Annie Lamont on Reinvention and Winning Across Four Decades of Venture Capital

**Annie Lamont** (0:00)
You do have to reinvent yourself, you have to repot, you have to rethink, because obviously, you know, trends change, cycles change.

**Peter High** (0:11)
Welcome to Technoventure. I'm Peter High, president of Metis Strategy. My guest today is Annie Lamont. Annie is the co-founder and managing partner of Oak HC FT, a venture capital firm managing more than $7 billion in assets and focused on health care and financial technology. Since its founding in 2014, Oak HC FT has backed innovative companies including Devoted Health, Village MD, CareBridge, and others transforming health care and financial services. Annie spent more than four decades investing at the forefront of technology innovation. She began her career at the Investment Bank, Hambrick and Quist, where she worked on the landmark IPOs of Apple and Genentech, among others, before spending nearly three decades as a managing partner at Oak Investment Partners. Throughout her career, she's invested in category-defining companies including Athena Health, One Medical, Cotivity, and Devoted Health, and has been recognized multiple times on the Forbes Mitus List as one of the world's leading venture capital investors. Today, we'll discuss Annie's remarkable career, how she successfully navigated multiple waves of technology innovation, what she looks for in exceptional founders, and why she's so optimistic about the future of AI and health care and financial services, among other topics I'm sure we'll cover. Annie, welcome to Technoventure. It's great to speak with you today.

**Annie Lamont** (1:18)
Thank you, Peter. Great to be here.

**Peter High** (1:21)
Very kind. I'm looking forward to our conversation. Maybe we begin, if you don't mind, with Oak HC, FT.
Take a moment. I mentioned, of course, a little bit about your focus. I would love to have you double click a little further than I had an opportunity to in that introduction to talk a bit more about the firm that you lead.

**Annie Lamont** (1:39)
Yeah, no, absolutely. Andrew Adams and I founded the firm in 2014 As you said, we now have over $7 billion under management, just because we did raise a new fund six months ago. That was six.
We've been working together for over 25 years. We now have over 26 investors and a firm of 50 people.
We're really about building the next generation of enterprise tech companies and it's the intersection of AI and tech. We obviously have a great deal of expertise in the health care and fintech side, but we do invest in broader platforms, horizontal platforms. We just are extremely helpful when it comes to going after these two verticals. Now, you can say fintech, everything touches payments and finance. We've defined it very, very broadly. We do everything from million dollar seeds to 100 million dollar investments in later stage category defining companies.

**Peter High** (2:43)
Talk a bit about how you landed on, you mentioned a little bit about some of what rhymes between the two spaces you occupy and among other ways in which they're a little bit similar. How did you develop those as areas of focus? I know that they had been for some time for you in your career.

**Annie Lamont** (2:57)
Yes, they have. Yes, so originally invested in biotech, some of the original economic companies, Genzyme, Cephalon, Courier, Alexion, many of those still exist today.
Then in 2000, getting into health care, software, and technology enabled services, and Athena Health happened to be in 2000, our first investment in health care software, and it was the first cloud-based software company in health care. As you mentioned, I've gone on to invest in our companies there in 2002 Before people knew what FinTech was, we started a FinTech practice, and I think that that was in part another highly regulated market that touched everything, and I will talk about this, I'm sure, later on. But in my career, I have certainly looked at what is the next area that we should be investing in, and when you think about trends that were occurring at that time, FinTech was something that held amazing opportunity, and very few people were investing in it, or really understood it, and we felt we've been very good at investing in a highly regulated environment in health care, a lot of overlap in payments and insurance, and so launched a FinTech effort.

**Peter High** (4:21)
Makes sense. I would love to rewind a little bit further to the early parts of your career that you briefly alluded to there. As I mentioned in the introduction, you worked at Hembrick and Quist. You were at a front row seat to the IPOs of Apple and Genentech and some of the great biotech companies you just mentioned as well.
I wonder if you could describe briefly entering the technology industry during such a transformative time. You've subsequently influenced through the investments you've made, a variety of different periods of consequence, but that certainly was one of them and would love to have you reflect on that if you would.