Oak HC/FT's Andrew Adams joined LinkedIn's Tanya Dua for VC Wednesdays. Andrew discusses opportunities in AI, what he looks for in an entrepreneur, what early-stage companies often get wrong, and more.
Technology Editor at LinkedIn covering AI | Conference Moderator & Speaker | Columbia Journalism Grad | Ex-Business Insider
🚨 A co-founder of the healthcare and fintech VC firm Oak HC/FT, Andrew Adams has helped more than 35 startups with successful exits, including One Medical. He joins us for VC Wednesdays. 🚨 ✒️ You focus on healthcare and fintech. What’s your biggest focus area for 2024? These days, there’s an embrace of AI, but it’s important to look at it as something that powers efficiency as opposed to being the key driver of the business. In healthcare, data has been siloed so far, and it’s been really hard to aggregate that information to then be efficient in how you're thinking about clinical delivery. And on the administration side, there's $1 trillion of waste every year in the system. So there's plenty of opportunity to gain efficiency. ✒️ What's an example of a recent investment you've made toward this? An example is our investment in Trovo Health, which is building an AI-powered platform to drive clinical support for specialty practices, and filling care gaps for physician practices that are resource-constrained and need solutions with human capital, clinical capital as well as administration. ✒️ What’s the No. 1 thing you look for in a startup? The No. 1 thing, whether it's early-stage or growth, is the quality of the entrepreneur, CEO and management team. Working knowledge of the industry is also important. We invest in healthcare and fintech — both regulated markets — so they require category depth, not just to be able to appreciate the regulatory frameworks, but also to see where they can be disruptive. Underlying that is their ability to do capital-efficient scaling, because our goal is to build significant businesses at great scale that have an impact. On the healthcare side, for example, we do value-based care models where we're looking at clinical impact, because the more clinical impact you can have, the more savings you're generating for your partners. ✒️ What’s one thing that startups often get wrong? Sometimes when you're a young company, you can be pretty focused on an early substantial customer and get beholden to that anchor partner. And one of the biggest decisions you need to make is not letting the company be dictated by that one customer. You have to take a step back, take the long-term view on the opportunity set and trust that you’ll grow and add a lot more customers over time. ✒️ What’s one pitch that sticks out in your memory, and why? I’d rewind the clock to One Medical, because that was the first time we’d ever heard of anyone talk about the patient experience in healthcare in as tangible a way as its founder, Tom X Lee, did. He was really focused on the patient as a consumer, as opposed to just a 10-minute increment, where they were offering the convenience of same-day appointments and more interaction as well as time with your physician, and even measuring NPS (Net Promoter Scores). That, combined with how he planned to scale it, was very distinct. #VCWednesdays #vc #venturecapital #startups #TechonLinkedIn