Shaun Maguire - Biography 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 was a partner at Google Ventures at the time. ZIERLER: Shaun, to zoom out from your specific research, what were people talking about with regard to quantum gravity during this time? Vise is an AI-powered portfolio management platform. Or was this really a sudden career shift from what you might do otherwise with a PhD in fundamental physics? I don't want to sell for a billion dollars now, I want to sell for $20 billion. Dr. Shaun Maguire serves as a Partner at Sequoia Capital. ZIERLER: As you were surveying all of these ideas, where did you see a niche? I literally emailed John Preskill from Afghanistan. At my job I'm dealing with incredible rate of change, I'm dealing with incredible amounts of data, and physics gives you frameworks to make sense of all this and try to come up with heuristic laws and ways to think about things which are very powerful for investing. MAGUIRE: I was at Stanford for a year and a half. Robco rethinks how products are made, using modular robot systems. My physics passion was in ninth grade. The way John works, is it's really a Socratic style. Prior to joining Sequoia in 2019, Dr. Maguire was a Partner at GV, where he led their . 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. On the other hand, since I was a little kid, my passion was black holes and space. 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. 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. ZIERLER: Does the comparison hold up insofar as with solar startups, we knew what solar would be good for, right? I was probably taking eight classes a quarter. Five years ago, quantum information was moving way faster than machine learning. I just kind of knew this thing, the information paradox, and all of that. I didn't even know the prerequisites to be in that world, so it took an extra few years. MAGUIRE: Yeah. These things change over time. It was a happy accident. Gather hosts virtual spaces for work and play. 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. Some of it is subconscious. So, I basically made that decision a long time ago that I wouldn't do it. That happened in the early 90s. That's the way I would describe it. Honestly, after getting to the cutting edge of knowledge there, it's weird. With computers, it just seemed like the most important technology of the time. There's some technical definition that gives you that, but you can have negative, zero, or positive curvature. The hardware is going to be really valuable. Shaun, for the last part of our talk, just one retrospective question and then one going forward. You know for the vast majority of compute, you want it to be centralized. ZIERLER: You mentioned on a day to day basis you utilize your expertise in quantum information fairly rarely. MAGUIRE: That's a great question. Alexei is really introverted. That was the next huge jump in this area. He also serves as Chairman and Advisor at Vise. She recruited me onto a pretty crazy project related to the war in Afghanistan. Mathematicians have studied hyperbolic geometry to death and have learned incredibly beautiful things. I was the only student in my year that joined that department, the only grad student. Shaun Maguire, Sequoia Capital Partner, joins 'Tech Check' to discuss the decision to back the social network, what makes it . Before black holes, a prerequisite to understand them is you have to know some general relativity. MAGUIRE: Yes, I do. When did that start for you? There's two things. 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. I still don'tno oneI don't know anything about quantum mechanics. I try to keep up with all those fields. So, I don't stay up perfectly, but I do try to stay up with the really big results. By navigating this website you agree to our cookie policy. I think there are probably actually wormholes, but it doesn't matter for the sake of the work. ZIERLER: Did you officially unenroll from Stanford at that point? MAGUIRE: That was another thing, is that I am athere's this joke at Caltech (MIT does this too): How do you tell the difference between introverts and extroverts at Caltech? By normal human standards, I'm an introvert. Mark Wise. Another was the way black body radiation happens. So, when I was doing that one, yes, sure, having the quantum background was really important, and being able to do diligence on the company and trying to figure out what the roadmap would be and what the biggest bottlenecks would be for scaling and things like that. The big bang one issomehow people don't really talk about that. One is people respect John so much that you don't want to disappoint John. I had to say yes to it on the spot, so I went to DARPA for a year and a half full-time there. (Sequoia will have two board seats at the company, held by Gupta, who focuses on later-stage investments, and Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, whose concentration is on investing in early-stage . 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 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. Show more Show more . I love Caltech, etc. The fourth area is I'm super hyperactive. But once I got there, I got over a 4.0 or whatever in my first year. He was always accessible. You want to live up to his name and reputation. Thank you so much for joining me today. [few minutes pause] When you got to the group meetings with John, what were some of the big debates that were happening? What I was actually most interested was space. Don Valentine, the founder of the firm, he had been at some of the top semiconductor companies of the past, including Fairchild and National. 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. Astronomy becomes interest in black holes, which leads to people like John Preskill, you know, legends of the field. He dropped out of MIT. One of the most famous ones was the photoelectric effect that Einstein won the Nobel Prize for his explanation of. Now at this point I'm maybe a 25 year old or something, I think was when I was coming back to Caltech. MAGUIRE: John. He had a couple PhD students that were about my age or a little older who became good friends. Look at solar. ZIERLER: Shaun, in your day to day role at Sequoia, are you bringing your quantum information expertise? You can't have spaceships traveling away in a straight line from a Euclidean geometry perspective. In high school, I didn't know about the IMO, USAMO, AIME, or any of these things. It's a tautology, but it's also 100% correct. ZIERLER: Once you started going to group meetings at IQI, what were your impressions? I got lucky in that when I was leaving DARPA, we came up with an idea. Sorry, not in ninth grade. They've always been more of an R&D firm and government contractor. Just knowing where that edge is, is enough. He has a PhD in Physics from Caltech and Masters degrees in Statistics from Stanford and "Control and Dynamical Systems" from Caltech. From the time I was 9, Ive been obsessed with space. Or are you a lifer in business and VC at this point? ZIERLER: To foreshadow to what happened next, were you on a trajectory of pursuing an academic career and then some opportunity came up? Another is how the universe was formed, like the big bang. I love John. But I think he's testing people's commitment, which I think is a really smart strategy that not enough people do. Shaun Maguire Ph.D General Information. I didn't really have much of a formal background in it or anything. I didnt even go to class most of the time1.8 GPA in 10th grade and an F in algebra II. ZIERLER: From your own perspective, do you tend to think of this in somewhat of a horse race metaphor? So, I've always been attracted to people like that. Shaun Maguire - Partner @ Sequoia Capital - CrunchBase Join Facebook to connect with Shaun Maguire and others you may know. Knowde is the marketplace for chemicals, polymers and ingredients. People don't really use that as an example. It was purely just my curiosity. Bill Thurston was this guy who's workI had just been fascinated by the guy, and I read a lot of his papers. See Shaun Maguire's recent investments in Series A Cloud Infrastructure, other investment areas, and co-investors. On the AdS side, that has a very deep relationship to hyperbolic geometry, which is something mathematicians have studied very deeply. Our Team | Sequoia Capital US/Europe He was a physics major. What advice should first-time founders heed? There are a lot of people in that camp. I have a fellowship, so I don't need any funding. So, I did this and got to ask a question to the astronauts, and that honestly made space really tangible to me. It's actually breaking in some ways right now via Apple. 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. It was entertaining. Ive started five companies. A lot of people, their intuition for space or geometry is that we live in flat space, but if you live on a sphere, that sphere is what we would call positively curved. MAGUIRE: I think something that's hard for people to understand about me is that I've always been doing multiple things in parallel my whole life. It wasn't as obvious, but it was obvious there would be certain niche applications of solar. [laughs] Math is math, and there's a pretty good history of the math becoming reality. The vast majority of the individual solar companies failed, but the whole category has been incredibly successful. ZIERLER: What's the connecting point from Stanford to Caltech? There's a lot of amazing faculty at Stanford; I'm not trying to knock Stanford. I feel like that's what happened with string theory. I have been really interested in machine learning, and in cryptocurrencies, and in robots, and in space, and in physics, and other things. Shaun Maguire's Investing Profile - Sequoia Capital Partner | Signal I think it depends on a lot of things that play out. 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. When we make a decision to do something, it doesnt happen unless the whole team is behind the decision. I really did the PhD for myself. Shaun Maguire, Partner, Sequoia Capital - Topio Networks He started mentoring me. Before Sequoia I was at Google Ventures. I like high-IQ founders. I think Bell Labs, one of the key things, they basically had a regulated monopoly. MAGUIRE: Honestly, yeah. Seed/Early. There's this guy Amir Safavi Naeini who's a professor at Stanford now, and Alex Krause, and Simon Grblacher who's a professor at TU Delft. Then, we went straight on my honeymoon. Sequoia's Shaun Maguire on competition and conviction in - Yahoo MAGUIRE: My job title is I'm a general partner at Sequoia Capital. Sequoia BitClout was both a sensation and a controversial startup when it launched earlier this year. He serves as a Board Member at Luminar, Knowde & Gather. So, if you say, "Hey Alexei, there's something that I would really like to understand that you worked on. Shaun Maguire. My PhD was basically making a bunch of connections between these ideas. Facebook gives people the power to. Could you have gone back? Seven Questions with Shaun Maguire - Sequoia Capital He served as Board Member at SpinLaunch and AMP . I'll pause. It was a good investment for governments. 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. I left Stanford with a master's degree and went to Caltech. 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.
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