We call that quantum gravity. Look at solar. I was lucky enough to work with him. ZIERLER: Shaun, in your day to day role at Sequoia, are you bringing your quantum information expertise? That was the next huge jump in this area. 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. It's a universal thing across many different fields. He knows where you're going. Vise, a company founded by two high-school graduates, raises $45 I was really doing a lot. There's some technical definition that gives you that, but you can have negative, zero, or positive curvature. So, I didn't really know anyone at Sequoia, but I was getting recruited by other firms. 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 don't know what shape or form that will take. Patrick is a huge lover of physics. I didnt even go to class most of the time1.8 GPA in 10th grade and an F in algebra II. Our Team | Sequoia Capital US/Europe It's a stable energy source. I don't want to sell for a billion dollars now, I want to sell for $20 billion. Just to give you some examples of people from different domains, in mathematics there's this guy, Bill Thurston, who pioneered hyperbolic geometry. Another is just the network of people. 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. Shaun Maguire's Investing Profile - Sequoia Capital Partner | Signal View who can give you a warm intro to Shaun and 30,000+ top startup investors by joining Signal. MAGUIRE: That's a great question. He taught computer science and astronomy. There's a lot of amazing faculty at Stanford; I'm not trying to knock Stanford. There are probably a thousand solar companies started in that ten year window and at most two or three of them that are meaningful today. Partner @sequoia // @caltech physics PhD // quantum space crypto security (it's a niche but high impact field) The first one was a failure, three of them have been successful, and one is too early to call. I had moved from a full-time operating role to chairman, and I was finishing my PhD. That then led to a lot of evolutions over time. Shaun is an entrepreneur, investor, and scientist with a broad and eclectic background. He would say, "Be here at this time and place." I didn't even know about math competitions. ZIERLER: So, this was a real vibrant social scene separate from the science? 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. Where do you see some really new directions? The only firm that we never pitched was Sequoia, because they had a competing portfolio company, so we didn't want to give them the data on our company or something about us. 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. Dr. Maguire is also on the board of 5 other companies. You're not supposed to say that these days, but it was important, because when you have that incredible amount of predictable free cash flow, it makes it really easy to go pump tons of money into the R&D. But as an investor, I wasn't doing any calculations. If Figma grew this quickly, we can grow this quickly." 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.. I did horribly in high school. Honestly, after getting to the cutting edge of knowledge there, it's weird. In some cases, they were wildly misunderstood as kids and have chips on their shoulders. 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. MAGUIRE: First of all, I could not love John more, could not be more grateful to John, could not think more highly of John. I originally self-studied quantum mechanics, and I was able to have some intuition. I had a really horrible experience, to be honest. It was more helpful for being able to do diligence. I think a lot of people were always too afraid to even ask him. 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. 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. Some of it is subconscious. So, we raised a bunch of venture capital. It was purely just my curiosity. There has already been a lot of great results there, and I'm sure there are more to come. They've always been more of an R&D firm and government contractor. Posted By : / how do i access my talk21 email /; Under :eaglestone village lambertville, mieaglestone village lambertville, mi (It turns out space is curved.) Can you make time for me?" I didn't really have much of a formal background in it or anything. I also think we were living through a pretty incredible period in semiconductor technology. See Shaun Maguire's recent investments in Series A Cloud Infrastructure, other investment areas, and co-investors. I know that's a long answer. What I was actually most interested was space. MAGUIRE: 26 actually. It's too far outside of our tools right now, and we really don't know what direction to go. It's kind of the same thing. 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. That sort of developed over time? Physics is something I use all the time, because I've invested in a lot of companies that touch atoms. They're not that" They're really, really smart, but having that exposure really raises your own personal ambition. I personally believe quantum computing is going to be similar to solar. I just had to get to the cutting edge. Right now, machine learning is probably the field that's moving the fastest, so right now I'm actually probably spending more time reading the machine learning literature than, say, the quantum information literature. He has a PhD in Physics from Caltech and Masters degrees in Statistics from Stanford and "Control and Dynamical Systems" from Caltech. Shaun Maguire, Sequoia Capital Partner, joins 'Tech Check' to discuss the decision to back the social network, what makes it . It was when I was at DARPA, that's when I got exposed to quantum information. MAGUIRE: My academic background is pretty unusual. Shaun Maguire, Partner, Sequoia Capital - Topio Networks 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. When I was in sixth grade, NASA had this program called SAREX, Satellite Amateur Radio Experiment. A saddle is what we call negatively curved. Sequoia Capital: "Crypto is one of the two big sectors of the next 10 In the late 90s, Juan Maldacena had a big breakthrough there. I try to keep up with all those fields. As someone who loves quantum information, I'll be thrilled with that. They've lost a lot of the goodwill of public markets. MAGUIRE: No. Before black holes, a prerequisite to understand them is you have to know some general relativity. There was oneI think it was shortly after I was 13for about six months I couldn't sleep at night. I would almost say in a lot of ways it was similar to Maxwell's demon paradox, which was in the late 1800s. 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. He is a Director of AMP Robotics, Gather, Physna, and Vise. The professors at USC told me I should graduate and go somewhere better, so I went up to Stanford and started grad school there, actually in the statistics department. It was unbelievably lonely. ZIERLER: The point of connection to Sequoia, how did that happen? 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. Even within string theory, there are many different branches and ideas. ZIERLER: What were you doing at Google? Watershed is a software platform that helps companies get to zero carbon fast. 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. When did that start for you? I'm so glad we connected. We're so nascent in those fields that if you're just really smart, IQ will get you far, and in three months you can do some original work. Will you sign this thing for me?" It's path-dependent over what happens over the next ten, twenty years. Sequoia's Shaun Maguire on competition and conviction in - Yahoo! 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 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. He received an undergraduate degree from the University of Southern . The founder of Figma is an amazing 30 year old kid who also really loves physics and computers. Shaun Maguire. From the time I was 9, I've been obsessed with space. I was fascinated by what made these numbers go up and down. That was the question, and what he meant by that was if you could take boundary measurements around the sounds you'd be hearing on a drum, or the heights of waves moving through a drum, could you uniquely figure out the shape inside? I was the only student in my year that joined that department, the only grad student. Not completely explicitly, but a little bit subconsciously and implicitly. 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. There's this other thing called holographic entanglement entropy. He is also an angel investor. MAGUIRE: I will do my best to explain the arc here. Seven Questions with Shaun Maguire - Sequoia Capital