When I was at GV I invested in Stripe. It wouldn't be relevant to the business model in a parent company. Shaun Maguire is Partner at Sequoia Capital Ltd. See Shaun Maguire's compensation, career history, education, & memberships. It's obvious that for things like material science, when quantum computers are powerful enough, they will play an important role in material discovery. You have to claw your way from hell to get to the edge. Aharonov is one of these guys that's always doing things very differently than other people. It became a program. It's the first time that information had to be considered in physics. They said, "Man, I love Dylan, but like, I can do it, too. 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. It was a good investment for governments. But it's only those two places where we know that quantum mechanics and general relativity make different predictions. 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? Shaun Maguire - Biography I went to public school in Orange County, California. But they were talking about quantum computing. The vast majority of the individual solar companies failed, but the whole category has been incredibly successful. Alexei is not going to just go hang out in the hallway at the blackboard doing his work in a public space, inviting people to come up and start talking to him. Basically, starting in eighth grade, I got really disillusioned with school. You don't know where you're going. I have a degree from Stanford. By normal human standards, I'm an introvert. 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. MAGUIRE: I will do my best to explain the arc here. Seed/Early. ZIERLER: Awesome. 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. MAGUIRE: Of course! When the Figma acquisition happened, it caused a lot of our other portfolio companies to raise their ambition. I was so nervous. Those are things that Google should be investing like crazy into, because those are existential risks to their core business on a 20 year time frame. 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 do know Rob. It wasn't as clear actually, if you go back 15, 20 years, that solar would be able to get to the price levels it's at today. Can you make time for me?" He just gives you breadcrumbs along the way when you need them. SHAUN MAGUIRE: I'm beyond thrilled to be here. How did that play out? I didn't even know about math competitions. But I think he's testing people's commitment, which I think is a really smart strategy that not enough people do. It was just announced last week that Figma is going to be acquired by Adobe for $20 billion. But as an investor, I wasn't doing any calculations. Harry Maguire is the world's most expensive centre-back and captain of arguably the world's most famous football club. The actual edge doesn't move that quickly. Maguire focuses on enterprise,. ZIERLER: Besides John, who else was on your committee? It was a small event, call it 50 people. In the late 90s, Juan Maldacena had a big breakthrough there. MAGUIRE: It was simply in having a stronger math background than some people. I had never seen one of these. MAGUIRE: I was doing the same thing. When I had thought about itI'm going to tell you, this is the 100% truthful version. ZIERLER: As you were surveying all of these ideas, where did you see a niche? Once you get to the cutting edge, it's not that hard to keep up. He knows where you're going. MAGUIRE: One of the things that I am proud of in my own life is I've been willing to change course quickly even with limited data when crazy opportunities come up. The Wire Digital is helping global businesses make smarter decisions. ZIERLER: Yeah, your job title, where you work, and what your title is there. 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. Another is this idea that people have called ER = EPREinstein-Rosen equals Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen. I think it depends on a lot of things that play out. He would say, "Be here at this time and place." That's a personal, philosophicalit's like a religious conversation. 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.. Another example would be: in quantum there's a guy, Yakir Aharonov, as in the Aharonov-Bohm effect. Dr. Shaun Maguire serves as a Partner at Sequoia Capital. I had this unbelievably lucky thing: one of my friends' dad was a local community college professor. I would do these thought experiments. Candidly, with my background of 1.8 GPA in high school and an F in algebra 2, beggars can't be choosers. Are you not looking at faculty appointments? I took a lot of tough graduate math classes. I think these are actually wormholes, and that's a huge point of disagreement. 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. 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. Show more Show more Patrick started a company called Stripe. ZIERLER: When did you first appreciate the connections between black holes and quantum information? Dr. Maguire previously occupied the position of Member of DRW Trading Group and Partner at GV Management Co. LLC. 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. One thing that I think is close to Bell Labs from a different direction right now is Deep Mind. I emailed him from Afghanistan and said, "I'm coming back to Caltech. 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. I saw these 12 questions and sat down outside his office and started thinking through how to solve these. We don't need to know the exact algorithms that are going to run. He was an incredibly brilliant man and had really good technical instincts, but he was really from the sales and marketing side. So, we raised a bunch of venture capital. ZIERLER: Did you think about quantum information at all at Stanford? Shaun Maguire's Investing Profile - Sequoia Capital Partner | Signal We would have gotten there later with the different technology. 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. Just think of a few examples. It was basically learning, reading papers, talking to lots of people, going to group meetings for a long time. But photons are always moving, and they have a mass when they're actually moving from a relativistic perspective. I sold it for a billion dollars, all of that. 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. 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. 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. I received my PhD. I've brought some people from Caltech into companies I've worked with. There's some technical definition that gives you that, but you can have negative, zero, or positive curvature. ZIERLER: I meant relative to where it was maybe 20 or 30 years ago, not relative to Stanford of course. Another thing too, to be very candid for me, I have very broad interests. You can register here. That's the way I would describe it. 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. It's almost a minimalist style. There was oneI think it was shortly after I was 13for about six months I couldn't sleep at night. 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. It's a stable energy source. I think I will definitely have more involvement with Caltech at some point in my life. MAGUIRE: Honestly, yeah. [few minutes pause] When you got to the group meetings with John, what were some of the big debates that were happening? When I came to Caltech, I was going to work with Jerry Marsden. ZIERLER: Did you get any curveball questions? In high school, I didn't know about the IMO, USAMO, AIME, or any of these things. 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. That sort of developed over time? Mark Wise. We became friends from that. I admire John as someone who's fearless enough to go be at the top of one thing and then jump and do another field where they're a relative novice. I started the second company with two friends and I got to know a lot of VCs raising money for it.