Shaun Maguire

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.

I like high-IQ founders. But even more important to me is someone that’s just irrationally motivated. For whatever reason, it’s their life mission to try to revolutionize the industry they’re going after. And some of these founders don’t even understand where it comes from, or how deeply ingrained it is in them. I’ve got to believe that they work incredibly hard in part to make their families proud. In some cases, they were wildly misunderstood as kids and have chips on their shoulders. One of the ways to measure this is, what do people do on their weekends? The best founders are just so obsessed with what they’re doing that they cannot turn off.