Cathy Friedman

Cathy Friedman is a business executive with nearly 40 years of experience across finance, technology, and healthcare. As Executive Venture Partner at GV, she advises the life sciences portfolio and invests across the healthcare continuum. Her interests include adolescent mental health, the full lifespan of women’s health, and more equitable systems for the underserved.

Before joining GV in 2021, Cathy spent 15 years on the boards of leading public and private life sciences and technology companies. Recently, in addition to her role as board chair at Grail (acquired by Illumina), she has been an independent director at Vividion Therapeutics (acquired by Bayer), Lyell Immunopharma, Seer, Altaba (formerly Yahoo!), Radius Health (acquired by Gurnet Point Capital and Patient Square Capital), and Revolution Healthcare Acquisition Corp.

Always interested in healthcare, Cathy considered becoming a doctor. Instead, she jumped to Morgan Stanley early in her career and eventually moved to California to open the firm’s West Coast biotech practice. Cathy spent nearly 24 years at Morgan Stanley, magnetically drawn to the emerging sector’s scientific and entrepreneurial energy. While there, she held several executive positions, including managing director, head of West Coast healthcare, and co-head of the biotech practice.

Her singular experience that combines business, technology, and healthcare led to venture because, as she says, “We want to do good, but in order to do good, we have to make good investments.” Over her extensive career — finance, advising, and now investing — Cathy has garnered the patience and experience to help healthcare companies build businesses for the long term.

Cathy holds a B.A. in economics from Harvard University and an MBA from The University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. She is a foundation trustee at the Darden School. Cathy lives in the Bay Area with her husband and six children.