As ever with high-earning, high-profile . 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. 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. I sold it for a billion dollars, all of that. ZIERLER: Once you started going to group meetings at IQI, what were your impressions? There have been these big evolutions, these big jumping points, and I only mentioned some of the ones related to the information paradox. Shaun Maguire. That was my passion, so I went to Caltech to work with Jerry. AMP Robotics is changing the face of recycling with high-speed guided robotics. So, I didn't really know anyone at Sequoia, but I was getting recruited by other firms. I got lucky in that when I was leaving DARPA, we came up with an idea. 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. MAGUIRE: The point of connection to Google Ventures was simple. Another is this idea that people have called ER = EPREinstein-Rosen equals Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen. I actually think that with Google, they've lost a lot of the goodwill internally. A few things: one, I think there are many finish lines; two, I think the future is non-deterministic. So, at that point, I wasn't just a beggar anymore. I was so nervous. ZIERLER: Shaun, do you have a sense of the origin story of Sequoiawhat niche it was looking to fill when it started? It was a tiny department. When I was nine years old, I became really passionate about the solar system. What were people excited about at that point? I have a fellowship, so I don't need any funding. It was basically learning, reading papers, talking to lots of people, going to group meetings for a long time. 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. I've brought some people from Caltech into companies I've worked with. ZIERLER: So, this was a real vibrant social scene separate from the science? I had moved from a full-time operating role to chairman, and I was finishing my PhD. Seed/Early. He was also an interesting, out of the box human, so I found him really exciting. Before, there was too much incompatibility in the languages these fields would use, so it was just hard to even communicate. 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. 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. I was lucky enough to work with him. I don't know, I was learning the rest. MAGUIRE: That's a great question. So, I've been absolutely fascinated by business since I was a little kid. It was really lonely and solitary. 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. The only area where I actually knew something was probability, which was an area that I had spent five years or whatever, so that was an area where I knew something. 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. I have been really interested in machine learning, and in cryptocurrencies, and in robots, and in space, and in physics, and other things. In some very crude sense, one says that information is conserved, the other says that information is destroyed. So, that was the question. MAGUIRE: We don't know. He knows where you're going. But the crypto theme is so unique that we decided to create a dedicated fund (a first for Sequoia, ed.) 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.. For whatever reason, its their life mission to try to revolutionize the industry theyre going after. These things go in waves. By navigating this website you agree to our cookie policy. Is this like a common narrative in venture capital? Then, we went straight on my honeymoon. ZIERLER: What did you see as your primary contributions and conclusions with your thesis research? 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. I don't even know some of the things that I know are there, but I'll tell you some of the things that I'm aware of. Where were you for your undergrad? Shaun Maguire is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm that helps daring founders build legendary technology companies. Mathematicians know a lot of things; I don't think we're yet well-known enough by the physicists. 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. While the crypto industry continues to mint new unicorn startups, the rapid cooling of public market tech stocks has threatened to stall growth in the emerging category, which has still proven awfully susceptible to macro conditions. It became a program. And some of these founders dont even understand where it comes from, or how deeply ingrained it is in them. 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. ZIERLER: So then what happens next? Now, power cost per watt generated by solar is roughly one-tenth of fossil fuels at this point, depending on where you are. Bill Thurston was this guy who's workI had just been fascinated by the guy, and I read a lot of his papers. 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. It took a long time to get to that point. Robco rethinks how products are made, using modular robot systems. Or is it something entirely. They ebb and flow, so I try to go where the action is. He is a Co-Founder and served as Board Member at Expanse. I think that on the grad student level, the evolution from IQI to IQIM wasn't that big of a deal. I had the opportunity to win an awardoriginally a $10.5 million contract to go build some of that thing that I helped come up with the idea for. I would do these thought experiments. It became a $110 million program. You can register here. 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 did horribly in high school. 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. He also serves as Chairman and Advisor at Vise. People were doing references with him. He served as Board Member at SpinLaunch and AMP . So, I've always been attracted to people like that. Mark Wise. I made a lot of my closest friends from Caltech. Subscribe to Chain Reaction onApple,Spotifyor your alternative podcast platform of choice to keep up with us every week. With the literature, I am really, really busy. That happened in the early 90s. That's a personal, philosophicalit's like a religious conversation. One of the ways to measure this is, what do people do on their weekends? The arc was that Hawking and others had come up with this information paradox that was basically saying that the general relativity and quantum mechanics make different predictions about the end-state of a black hole. Was it related to what he was doing at the time? That's another area where Google has done an incredible job, is machine learning research. Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia, has been on both sides of the table, as an entrepreneur and investor. MAGUIRE: Others know this stuff better than I do, but last I checked, there are only two places in nature that we're aware of where quantum mechanics and general relativity make different predictions about what should happen. Shaun to start, will you please tell me your title and institutional affiliation? His name is Doug Borcoman [?]. He would always offer that. We say they're massless, because if they were at rest, they'd be massless. Trying to understand these discrepancies led to quantum mechanics. It's the first time that information had to be considered in physics. In other words, the experimentalists joining matter to the theory, did that register with you at all? ZIERLER: [laughs] Shaun, let's establish now some context. Mathematicians have studied hyperbolic geometry to death and have learned incredibly beautiful things. 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. Now at this point I'm maybe a 25 year old or something, I think was when I was coming back to Caltech. The Boring Company creates safe, fast-to-dig, and low-cost transportation, utility, and freight tunnels. At that moment, he becomes your advisor. It was a small event, call it 50 people. Patrick called Sequoia and told them they should hire me instead. They'll build someone up and then they'll tear them down. The hardware is going to be really valuable. It gave me a really deep intuition for that, and that led to a passion for black holes, and I came back to it later. 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. Many would disagree with me, but I actually think it takes away from the quality of research at Stanford. I've been reading your notes from Afghanistan." 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. I was paying pretty close attention back then. When I was getting recruited by other funds, Patrick was aware. The media built them up. I started at Stanford in 2007 and moved to Caltech in 2009. I think it's a good thing. On the AdS side, that has a very deep relationship to hyperbolic geometry, which is something mathematicians have studied very deeply. 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.. SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches rockets and spacecraft. When I was in sixth grade, NASA had this program called SAREX, Satellite Amateur Radio Experiment. I would almost say in a lot of ways it was similar to Maxwell's demon paradox, which was in the late 1800s. He had a couple PhD students that were about my age or a little older who became good friends. So, if you say, "Hey Alexei, there's something that I would really like to understand that you worked on. It's an interesting thing, because I think John changes many people's lives. You can listen to the entireinterview with Maguireon our podcast, Chain Reaction. I originally joined in the Control and Dynamical Systems Department. Growing up, I had a cousin who studied computer science at UCLA, who made a huge impact on me. Shaun, it's great to be with you. One thing that I think is close to Bell Labs from a different direction right now is Deep Mind. I love John. 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. I think everyone that's been at Caltech, it has to lower your ego. The founder of Figma is an amazing 30 year old kid who also really loves physics and computers. I'm probably making this up, but it felt like 20 kids. I have always, in science, I'm attracted to people that have been out of the box. It wouldn't be relevant to the business model in a parent company. Institutionally, is Sequoia involved in the quantum information space at all? Not completely explicitly, but a little bit subconsciously and implicitly. So, I tried to bring some of the hyperbolic geometry ideas into this field. Magic Eden is the leading destination for NFT discovery, expression, and ownership across digital cultures. But as a grad student, especially a social one, you already knew a lot of those people. ZIERLER: Does the comparison hold up insofar as with solar startups, we knew what solar would be good for, right? MAGUIRE: I love Alexei and couldn't think more highly of him. ZIERLER: Was Alexei accessible? It's my Hogwarts. I think, sure, the volume of companies is greater now, but Caltech had its hand in some pretty legendary companies in the past. I think these are actually wormholes, and that's a huge point of disagreement. MAGUIRE: It's one of these weird things. So, we became friends. Out of the three you mentioned, I think Google is the only one that has a lot of parallels. 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. In some cases, they were wildly misunderstood as kids and have chips on their shoulders. I was probably taking eight classes a quarter. Oskar Painter. Rob is another legend of the field. There are a lot of candidate theories that fit under that umbrella. Partner @sequoia // @caltech physics PhD // quantum space crypto security (it's a niche but high impact field) When I was at GV I invested in Stripe. MAGUIRE: I was really into computers as a kid, and really passionate about physics. Will you sign this thing for me?" Shaun Maguire, a crypto partner of Sequoia Capital, one of the venture capital firms most active when it comes to investments in the cryptocurrency space, issued its opinion on the future of many VCs investing in crypto. Apr 26, 2023. That's kind of the core intuition of behind the holographic principle. He emailed Mike Moritz, who's a legend in venture capital, and, Michael Abramson, and they ended up giving me a job. ZIERLER: Yeah, your job title, where you work, and what your title is there. ZIERLER: The point of connection to Sequoia, how did that happen? Basically, I was investing in companies and taking board seats. He received an undergraduate degree from the University of Southern . Some of these things are so dependent on so many other variables. I was kind of doing both: doing the company and grad school. ZIERLER: As you were surveying all of these ideas, where did you see a niche? He serves as a Board Member at Luminar, Knowde & Gather. I felt like I just had to get to the cutting edge. I had literally never done one. ZIERLER: To foreshadow to what happened next, were you on a trajectory of pursuing an academic career and then some opportunity came up? They've lost a lot of the goodwill of public markets. ZIERLER: Relatedly, I wonder where you see all of this investment in quantum information within the broader context of venture capital. Everyone was telling mepeople on both sides didn't understand why I was doing both. He was a physics major. I sent him a picture. Prior to GV, Shaun co-founded two companies: Qadium and Escape Dynamics. Physna codifies 3D models into detailed data for software applications. I've used people from Caltech as expert diligence when I've looked at companies. ZIERLER: On a technical level, I wonder if you can explain, what was the relevance in this field? because some crypto projects have characteristics and show performance that can't really be measured . I think a lot of people were always too afraid to even ask him. Then I got recruited to work at DARPA by Regina Dugan. Alexei Kitaev. MAGUIRE: I wouldn't say that Caltech is the most entrepreneurial place. I was a partner at Google Ventures at the time. He didn't take me as a student, but he told me to come to his group meetings, so I did. 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. I still don'tno oneI don't know anything about quantum mechanics. MAGUIRE: No. When I was 7 years old, he helped me build my first computer. MAGUIRE: My read is John is just testing your commitment. The way John works, is it's really a Socratic style. I had some aptitude. Bored out of my mind. There's two things. Another is just the network of people. Another is that Jeongwan Haah had just done this three dimensional error correcting code work, or was just finishing. Then another fund that was trying to recruit me did a reference call with my friend Patrick Collison. I'm delighted to be here with Dr. Shaun Maguire. In my job as a founder of companies and partner at Sequoia and all this, being on lots of boards, I deal with the media a lot. MAGUIRE: Yeah, I don't think they're racing toward a singular finish line. Shaun Maguire, General Partner, Sequoia Capital, Quantum Information and the Venture Connection. 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. Social crypto network Bitclout is now listed on Blockchain.com. An equivalent thing is in quantum mechanics, people still debate the interpretation around wave function collapse and things like this. Another was the way black body radiation happens. 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. I didn't know anything about quantum information. Did you talk to him a lot about these things? You want him to respect you; you don't want to disappoint him. My goal with the PhD was just to get to the cutting edge of knowledge in that field, because these things had kept me up in the middle of the night as a little kid, literally, for a long time. It was entertaining. It's obvious that for things like material science, when quantum computers are powerful enough, they will play an important role in material discovery. 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. Imagine having a relationship between the masses of photons and the shape of space. While decentralization allows for a certain type of consumer protections, Maguire still contends that the rulebook of traditional investor protections shouldnt be thrown out. It was when I was at DARPA, that's when I got exposed to quantum information. (It turns out space is curved.) It's going to be fun. That day, I was working. 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. The other groups I had been in, they weren't groups. Michael Moritz. 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. Some of it is subconscious. 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? It led to this overbuilding phase with fiber, which was actually a prerequisite to have all the internet businesses of the next decade built on top of it. ZIERLER: I meant relative to where it was maybe 20 or 30 years ago, not relative to Stanford of course. One of the things that's a flywheel: because Sequoia has so much historical success and so many legendary companies in our portfolio, when our foundersjust as a very recent example, Sequoia had invested in a company called Figma. Five years ago, quantum information was moving way faster than machine learning. 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. What was some of the work there? As a teenager, he played in the world's top league for the video game Counter-Strikeand got an F in Algebra II. Seed/Early + Growth. I just had to get to the cutting edge. When I came to Caltech, I was going to work with Jerry Marsden. Or did some interesting debates come up? I got to know a lot of funds. You need to grab him when he's around and set up a time, but he'll always do that. They've always been more of an R&D firm and government contractor. Could you talk to him? SHAUN MAGUIRE: I'm beyond thrilled to be here. Do you stay on top of the literature? So, I think John has a smart system. Or did you know in the back of your mind that you'd be doing something besides academia? Those are my heroes, my role models, the people that have done things very differently than other people. I think Bell Labs, one of the key things, they basically had a regulated monopoly. People don't quite give credit, but Caltech's own Arnold Beckman in many ways was maybe the first VC. It was a happy accident. But as an investor, I wasn't doing any calculations. Shaun Maguire is Partner at Sequoia Capital. Privy makes Simple APIs to manage user data off-chain. One of the big evolutions in the early 90s was this thing called the holographic principle. ZIERLER: What's the connecting point from Stanford to Caltech? Thank you so much. What has stayed with you from IQIM and Caltech in general?
Kaitlin Kozell On Murdoch Mysteries,
What Happened To John Stokes Of The Bachelors,
Lyons Corner House Menu,
Rebellion To Tyrants Is Obedience To God Latin,
Articles S
