Annie Lamont talks up Connecticut
Expresses optimism in LWV ‘fireside chat’
GREENWICH — Annie Lamont, the state’s first lady and a leader in the field of venture capital, is feeling bullish about Connecticut.
The source of her optimism is the influx of new residents who have found homes in Connecticut during the coronavirus crisis.
“If you’re coming from New York City, you’re paying half what you were in taxes when you move here,” Lamont said. “It feels like a tax reprieve coming to Connecticut, and obviously, real estate taxes are lower
here than New Jersey and New York.”
A town resident and the wife of Gov. Ned Lamont, Annie Lamont was the guest speaker in a “fireside chat” with the League of Women Voters of Greenwich on Zoom on Wednesday night.
Those new residents are “discovering the beauty of small towns again” in Connecticut, particularly in how the communities value their education systems, she said. That shows in the “loving thought and care” that towns and cities put into reopening schools during the COVID-19 pandemic.
League member Becky Gillan conducted the interview during the members-only Zoom stream during the annual meeting for league, which is marking its 100th year. During the 45-minute chat, Gillan asked several questions about Lamont’s views on the state and about the venture capital industry.
Lamont spoke of the need to see more diversity in her field and about the differences between a successful enterprise in government versus in the private sector.
In both government and industry, Lamont said she sees a “passion around the mission,” particularly when it comes to lowering costs and improving quality in health care. Workers in both areas want to do good when they focus on a positive mission, but good leadership is a must, she said.
“It’s all about attracting great people who want to work with you,” Lamont said. “In government administrations, it’s the same thing, I think. It’s getting people around you. It’s being able to evaluate what good is and attracting people with different mindsets to come together. It’s diversity not only of color and gender and sexual orientation, it’s also diversity of thought, where not everybody has gone to the same college or lives in the same place.”
Gillan said she thought businesses had more of a “bias to action” with their missions and visions along with the desire to satisfy customers and create loyalty.
“I don’t always see that bias to action in government,” Gillan said. Lamont replied that there could be a “bias to inaction” in government.
“Change is hard and you’re always going to upset someone when you do things differently,” Lamont said. “The thing about politics is administrations tend to look at what they can get done in their term or how people perceive their term as opposed to investing in the future.
“It should be the exact opposite from business because you hope a business is going to be around 10 or 20 years from now,” she said. “But the state of Connecticut is going to be around forever. We should have incredibly long-term thinking about what we’re doing and how we’re investing.”
To that end, Lamont expressed her hope that Connecticut could “reimagine and push forward” in health care.
She speaks from a position of authority on financial and venture capital issues. Gillan noted in her introduction that Lamont is managing partner of Oak Investment Partners and Oak HC/FT, which focuses on health care and financial technology. Lamont is also a board member on 11 companies, many with a focus in health care, and has been involved with investments in more than 100 health care and financial technology firms that went public or were acquired by other companies.
“It’s really not a surprise that she’s been described as one of the most successful women in the history of venture capital,” Gillan said.
Lamont said her interest in health care goes back to her college days. While a junior at Stanford, her father became ill and had no health insurance. Her family couldn’t afford to pay her tuition, forcing her to return home. She went to work that summer while taking classes at the University of Wisconsin to earn credits.
The next year she was able to return to Stanford and graduated. But she said she found out 25 years later that her father had cashed in his life insurance to pay for her final year of college.
“It really instilled in me a lifelong feeling that our health care system needed to be transformed because of the payment process and the accessibility and the damaging effects it could have on a family when you personally can’t afford to pay for it,” Lamont said. “I think this was a seminal reason I got into the health care industry.”