Insight
Mario Schlosser: Becoming a billionaire requires an entitlement mindset bordering on defect
“I've seen the people who make the real amounts of money, the people who become the moguls, they have an incredibly strong sense of what they are owed by society and by the system or by other people that I don't have. And I think it's almost a brain defect. If …”
Insight
Mario Schlosser: Very few tech startups actually understand how healthcare works
“If you want to draw a Venn diagram of companies or startups in healthcare, you've got the circle of startups with good technology, and you've got a different circle of startups that understand how healthcare actually works, and the overlap is very small.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mario Schlosser: Everyone could have an LLM-based doctor by next year
“There's definitely the possibility that we will all have an LLM-based doctor next year.”
Insight
Mario Schlosser: Sell-side analyst price targets provide virtually no predictive value
“At Bridgewater, we always saw that analysts' price targets lag stock market changes. So the market moves first, and then analysts move afterwards, and move prices up and down. You just see this throughout history, ok? There is no, almost no information in anal…”
What-if
Mario Schlosser: Oscar Health would not exist today without its IPO
“And frankly also Oscar wouldn't be around having not gone public.”
Insight
Mario Schlosser: Antidepressants can block deep intuitive insights needed by founders
“That insights, being on the drug might not come to you, and you might end up actually doing the wrong thing because the drug sort of cuts out some of these deeper insights that you should, that should flood into your consciousness.”
Opinion
Mario Schlosser slams Silicon Valley's life-and-death rhetoric around startup struggles
“Sometimes the rhetoric and Silicon Valley of like, oh my God, life and death, whatever, is also just fucking stupid. Like none of us is, you know, gonna get shot at in the trenches of Ukraine if our stock price goes down.”
Insight
Mario Schlosser: Step-down founders blow up startups by undermining new CEOs
“If you do it, you have to do it wholeheartedly. That, that what blows startups up is, is if you say, oh, I'm gonna take a different role now, and then you don't, and people still come to you when you tell them, oh, yeah, I would do this, you know, but whatever…”
Insight
Mario Schlosser: Founders who deny struggling after stepping down are lying
“It's difficult to not be the person with the top authority anymore. It just is. I mean, anybody who doesn't tell you that isn't fucking idiots. You know, like, if you're the guy who can tell everybody what to do, and they all have always respect for it, that's…”
Insight
Mario Schlosser: Professionalizing top management creates excessive organizational layers
“One thing I've certainly observed is if you try to professionalize management at the top level, everyone below you will try to do the same thing. And that's how you end up with nine layers, you know, or nine is nice, like, 20 layers. So if you tell, if you as …”
Assertion Supported
Schlosser: Medicare is more cost-efficient than commercial private health insurers
“Ironically, it is to the point where the government run part of healthcare, in this case, actually Medicare, tends to be on the cost side, at least, more efficient than the commercial part of healthcare.”
Insight
Schlosser: Healthcare incumbents cannot easily innovate due to legacy COBOL code
“If you come into this by having first and foremost in your DNA that you want to serve members and create the best experience for them, get their costs down, you suddenly start developing new technology and products. That the other guys will not get around to d…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mario Schlosser: Grand disruptive healthcare bets have largely failed
“The big ideas and the big disruptive approaches to just changing this Fortune dollar system have not worked all that well for the most part. Nobody's completely reinvented primary care.”
Insight
Mario Schlosser: A 95% drop and 8x rally proves market inefficiency
“An efficient market is not efficient if you go down by 95% and then up by eight X. You know, that's not a hallmark of an efficient market.”
Disclosure
Mario Schlosser: Took Sertraline to manage pressure during Oscar's stock crash
“I mean, I really thought I took a thing called sertraline. That was a unique way to do this thing.”
Insight
Mario Schlosser: Generic VC advice fails because leadership depends on individual traits
“I think the explanation is it depends. It depends on the person and the metabolism and the genetic makeup, whatever, of the people who take the advice. And I think that very thing is true for CEO-ship as well.”
Insight
Mario Schlosser: Famous leaders are not better at having difficult conversations
“If you think that the people who are famous in this world somehow are good at these things, it's a complete nonsensical thing. In fact, one of the, I think they're good at They're better at avoiding these conversations than we are. You and I are good at maybe …”
Opinion
Mario Schlosser: Money is the best available metric for measuring societal impact
“I certainly, by the way, think money is the best way we have to measure societal impacts. It's not perfect by any means but I, and I don't like it necessarily but I absolutely think that, ah, It is, it's not that the wrong, it's always the wrong people who are…”
Disclosure
Mario Schlosser cashed out $900k in Oscar Health's 2015 secondary round
“I, at that time, it wasn't a million yet, by the way. It was, but it was approaching that level, I think. So then, but yeah, it was close enough, like 900,000, something like that.”
What-if
Schlosser: Matching foreign healthcare efficiency would save the US $1 trillion annually
“If we became merely as efficient as, say, Switzerland is, or Germany is, or Japan is in delivering healthcare, we would save a trillion dollars a year In the US.”
Assertion Contradicted
Schlosser: Oscar Health was the first health insurance startup ever
“We, I think, knew fairly early on that given that we were literally the first insurance company startup, health insurance company startup ever, I mean, we essentially defined the category of insure tech, if you want to think about it that way.”
Insight
Schlosser: An insurance company's three superpowers are money, data, and care flows
“Three superpowers I think you have as an insurance company are you manage the flow of money, you manage the flow of data, and you manage People are able to make decisions. We manage the flow of money because we are the ones who set incentives for members and f…”
Assertion Partly supported
Schlosser: Oscar Health transitioned to fully owned internal networks in five years
“We had a grand plan from the very beginning, and it was actually about a five-year plan as it happens. And in that five-year plan, we basically mapped out that early on, we largely want to rely on outside vendors where we want to be the matchmaker. You know, w…”
Insight
Schlosser: Startups tackling complex industries need older, experienced industry veterans
“I think that as startups go more and more into a more complex world, parts of the world, and out of, hey, I've got a cool viral app, which I think is a path we need to continue to walk down, it's very important that we are able to pull in, I don't know, people…”
