Challenging the Status Quo of Healthcare Investment with Annie Lamont

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. This is Master's in Business with Barry Ridholds on Bloomberg Radio.

What can I say about this week's rock star guest? Annie Lamont incredible track record as a venture capitalist. She's co founder and managing partner of Oak HCFT. I can't list all her accolades because they're just one hundred most influential people in healthcare Forbes Midas List five times, Top one hundred venture capitalists according to CBE Insights, Top vcs on the New York Times List, Top twenty Private equity power Players, Fintech Finance forty. She has had seventy exits

Annie Lamont, thanks very great to be here.

I've been really excited for this conversation. You do so many interesting things. But let's start with OAKEN Investment Partners. You were a GP there starting in eighty six and eight c ventures. What led you to that part of your career.

Well, very early on, I got out of Stanford when Silicon Valley was really at the very beginning of Silicon Valley and joined somebody called hambrickton Quist, which was a boutique investment bank venture firms or of legendary at that time. I think I was the fiftieth employee and really fell in love with venture from day one and working with entrepreneurs. I Carrie Steve jobs Bags on the Apple IPO road

I didn't know that at that time.

That was my next question is did you have any sense of who you were upping shouldiers with or was just like fast moving blur.

I certainly those two seemed like extraordinary people, and I extrapolated that to most entrepreneurs. I quickly learned they were two extraordinary individuals. But that was it just got me hooked. I thought, if I could just learn and be with people like this and not be the entrepreneur, but be the person that supported, helped, edited, therapist, whatever was required. I just wanted to spend the rest of my life with people who envisioned the world as it should be.

And H and Q is known for a lot of their software, internet hardware technology. What led you over to the healthcare sector.

So when I joined Oak, which was really just a couple of years out of out of Stanford. We were founding Genzyme the year that I joined, one of the also very first biotech companies, and there was only one public software company at that point. And I wasn't really interested in one of the three hundred disktrive companies that were being created.

Not an Iomega fan, I remember that one.

Just yeah, they had done seagates for the original Seagate shuegart And so I said, I want to create my own space, you know, I want to create my own expertise in an area that I could fundamentally be interested in, and that ended up being biotech and so focused on life science is the first fifteen years of my career, and that companies like Alexian, Cephalon, Alkermes, all host of companies.

Were you anything healthcare or medical or biotech related at Stanford?

Well would you do?

Now?

I should have been a hum bio major, but I wasn't. I had no idea how interested I was in the topic. But I became fascinated by it and educated myself and I wish it would have been nice to have had the Internet back then.

But what what'd you study at Stanford?

I was a political science major, so of course that prepared me for my life with my husband ultimately. But I did have an interest in politics, but.

No technology, no engineering.

I mean, everybody takes a computer science course at Stanford.

But huh really interesting. So Oak Investment Partners very sophisticated VC platform going back to like the late seventies, I think is when they launched. Yeah, so when you joined them in the eighties, what did you what did you focus on? What? What was was it healthcare right out of the gate or how did that transition take place from carrying Steve jobs bags on the road show to focusing on healthcare.

I think my interest, I said, and we found a genzyme it just intellectually interested in the area, but worked on you know, some software companies back then, and then decided I really needed my own hook. Like the reality is in every career, you know you should, you need to create your own expertise and your own special lane.

And that was going to be my lane.

I wanted to differentiate myself from all the other engineers at at OAK and do my own thing.

Was was that kind of a white sheet at that point? There wasn't a lot of there. Yeah.

Yeah, that was the other thing. It wasn't any real competition at OAK. And in terms of the market, it was a burgeoning area and you didn't have to be a PhD. You could hire PhDs to help you analyze these things.

What was Oak's core focus when you joined them was was healthcare something that had they had previously played in? Or you essentially did you stand up that sector? Yes, Oak? Yes, huh So what else were they investing in at the same time?

Well, a lot of hardware is, I said, a number of disk drive companies PC. I mean we did actually invest in compac during that period, and so it was more PC hardware telecom related.

So clients, the LPs who come to Oak, were they just giving them cash to be allocated across all these different sectors or did people say all right, I'll try a little bit of healthcare and a little now.

We always had and we do have an OKHCFT one fund at everything, and we would choose the allocation.

Huh.

So that investors are getting bosure to whatever you guys think has the most potential. Right, So you're listed as a managing partner at Oak as well as a managing partner and co founder at Oak HCFT. What's the relationship between the two companies?

There is there is no relationship. Ok Investment Partners is Wine is wound down effectively, I'm still there until the last company is.

Just waiting for a right.

Yes, for the last.

Exactly have an obligation to those LPs in that firm, But the reality is there is no relationship. We started ok HCFT because we had had two practices obviously in healthcare and fintech. Andrew Adams and myself launched the firm and ten years ago and really wanted to focus on the new model of investing that wasn't just Jedi Knights from you know, twenty five years ago, where it was just you're a good advisor and you don't have a talent function and you're not The really changed to become

So you've used the phrase Jedi Knights in the past. Tell us a little bit what you mean by that. I get the sense the world of venture today is very different than the eighties and.

Nineties, very different.

I think the Jedi Knights means that it's just a group of individuals, maybe a firm, but it's a group of individuals that are sort of all out for themselves just investing directly with entrepreneurs, with no real overlap between anyone else in the firm and that entrepreneur, whereas now I would say, like, okay, safety is very much a team based approach where we support the entrepreneur in a myriadive ways. Whatever they need, you know, will we will supply as a firm.

So some of the VC books and autobiographies and the like that I've read kind of imply the early eighties and earlier days of venture was first they would write a check, and after they had been writing checks for a few years, they ended up having a bit of a network of other engineers and other venture funds and other entrepreneurs, and so people would plug into that network. It sounds like you're describing something much more comprehensive and

I think that first of all, that we should just talk about that the difference between a world where everything there was more, There was less capital and more entrepreneurs in the early days, so the supply demand balance was such that there was a lot more power I would say with the money than with the entrepreneurs and the

So that flipping of the power dynamics from the capital to the entrepreneur. Does that have anything to do with companies now staying private for so much longer that seems like there's endless amounts of money around and no shortage of people willing to fund startups. How does that dynamic play out with all these companies just postponing IPOs for seemingly much longer than they used to.

Less about postponing ipo. So though certainly some of the major you know, some of the very large companies are doing that in order to realize full value, I would say that the IPO market is not as you know.

It is so cyclical.

It's just not For example, it's not friendly right now, and it's hard to get exits. So I would say in these two sectors, I mean, a stripe can go public anytime it wants. Is when to choose to go public when it feels like the values there and they're in the best position from a profitability standpoint and growth perspective. The reality is most companies cannot go public. What has changed dramatically in the last thirty years is that companies

The reality is is.

It is not an exit to go public, and with biotech, it's just a funding mechanism, right, there's a it's a public private world in biotech. The rest of the universe, you really have to be a more mature company. You have to be an over billion dollar market cap company to haven't make any sense to go public. You know, there used to be companies that have one hundred and two hundred million dollar market gaps that would go public, but it's been it's been made much more difficult to

It seems odd that markets are at all time highs at the same time. Not a friendly IPO market. I'm trying to remember the last time those two things happened at the same time, right, Like you think back old time highs, late nineties, red hot IPO market, even mid seventies before the financial crisis, pretty robust IPO market. And then again venture and IPO is right up and through the early part of the pandemic, you know, red hot market.

But I think if you looked at the market, so much of it has been driven by the top seven tech companies. So it's a bit of a head fake. You're now seeing rotation right in terms of other companies through you know, other companies now benefiting by the markets from being higher. But I think the reality is right now, we just have an overhang from certainly in my world I can speak to healthcare and fintech, a number of companies going public and then disappointing or evaluation just being

So let's talk a little bit about some of the companies that you guys have invested in. You were very early in some iconic names. You mentioned Athena, there's also one medical Village MD Devoted Health. Quite a on of really big names. Tell us what led you to these companies? How are you so early so often in companies that turned out to be, you know, big movers in the space.

Well, I would say it started with Athena Health, backing Jonathan Bush and the Park brothers there, Todd and Eddie Park, then founded cast Light actually by Todd, and then then devoted So a lot of what we do repeat entrepreneurs. Once you find a great entrepreneur, you develop a deep relationship with them their friends as well as business colleagues, and then you back them over and over again. And so we've done that very successfully over time. But it

Give me, give me those three again, improved outcomes and patient experiences. Yes, well that sounds like, you know, the Holy grail if you can do all three of those.

So you don't always do all three, but at least two of them. It really is a mission for us and trying to improve healthcare. And we started Athena was the first cloud based healthcare company, and we invested in them, and really it was just a red cycle management company then, which was part of art thinking also around why we did payments and fintech. A lot of overlap in the

So let's talk a little bit about quality and cost. It seems like healthcare, unique in the US business space, has been so resistant to an end to end form of technology that improves quality reduced costs, like technology and computers and software seem to have improved productivity and lowered costs everywhere twenty thirty years ago, and it's still compounding. Why has healthcare been such a challenge to build in

Well, so a little like banking, as many of those are also working off of cobol systems but are now finally being reinvented. I would say healthcare. If you actually to most people who have worked in healthcare, there's almost like a right brain left brain disconnect and that you're either tech focustory or healthcare focused. And I would say, what's happened in the last decade is that you have a younger generation coming into the industry that are just

So I want to put a little It's almost a cliche to say flesh on the bones, no pun intended. So I have my Charts by Epic on my phone and it's the first app I've ever used where I can renew a prescription, I could set up an appointment, I can ask a doctor question. But literally six months ago, if I wanted a record before I put this on this phone, the doctor's office would say, fax your request to us, Like, what's a fact? I mean, really, we're

Yes, just even in New York City. Just got any doctor and you will find that they're still faxing or handing you a piece of paper, and they're not integrated with their own hospital system that they may be affiliated with or have surgical privileges at is.

It's absolutely insane.

My images, I'm still carding around on discs right, it's crazy. Now. The amazing thing and the problem with Hippa is you're right, like you can't do zoom.

You're not supposed to do zoom.

Right because it's not secure.

It's not you don't have it's not hippo compliant.

You. What makes absolutely no sense is that a fax is considered secure.

Right. It sits on the fax machine somewhere for hours.

Anybody can see it, right, you know the sanitation worker that night, can you know, like see, the whole thing's crazy so much somehow you know your private email is not private enough?

So I mentioned my charts. Epic is still private, very large private company. There's been some litigation because of any trust concerns with them. How big is their penetration if so many offices are still you know faxing records around.

Their penetration is enormous and growing and I effectively you know Serner is losing traction and losing clients every day. Really and yes, Epic is is owning that market.

Is that because the software is so good? And I will tell you my experience with the app, you know, ten out of ten. But what else is happening behind the scenes that's giving them such an advantage over everybody else.

Well, I think Cerner lost its way in manner a decade ago. Oh really a decade ago. So it just create opened up the it just opened up. There wasn't you know. It takes time to create all the different modules and all the different departments. So this is just a time game almost and that you know, Epic had a lot of time to create integrated software across all

They've become the eight hundred pound gorilla in the space.

Is that what's happened, no question, And you as an innovator has to have privileges to link into that system.

So they were the disruptor, and now like Apple was the disruptor, now they become the dominant player. So that's why there's some challenges. I was kind of shocked when I saw the chatter about anti trust because literally it's the first app that just works as a patient. Wait, I could do all these things, prescriptions, appointments, I could see X rays or whatever. Wow, nothing else has ever worked this well, they always send you to a website,

Well, I think you know, let's define the space right that is just for providers and hospital systems specifically, not independent providers there. But you think about the way we think about healthcare in general. What we do in tech enabled software and solutions is we're treating pharma services so farmer as a client, employers payer, employer market as a client, and payers our clients beyond our customers of our companies, beyond hospital systems.

Actually, this has.

Been the hardest place to play and where we've made the least number of investments, the fewest number of investments is in hospital systems because Epic owned it, and so you know, it's been a sort of dangerous territory for a young innovator to go into. But there's plenty of opportunity to have payers, solutions to focus on provide creating companies that are value based or focused on out how do we create better outcomes in medicare, medicaid and commercial.

So you guys aren't necessarily an investor in hospital systems or hospitals. But when we look in the hospital space, there's been a lot of private equity activity. There's been a lot of consolidation. A ton of not for profit hospitals still carrying that moniker have been picked up by for profit private equity players. How do you look at the consolidation taking place in the hospital chain area? How does that affect how you think about software technology and integration.

There will be more consolidation, it will mostly be done by not for profits. That is, the vast majority of hospital systems now are part of not for profits. Right the private equity world, we consider ourselves venture capitalists or growth growth investors, not PE but p you know, has bought several hospital systems, not all of it's gone well.

Right somewhere along the line, someone is making a decision and obviously.

That impacts their income.

Right, So that there's no such thing as a not for private hospital in America.

So what are the better known hospitals that HCA manages If I'm not familiar with eight c A generally, Well.

They're going to be brands.

You know, there's Baptists, there's They're gonna be brands all over the country and they're gonna be different in every market because they.

Want to be local.

You feel local, and so you wouldn't necessarily know the brands. It's gonna be Florida, and it's going to be city by city, and every hospital will have a different name.

Like I've been fortunate to not spend a whole lot of time in hospitals, my experience at NYU Lang Gone was kind of eye opening. Well, first, you know, sometimes you get advice, Hey, go someplace that specializes what you need. So they've seen every variant. And even with that, I wasn't prepared for what an amazing factory assembly line. And I mean that the most positive sense of it. It's like, yeah, we do a million of these a day. Whatever you have,

New York does not allow for hospitals, so you wouldn't experience it in New York state.

It did not feel like it was a not for profit. Yeah, it felt like everything was structured to get them in, get them out, move on time.

We have New Yorker's a lucky and that they've got a somewhat competitive hospital environment and for sure excellent care here right.

So No, it's and that's that is.

I think if you sat in a boardroom of a not for profit and a for pro hospital, you'd be amazed how similar the conversations are.

I don't doubt that at all. How do you think about having sat on a board how do you think about managing problem hospitals? I just got off the phone with a friend in Florida who jokingly said, you know, if you fall and break your leg in Florida, you don't call an ambulance, You call cab. You call an uber to take you to the airport to fly up to New York. I think he was exaggerating a little bit. But that's not the first time I've heard things like.

That over and over again.

People come dig you know, from Connecticut, and people come back to Connecticut all that they do their healthcare. Connecticut may be there, or Northeast could be their second home, and maybe theyre domicile now in Florida, but they come back for the hospital.

How does the system that has that sort of reputation, how do they address that. It seems like in Florida, you would think that they have lots of people who were older. They should be really good.

At that, they should be really good.

It's a it's just a you know, it's just a I'm just musing. But it just seems like I mentioned somebody I was speaking to you, and they're like, find out why Florida hospitals are not good. I don't think she invests in hospitals.

Well, you know, and I think there's there's just a long history, like they have doctors going to to Florida to there's been a culture of like making money there, you know, and the more specialists you have, the more it's it's amazing. The more specialist you have, more surgeries and.

More things to get done it right.

And so I just don't think they have the same tradition of quality that other states have had, or the Northeast has had.

So I can't.

Obviously they're good HCA hospitals and Florida, but for some reason, the whole ethos there has not been the same in general.

So I'm kind of intrigued by a couple of things you've said about wanting to improve outcomes, reduced costs, and enhance experiences, and you talk about five levers of change that the fun looks at, and let's go through all of these access, outcome, cost, speed, and friction that sounds like everybody's combined headache in healthcare. Tell us a little bit about those five levers.

Well access. I think we all learned a lot about that during covid R. There is differential access and it's not just minority or city based. Obviously rural. The rural environment is very challenging a.

Little bit of a healthcare desert.

In some healthcare desert, you've got pharmacies closing, you have hospital that are a year and an hour and a half away from people. You have challenged hospital systems. I would say in suburbia and urban environments, hospitals are actually doing quite well in making a fair amount of money,

So I have a vivid recollection of a television show called Northern Exposure. They wanted more doctors in Alaska, so the state of Alaska would pay for your medical school, but you had agreed to practice there for five years. It seems amazing that in the United States in twenty twenty four there are healthcare deserts. Why haven't states? And I know this is not your expertise, but it seems like states should have addressed this a long time ago. How is it possible in a modern era you could

Yeah, no, I agree.

I'm the fact that they should be in setting primary care, paying for people's medical school that will go into primary care and go to rural markets, and there are some that are doing that. I think about virtualization though, because of one of the aspects of a main street or some other models we have care Bridge is that virtual care and wrap round care so much of this actually

Right, memorials locattering, Ye, yes.

Memorials loancuttering exactly.

Difference between virtual and wrap around how do they differ?

Well? I think wrap around may mean that you have a connectivity locally, plus you have virtual care that extends what is available locally. But wrap round could be you have in Carebridge's case, you're you're managing what we call dual eligibles, which are those who have Medicaid and Medicare. They're the sickkest of the sick that are in long term services home based services, so they're in the home.

Help them out.

And then you're supplying you know, nurses and mad and others that will they get to know these patients, but all virtually but end up you know, developing a relationship with the caregivers that have a you know, we have an iPad in the home with a button essentially, you know, like the nine one one button where you hit the button, as opposed to all of a sudden for every issue, sending that patient to the emergency room, which is wildly expensive,

And you mentioned Carebridge, that's a company you have an investment in. It seems I'm so obvious. How do we get better outcomes and less expensive costs by intervening before they end up in an emergency room? Again, how has this not taken place before? Is that is that what care bridges business?

Yes, and yes they mainish the sickness of this chronically ill in the home that are in that are dual eligibles, and that is what they do. They develop a relationship, they wrap around, but they it's all about part of this is financial alignment. They have contracts with the health plans to take care of these individuals. They get paid Basically, they have full responsibility for the cost of care for these individuals, so they're highly incentive to take.

Good care of them, preempt those emergency.

Those emergencies rooms. The two most expensive things are in healthcare are rising hospital costs, which are up like twenty percent this year, and drug costs, So if you can manage drug compliance better, and most importantly the easiest but not easy thing to do is to keep people out of the hospital appropriately. Nobody wants to be at the hospital. I mean, this is the thing I always hospitals always

And it's always astonishing to when you read I think medical errors are the third most common cause of fatalities in the United States. That's a stunning number. And I guess why none of us really want to be in a hospital this weekend.

It's dangerous to be in a hospital. It is dangerous. Think about the infection rate in a hospital staff, and yes, it is actually dangerous to be in a hospital. So there's better be a good reason to be there.

So we talk about access outcome. I'm kind of intrigued by the focus on cost, speed, and friction because all three of those seem to apply to both healthcare and financial technology. You mentioned they both live on old legacy systems. They're not nearly as cutting edge as they should be. Is that how you ended up being both a healthcare and a fintech investor?

Certainly between insurance and payments and rev cycle, we thought it was in two thousand and two and obvious place to go. And having gone into biotech early and then tech enabled you know, software using leveraging the Internet in healthcare early, I just felt like payments in fintech I wanted to be early, like that was an area you

And prepaid an under bank.

Underbanked being sixty at that time, sixty million people in America did not have checking accounts or credit or debocards, right, and think about what you can't do, okay, and you had the advident of the internet, you can buy things online. You could and reserve a hotel room, you couldn't rent a car, like all these things that change your life.

So by investing in netspend, which is one of the.

First prepaid debit cards, people could actually do those things. They could buy online, they could reserve a hotel room, they could rent a car. I mean, these are game changing things to someone.

So that was.

Exciting because we were changing people's lives and giving them access, you know, democratizing credit effectively.

So it's interesting you started in fintech in two thousand and two, because I recall former fitcham and Paul Volker said only half in Jess and I want to say it was twenty eleven, twenty twelve. You know, what innovation is there in the financial space? Other than the ATM, nothing's happened, And it seems like that really isn't true. There's been a ton of innovation in the financial space. Tell us some of the other fintech investments made.

More recently. And fraud. Just think about fraud as being an area.

Of constant, constant.

Battle arms race.

It is an arms race, and well even more so when you think about what happened was in the payments world you had card present right, you're swiping at the point of sale. And then we had the Internet come along and they had virtualization of payments. Then fraud exploded, right.

And now with.

You know jen ai and obviously deep fakes, you have person at present, So you've got a whole different level of fraud that is being experienced right now, right where somebody's mimicking your voice for a call right.

Literally, just had this conversation yesterday with my head of compliance. It was a I don't remember it was Gizmoto or one of those sites that talks about the fake calls you're getting supposedly from Google, who will never really call you. Assume any foone call you're getting it is a fake. But the AI agent on the other side sounds so realistic. Always ask them to sing a song and that was that was the solution, and AI app will sing it

Yeah, Well, I think it's just going to be a continual battle of they'll create new ways to implement fraud and then we'll create solutions against that fraud, and so it is I think will be a perpetual and continual battle. We have companies like feeds I and Prove that are focused on that area, and it.

Be feeds I focuses on risk management and combating fraud.

Combating fraud for Yes and Prove is that when you get the pin and you're you're putting, you're doing sort of double authentication. They're the ones that are integrated in the operating system of phones and effectively are giving you that number that pen when you're typing in that second number to authorize a transaction. So so we have a number of companies, probably seven or eight in that space.

And two decades behind.

Yeah, two decades behind, which actually will probably be an advantage and they will leap frog us because they don't have.

These they'll start from scratch.

Those start from crutch and scratch. And if you look at Brazil, they've created something called Picks, which they built for two million dollars, which is amazing by their central bank, and it's real time payments, and effectively it's a protocol and effectively allows bank to bank authentication. So if you think about ACCH and your cash account to somebody else's gay, it is incredibly complicated in the US to do an ACCH transfer your bank account to another bank account.

Right, there's this takes forever.

I wanted to address that. I grabbed my phone and I'm opening the folder with the fin tech apps on it. So Venmo is the easiest thing in the world to use just to send money to someone else. But I did something in South American Colombia. I had an old truck rebuilt in Colombia and I was using remitly and World remit to send as long as it was less than ten thousand dollars at a time. Internationally, it was like click click, click done. That was an unthinkable nightmare.

Certainly, the innovation from the consumer experience is there. It's ironic though, because if you think about Venmo, everything runs on on the credit card rails right now, right, I mean that's actually what's happening on the visa rails, the master card rails or MX and the reality is that because it scur it exists.

Right, and it's easy.

So I mean think about Apple, right, they run on you're putting your credit card in for Apple.

Pay, right, I just drop the phone on it and that's right, that goes right through the credit So that's.

If you think about Latim, that's an expensive option. And so what they've done in Latam has created a pretty friction free visa like rails, but the very cheap like sense pennies like virtually no cost. So that is then that is probably taken like forty percent of credit card and debit card transactions.

Really and wasn't there a couple of things done over cell phones in parts of Africa where they didn't have a credit card system and just you know, necessity being the mother invention came up with some things. So my question is are all of these various things secure or you know, what is the challenge building the next generation what's going to replace I think will anything replace credit cards?

Well, I think real time payments will replace credit cards. But you are going to build costs on top of it, because if you're talking about large B to B payments, right, you're still going to be talking about something that needs and even larger B two C payments. There is more fraud capability that needs an identity authentication capabilities that need

H really kind of fascinating. So, given these two areas that you focus on and the track record you guys have put up, I just wanted to mention again you were named one of the top ten venture farms of twenty twenty four and a number of other accolades last year. How does this affect the deal flow you see in the companies you look at. Do you have your own space and that's what you drill into or are you guys a little broader thinking about a variety of different types of companies.

For example, we define fintech very broadly. If that is e commerce infrastructure, you know, it's fraud and identity, it is payments, it is general infrastructure. So it's fairly broad

And to end one company for software from when it leaves this place to what ends up that place and all the quantitative metrics and tracking and everything that with it.

Huh really really, So we committed one hundred million to that.

Oh no kidding. Oh so that's you're pretty that sounds like a pretty big bet.

Yeah, we're all in.

But yes, we're doing more of the one hundred million plus investments seventy million dollar investments because we want concentrated bets in the areas that are most exciting to us with the best entrepreneurs.

So I only have you for another ten or fifteen minutes, and before I get to my favorite questions I ask all of my guests. I gotta throw a curveball at you, Okay, which is you know, normally at this point in a conversation with a VC, we talk about you've had seventy exits and fifteen IPOs, and but you're also the first Lady of Connecticut. You're married to Ned Lamont, the governor of Connecticut. Kind of an unusual role for first ladies being a VC. Tell us how you juggle these two roles.

Right, it is unusual.

The great news is that there is no expectation for the first Lady of Connecticut either. There is no established role, and so I'm really just a partner to my husband as I would be in terms of just their support and guidance. But I do campaign with him. I go on week you know, on weekends, we do things together. But he's very much running the state of Connecticut. Well, I am doing my thing, you know, during the week, and then we come together in Connecticut and Greenwich during the weekend.

But it's been I mean, it's fascinating. He loves the job.

It's I you know, I'm biased, but I think he's done a great job for Connecticut as a businessman himself, but somebody who has a you know, his social conscience. So it's been fun to watch because he does love the job and.

Really really interesting. All right, let's jump to our favorite questions that we ask all our guests, starting with since since you mentioned you like to uh spend the weekends with your your husband the governor, what do you guys do on the weekends? What are you watching listening? What's keeping you entertained?

Right?

Yukon basketball? I can't wait to have it back. So women and men are going to be amazing this year. So and they I have been obviously, the men have won two years in a row.

Huskies have a great team. They've been they've been winning for.

A long time, amazing.

And the women's team has done really well. Also the past.

Gina is incredible.

I mean, the fact that they had five injured players and got into the basically the final four was incredible. So between Gino Oriama and Dan Hurley to the best coaches in the country. So that's been super fun. We go to games and we and we watch on weekends, but we're we're I don't know, I don't know if I'm an athlete, but I love sports, and we love sports. We play golf and tennis and hike and it's being out ski and being outside as much as possible.

Uh.

And he watches and you know, he's been a long suffering Jets fan. We're hoping the Jets are back, and I having to be a Pack fan being from Wisconsin.

So really interesting. Tell us about your early mentors who helped shape your career.

Yeah, there was an individual, Jerry Gallagher. I'm from Wisconsin. He was from Minnesota and he ran for a prior firm. He ran the retail investing and was a brilliant investor. I mean it was somebody at Donaldson, Luff and Jen Ratt in the early days. He was the retail analyst and he actually invented the same store sales metric.

Oh no kidding.

If you can imagine, people were just saying, oh, that company's growing one hundred percent a year. They didn't know if they'd added one hundred store you know, double number of stores. But yeah, so he actually invented that. He joined us and invested in well, there was a filing's basement Whole Foods Amazon Whole Foods, which we sold Amazon Dick's Sporting Goods office depot. It was just a pfang Jambajews, I mean, just an unbelievable track record, the best retail

I don't remember which VC it was that said the same thing that you just said about backing the team and the entrepreneur, not the idea, but to drive the point home. Hey, each of these companies that have had a successful exit, they've pivoted five times and however it works out. It's never the initial idea, it's always the person. And I never really thought about that until right. It's if you're betting on the idea, your you're three iterations away from where it's going to end up.

Yeah, and the general idea and secular trend maybe right, but actually the business model is wrong. So getting the business model is so right is so critical.

Really really interesting. Let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites?

What are you reading right now?

Well, original favorite was To Kill a Mockingbird, and but that like influenced my sense of social justice. And then it's probably the Robert Massey books. And you know, I've never been to Russia, but I've been fascinated by you know, Peter the Great Nicholas and Alexandra Catherine the Great. I mean one, it's so if you look at what's going on in Russia now, same exactly like you understand cultures, right, I mean, it's sort of like understanding history and culture.

They like Not a coincidence, right.

Yeah, yeah, not a coincidence. So yeah.

And then recently The Money Trap, written by a friend of mine of Lokes Soma, is a fascinating book. He was the head of soft Bank during the crazy period in North America. Yeah, and he actually had never written a book. He went to the Creative writing program Okay, got his visa, was able to stay in America, went to the Creative writing program in New York City and and wrote this book. And it's absolutely beautifully written and it's fascinating. So I highly recommend it Money Trap.

I'm gonna I'm gonna put that on my list. If you're you mentioned books about Russian I know you're talking more historically. If you haven't read read Notice.

By I know Bill and yes, so you did.

Yeah, astonished. It's it reads like it's fiction and it's such a page turner. All right, Our final two questions, What sort of advice would you give a recent college grad interest in a career in either venture investing, healthcare, fintech? What would you would you how would you advise them?

They have to go work inside companies, and they should go work in a startup, in an early stage company, and maybe mid stage, and definitely a larger legacy company, because they need to understand business. I mean when I read the New York Times Business section, now, I think these people have never been in business. And obviously Bloomberg specializes in it, and so it has a lot of

So it's important to understand and.

Our final question, what do you know about the world of investing today you wish you knew back in the nineteen eighties when you were first getting started.

It's an interesting question because I, you know, and maybe because I have a tough, long memory, but I feel like I only remember the good things. I think, you know, knowing that large secular changes are the most important thing that drive investment waves and right and and ultimately build great companies, just focusing on those. But I feel like I ended up actually doing that well, you know, picking the secular wave that made sense and getting ahead of it, but not too far ahead of it.

I was going to say you did that well, but you were You were also early in a lot of big secular trends.

Yes, So I would say that ended up working out well. You can't be Being too early is a killer, right right in investing, So that worked out well. But I would say, you know, in general, I don't sweat the small stuff. You know, get the large things right and

Huh really interesting. Thank you Annie for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Annie Lamont, co founder and managing partner at okhc FT. If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure and look up any of the previous five hundred discussions we've had over the past ten plus years. You can find those at Bloomberg, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube,