Annie Lamont

Annie Lamont co-founded Oak HC/FT in 2014 to invest exclusively in healthcare and fintech entrepreneurs. In 2023, Oak HC/FT was named one of the ten best-performing venture capital firms in the world.

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. Annie has been named to the Midas List multiple times as the top-ranking investor in healthcare. She has also been named to the Top 100 Venture Capitalists (New York Times, CB Insights), Top 20 Private Equity Power Players (Fortune), Fintech Finance 40 (Institutional Investor), and 100 Most Influential People (Modern Healthcare). She has received multiple Lifetime Achievement awards for her role in transforming the healthcare industry, by funding technology and new commercial models that better align structural economic incentives. Her contributions include: leading early rounds in iconic $10B+ companies (e.g., One Medical, athenahealth, VillageMD, Devoted Health); being first to declare that she and her team would only invest in companies that simultaneously improve health outcomes and lower costs; creating the hospice category with the first IPO; igniting investor interest in mental health with the largest mental health IPO of the twentieth century.

Annie serves on the Board of Directors for Bloomberg 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.