At Oak HC/FT, we pride ourselves on our partnership principles and our passion for putting the entrepreneur first. As partners, we strive to provide the entrepreneurs we back with the best intellectual resources, strategic partnerships, talent strategy and comradery to position their companies for growth and success.
To reinforce our commitment to our CEOs, we gathered them along with leaders across our portfolio and the Healthcare and FinTech ecosystems for our inaugural CEO Summit for insightful conversations, expert presentations and networking.
We leaned on our network to bring some of the industry’s brightest and most compelling speakers to the stage, including BlackRock’s Global CIO of Fixed Income Rick Rieder, North Island Chairman Glenn Hutchins, and Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat among others.
With the goal of fostering meaningful connections and offering actionable insights to strengthen our companies’ businesses and accelerate growth, the agenda focused on topics spanning market outlooks to workplace revolution/talent strategy and data-driven analysis around the Healthcare and FinTech environments.
Here is a recap of some of the things we explored:
- Macro Environment: BlackRock’s Rick Rieder equated navigating the current market environment to “polishing your surfboard while there’s a hurricane outside.” Recognizing that the markets are being impacted by a set of conditions that are difficult to predict – i.e., inflation, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and the Fed – Rieder’s ultimate message was firm: The market is ripe for investments.
- Talent & People Strategy: Wing’s Head of People Davina Mazaroli, Gusto’s Chief Diversity & Engagement Officer Bernard Coleman, and Paxos’ Chief People Officer Madan Nagaldinne – three of the five founding members of Oak HC/FT’s CPO Guild – discussed the importance of prioritizing trust, radical honesty and psychological safety when building effective teams to ultimately scale a company. In a wide-ranging discussion that covered the war for talent, remote work, navigating social justice issues, and compensation, it became clear that at the end of the day, if the CPO doesn’t have trust with its executive team, outcomes will be compromised.
- Healthcare: The pandemic has allowed decades worth of progress in terms of telehealth, however affordability and fragmentation continue to be an issue across the U.S. healthcare system. To drive innovation within healthcare, payers need to understand the pain points that patients are experiencing and work with providers to provide the requisite information that they need to care for patients. Going forward alignment across payer, provider and patient activities is going to be critically important.
- FinTech: The FinTech opportunity continues to be enormous, approaching 30% of total tech fundraising volumes. M&A activity is bustling, while IPOs have completely slowed down. In terms of investment trends, funding is shifting from challenger institutions and insurtech to crypto and back-office services.
- Leadership in the new world of work: Alphabet’s CFO Ruth Porat, interviewed by the affable Fortune CEO Alan Murray, gave advice on operating a company in a tumultuous environment. She shared her perspective on how moments like this present the opportunity for companies to really distinguish themselves by doing the right thing. According to Ruth, the key to scale and achieve long term success is to focus on what is imperative for long term growth. Companies can get paralyzed by the next 3-, 6- to 12-months, but ultimately, as markets go up and down, we’re building something for the future – an imperative mindset for success across Healthcare and FinTech.
It was fulfilling and empowering to be surrounded by our ecosystem – our team and our entrepreneurs – who work tirelessly to drive impact across Healthcare and FinTech. Our companies are driving the future, and we are grateful to our partners on this journey to create positive change.