Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
Oak HC/FT cofounder and managing partner Annie Lamont
- Annie Lamont, cofounder and managing partner of venture firm Oak HC/FT has been investing in healthcare for three decades.
- Lamont's focus changed during her career, starting with biotech, later health IT, and now companies like health insurance startup Devoted Health and primary care company One Medical.
- Her driving force for the investments were that she didn't want to add costs to the system. "I just felt like so many of the ills around healthcare are not necessarily going to be solved by a drug but maybe a better healthcare system," Lamont said.
- Lamont is one of Business Insider's 10 people transforming healthcare.
In 1980, Annie Lamont, a newly minted Stanford graduate, was carrying Steve Jobs' bags during Apple's initial public offering road show.
Lamont was working for Hambrecht & Quist, a boutique investment bank in the Bay Area that worked on IPOs for Apple and for the biotech giant Genentech. Watching those companies go public got Lamont excited about entrepreneurs.
So a year and a half into her job with the bank, she decided to make a leap into venture capital. She loved working with entrepreneurs, but she knew she wasn't an entrepreneur herself.
At the time, the career path was unconventional.
"People had no idea what venture capital was," Lamont said.
Read more: INTRODUCING: The 10 people transforming healthcare
Since then, Lamont's gone on to back dozens of influential startups that have shaped the future of healthcare: from biotech, to healthcare software, to primary care, with the aim of making healthcare better and more affordable.
After her stint in banking, Lamont landed across the country at Westport, Connecticut-based Oak Investment Partners. There, she got more exposure to the biotech industry through Genzyme, which was founded by an Oak partner. Ultimately, it led her to start a healthcare practice at Oak.
"In any industry, particularly in venture, have your lane. Have something you know better than anybody else," Lamont said. "You've gotta pick your spot. So I picked my spot, and that was going to be healthcare."
Read more: A top VC who's spent 3 decades investing in healthcare shares her best piece of advice for investors
She started by investing in neuroscience biotechs like Cephalon (later acquired by Teva), and Alkermes. Over the next decade, Oak went on to invest in about 15-20 biotech companies. By 1998, though, there were thousands of public biotech companies, but only a few had gotten their drugs approved.
"You could just see the disenchantment coming," Lamont said. "You want tailwinds when investing in any industry. I felt like it was going to be headwinds not tailwinds, because the biotech industry had disappointed."
Seeing those headwinds, in the 1990s, Lamont shifted her attention over to other parts of the healthcare industry, backing companies developing health plans for Medicaid, running hospices, and in behavioral health companies.
"I just felt like I needed I wanted to understand the system better and I felt like I didn't want to be completely dependent on the biotech industry for my investing," Lamont said.
Then came the internet, and the opening to invest in the intersection of software and health. Her first investment, in 2000: Athenahealth, a cloud-based electronic medical record company.
Her driving force for the investments were that she didn't want to add costs to the system.
"I wanted to be part of lowering costs and improving quality," she said. "I just felt like so many of the ills around healthcare are not necessarily going to be solved by a drug but maybe a better healthcare system."
It led her to invest in companies like care navigation company Castlight Health, payment software Cotiviti (which later became part of Virence Health, which is merging with Athenahealth), and health savings account company Payflex, which later sold to Aetna.
Then came the Affordable Care Act, sparking a wave of new healthcare startups for Oak to potentially invest in. In 2014, Lamont and her growing team spun out Oak HC/FT, a venture firm investing in healthcare and financial technology. The firm now has $1.1 billion under management, backing companies like Medicare Advantage insurer startup Devoted Health, palliative care company Aspire, and primary care company One Medical.
"Our mission is anything that lowers cost and improves quality, we're in - with the right people," Lamont said. "That means that we are focused on keeping patients out of the hospital and having them get the right in the right care right setting."
- Read more:
- Health-insurance startups like Oscar Health and Clover Health have raked in $1.3 billion in the past year. We took a look at their financials, which show how hard it is to get a foothold in the industry.
- Investors just made a $35 million bet on a startup that wants to help people find food and housing to keep them healthy
- Meet the pharmacy quietly powering hot startups like Hims and Nurx that ship Viagra and birth-control pills straight to your door
- We got a look at the slide deck that buzzy startup Devoted Health used to hit a $1.8 billion valuation before it signed up any customers
