Annie Lamont

Annie Lamont co-founded Oak HC/FT in 2014. Prior to founding Oak HC/FT, Annie spent 28 years at Oak Investment Partners, where she served as a Managing Partner and led the healthcare and fintech practices. Over the course of her career, she has invested in category-defining companies across the healthcare and financial services industries, including athenahealth, OneMedical, VillageMD, Castlight Health, iHealthTechnologies (which became Cotiviti), Aspire Health and NetSpend. 

Annie has been featured on the Forbes Midas List, Modern Healthcare's 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare list, Institutional Investor’s FinTech Finance 40 list, and the Top 100 Venture Capitalist rankings published by CB Insights. She also served as a core participant of the Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary’s Innovation and Investment Summit (DSIIS). 

In addition to her portfolio company board seats, Annie serves on the Board of Directors for Bloomberg Inc. and has served on the Board of Trustees for Stanford University, from which she holds a B.A. degree. 

There are two ways to do VC. Once you have a win, you can double down on it. You become known as the expert, and founders in that space flock to you. You can be hyper successful riding that momentum. But at some point, the world changes. Something shifts in your area of expertise, a business model no longer works, the headwinds become greater than the tailwinds.

Truly great investors don't rest on their laurels. They are fundamentally curious. They find it exciting, not frustrating, when someone flips the rules of the game because dislocation creates opportunity. They embrace that the world changes and seek to understand how political, social, and economic dynamics evolve with each other. Their prepared mind can recognize a transformative idea before it becomes obvious to everybody else. I have always sought to be this kind of investor, and I decided to build a firm where that approach could thrive. But this required a different kind of operating model.

Most VC firms have "Jedi knights" who are primarily concerned with their own portfolios. Successful Jedi often get caught up in their own triumphs and don't like to hear what they might be missing. Above all else, Andrew and I wanted to stoke and protect intellectual honesty. This only happens when investors drive to the best answer in concert. For us, this was not just a better way to work - it was the most durable strategy for investing. When curious people continuously challenge each other with rigor and sincerity, they can anticipate complex market changes before others do. That is how you become and stay the best.