Manish Kothari built his investing instincts by actually building things: he helped start around 40 companies at SRI covering voice assistants, surgical robots, apple-picking robots, and space radar, co-founded one of the first telemedicine systems back in 2007, and later helped build Mytrus, an early virtual clinical trials company later acquired by Medidata—all of which shaped his belief that backing science only works when the original inventors stay hands-on, not just license out their research. That operating background feeds into how he evaluates deep tech today: he checks whether a technology can survive changes in direction without breaking, points to CRISPR as an example of a field that only became fundable once its tools matured, groups his investments into software, hardware, and what he calls wetware for biotech and health, and argues publicly that frontier science needs support like advanced market commitments to actually scale into real industry.