Written on 16th October 2008
2 COMMENTS 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every once in a while we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.
This time I’m interviewing Oliver Kharraz, MD, Co-Founder, and COO of ZocDoc. This is an online service for patients to book doctor and dentist appointments instantly. Within a few clicks, an appointment is booked and confirmed, sometimes for the same day. They also stimulate transparency, giving users an idea of how good or trustworthy a doctor is.
I’ve met Oliver and his team at the Altsearchengines New York meeting in the stunning office of Hakia. After a good chat, I decided to send him the five questions. Here’s the result.
How did you come up with the idea of Zocdoc?
“Last year Cyrus Massoumi was on a cross-country flight with a sinus infection when his eardrum ruptured on landing. Obviously needing an ENT doctor, he came home to New York, and quickly realized just how hard it is to find a doctor. Between woefully out-of-date insurance websites, offices keeping him on hold for ages, and doctors being booked for weeks in advance, it actually took him four days to finally see someone. With no better way in sight, Cyrus, our CEO, decided to go ahead and make one.
What was your biggest challenge during the development process?
“We learned very quickly that things don’t always go according to plan, and that being flexible is key. ZocDoc launched at TechCrunch40 last year, and one of the requirements of launching was that we had to go live at the conference. We had not planned to go live until six weeks after the conference, however. Our development time was pretty much cut in half, but we chose to brave it, and had a successful launch. If we had any advice to give other start-ups, it would be to give yourself hard deadlines. And release early, and often!
Can you describe NYC’s start-up culture compared to Silicon Valley?
”New York City has more doctors per capita than any other city in the world. With no easy way to know which of these doctors are good (or available), basing ZocDoc here just made sense. The number of startups has grown steadily in New York, and we are fortunate that we launched at TechCrunch 40, and were also featured at NYTech Meetup. Also, while it might be more difficult to hire top development talent (although, we did get 1900 applications), people who do sign on with us are really committed to ZocDoc. They don’t plan on running off to the next hot thing, and that’s a big benefit to any new company. Plus, it’s New York! If you can make it there…”
What will be the influence of your start-up on the next web?
“ZocDoc is using the web to make the healthcare industry better than it was before. By making it easier to find doctors, and by changing the way patients book appointments, we hope our influence expands beyond the web. We hope patients will see doctors when they need to, instead of putting it off because doctors are too hard to find or book. And we hope doctors will realize the convenience our service provides and sign up with us. We’d like to see a healthier America.”‘
You can make up this question yourself!
What inspires you?
“The people who support us! Our Series A round of funding was recently led by Khosla Ventures, the firm founded by Vinod Khosla. We are beyond proud to receive the support of Khosla Ventures, because they are a firm truly dedicated to social causes. Just like us. We’ve also received investments from Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com, and Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment firm of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. Salesforce is the leader in Software as a Service, and Amazon pioneered e-commerce as we know it. ZocDoc follows in their footsteps, and combines these two areas. Receiving the support of these Internet giants humbles and inspires us.”
Written on 20th August 2008
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The last couple of months, quite a large number of medical/ health start-ups have emerged. These sites are not without controversy. The following conversation about ZocDoc, covered by my co-editor Boris at TechCrunch 40, says it all:
Guy Kawasaki, who was one of the members of the jury, said ‘I just don’t see it. You search this site and you’re like, “Oh look, Dr. Molly Adams, she looks nice, I’ll ask her to operate on my heart.”‘. While the audience laughed ZocDoc founder Massoumi cleared his throat, grabbed the microphone and replied ‘You might ask your friend for an optometrist recommendation, but you might not ask them for someone who could diagnose the rash on your butt.”.
Massoumi could be right when he thinks health sites will be successful. Since even Google launched its own version in February, called Google Health. You can store and manage all your medical information on this site (This freaks me out by the way, what if Google suspends my account or something like that?).
Several start-ups profit from this move by Google. Like San-Francisco based MEDgle, a site where you can search through 10,000 symptoms and more than 2000 diagnoses. Just click the body part that’s bothering you and start browsing away to find a solution. MEDgle founder Ash Damle explains how Google Health helps them: “Google Health is a good opportunity for us. MEDgle was designed to be able to run on top of medical health records. Google Health now provides a platform for this. They have the data, we can make it actionable and relevant to the user.”
So the self-funded start-ups basically puts an accessible layer over the Google Health data. Users select the body part and the symptom, and then specify their gender and age. After hitting the search button, a page with a short description about the symptom and external links appear. A nice touch to this page is that users can rate those external links.
There seems to be a rather large demand for medical search engines like MEDgle. A recent study by Comscore showed that 60% of women looking for information about birth control turn to the Internet. Damle notices the demand when looking at the MEDgle traffic: “We opened the doors in June of last year. Last month we had around 500K page views. All the traffic has been organic to date.”
Written on 29th January 2008
1 COMMENT
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Esther Dyson laughing at Guy Kawasaki
At Techcrunch40 we watched a presentation (Follow that link for video) by ZocDoc co-founder Cyrus Massoumi. ZocDoc is an online service that lets consumers find, search and book dentist and doctor appointments. After Massoumi’s presentation Guy Kawasaki, who was one of the members of the jury, said ‘I just don’t see it. You search this site and you’re like, “Oh look, Dr. Molly Adams, she looks nice, I’ll ask her to operate on my heart.”‘. While the audience laughed Massoumi cleared his throat, grabbed the microphone and replied ‘You might ask your friend for an optometrist recommendation, but you might not ask them for someone who could diagnose the rash on your butt.”. I don’t really know why but there has been some animosity between Jason Calacanis, who was the moderator for Techcrunch40 and Kawasaki. So the crowd went wild when Kawasaki said “Sure I would. I’d call Jason (Calacanis); he’s had plenty of rashes”.
“I’d call Jason Calacanis; he’s had plenty of rashes”
Kawasaki, as you might know, is a man and not a female and that might have some influence on his opinions. Maybe. If he would have been a female there would have been a 60 percent chance he would prefer the Internet over friends, family or significant other to get medical advice. I didn’t just make that up either. Comscore asked 921 women between the ages of 18 and 44 how they choose their methods of birth control. Turns out that 82% turn to Medical Professionals (i.e. doctors, pharmacists and healthcare workers) but 60% also turns to the internet. Apparently women use all sorts of sources because 51% also asks their friends, family or significant other. Good to know that men (significant others?) are in the loop too when it concerns methods of birth control.
I hope Comscore will repeat this study with men soon so we can accurately determine if there is a future for web-based services that allow you to get medical advice via online services like via ZocDoc or the just announced and soon to launch Google Health. In case you missed it; Google announced last week that they will soon launch Google Health which will enable you to build online health profiles that belong to you, download medical records from doctors and pharmacies, get personalized health guidance and relevant news, find qualified doctors and connect to time-saving services and share selected information with family or caregiver.
Some people freaked when Google launched Gmail saying that it would mean Google would know almost everything about you once they could read your email. I hope these same people will post a few comments here with their opinions on Google Health.
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