Charlotte Black

Charlotte Black, a Vice President at Oak HC/FT, joined the firm in 2021 and focuses on growth equity and early-stage venture opportunities in healthcare.

Charlotte is a Board Observer at Bloom, Harmony Cares, Imagine Pediatrics, Indigo, Reveleer and Rialtic. She is also actively involved with Quartet Health.

Earlier in her career, Charlotte founded eir.health, an LGBTQ+ healthcare service meeting users where they are through their digital platform. Before that, Charlotte was a Senior Associate at Lightyear Capital, where she focused on healthcare financial services investment opportunities. She has also held roles at MBF Healthcare Partners and Piper Jaffray.

Charlotte has been named to the Rising Stars of Venture Capital (Business Insider). She also serves on the Board of Directors for Phaidon.

Charlotte received a Bachelor of Arts degree from University of Chicago.

I entered healthcare a bit by chance after graduating college and starting in healthcare investment banking. It’s an incredibly complex, vast, and ever-changing industry; you can spend 20 years in the space and still understand only a small sliver of the sector. An experienced healthcare investor cultivates a deep knowledge moat that creates a significant competitive advantage.

I believe that investing is a team sport. At Oak, we work together and utilize a full roster of talent and complementary skills to create value for our portfolio companies. I decided to join because of how deliberate Oak is about surrounding entrepreneurs with the right talent – be it our talent team, senior healthcare advisors, investment professionals, product + technology experts, or other executives in the Oak portfolio.

In healthcare you have payors and health systems with an incredible amount of scale. This is a benefit because of the reach of the healthcare ecosystem, but operation and execution can often take precedence over innovation. Companies succeed when they start small - single region, single indication, single technology need - to solve problems that the larger players do not have the capacity to solve. Innovation starts locally, this is why startups and disruptors are such an integral part of our world. Innovation in healthcare isn't antagonistic to the status quo, it's additive.

By 2034, older Americans are expected to outnumber children for the first time in US history. Healthcare for seniors is 6x more costly than for children. While this is a huge burden for our current healthcare ecosystem, it represents an opportunity for companies to innovate around quality of care, reach of innovation models, and use of technology as an enabling factor.