Bob Kocher
Those who tire of Washington’s health care struggles often wonder if Silicon Valley can get the job done. Enter Bob Kocher, M.D.
Bob is a partner at Venrock, the venture capital firm founded in 1969 by members of the Rockefeller family, best known for helping fund startups like Intel and Apple Computer. “I wake up each day and think about how I can apply imagination and talented people to health care problems. My hope is to help our health system get better, faster.”
“Bob is probably the most influential person in Silicon Valley when it comes to health care investments,” according to Robert Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Managed Care magazine described Bob as possessing “missionary zeal” for fixing the American health care system with venture capital. “Health care now costs $18,000 per year for a family,” says Bob. “People can’t afford it. And no amount of government subsidies can overcome that gap. That poses…a great entrepreneurial challenge.”
Bob’s rise through the Silicon Valley ranks has been strikingly rapid. In the Aughties, he was a partner at McKinsey & Company. From 2009 to 2010, he served on the National Economic Council as Special Assistant to the President for Healthcare and Economic Policy. Soon after, he joined Venrock as a health care investor. “At McKinsey, I could think about policy from the point of view of what is smart and optimal economically. In government I had to think about what is doable. It is fascinating, frustrating, and amazing to have the opportunity to try to convert ideas into policy reality.”
As a member of FREOPP’s Board of Advisors, we take advantage of Bob’s ties to the innovation economy and to leading policy minds, to help us come up with creative new ways to solve challenging public problems. Bob co-authored FREOPP’s white papers on reopening schools and the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic; he also served on California governor Gavin Newsom’s coronavirus testing task force, a role for which he was profiled in Michael Lewis’ book The Premonition.
Bob grew up in Bellevue, Washington. “As a kid,” he recalls, “I rode my bike through the dirt trails that are now Microsoft’s headquarters. I remember that the best dirt jumps literally were where they built Microsoft’s first three buildings.” Bob stayed local for college, majoring in Political Science and Zoology at the University of Washington, before getting his M.D. at the George Washington University School of Medicine in D.C.
Today, Bob also serves as an Adjunct Professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, a Senior Fellow at the Schaeffer Center for Healthcare Policy at USC, and a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution. Along with FREOPP’s Board of Advisors, Bob serves on the advisory boards of the Harvard Medical School Department of Health Care Policy, and of the National Institute for Health Care Management. He lives in Palo Alto with his wife Cindy Chen, two daughters, and a golden retriever.
“I love solving problems,” says Bob. “I am hopeful that at FREOPP, we can develop ideas that can expand opportunity for all Americans.”
