RRE Ventures - RRE Ventures - Raju Rishi, Nikita Singareddy, Jason Black

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:33)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:56)
My guests today are Raju Rishi, Nikita Singareddy, and Jason Black of RRE Ventures.
RRE is a New York based VC firm investing in early stage startups with more than 400 investments over its 25 year history. Raju, Nikita, and Jason focused their time in the world of healthcare investing, a topic I haven't explored much personally or on this show. We discussed the current landscape for healthcare investing, the variety of stakeholders in the healthcare value chain, the opportunities for founders and investors in this space, what excites them about the future and the impact Covid has had shaking up the industry. I hope you enjoy my conversation with the RRE team.
So Raju, Nikita, and Jason, I can't not remember the last time I had three people on the line. So this is going to be a lot of fun and we're going to explore a topic that I don't think I've ever explored on the podcast, which is the non-biopharma part of healthcare investing. So I think there's a lot to learn and this is the perfect time given the Covid situation that we're facing to have this exploration. Raju, I thought that a neat place to begin would be for you to walk us through how you and your team think about what makes for an attractive market or segment to invest in in the first place. We were talking offline about sort of how you explore areas and I'd just love to hear more about that process because I think the market you pick can be so important to outcomes and obviously I'm curious why healthcare in the final analysis was so interesting to you and your team.

**Raju Rishi** (3:21)
Generally speaking, RRE has been around for 26 years and our original thought process was no venture capitalists in New York 26 years ago.
That's gonna be a burgeoning ecosystem and so let's deposit ourselves there. I guess 10 years ago we decided to supplement our localized strategy with a thesis driven strategy. What we generally do is every partner picks a team. I picked Jason and Nikita here. We'll pick a sector that we think could be exciting and we'll do a bunch of homework in it. About six or seven years ago we picked healthcare as a thesis for us to focus on. We went to a bunch of industry experts, universities, built an overarching thesis around why healthcare would be valuable. Sometimes we've done this a couple of times where we've come to the conclusion that timing is wrong. Many, many years ago we picked robotics and battery density, battery technology as a sector to focus on, came to the conclusion that it wasn't a good venture bet.