Alex Friedman and the Numbers That Money Forgot

Alex Friedman has spent much of his working life around people who know what money is worth. A harder question kept following him: what else was the money doing? At the Gates Foundation, then in investment management, he encountered the difficulty of assessing results that would never fit neatly into a financial return. Years later, that unfinished business became the starting point for Novata.

There is an appealing lack of theatricality to this origin. No garage is required. The revelation is that sophisticated institutions can have sophisticated financial information and still lack the comparisons needed to understand a business. Friedman’s career had given him several views of that gap. In 2021, he helped create a company to work on it.

A vacancy in the spreadsheet

Friedman’s route to the Gates Foundation contained an unusually candid job interview. Recommended for the chief financial officer position in 2007, he recalled telling his prospective employers: “I’m not qualified. I’m not a CFO. I don’t manage money.” He got the job. Candor, on that occasion, proved an unexpectedly effective application strategy.

At the foundation he established a strategic investment fund, extending the use of capital beyond grantmaking. That introduced a demanding practical question. A financial return could be calculated; the broader results required other information. The experience gave him a problem to carry into the next chapter of his career, rather than a tidy answer to carry out of it.

His subsequent titles grew larger. The information problem remained stubbornly ordinary. Before anyone could decide whether an investment was producing the desired effects, somebody had to know what to measure, collect it consistently, and understand the result. A spreadsheet can contain an impressive number of cells without containing the answer to the question that matters.

The long way round

His education supplied credentials in several institutional languages: a BA from Princeton, a law degree from Columbia, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, and an MBA from Columbia Business School. He also served as a White House Fellow and an assistant to the Secretary of Defense during the Clinton administration. Government, law and business all appear early in the biography.

From 2001 to 2007, he worked in investment banking at Lazard. The foundation role followed. In 2010 he became global chief investment officer for UBS Wealth Management and Wealth Management Americas, chairing its global investment committee. In September 2014, he moved to the top job at GAM Holding. These were different settings for making decisions about capital, with different constituencies expecting results.

The GAM chapter ended in difficulty. In November 2018, Friedman stepped down during a crisis that followed the suspension of portfolio manager Tim Haywood. Investors had withdrawn money and the company’s share price had fallen sharply. A career profile that hops directly from one title to the next would miss this consequential interruption.

GAM’s announcement said Friedman and the board had agreed that new leadership should take the company forward. It also said he had the board’s full support in the decision to suspend the portfolio manager. Both details belong in the account. The departure was a setback, and the company’s description of the decision was more specific than a simple story of individual blame.

In 2019, Friedman co-founded Jackson Hole Economics, a research organization concerned with political economy and sustainable growth. He would also join the board of Franklin Resources, the company behind Franklin Templeton, in 2021. He continued to work across the boundary between discussing economic systems and participating in the institutions that operate them.

A company with an unusual guest list

Novata’s original backers make sense against that background. The Ford Foundation and Omidyar Network joined S&P Global and Hamilton Lane in the founding coalition. Philanthropy, financial information and private-market investing were represented at the same table. It was a group assembled around a shared measurement problem, with each institution bringing a different reason to care about the result.

The business launched publicly in October 2021 with a $21 million Series A. Its founding employees invested, too. Friedman described a company intended to sustain itself commercially while serving a wider purpose. Its legal form, a public benefit corporation, put that ambition into its structure rather than leaving it entirely in a presentation.

That arrangement also addressed a delicate commercial issue. Novata would be asking private businesses to provide information, then helping them understand how they compared with others. The organization collecting those figures needed a credible position between participants. A coalition of different owners offered a practical answer to the question of whose interests the intermediary would represent.

In 2023, Hamilton Lane led a $30 million Series B, with Microsoft joining the investor group. By then, the project had moved beyond its founding conversation. Software, collection processes and customers had to turn an institutional agreement into something a company could actually use. Capital supplied the means to attempt that work; adoption would test it.

The work behind the acronym

Friedman has compared the isolation of private companies to “Plato’s Cave.” The image is unusually literary for a discussion of reporting software, but the point is concrete. Without relevant comparisons, a company has limited ability to judge its own performance. Its internal figures may be accurate and still tell it little about where it stands.

Novata’s approach moves from gathering data to putting it in context and helping users act. The distinction matters. Collection alone can produce a handsome archive of unanswered questions. A useful comparison can help an operator decide where to investigate, which target to set, or what needs a better explanation. The desired destination is a decision.

The politics surrounding the ESG label have made this work noisier. Friedman’s response has been to keep the discussion close to business questions: environmental risks, workforce practices, governance and the information needed to understand them. He allows for commentary alongside metrics. A number deserves a definition, and sometimes a sentence explaining what happened.

“Don’t wait for a perfect system.”Alex Friedman

That advice captures the operating challenge. Requiring perfection before collecting anything leaves the information gap intact. Collecting without definitions makes comparisons unreliable. The work occupies the less comfortable space between those extremes, where a company must begin, learn and improve. A dashboard can display the result. It cannot excuse careless thinking about the inputs.

A red Labrador enters the bibliography

There is another Alex Friedman in this biography, with a smaller audience in the literal sense. He writes children’s books. His titles include Babu’s Bindi and The Big Thing: Brave Bea. The financial executive’s bibliography provides a welcome change of scale after investment committees and private-market reporting.

His book-team biography places him in Wyoming with his family and a red Labrador called Babu. It also records his enthusiasm for skiing and climbing in the Tetons. These are specific interests, rather than the obligatory claim that an executive enjoys the outdoors. There is a dog with a name and a mountain range with one, too.

It would be easy to turn climbing into a tidy explanation of how he runs a business. The facts are more interesting left intact. Friedman writes for children, spends time in the mountains and has held financial roles. A person can contain several pursuits without each becoming a metaphor for the others.

A 2025 conversation with Shannon Huffman Polson on The Grit Factor brought those parts of his life into the same discussion: outdoor experience, public service, leadership, family and purpose. The range helps explain why a list of employers gives only a partial portrait. His professional subjects have occupied considerable space; they have not occupied all of it.

Five years, and a wider circle

By July 2025, Novata was announcing a deeper collaboration with Microsoft, intended to bring sustainability tools to smaller businesses and supply-chain partners. The plans included joint AI development and broader distribution. Microsoft had invested in 2023; the relationship was now extending into how customers would obtain and use the software.

Novata’s 2024 public benefit report, published in 2025, described a platform supporting more than 10,000 companies and a library exceeding 3,000 curated metrics. Those figures show how much work had accumulated around the initial idea. They measure the platform’s reported reach and resources, rather than proving what every participating company subsequently changed.

In January 2026, Friedman discussed supply-chain risk on All Things Sustainable. His argument widened the frame again: large public companies cannot fully understand their sustainability footprint without information from the private businesses supplying them. A small company’s data can matter far beyond its own offices. The reporting relationship follows the commercial one.

The July 2026 fifth-anniversary episode of Novata’s Sustainable Intelligence podcast introduced Friedman and Josh Green as co-founders and co-CEOs, with reflections from employees across the business. Five years after the company’s founding, the story had acquired more voices. That is an appropriate development for an enterprise built around persuading different participants to contribute.

Friedman’s original question remains demanding. What is the money doing, and how would anyone know? His answer now involves software, patient collection and comparisons that another company can understand. For someone who has held several imposing titles, it is a pleasingly concrete assignment: help people get the information they need to make the next decision.