United States

Caldera

Products

Tools

Interoperability

Protocols

Apps

Infrastructure

Dev Tools

Scaling

Resource Coordination

DeFi

Exchanges

Oracles

Wallets

Gaming

Data

Bots

Indexing

Block Explorers

Stablecoins

Layer 2

Rollup

Shaun Maguire is Partner at Sequoia Capital. Formerly, Partner at GV.

Growing up, I had a cousin who studied computer science at UCLA, who made a huge impact on me. When I was 7 years old, he helped me build my first computer. From the time I was 9, I’ve been obsessed with space. For months, when I was 13, I couldn’t sleep at night because there was a thought experiment I couldn’t understand. (It turns out space is curved.) I did horribly in high school. Bored out of my mind. I didn’t even go to class most of the time—1.8 GPA in 10th grade and an F in algebra II. I was doing projects on the computer, hanging out in hacker forums for 10 hours a day in IRC.

I’ve started five companies. The first one was a failure, three of them have been successful, and one is too early to call. I started the second company with two friends and I got to know a lot of VCs raising money for it. I pitched everyone—except Sequoia, because they had a conflict. Fast forward a few years, and Google Ventures offered me a job that gave me the flexibility to stay in LA and finish my Ph.D. in quantum gravity. This wasn’t necessarily what I thought I would do long term. Then another fund that was trying to recruit me did a reference call with my friend Patrick Collison. Patrick called Sequoia and told them they should hire me instead.

Shaun Maguire

Funding Rounds

CypherHunter Plus

Shaun Maguire

Lead Investments

Investment Rounds

Deal by Year

Portfolio