Will Manidis

He attended Olin College, which Packy McCormickPacky McCormickPacky McCormick is a writer and venture investor who founded the Not Boring newsletter and Not Boring Capital. He previously worked in investment banking and the flexible workspace business, turned in 2020 to writing focused on technology and business strategy, then took up angel and fund investing, and has been involved in an energy podcast and collaborative writing.Open the full entry’s October 2021 Not Boring investment memo on ScienceIO describes as an engineering-focused school founded in 1997. The alumni directory on Dorm Room Fund’s website also lists Olin College as his school.⁠[1][2]

The memo states that while in college he was a Partner and then Managing Partner at the student-run venture fund Dorm Room Fund, and also worked at the therapeutics company Immuneering, where he built out systems to accelerate the speed of clinical literature.⁠[1]

The memo states that after a year at Immuneering he joined Cambridge-based Foundation Medicine as a Visiting Researcher. Gaurav Kaushik was then leading the company’s real world data team, which he had started; in 2018 Will Manidis joined that team to help develop AI tools.⁠[1]

The Not Boring memo states that he and Gaurav Kaushik both left Foundation Medicine and launched Cascade.Bio, which they later rebranded as Science.io. Veradigm’s 2024 press release gives 2019 as the year ScienceIO was founded.⁠[1][3]

On July 10, 2019, the Thiel Foundation announced the 2019 class of Thiel Fellows; he is item 22 on the list, with West Chester, PennsylvaniaPennsylvaniaPennsylvania (officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) is a Middle Atlantic state of the United States; its capital is Harrisburg, and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are its two great metropolitan areas. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on December 12, 1787, the second state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 13,002,700.Open the full entry / Boston, MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry given as his location and Cascade.bio as his project, under the category “Biotech, Healthcare.” The Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry’s website states that the program was founded by Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry in 2011 for young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.⁠[4][5]

The Not Boring memo states that in 2019 he dropped out of Olin College to become a Thiel Fellow and that, since he was already employed and did not need the money to live on, he took the $100,000 grant and invested $10,000 in each of ten companies. The memo reproduces a tweet he posted two years later, which reads in part: “all ten are still alive-- one is a unicorn, one got picked up by a faang, and the rest are still kicking.” The guest biography on the Hidden Forces episode page also calls him a 2019 Thiel Fellow.⁠[1][6]

His newsletter on Substack is called Minutes. The earliest post listed on its archive page is “the hard thing about choosing hard things,” dated May 18, 2020; the other 2020 posts listed are “we were promised flying cars and all we got were apps” (May 27), “a pandemic of confirmation bias” (June 12), “longevity, and resets.” (July 22) and “on august” (September 24).⁠[7]

On October 13, 2021, ScienceIO announced that it had emerged from stealth mode and had raised $8 million in seed funding. It was an AI-based data platform for life-sciences organizations that turns the unstructured data in large volumes of patient data into usable information and identifies biomedical terms and links them to larger concepts. The company planned to expand its machine-learning repositories and healthcare AI capabilities, upgrade its natural language processing, advance programs with healthcare systems, enlarge its engineering, product and commercial teams, and launch an API early access program for developers.⁠[8][1]

The Outsourcing-Pharma article calls Will Manidis and Gaurav Kaushik co-founders and quotes him: “Healthcare providers and organizations want to make patient-first decisions.” It also quotes Mike Pellini, managing partner of the venture firm Section 32, and states that Chuck Smolky had been named the company’s first chief commercial officer, having previously been a vice president at Optum and Aetna and a senior vice president at Health Fidelity.⁠[8]

The Not Boring memo that Packy McCormick published on October 14, 2021, calls him co-founder and CEO and lists the investors in the $8 million seed round, among them Section 32, Sea Lane Ventures, Quiet Capital, Lachy Groom, Josh Buckley, Scott BelskyScott BelskyScott Belsky is an American entrepreneur, author and early-stage investor who co-founded the creative portfolio platform Behance; after Adobe acquired it in 2012 he served as Adobe’s chief product officer and chief strategy officer. Since 2025 he has been a partner at the independent film studio A24 and founder of A24 Labs, and since September 2026 also a Product Advisory Partner at Union Square Ventures (USV).Open the full entry, Todd Goldberg, Rahul VohraRahul VohraRahul Vohra is a software entrepreneur and angel investor, co-founder and head of Superhuman Mail, and co-founder of Rapportive. He studied computer science at the University of Cambridge, moved to the San Francisco Bay Area with Rapportive in 2010, and saw the company acquired by LinkedIn in 2012. In 2014, he began building Superhuman, developing a set of startup practices around email efficiency, user onboarding, and product-market fit. His email business was acquired by Grammarly in 2025 and later renamed Superhuman Mail; he also co-manages Todd & Rahul Capital with Todd Goldberg.Open the full entry, Turner Novak’s Banana Capital, Ankur Nagpal, Austin Rief, Jack AltmanJack AltmanJack Altman is a general partner at Benchmark and a member of its management company, and the co-founder and executive chairman of Lattice.Open the full entry, Pipe founder Harry Hurst, Earl Grey Capital, Swell Partners, Dorm Room Fund (where, the memo notes, Will Manidis had been a Managing Partner) and Not Boring Capital. The author states in the memo that he himself invested in ScienceIO through Not Boring Capital.⁠[1]

The memo describes the company’s products at the time: Tycho automatically turns unstructured healthcare data into labeled data, with a dataset of more than 2.2 billion labels in more than 20 million documents — clinical trial records, physicians’ notes and clinical research papers — up from 40 million labels in early 2020; the memo calls this dataset 22,000 times larger than the previous largest healthcare dataset, with 50-fold growth over the prior 12 months and more than 20 clinical ontologies integrated in 2021. Kepler is a platform for parallelized, multi-GPU training of large language models. Annotate is an AI-assisted data-labeling and training platform to which users upload their own notes, PDFs and Office documents, which ScienceIO’s models pre-label; users can validate, change, add or remove labels, and the memo puts its intervention rate at under 2% and the speed-up over manual labeling at 20 times. A self-serve API for developers was about to launch, charged by usage, with a small amount paid for every page processed; there was also a patient-profile product, Patient 360.⁠[1]

The memo adds that the company’s models used 9 million healthcare concepts, that its enterprise pipeline was growing 75% month over month, and that enterprise customers began with a three-month pilot in the six figures of revenue; the pilot customers were a top insurance company, the largest clinical trial infrastructure provider, a discovery-stage pharmaceutical company and an academic medical center, the insurer using it to digitize and summarize claims and to flag severe cases and potential fraud.⁠[1]

In 2022 ScienceIO was one of four companies chosen to take part in Mayo Clinic Platform_Accelerate, Mayo Clinic’s AI startup program, which helps AI-based startups become market-ready.⁠[9]

The Minutes archive page lists his posts “508 Miles: introduction (9.18-9.25),” dated September 26, 2022, and “508 Miles: all too short,” dated October 3, 2022.⁠[7]

On February 13, 2024, Pirate WiresPirate WiresPirate Wires is an American subscription media company covering technology, politics and culture. It was founded by Mike Solana.Open the full entry published an article under his byline, “The Executive Physical: Behind the Velvet Rope of Healthcare for the 1%.” Written in the first person, it deals with the “executive physical,” which the subtitle describes as an intensive, three-day, no-expenses-spared check-up for the ultra-rich; in the opening scene the narrator is asked, “Income from your business last year?” and, after a pause, replies, “We’re early.” His personal website lists the piece as “Executive Physicals.”⁠[10][11]

The Agreement and Plan of Merger is dated February 21, 2024. The company being acquired under it is Cascade Bio, Inc., a DelawareDelawareDelaware is a U.S. state in the Mid-Atlantic region on the East Coast, with its capital at Dover and Wilmington as its largest city. On December 7, 1787, it became the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, entering the Union as the 1st state, and it had a population of 989,948 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry corporation; the purchaser is Veradigm Inc., the merger subsidiary is Veradigm Merger Sub, Inc., and Fortis Advisors LLC acts as the equityholder representative. The agreement defines Will Manidis and Gaurav Kaushik as the “Designated Management Equityholders”; the “Designated Equityholders” also include Raunaq Malhotra, Dennis Ryu, Stan Miroshnikov and Lara Yuan, together with Buckley Ventures II, LP, Cherubic Ventures Fund IV, L.P., LGF II, L.P., Quiet Venture I, LP, Quiet Venture II, LP, Section 32 Fund 2, LP and SH Burst XIX. He is also named in the definition of “Company’s Knowledge.”⁠[12]

The agreement defines the “Merger Consideration” as a base of $130 million, plus cash, minus indebtedness and transaction expenses, and adjusted for any working capital surplus or deficit; it separately defines the “Deferred Merger Consideration” as $10 million.⁠[12]

On February 27, 2024, Veradigm issued a press release announcing that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire ScienceIO, unanimously approved by its board of directors. The release puts the purchase price at $140 million in cash, subject to customary adjustments for cash, indebtedness, working capital and transaction expenses, of which an aggregate of approximately $44 million is deferred, substantially all of it payable in installments on each of the first three anniversaries of the closing date; the price was to be funded with cash on hand, the deal was not subject to a financing condition, and closing was expected as promptly as practicable once customary conditions were satisfied. The release calls ScienceIO an AI platform and foundation model provider for healthcare whose models support patient anonymization, record linkage, information extraction, summarization and predictive analytics.⁠[3][13]

The Form 8-K that Veradigm filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionU.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionThe U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is the federal securities regulator of the United States. Created during the Great Depression by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and led by five commissioners, it has a three-part mission of protecting investors, maintaining fair, orderly and efficient markets, and facilitating capital formation.Open the full entry on the agreement is signed February 27, 2024. It names the acquired company as Cascade Bio, Inc. (“d/b/a ScienceIO”), states that after the merger ScienceIO would be an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Veradigm, and gives the purchase price as $140 million in cash, of which approximately $43.55 million is deferred. It also states that Veradigm would establish a retention pool of up to 2.75 million restricted stock units (RSUs) for eligible ScienceIO employees, to be issued within 30 days after closing and to vest in equal annual installments over four years.⁠[13]

The release identifies him as CEO of ScienceIO and quotes him: “Joining Veradigm aligns with ScienceIO’s mission to better serve patients and healthcare professionals,” and “Together with Veradigm, we will provide new features and capabilities for providers and partners.”⁠[3]

Veradigm planned to use ScienceIO’s platform to build its own proprietary large language models on its data set of 400,000 providers and more than 200 million patients. The law firm Gunderson Dettmer stated in a notice dated February 27, 2024, that it represented ScienceIO in the transaction.⁠[9][14]

On March 4, 2024, Veradigm issued a press release announcing that it had completed its acquisition of ScienceIO. The release quotes Yin Ho, Veradigm’s interim CEO and a member of its board: “This is an exciting day as we announce that we officially closed the ScienceIO transaction.”⁠[15][16]

Episode 2 of season 1 of the podcast Three Course Founders, “Healthtech Fever Dream,” released on September 26, 2024, has him as its guest. The host, Sherveen Mashayekhi, founder and CEO of Free Agency and an angel investor, calls him a friend in the episode description and says he was the founder and CEO of ScienceIO. The topics listed in the description are opportunities in healthtech and AI, how founders lose deep expertise as their startups grow, his strengths and weaknesses, the behavior of venture capital and industry trends, and Palantir.⁠[17]

The Writing page of his personal website groups a set of essays under “A Businessman’s Apologetic (2025–)”: in order, “Craft Is the Antidote to Slop.,” “Rented Virtue,” “Nobody Walks to Canterbury,” “Tool Shaped Objects,” “Against Taste,” “On the Garden (against Citrini),” “The Pyramid and the Tomb” and “On Grindslop,” all of them linked to Minutes. The Minutes archive page gives “Craft Is the Antidote to Slop.” the subtitle “to dress it and to keep it.”⁠[11][7]

On February 11, 2026, he published “Tool Shaped Objects” on Minutes. The essay discusses what he calls “a category of object that is shaped like a tool, but distinctly isn’t one,” with examples running from the kanna plane blades of a Kyoto toolmaker to the game FarmVille and AI agent systems; he argues that many products and practices give the feeling of productive work without producing anything, and that spending on and use of AI are driven largely by visible activity rather than output. He also writes that in his view the models will become very good in short order, but that their diffusion into the real economy will take much longer.⁠[18]

On February 17, 2026, he published “Nobody Walks to Canterbury” on Minutes. The essay opens in 1538, with Henry VIII’s commissioners looting Becket’s shrine at Canterbury, and contrasts the medieval pilgrimage to the shrine with the parish system that put a church within a short walk of every believer; he argues that the parish system, like the modern internet, minimized the distance to consumption and so removed any reason to travel, and that the real measure of a thing’s value is whether people are willing to move toward it. The essay draws on Michelin’s distance-based star ratings and on a 2023 article by Zack Baker and Adam Katz in Anthropoetics; in it he calls Zack Baker and John Fiorentino his friends and mentions visiting, the previous morning, a friend who is a prominent rare book dealer in London.⁠[19]

Episode 479 of the podcast Hidden Forces, “God, AI, and the Coming Violence,” has him as its guest and Demetri Kofinas as host; the episode page gives the recording date as April 5, 2026 (written 04/05/2026). The summary on the episode page states that the first hour covers his background, his early upbringing as a Quaker, his experience building and selling a healthcare AI and data science company, and his theological arguments about technology and the innovation cycle; that the second hour covers AI’s effects on wealth concentration, labor, the social contract and political violence; and that the conversation closes with his essay “Nobody Walks to Canterbury” and his concept of “totemization.”⁠[6]

The guest biography on the episode page describes him as a New York-based entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of ScienceIO, a former managing partner at Dorm Room Fund and an active early-stage investor who writes on technology on his Substack, Minutes.⁠[6]

On October 29, 2026, he and Joe Roberts published a long essay under both their names, The Commanding Heights, at commanding-heights.com. It argues that technological revolutions tend to create wealth far from where they begin and that machine intelligence will do the same; it defines the “Commanding Heights” as scarce, controllable positions of economic power that durably capture the gains from increasingly capable and widely diffused intelligence. The essay consists of a narrative named for Ravi, an Overture, Parts I–VIII and a Closing; it covers AI capital spending, a “Neo-Dollar” built on stablecoins, sovereign control of frontier models, labor and inequality, and the future of the firm, and is also offered as a PDF.⁠[20]

As of November 2026, his personal website states that he lives in New York and founded ScienceIO, a language model provider that was sold to a large electronic medical records (EMR) provider, and that he has spent the last few years walking and investing, taking part in the early rounds of Brain Co, Chroma, Thatch, Silna and others.⁠[21]

As of November 2026, the team page of Dorm Room Fund’s website lists him under “Where DRF leads” as “Founder, ScienceIO”; the page states that Dorm Room Fund writes the first check for founders who are still in school or just out.⁠[22]

The Not Boring memo states that, by his own account, he went into healthcare because he had spent much of his youth sick; it also states that in high school he used large-scale natural language processing (NLP) to study cross-language allusions in early classical texts.⁠[1]

The Affiliations page of his personal website lists two organizations: the American Model Yachting Association and the US Vintage Model Yachting Association.⁠[23]

One page of his personal website states that he has spent the majority of the last few years behind a computer, that as a result he spends a lot of time thinking about keyboards, and that this turned into an obsession. Another page presents Hyperstition, described as “an interior design practice,” and names among its select clients Octave Capital Partners; RIT, New York; and the Technology Brothers Podcasting Network. The site also has a photo page titled “Archive” and a page titled “Scans,” both consisting of images without captions.⁠[24][25][26][27]

The 2021 posts listed on the Minutes archive page are “Biotech for the Biocurious” (March 15) and “How FDA Works” (April 21), both co-written with Shak Lakhani; “making progress on progress studies” (October 6), co-written with Chris Painter and Andre Bertram; and “negotiating startup comp” (December 7).⁠[7]

The group “Our Intelligence Troubles (2026–)” on the Writing page of his personal website lists “Our Intelligence Troubles” and “No ‘New Deal’ for OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry,” both posted on X; “Wargames,” hosted on his personal website; “On the Political Economy of Language Models,” on Minutes; and a link titled “Track State Level Data Center Bans” that points to datacenterbans.com. The group “Cardiff Giant (2026–)” lists “The Cardamom Game” and “Black Sun,” both on Substack.⁠[11]

The travel group on the Writing page lists “Oman” and “Norway”; the remaining pieces, apart from the Pirate Wires article, are “Asset Light Software Businesses,” published in Every, and “Grok, show me the first man without sin,” on Minutes.⁠[11]

Personal website: https://willmanidis.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[21]

Substack newsletter Minutes: https://minutes.substack.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7][11]

Dorm Room Fund: Official website: https://www.dormroomfund.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[22]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

X: Public account: https://x.com/WillManidis (opens in a new window).⁠[11][17]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/willmanidis (opens in a new window).⁠[21]