The Exchanges

Q Given that your father was Iranian and your mother was, was sort of German, um, and you, even though you were born in Germany, did you feel, did you feel as German as everybody else?

A So, yeah, I, I didn't have a second identity. We only spoke German at home, and, um, yet, as you say, I was also not always fully accepted. So, if I give you an example, in my school, there were 1200 students, and you could pick out two that didn't look like everyone else, and, and I was one of them, right? And, and even in an enlightened country like Germany, that is noticeable. So, I had what I call a visual accent, where people would see me on the street, and, and they would ask me how I learned to speak German so well, and, you know, but they also, at school, they skipped my name when reading out scores, because they weren't sure how to pronounce my last name, uh, and, and I had opportunities taken away, and, you know, even it was physically threatened, so I, I think that really shaped me in, in many ways, because I realized very early that, uh, in order to be As successful as everyone around me, I would have to be dramatically better and really work much, much harder than anyone else, and so that really induced a very strong worth ethic in me.

AI assessment note: “I didn't have a second identity. We only spoke German at home”

Q So what started to happen? When did you start to kind of see a real turning point?

A Yeah. So we, uh, we, we had launched New York successfully with, with, uh, years of hard work. We've gotten it off the ground. We've transported that to D.C., and it worked well in D.C., and now we said, well, why are we not in more cities? And so we actually, we raised a Series B with Founders Fund, and, uh, we used this to expand off the East Coast into San Francisco, then Chicago, and we just got better and better at it. So we, we then ended up raising a Series C in, in, in Primarily use this to grow our sales team and sign up more and more doctors. And from 2011 till 2013, we launched roughly 30 new cities.

AI assessment note: “from 2011 till 2013, we launched roughly 30 new cities.”

Q So did you see a drop in revenue in 2018 when you rolled this out?

A No, we didn't, because we actually didn't see, uh, the doctors, uh, leave the way that we had anticipated. And in fact, you know, while we had very much worried that, uh, they would be upset, and some of them certainly were upset, um, we were providing so much value to them that, that, that one of them just said, you know, what, uh, what took you so long? I knew I was getting a great deal all along. So, uh, that worked, uh, really well, and we had, uh, Piloted in, in Georgia initially in April, 2018. And then, uh, that had worked. And so we, we then rolled out in Colorado a few weeks later. That worked too. And, and from there we went to, uh, Washington state. And again, very positive results. And after these three states, I said, okay, great. We know this works. Let's roll it out in our largest, most important market. Let's go to New York. And that went terribly, horribly wrong.

AI assessment note: “No, we didn't, because we actually didn't see, uh, the doctors, uh, leave”

Q Did anybody say you were crazy for quitting?

A Oh, everyone. Everyone told us we're crazy, and we got a lot of negative feedback on the idea, too, right? People would say, this is, this just won't work, you know, I would never pick my doctor on the internet, or I already have a doctor, uh, or, you know, doctors wouldn't accept patients that, that Are looking on the internet. There were all kinds of, uh, projections that people had when they were thinking about their own situation. But, you know, when, when you talk to people in Starbucks, they actually thought about it much more positively. So we were encouraged enough to say, well, this is, this is going to work as long as we get out of our circle. And if you don't ask McKinsey consultants and doctors, uh, the, the response will be better.

AI assessment note: “Oh, everyone. Everyone told us we're crazy”

Q Oh, this was in San Francisco that you went to?

A Yeah, we flew out to San Francisco, and so we launched DocTalk in front of eight, 900 people. A lot of them were journalists. When the judges opened up with feedback, Guy Kawasaki, who we knew and valued, As an evangelist for Apple, he, he came out and just said he, he didn't get it, he would never use this in front of everyone, right? And his, his direct quote was something like, honestly, it would just never occur to me to go to any site and pick a doctor. That's really burned in, in my brain. And what was worse is that he seemed to be right. You know, we didn't get a single booking that day. We were hoping that This PR would get us of our initial batch of users, right?

AI assessment note: “Yeah, we flew out to San Francisco, and so we launched DocTalk”

Q Wow, that just sounds, I'm getting exhausted just hearing about that, because this is like, even, this is like pre-Google calendars, right?

A Yeah, yeah, that was, uh, that was early days, and what we were extremely focused around were making sure the experience was fantastic, and if something went wrong, we'd, we'd fix it, right? So I was our customer service, uh, I personally would call the doctor and, and confirm the appointment was all set, and if it wasn't, I'd Personally contact the patient to let them know, uh, and then I would offer them an Amazon gift card alongside with an apology. And there was actually one case where I didn't catch a patient in time and, uh, and they were already in the subway to the doctor. And, and so I, I raised them to the doctor's office and picked up a bouquet of flowers on the way there and, and met them in person to apologize. Uh, and, and that was really a turning point where I said, well, this service has to work and we need to be, Have this patient's first attitude in, in terms of how it works completely ingrained in the company.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, yeah, that was, uh, that was early days”

Q Yeah. All right. So, uh, so this guy Cyrus, super charismatic, uh, really smart. Clearly the two of you start to, to work together. And, and what, what kind of business ideas are, are you coming up with?

A Well, we kind of fell in love with this new idea that came about at one of these lunches, where Cyrus told me about how he had recently ruptured his eardrum while flying with a cold, and then he found it very difficult to actually find a doctor, and he had asked people for recommendations, and he had called down his insurance directory listing, starting with the A's, and some of these doctors weren't accepting new patients, some no longer accepted his insurance, One provider actually had passed away, and so he said, well, why does it take me four days to see a doctor when I'm in pain, right? And why can't this be much easier? And we both very quickly realized the potential of this idea, you know, from working at projects at McKinsey, we knew that health systems were actually spending millions of dollars for marketing to grow their patient base, because they had, uh, Wasted inventory, right? They had something that I like to call hidden supply, which is these last minute cancellations, no shows, reschedules, uh, that, uh, that, that go to waste. And, and then on the other hand, there were the patients who had a hard time accessing this.

AI assessment note: “Well, we kind of fell in love with this new idea that came about”

Q And were you working out of, out of one of your apartments, or did you guys rent space?

A Uh, No, we, we worked out of our respective apartments. Many times, uh, we came to Nick. He had the nicest apartment, uh, and, and we could, uh, bring him a breakfast burrito and wake him up. Uh, and, and, you know, the, the reality is that we originally had a pretty ambitious launch plan, right? So we got together around July. We wanted to launch by December of 2007. But then something interesting happened where Nick, uh, sent an email suggesting to look at what was then Called TechCrunch. And, you know, TechCrunch is, is one of these, is now, you know, household name. But, uh, the, the draw for us back then was there was a 50,000 dollar prize.

AI assessment note: “we worked out of our respective apartments. Many times, uh, we came to Nick”

Q Alright, so you come back from San Francisco, and, you know, you had Guy Kawasaki say, I don't, I would never use this service. I'm sure he feels differently today, but maybe then he, you know, said that, but did, so did you come back feeling like, like, dejected, like losers, or, or were you excited, like, how did you feel coming back?

A Well, you know, I think we were obviously hoping that we would eventually get more bookings, and, you know, in the beginning we probably refreshed the bookings report a hundred times a day. But as we were thinking through this, what we realized it was really a typical two-sided marketplace challenge. It's just a classic chicken and egg problem. You need the supply to get the demand, and you need the demand to entice the supply. And for ZocDoc, it was even trickier, right? When you think about it, healthcare is hyperlocal and very complicated, so you have to match supply and demand on a zip code specialty level, and then we have thousands of insurances to take into account, and so we realized that our odds of actually finding a patient that wanted what we had on offer were, you know, quite low, and so the best Path forward was to, uh, methodically build up supply. So we just, we just kept going. We put up a huge map of Manhattan on the wall, and then actually put little flags on it of where the doctors were that we had on the website, and which insurances they accepted, and we, we, we just, we knew that perseverance is, uh, the name of the game.

AI assessment note: “So we just, we just kept going... we knew that perseverance is”