Origins - Inside Venture Capital, Hosted by a GP and an LP · OpenLP from Sapphire Partners

Merchant Banks: Venture’s Next Act with Will Manidis

·44 min·2 clips

Will says merchant banks use long-duration partner capital to back a wider remit of opportunities than venture.

1. Origins - Inside Venture Capital, Hosted by a GP and an LP, centers on Merchant Banks: Venture’s Next Act with Will Manidis. 2. Nick Turles, a GP at Asylum Ventures, and Beezer Clarkson, an LP at Sapphire Partners, host Will Manidis, founder of Science.io and SVP overseeing AI initiatives at Veridigm. 3. The episode asks whether venture capital should evolve into a merchant-banking model with longer-duration capital and broader services. 4. Will describes a recent four-hour podcast appearance, then jokes that professional podcasters need “professional athlete levels” of adrenaline. 5. The hosts use that setup to pivot into AI media, advertising, and Will’s thesis that “elite media” will survive as AI content spreads. 6. Will says he thinks the future belongs to “highly curated, opinionated things” like Stripe Press, the FT, and TPPN. 7. He traces his healthcare work through Foundation Medicine, Flatiron Health, Roche, and the pain of translating unstructured medical records into spreadsheets. 8. He says Science.io was built after the “Attention Is All You Need” paper to create narrow models for “high-trust regulated use cases” like healthcare abstraction. 9. He says Veridigm mattered because it has “the best data in the world,” and his core thesis became “models don’t matter, data matters.” 10. He argues that transformer models and scaling laws were real, but that the 2023 wave of giant foundation-model fundraising was more a “capital formation symptom” than a company symptom. 11. On healthcare adoption, he says doctors are already using ChatGPT for notes, denial letters, and appeal letters, and patients are using it to interpret blood work. 12. He says the near-term change is cultural willingness to use technology, not a large new technology breakthrough. 13. He is skeptical that new venture-backed AI health companies will capture most returns because legacy companies already have distribution and long-term contracts. 14. He names Veridigm and Epic as better positioned to roll AI into EMRs than new clinician-facing wrappers around OpenAI. 15. On science, he says current models have not shown the cross-domain leaps he would expect from a human with equivalent reading volume. 16. He therefore doubts “automated scientists at scale” will make novel discoveries, and says drug discovery is constrained by workflow, not by molecule simulation alone. 17. The concierge-medicine section turns to Atria, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland, and a “U-shaped” future where low-end and ultra-high-end care improve while the middle gets squeezed. 18. The tone is conversational, argumentative, and detail-heavy, with Nick Turles and Beezer Clarkson repeatedly pressing for definitions and distinctions. 19. Listeners interested in venture structure, AI in healthcare, and LP-GP incentives will get the most out of it. 20. Listeners looking for light startup gossip or a short casual interview may skip it.

As heard by us

A venture discussion about alignment, LP dynamics, and what an aligned fund could look like.

Nick and Beezer frame the conversation around what venture is for and what an aligned next generation firm might actually look like. They spend most of the time on incentive alignment, LP dynamics, and the argument that venture should back risky ideas efficiently instead of…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play if you want venture argued like GP and LP alignment still matters.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Origins - Inside Venture Capital, Hosted by a GP and an LP