Annie Lamont, powerhouse venture capitalist and first lady of Connecticut, is clear about what she is not: “I am not an entrepreneur.”
Rather, she says, she helps entrepreneurs realize their visions. She has many tools, including mentoring, networking, managing, staffing, directing, funding, cajoling and recognizing when to exit.
She’s been stunningly effective in this entrepreneur-adjacent role. She’s appeared on the New York Times’ list of the Top 100 Venture Capitalists and a similar list prepared by CB Insights.
She spent years on the Forbes Midas List, including time as the nation’s top life science investor.
She was the first recipient of the National Venture Capital Association’s Award for Excellence in Healthcare Innovation and was presented with the Healthcare Private Equity Association’s Russell L. Carson Award for Lifetime Achievement in Healthcare Investing.
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But none of this was what Ann Huntress envisioned when she left small-town Wisconsin for Stanford University.
Growing up
Lamont is the youngest of six children and grew up as “a big fish in a little pond.”
As a straight-A student, she had many options and admits choosing Stanford for all the wrong reasons. She was looking for fun in the sun. She majored in political science with an eye toward law school.
“I loved Perry Mason,” she recalls.
The ride hit an unexpected bump when her father, a real estate broker, became ill.
“In his business, he ate what he killed,” she explains.
When he couldn’t work, funds dried up. After her junior year, she had to come home and go to work.
The experience “made me grow up,” she recalls.
Money materialized the next year and she went back to Stanford. It wasn’t until much later that Lamont learned the money came from her father cashing in his life insurance policy.
She took her bachelor’s degree and went to work for a law firm. She recalls spending six months working on the case of a guilty client and quickly recognized she was on the wrong track.
It wasn’t a complete loss. She worked with engineers developing what would become the first computerized litigation file system and found she liked that kind of challenge.
Exciting new opportunities were close at hand. What was happening just off campus was changing the world. Silicon Valley was in its infancy. New industries were developing computers, chips and software. And venture capitalists were raising funds.
She found a job as a research associate with investment bank Hambrecht & Quist and is fond of telling the story of carrying Steve Jobs’ bags as he made presentations to would-be investors.
“Meeting (Steve Jobs) changed my life,” she says.
These were heady days. Her firm was handling the initial public offerings of soon-to-be-giants Apple and Genentech. She was hooked.
One of the skills she quickly mastered was networking and it led her to a job across the country, as a research associate with Oak Investment Partners in Westport. That was 1982.
A year later she married Ned Lamont, great-grandson of J.P. Morgan & Co. chairman Thomas Lamont. The Harvard- and Yale-educated future governor was building a cable television firm in southern Connecticut before turning his attention to politics.
Annie Lamont worked her way up the ladder and became managing partner at Oak Investment Partners, which has invested $9 billion in more than 500 companies. Along the way, she amassed a multimillion-dollar fortune that allowed her to help underwrite her husband’s statewide electoral races for U.S. Senate and governor.
In 2014, she became a co-founder of Oak HC/FT as a separate entity from Oak Investment Partners. As the name suggests, the investment focus is squarely on health care and fintech.
Higher quality, lower cost
In broad terms, Lamont said investment decisions start with the leadership of a prospect company followed by the business plan, technology and market positioning.
Health care has been a personal focus of Lamont’s, inspired and informed by her father’s illness.
She describes a straight-forward investor philosophy — “more access, higher quality, lower cost” — that leads her toward innovations in primary care.
She points to VillageMD, a Chicago-based company in Oak HC/FT’s portfolio. It is developing primary care practices adjacent to Walgreens pharmacies. The focus is on results, which leads to placing a priority on better management of patient wellness.
Physicians spend more time with patients and actively coordinate care. Specialists are chosen based on their value and are not limited by networks.
An emphasis on testing allows intervention in the early stages of diseases when care can be delivered at home rather than in an expensive hospital setting.
Over the next few years, VillageMD plans to open 1,000 new clinics, half in underserved communities. Clinics are open in 14 states, including Massachusetts and Rhode Island, but not yet in Connecticut.
Lamont serves on the board of directors of VillageMD, which is one of 50 healthcare companies in Oak HC/FT’s portfolio. Other portfolio companies include Noom, which takes a behavioral health approach to diet and lifestyle changes; LDI Integrated Pharmacy Services, a pharmacy-management platform; Dispatch Health, which focuses on in-home health care; and Aspire Health, a provider of palliative care, which was acquired by Anthem.
Women investors
While Oak HC/FT has focused on the U.S. healthcare market, it has taken a global view of the fintech space. Lamont says Latin America and Brazil in particular are ripe for fintech innovation.
Among the 31 firms in Oak HC/FT’s fintech portfolio are Wisetack, a provider of buy-now-pay-later solutions to in-person businesses; Urjanet, the world’s leading aggregator of utility data, which was acquired by Arcadia; Paxos, the first regulated blockchain infrastructure platform; NextCapital, a supplier of digital retirement advice, which was acquired by Goldman Sachs; CLARA Analytics, an insurance claims solution driven by artificial intelligence and data science; and 99minutos, a supplier of logistical services for e-commerce in Latin America.
Lamont estimates there may be as many as 10,000 vacant fintech jobs in Connecticut and points to a new fintech university program coming to Stamford as a step in the right direction.
In reflecting on her long VC career, Lamont says one of her smartest moves was to leave Silicon Valley, although she didn’t know it at the time.
In her youthful enthusiasm, she recalls, she barely noticed how few women were in key roles in Silicon Valley. All things seemed possible then, but the development of a male-dominated hierarchy across the valley raised questions.
By moving to Connecticut, she found a more welcoming environment for women — up to a point.
Both Oak Investment Partners and Oak HC/FT have built enviable records of gender inclusion. But Lamont recalls too often looking around an industry event and seeing few — and sometimes no — other women in the room.
Alison Malloy, director of investments at Connecticut Innovations, the state’s quasi-public venture investment firm, was having a similar experience, and when she and Lamont started talking about what could be done, Tidal River was born.
A collaboration between the wife of Connecticut’s governor and the niece of the previous governor seems unusual. Fold in the fact that Ned Lamont unsuccessfully fought Dannel Malloy for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2010 and the chances seem slim.
Alison Malloy disagrees. Expanding opportunities for women investors is more important than bygone differences, she says.
For Lamont, Malloy says, it’s also a chance to use her skills, interests and position as first lady to achieve a win for the Connecticut economy. During her Aunt Cathy Malloy’s time as first lady, Alison Malloy recalls, she focused on helping the arts and programs serving domestic abuse survivors. This time, it’s Lamont focusing on changing the investing environment.
Tidal River is set up to develop a network of women angel investors. Meetings bring together a couple of dozen women to learn about investing and hear presentations from selected startups seeking funding. An emphasis is placed on doing due diligence.
While the focus is on women investors and women-led companies, men are welcome both as investors and funding recipients. Similarly, the focus is on investing in companies that will grow — and create jobs — in Connecticut, but the group is open to innovative companies anywhere.
Finding good investments is job No. 1.
Malloy has been urging Tidal River members to raise a fund — similar to the approach of New York’s Golden Seeds angel investing group, of which Malloy is a founding member. But so far it’s been no sale.
Still, Malloy says, Tidal River places Connecticut at the forefront of investment opportunities for women.
And she credits Lamont for helping found the organization.
“She supports entrepreneurs in their mission … she is a true investor — a backer of true entrepreneurs,” Malloy says.