to string theory over the last, like, 40 years. In some very crude sense, one says that information is conserved, the other says that information is destroyed. Mathematicians have studied hyperbolic geometry to death and have learned incredibly beautiful things. Patrick was talking to an extremely famous founder. Don had mainly been in sales and marketing. ZIERLER: That's pretty cool. 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? People would know who he is and know the companies he started. And some of these founders dont even understand where it comes from, or how deeply ingrained it is in them. Sequoia Capital: "Crypto is one of the two big sectors of the next 10 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. Was he a hands-on advisor? To answer the question: bachelor's degree from USC, University of Southern California, but there's a lot more to the story.
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