Investing in Outliers | Shaun Maguire, Partner at Sequoia | Ep. 1

[upbeat music] All right, Shaun, thanks for doing this. I'm really excited to talk to you today.

Thrilled to be here, Jack. What's going on, man?

All right, so I wanna go right into it. So the first thing I wanna talk about is sort of like the current state of the media and social media. I'm not sure if I have-

I have no opinions on the subject.

You got nothing. We can move on. [chuckles]

I'm just kidding.

I don't know if I have the timing exactly right, but the way I experienced sort of you on Twitter was October 7th happened, and you got super vocal, and you started sharing a lot of opinions on X that were, that were kind of controversial, that were strongly rooted. They were ones that I agreed with, but, you know, ones that many people were sort of afraid to say in those ways. I wanted to start there, of just, like, what happened in that moment, and did I read that right, that there was some change in you or the way you thought about how you were gonna show up around that moment?

For sure. Um, you nailed it. There's a pretty long backstory [chuckles] on this, so I'll try to keep it brief, but I... Child of the internet, born in 1985. First time using the internet was fourth grade at my friend Nick Palchakoff's house, AOL. We went in AOL chat rooms. We realized that we could impersonate being a professional baseball player, uh, Mike Piazza. If you're listening, Mike, I've never met you, but I, I did a great job pretending I was you in fourth grade. You know this, too, but there was just really something about the internet in those points, where it was very new and the social elements of it were brand new. And this is a, a weird tangent, but, like, in physics, when you study some system, you start with very simple toy systems that you can actually understand. You study a single ball on a spring or a single ball on a string, you know, or y- you study with some simple system, and then you try to build up from there. When you understand a simple system deeply, it makes it much easier to understand the complex systems. I feel like I got lucky with when I was born, where I was on the internet in the very beginning of the social element, and so I think I was able to understand, as a participant, like, how manipulation works, how, how misinformation works, how it spreads. Y- I, and I'll give you an example on Mike Piazza, and I've talked about this maybe twice before, but, you know, my friend and I, we would A/B test. Like, can we convince people as fourth graders that we're a professional baseball player? And we basically learned a tactic accidentally that worked almost every time, call it eighty percent of the time. You know, if you just come out in a forum and say, "I'm Mike Piazza," no one's gonna believe you. But if you join some chat room, and you're talking to people, and you seem normal, and oftentimes AOL at the time would then go into a sidebar, you'd be talking to someone one-on-one. You know, after talking to someone for a little bit about random stuff, you know, the weather, whatever their hobbies are, you know, they'd ask: "What do you do?" And if you're not the one that starts, you know, with that, and they ask you, "What do you do?" And you'd be like: "Oh, I play baseball. " And they'd be like: "What do you mean you play baseball?" You're like: "You know, like, I get paid to play baseball." And they're like: "So you're a professional baseball player?" S- It's like: "I guess so." It's like: "Who do you play for?" "I play for the Dodgers." They're like: "You're lying."