Hong Truong

Previous experience

• California Healthcare Foundation, impact investing for the Medicaid market in California
• Cedars Sinai and MemorialCare Health system venture capital group
• Kaiser Permanente Ventures
• Analysis Group, health economics and strategy consulting
• Yale School of Public Health, MPH health management
• Brown University, BS Human biology and BA international relations

What does defining healthcare mean to you?

I’ve watched my immigrant parents struggle all their lives trying to balance life and health. As seniors now, their struggles have accumulated into extraordinarily complex conditions - specifically, the highlights of which are end-stage-renal disease and dementia. As their English-speaking daughter and caregiver, I find myself bouncing between my frustrations with coordinating medical and social services and wondering how my parents ended up here. 

I want to fix healthcare at its root and leave a lasting impact. To that end, system and organizational level change is critical. I see investing in companies as my tool to change the rules of an antiquated healthcare system, be responsive to the changing needs of consumers, and to do it at scale. Building healthcare businesses is a means for rebuilding a broken system. I thrive on backing businesses that can meet patients where they are and that employ new business models that have the potential to keep people well. 

What does defining partnership mean to you?

I am in awe of entrepreneurs - of their passion, persistence and commitment. Investing in entrepreneurs gives me a chance to bask in that infectious spirit and to give back in any way I can. 

In my happiest and healthiest partnerships, shared mission, values and goals are the languages through which we understand each other. I am also simultaneously therapist and teammate - someone who listens with heart and compassion, and am resourceful and responsive to what I hear. 

Healthcare is hard and it takes a village to make even incremental change. It is critical that we all bring our individual strengths to the table and partnership to make progress.

What does defining leadership mean to you?

Good leadership is vision, but also a clear understanding that the way to achieve and sustain it is with your people. I’ve worked under good leadership and bad leadership. I’ve seen myself flourish under good and flounder under bad. Yet fundamentally, I am the same person. Being able to inspire, manage and do right by employees is a means to a healthy growing business. 

The legacy I wish to leave behind one day is not just phenomenal healthcare businesses, but also companies with happy employees.