Hong Truong now works as a director at Summation Health Ventures, the corporate venture capital group of Cedars-Sinai and MemorialCare Health Systems based in southern California. She joined it in September after three years as an associate in healthcare corporate venture capital at Kaiser Permanente Ventures.
She said: “The corporate venture groups I have been with have had the benefit of two worlds: the nimbleness and flexibility of a small company and the resources and opportunities of a big company. As an investor, it is great to be able to speak with entrepreneurs with a clear competitive advantage over other firms – the name-brand of my corporate, access to deep industry expertise and the ability to being a partnership to the table.
“I was involved with a number of investments while at Kaiser Permanente Ventures. Among them, two stand out as particularly meaningful to me. I sourced our investment in Validic, which sells a platform for connected devices in healthcare, and I was an advocate for our investment in HomeTeam, a tech-enabled private duty business.
“One of my biggest challenge has been to align corporate priorities and the timing of those priorities, with investments. Startups will raise money when they need it, healthcare systems will adopt new services and technologies when it makes sense for them. Bridging those two entities and their needs is an art. For those CVCs that act as strategic investors, it is important for them to partner companies for which they are truly able to deliver value. Otherwise, it makes us all look bad.”
Truong gained a master’s in public health from Yale in 2011, “and am still a public health junkie”, she said. “The intersection of public health and technology has never been more exciting. My main ambition is to improve the delivery of healthcare services. I see venture investing as a means to an end, to reshape this industry.”