Catherine Treyz
Head of Communications & Platform
Catherine is the Head of Communications & Brand at Cherry Ventures, bringing her former experiences as a business and political journalist to the team and portfolio. Much like her past in breaking news, she relishes the variety of venture capital and startups — each day is, indeed, different as she works with both the firm and founders on PR, media and content strategies, brand and marketing, and audience growth.
Originally from Washington, DC, Catherine landed in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar in 2018 to research art restitution, which remains a personal interest of hers. She then covered German tech for Sifted, a Financial Times-backed news outlet focusing on Europe’s startup scene. Previously, she spent several years at CNN in her hometown, driving White House and Capital Hill coverage as an editor, with a front seat to some of the most newsworthy political stories in the past decade. While the forward-moving nature of tech and news fascinates her professionally, she personally enjoys history, museums and archives, and has been learning letterpress and analogue photography.
What experiences have shaped your work?
People often ask me, “How did you end up on the other side?” As a journalist, bustling, fast-moving newsrooms in Washington, DC at strange hours — including one year spent as the sole overnight editor at two networks! — were my comfort zone as I fact-checked, wrote, edited, and distributed breaking US political news to global television and online audiences. And in this often loud newsroom environment, I became immersed in the ebbs-and-flows of news cycles, the comparative media landscape, important journalism (and PR) practices, and honed how to effectively place and tell stories in front of the right audiences.
While I thought I had made a huge career leap switching to communications, the truth is I’m still a newsperson. Sure, various aspects like the precise topics, tactics, and audiences are different. But, at the heart of what I do, I still fact-check, write, edit, and distribute news. I also help founders and their teams do the same, working with them to build key foundations and strategies to do so. While newsrooms used to be my norm, now stories around lively, forward-thinking startups are. Strange hours are still included.