The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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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 …”
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.”
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.”
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…”
Mario Schlosser: Oscar Health would not exist today without its IPO
“And frankly also Oscar wouldn't be around having not gone public.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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 …”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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 …”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Mario Schlosser: Performance bars drop in growing organizations without clear benchmarks
“That is absolutely something that happens in the organizations they grow with. That's the bar just And everybody will tell you this just sort of goes, goes down because people do not have a few standout folks or teams to look at and say, okay, that is the bar …”
Mario Schlosser: Replacing 40-year-old COBOL healthcare software is a massive opportunity
“There's an incredible amount of very pedestrian, simple workflows and ideas where some amount of companies make a ton of money in U.S. Healthcare and replacing their forty-year-old COBOL codebase With what you just said just a good startup that makes money ear…”
Mario Schlosser: Public markets ignore technical operational details of growth companies
“Public markets don't care about that. They just don't, they have limited attention spans, at least for companies like ours.”
Mario Schlosser refuses to return to NYSE until Oscar stock recovers
“I'm, I am not going to go until the price is back at the IPO price or I pay my next company.”
Mario Schlosser Admits Weaknesses in Delegation and Operational Management
“I'm certainly bad at some things that I think professional CEOs should be good at. I probably bad at delegation. I'm probably bad at you know, operationally managing people like saying, hey, I told you to do these three things. Did you do those three things ne…”
Mario Schlosser: Federal risk adjustments previously swung Oscar's revenue by $100M
“In late March, we get the first report from the federal government as to where our risk score landed, and it moves the numbers by a staggering amount, like it used to move the Oscar numbers by, like, you know on a, I don't know, half, on a billion revenues, th…”
Mario Schlosser: Process high-stakes bad news directly alongside team members
“That is the way to deal with bad news, to just deal with other people for whom it is equally bad, but at least you share the badness in some way.”
Mario Schlosser: Design company structure around personal strengths, not textbooks
“I do think I have an ability of keeping more pieces of information in my mind at the same time than most others. And so design around that as opposed to just sort of reading the book, you know.”
Mario Schlosser: Power law wealth distributions show talent allocation is imperfect
“IQs are a normal distribution and not a, they're not a power law distribution. So by definition, we know that, you know, whatever top IQ, there's like, you know, there's one percent of them. It's not that there's like three people of them, whatever. So they're…”
Mario Schlosser: In Silicon Valley, influence matters far more than money
“That attention economy, once you get to the level of, I don't know, Silicon Valley, whatever, well, that, where money is less of the issue, that is much more important, I think. Way more important than money.”
Mario Schlosser: Multi-decade venture timelines strictly limit total lifetime founder bets
“Oscar took 12 years. How many more of those, how many things of that nature could I try to do and try to bite off?”
Mario Schlosser: If a founder loses intensity, the company loses intensity
“If you let the intensity go out, I think the intensity goes out, it disappears from the company.”
Mario Schlosser: Co-founders should get their fighting done at the very beginning
“If you think he's a saint, if you think he doesn't have those things, you will awaken to it at some point. And so, you might as well get the fighting out of the way at the very beginning.”
Mario Schlosser: Asymmetric value generation destabilizes partnerships
“If the relationship becomes too asymmetric in terms of value generation, how we want to define that in a marriage, you know, it becomes difficult as well.”
Schlosser: US spends 18% of GDP on healthcare versus 10% elsewhere
“The U.S. Spends about 18% of GDP on healthcare. You know, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, other rich countries in the world spend maybe 10, 11% on healthcare, and those countries, by the way, tend to not have single-payer systems either.”
Schlosser: Healthcare is the last industry relying primarily on fax machines
“It's the last, I think, bastion pretty much anywhere in industry where the fax machine is still the primary means of communication. That is how healthcare works.”
Oscar Health was NY's first new commercial health insurer in 20 years
“The first year of Oscar was really mostly spent getting a license, and we ended up being the first newly licensed commercial health insurance company in New York State in about 20 years, and California later on about 25 years or so.”
Schlosser: Oscar Health will use connected device data for proactive care
“In five years from now, I think it means that we are able to look at data coming from your inhaler, let's say if you're an asthmatic, and are able to come in there with our nurses, with our doctors, much more proactively when we see something that might be tak…”
Mario Schlosser avoided checking Oscar's stock price during its 94% drop
“I honestly, I did not even look at the stock price. That was one way in which I dealt with it. I didn't look at it.”
Mario Schlosser: Oscar Health forecasts federal risk adjustments within $10,000 accuracy
“We now know how to do this. We now know how to have a really good system that lands within, like, 10,000 dollars or whatever, you know, of the estimate, because we get so much throughout the year or whatever.”
Schlosser: Oscar Health's early team was 70% experienced insurance industry veterans
“We would have not even gotten licensed as an insurance company had we not had in the early team about 70% experienced insurance hands. The early team was about 70% people who had run insurance companies, been in insurance companies.”
Schlosser: Oscar Health must publicly file its revenues and costs quarterly
“We file on a quarterly basis, regulatory reports with all of our revenues, all of our costs.”
Schlosser: Oscar Health tracks member emergency room visits in real time
“We know in real time when you're in the emergency room and make, can make sure that you get discharged from the ER with knowing what to do next and don't go back in there.”
Mario Schlosser: Oscar Health's stock dropped immediately upon 2021 IPO
“We went public, right, I think it was March third or whatever, twenty-twenty-one. It was Josh and I ringing the bell. And we're like, fuck yeah, this is going to be great. And then we open and the thing falls. It opens low right away and it falls right away.”