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Mario Schlosser

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2024-04-05
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2024-04-05
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  1. “I mean, I read it all. I mean, I hope I'm at the equivalence of what Oscar was in 2012. Some area that people don't have on the radar screen, that, as you said, has the bad talent brands. And it's just not interesting for most people, but that has so much more impact on big part of the world or something that is just not on people's radar screen at all. I hope I still have a notebook where the last interesting notes I took were the day before. I look in my notebook and I look at when it was the last taken notes on something interesting. And that is a big part of whether I still think I do something interesting, you know, and I still feel engaged on something. So I still, I hope I have that wherever I am, I have this notebook.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “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. Maybe that's one learning there. I think the other learning is that this thing is still a business. Don't just think that everything in life you have to do with one person. It is up to people like Josh to connect to many, many others who could do interesting different things. You should do the same thing. That is a much better kind of working together of equals. If you both have value, you can bring into this relationship. That's, I think, the other marriage advice people give, right? If the relationship becomes too asymmetric in terms of value generation, I really want to define that in the marriage, or it becomes difficult as well.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Josh and I started our first company together in 2006 so that it goes way back before Oscar. That was a thing that we later became a gaming company. But it wasn't a gaming company at that time. It was a social network and none of us was doing it full-time. And between the years 2007 and 2010, I think, he and I didn't talk. We hated each other because I wouldn't insist that strongly, but we just had like, we had fight over equity. And I thought his young kid doesn't know what he's doing. And he was arrogant about it and whatever. And why the fuck I'm doing the programming? What is he doing? That's pointless, you know, all that stuff. And we needed to get that out of the way. And I think my takeaway there, therefore, is Josh is an incredibly good person, very loyal, very smart, obviously, and an incredible guy at knowing what to ask of the right person. But he's also the other things. He also has those, you know, he's also a guy you can fight with. And at some point, you have to get that out of the way.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “That one I would go with the Jensen Kuang thing, which is the pain is deep and the lows are low and all that stuff, they will be there. And so you just need to basically say, step outside of yourself almost and observe yourself and say, you've done this before, it is going to be fine. And if not, then you can't change it anyway. So be okay with that. You have a finite amount of time to do this. 10 years sounds like a long time. It's not that long. And so it does matter a lot what you do. Like I remember there were times when it's weird I don't get enough emails today. Should I feel good about this or bad about this? And, you know, that's okay. Maybe I can do anything. It is your job to bring the intensity back in. It just is. And, you know, there's obviously family this rest of your life and so on as well. But if you let the intensity go out, I think the intensity goes out and disappears from the company. You don't have that much time is the other thing I would actually say to myself.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think Cajun and Tiger is like a much more pleasant death, no. Drowning seems like a very bad way to die. So that's the one I would pick”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think it is that attention piece. It is if you are boards, if you don't have anything to talk about anymore, that's probably the biggest thing because everything else I think, you know, I don't know, attraction level else, that comes and goes in waves, I think. It just does. But that sort of, whether you can stand each other. Like, will there be ways we don't? And then there will be ways where you're like, oh, this is what it used to be like, great, awesome. I'm happy again. But that something to talk about is if you run out of that, I think that's a problem”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So positive it gives you a lot to talk about. I really love when we get a dinner with my FNI and just like saying, oh, no, I did this today, sir today or whatever, all that stuff. That's them in the back here. So you have a lot to talk about, which is great. Like it's a real, in marriages, I think the worst thing is to run out of stuff to talk about. So that's great. It makes it awesome to go to them and to go on vacation with them. Like we went to Edrid last year. I actually love going with my wife on vacation because we have a very similar streak of like, oh, let's do some adventures, something adventures, whatever else. But to do it with the kids is just really like, oh, that's a hieroglyphic. And it is cool. It's been around for 5,000 years. And Jesus Christ was here and all that stuff. Like, it's just cool stuff.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “How much time I have left? I used to not care about it at all. And I'm like, Oscar took years. How many things of that nature could I try to do and try to bite off?”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And so, not being boring in conversations is maybe one of the biggest goods you can have, which is great. I hope this was not boring.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “and Silicon Valley, whatever, where money is less of the issue, that is much more important, I think. Way more important than money. Everybody can sort of get some NBA tickets or something like that. I couldn't care less as a Super Bowl or something like that. I just really didn't give a shit. Like a Taylor Swift concert, who gives a shit. Like, I really don't care. It's the influence. Are you getting a phone call when people want to know something about AI and language models? And by the way, not just from the big guys, but from the even former engineers in the company, whatever else, that actually I love it when somebody calls me about, oh, this, I have this, I saw this model. Do you think it's a useful model or whatever? I like that way more. And I actually do think that that is a relatively efficient market as well. I used to think, why do actors hang out with actors? That's so stupid. That's like a sign of they're stupid, whatever. It's not the case. Like I actually think actors and writers, whatever, they are incredibly creative people. They operate at this level of performance that few others can get to. And they just don't want to be bored in conversation.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “For me it's not the boat at all when we fly with the kids or whatever. Even when I fly somewhere myself, I probably still do economy or something like that when plenty of people fly with planes nowadays. And it is a very nice like putting my backpack on in a pillow or whatever. It reminds me of when I still thought everything was possible and this whole discounting improbabilities in some sense. And look, I mean, again, this is not a big hardship, right? It's to fly to the West Coast on an economy. It's not like that somehow in the trenches of Ukraine. Let's be very clear again here as well. The thing where I fit exactly the way you just said is in the influence sides. And this is some, I forgot who said this to me as well, probably, I don't know, Charlie Munger or whatever, but there's always a room you're not in. And I'm sure that's still the case even for Zuckerberg. Like if Zuckerberg doesn't get invited to, I don't know the royal wedding or whatever. He's like, damn it, I wish I was at the royal wedding. There is just always a thing that you don't get invited to when you don't somebody who doesn't call you back. And by the way, I learned plenty of those things. And that attention economy, once you get to the level of...”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I think it is that sense that I do not have to go do what others tell me to do. I love and it is unbelievably ineffective, to just do something that I find intellectually somewhat interesting. Like I learned Mandarin in the last two years, for example, for no reason whatsoever. Now I'm trying to learn how to read Arabic. I think there might be something coming out of it at some point, but it's not useful right now for sure. I built this game over this week, this weekend. I'm hoping to publish it next week or so. That takes like words and puts them into some kind of riddle thing. It's hard to explain. But I just programmed this myself. And it's very ineffective. I should hire somebody to do it, whatever. But I love doing those things. And I like the idea of being able to do more of those things. And I also think those things have sometimes randomly gotten me somewhere. And you have to put yourself into these maelstroms of randomness.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Oscar was because I was there for the whole thing. I was there for all the times when it almost blew up and fell apart. And it is that sense of improbability that I will now forever project into everything else I will do from here on outs. And that's a terrible thing because you start measuring improbability as opposed to naivety you had I had in 2012 was like I'm smart I can figure this out no problem at all and if there's one thing I want to do in my life is many things I would try to get over that sense of improbability again and say you know if I do something again I try to build a computer based on anthills then I want to go and do it and if it doesn't work out of the ants eat me that is a completely fine outcome you know and it is the case with that money you can do more of that for sure”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “At that time, it wasn't a million yet, by the way, but it was approaching that level, I think. But it was close enough, like 900,000, something like that. I have a screenshot of the bank account still of my checking accounts and that that was in. It really gives you a feeling of accomplishments. There's no question about it. You're very relieved that that is the case. There's relief as well that if shit goes to hell now, not everything will be taken from you. But the third thing is you have an instant feeling of, holy shit, now it's on. And the level of fall just goes up. Like you're like, okay, now we fuck it up. It's really painful. Now I have the excuses go away. I admire people who have an ability of going through that and then pushing the chair. I'd say before the pushing the chicks back and chips it back on the table. This is one reason why I think mathematicians do their best work before the age of 25 or whatever, right? Nobel Prize laureates tend to be 35 or something like that because you just don't want to venture out into the woods anymore. In some sense, I know how improbable the journey of”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I mean, the question is paper versus not on paper, I think it was when the 2015 fundraising rounds thereabouts. We did a cash. We did a secondary rounds, I think, in that 2015 fundraising round, I might say. And we tried to at that time make it so that we took everybody above a certain tenure and level at that time. They were all able to sell just about the same amounts. And we thought that that was important because otherwise you'd have that sort of inequity of like, why did the American founders sell something or whatever?”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Sure, it might not be true, but certainly in the world I live in, I think, you know, the venture vesting, whatever, like purely for myself, I did not try to somehow go to the board or whatever and say I need more, I need this and eat that and whatever else. And so, and that actually is not, that's not a good piece of advice. And I'm a white male, so probably”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Okay, I actually do have an opinion on that. Yeah. And this is my observation from Navigating the Woods of Silicon Valley as well. And this might be a bit of a European thing. Have a fairly strong feeling that others should judge my value and my worth. And I trust a system to some degree. So I say, shouldn't be on me to decides and what equity I get or, you know, how much money I have or all that kind of stuff. If there is enough systems in place that allocate value based on whether I did something that was useful for society at large or not, I certainly, by the way, think money is the best way we have to measure societal impacts. It's not perfect by any means, and I don't like it necessarily, but I absolutely think that it's not that it's always the wrong people who are rich or whatever else. That's stupid as well. It's a good metric to sort of assess that.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “To me, that's a value. I tell you the story of a Greg in 2014 15, we said we should write down our values. What we did is we gave the whole company an afternoon office, about 100 people at the time. Let's do a values bazaar. People were able to write values that they thought Oscar should have on the screen and they were holding them up and then people would congregate and gather and we would pick values that way. And then I got all the data back and they were the most boring fucking values ever. They were like excellence and integrity and all totally vanilla. You took an average of extremes and that is just going to be somewhere in the boring middle. You just need to lean into something as a company. You need to say we are a company that is going to generate ideas and we're going to do it unabashedly. I mean we all do all these things. But it means I want to understand what else is in your minds. And it's not every company that way.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “OK, but there are certain things I think that you, if you go one level down from these, you expect certain behaviors that flow for you from these values very obviously. They make money thing, for example, means that you don't have to share all of your information, I don't know, maybe it's okay to be competitive from like steal a deal from the other guy or whatever. I don't know that might be too far. But there's certain things you implicitly expect as behaviors and other people I don't understand that. And so that is a problem I think we had. People don't know when I want to brainstorm. They don't know when I want to get work done or whatever else. And that you have to codify for people. Otherwise, you get a lot. That's the other thing 3,000 person companies don't do. They don't know why are you in this meeting with me? Are you in the meeting with me because you don't trust me? Or are you in the meeting with me because, yeah, you do trust me and I think my work's getting done well, but you want to brainstorm. You want to have ideas. You want to be in the juices. That stuff you have to explain to people. And companies don't do that enough.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Well, I think 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. If you as a CEO say, look, I have a great idea. I want to have a meeting now. We meet and go through these things. And that's where we're going to get our ideas. I want to delegate more and whatever. Your people are going to do the same thing. And the people that report to them will do the same thing. And that's how you end up with lots of meetings, lots of spans of control, and fewer people doing the actual work. The other thing I would say is, and this is actually a problem I have, if things remain unspoken about how stuff should run. So we had the story at Oscar actually where I think it's 2014, 2015. So we were around like two years or so. We didn't have values written down. At that time, it was actually a little bit more rare that companies had values. Now it's a very common thing, right? And I also, you're making a very funny face. The funny face might mean, you know, it's like if you have to say, I'm an affiliate company, you probably not in an ethical company, that whole thing.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Of weedy management weeding compositions in the same way we have. And I always thought there must be some kind of way to do it. And you eventually get there. No, there isn't. So different stuff works for different periods and different people and all that kind of stuff. And so listen and ask people what they're doing. That's great. Don't just do what the professional managers will tell you to do for sure. And so, for example, I've always thought there is no way around spending hours and hours and hours in a room to just go through all priorities of your company with people in detail once a month, whatever else. And we just never really did that because people don't always like, oh, that doesn't seem necessary or less and whatever. That is one thing where I today know that suited my style. I like the ideas I get when I do that so I can make more connections. I do think I have an ability of keeping more piece of information in my mind at the same time than most others. So design around that as opposed to just sort of reading the book.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “The stage that we found or goes through where the board tells him, now you gotta bring in professional people. And then you go and hire and get recruiting for them and you find the first CFO and COO and whatever else. And I wouldn't miss any of the people we had in those roads. They're still great friends, every single one of them. And so we have great relationships. But what then happens inevitably is that those people will bring in management systems that have worked for them. They will make you as the founder and CEO feel that it's time to grow up dudes. Just don't be in a meeting and let us handle this one and you do that and so on. That can be a good thing. I mean, you should certainly always learn from other people as to how they do things. For example, I am so surprised that these podcasts, for example, don't ask more at the very simple question of what is your weekly meeting? How do you meet with the management team? Remember asking the CEO of Airbnb that and she was telling me, oh, we change it all the time, which was very relieving to hear because they had also come through the same different iterations.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “You a real human, and that's a great thing. Maybe you and I will not build fusion power or a fly to Mars. I've accepted that limits to my abilities.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Report from the federal governments as to where our risk or land is, and it moves the numbers by a staggering amount like it used to move the Oscar numbers by a billion revenues distinguished move it by like a hundred million up and down. It's insane, like it's completely crazy, and big public companies have failed in sometimes estimating that thing well. We now know how to do this. We now know how to have a really good system that lands within like $10,000 or whatever, you know, of the estimate because we get so much throughout the year or whatever. But that was one of these things where I could not bear to be openly email or whatever or hear the phone call or whatever. And we would then go and sit down. It usually comes on a Friday nights. We have whiskey out with the actuaries. And we would sit there and wait for this thing to come. That is the way to deal with bad news is to just deal with other people for whom it is equally bad, but at least you share the badness in some way. So yes, I had this too. It's totally normal. There may be some schizophrenic headphones managers who don't have it, but I'm glad you have it because it makes.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Oh my God, I used to have this issue of when there's an email and I know it's bards, most likely, where there's an excel tape I know it's bads. You don't want to open it and I just find ways not to open it. By the way, a good trick is to open it in the presence of other people. It's a got over it eventually. So we used to have this thing, it's actually an Oscar thing. I don't want to go too much into the weeds, but the federal government redistributes revenue of insurance companies in the market we are in depending on the risk of the membership base you've attracted. So if Oscar has a younger membership base than another insurer in the same states, we have to send money to the other insurance company because members of Oscar went to the doctor less and this called risk adjustments. It's an incredibly clever way to actually get insurance companies neutral in who they want to sign up as members. You want to get every member and then manage a member well. It's actually a very well working system now. It didn't work so well early on. Now it works well. But the way it works is that in late March, we get the first”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I don't know anybody who's good at that. That's one of these other things. Like when you, this is why I'm glad you're doing these kind of podcasts. 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, they're better at avoiding these conversations than we are. You and I are good at maybe avoiding competition because we don't want to have it. They are good at manipulating you in such a way that you didn't realize they avoid the conversation. You know, so that is a whole different skill. There are very few people who are schizophrenic or psychologically hampered enough that they don't feel difficulty telling you something you don't want to hear. In fact, to the point where you need to get, you need to get it out of people. This is something I always disliked. When I talk to my board, for example, or even to Josh, I'm like, you don't be polite to me. Like, it's just not helpful. Don't tell me, oh, this was a really nice thing you did, Mari. I'm like, okay, but then why are you not happy? Clearly, you are uneverybody the other thing.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Is always more difficult for me. And one of the reputations Mark had was to be more of a hard ass. I always thought the company needs more of a hard ass. And Mark is not, I would say, showing up that way as much at the moment of just like a guy. It's like, and he's probably also mature mellowed and whatever. But he's got that more than eye habits.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I think there's certain ways in which I would go about brainstorming strategy where even management tooling in the company, like who meets at what point in time, what data do we look at, whatever. I've always thought about that in a certain way. We could never quite get there, but this is like a system in my mind. I would like to see that system be the thing. But Mark is now doing it a different way. That one I don't like giving away. I don't like if, I mean, look, it is difficult not to be the person with the top authority anymore. It just is. I mean, anybody who doesn't tell you that isn't fucking idiots. If you're the guy who can tell everybody what to do and they all have always respect for it, that's a sweet gig. If you don't have that anymore, you feel like a chump. You have dreams at night of literally not getting invited to the party anymore. Like that's how it translates almost. That part's more difficult. It's the part that's easier is things along the lines of you got to deliver a tough message to a person. You gotta tell this person to shut up and do this now.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “If you do it, you have to do it wholeheartedly. What blows startups up is if you say, oh, I'm going to 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, maybe Mark has a different idea. You can do that. You have to say, that's a decision for the CEO. You got to go talk to Mark. Sometimes I hate saying that. I'll tell you honestly. Sometimes I love saying that. I'm like, I'm so glad. I don't have that one anymore. It's an annoying decision. So fuck yeah, Mark, go take it on. So that's definitely one important piece of advice.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Wrong with that. No, some founders should, by the way, right? Like, I mean, Elon Musk probably should. That guy seems to have a capacity to do things that is just not the same as what we have. By the way, I always, I read the biography so carefully for all the stuff that others say that he does. And it does seem to me he's not always the engineering ability he has. It seems to be some of these other things, like firing people quickly or like spending three hours on a topic, whatever, that have maybe even more to do with the success. But that's a different topic. But yeah, I agree with you. I think people need a not always cling to these things.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “I thought I was out of tricks certainly against the next crisis. I mean, Oscar needs a bunch of more tricks, that's for sure. I think there's a huge opportunity for us to shift more towards software as a service, towards some of the stuff that's happening in the U.S. healthcare market around individualization of care. Those are big opportunities. I didn't think necessarily my bag of tricks was the way to go and unlock these. In the CEO seats,”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “For sure. And maybe there's a survivorship bias of people who then do that and then become grades and others who don't. And then Faith frameworks obscurity. But I thought it's a better thing for the company. And I think it's probably a better thing for me if I then do the right things with us. Later on, there's a coder to this, to just hand that over and have somebody come in who, if there was a crisis again, would have a different bag of tricks and could do different things with a company. And to me, that was marked.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “that the company would not need to raise money again, it would be profitable within a foreseeable future. It would have a profitable insurance business in 23. Because the way insurance companies work is we get all membership at the end of the year before. It's all locked into a price that we can't change. And we do all these things in such a way that we have very good visibility into the annual numbers. I mean, stuff can always happen. But it's exactly what ended up happening. I mean, our 23 numbers were the same, if not better, than what I thought they would be in January 2023. Okay, so I knew we were essentially out of the woods. I had a very, very strong feeling about that. And I think the board thought that too and whatever else. We had quit the right markets, we'd quit the right sort of other deals that didn't work out and whatever. It was all behind us. I had made those decisions and we were done. But I was concerned that if we would ever turn down again. It would be my last crisis. I would not be able to go and do the same stuff that I said before and people would still believe me. And I didn't want to risk us. I think greater leaders and greater CEOs would have risked us.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “For me, a couple of different things. I remember watching the 2018 World Cup, which was in Russia, in Germany I kicked out in the first round. After winning the World Cup in 2014. And the coach was Yugi Leuv, the same coach who had coached him to be in World Champion in 2014. And you and I, I don't know about you, but I certainly measure my life in Germany's performance at World Cups. I'm like, oh, that's when they last won. That's when they went next to ever. It's like such a markers that you just remember. So they win the thing and then they go back to Russia and the guy stays on. And they just get kicked out in the first round and embarrassing fashion. And then he didn't leave again still, even after that. And of course, they get kicked out of the next tournament as well. It was such a great example of the guy just lost his hat was empty of magic of rabbits to pull out. He just lost his ability to talk to the team, motivate them, whatever. And I was very concerned about that. At that time, at the beginning of last year, Mark came in in April, I think we announced him. At that time, it was relatively clear.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Absolutely, yeah, totally. I think that Jeff Bezos are saying is I reserve the right to change my opinion even without new facts. That is totally true. I think you just should constantly try to rethink, what should I do with my life, whatever, and which should the company do and stuff like that? You don't need to tell people all the time about it, but if you have this one thing you cling to, that's limiting, I agree”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “It's also a good place to not stop there. I mean, that's something I think about a lot today as well, that I admire the people who put there, who have an ability of putting their chips back on the table when they get to a certain place. And I mean, that's one of the great things about Elon Musk, certainly, right? That he's like, screw this, I'm just going to take my 100 million and buy Russian rockets”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Like, literally, when I said I'm going to be on Harry's podcast, I got tons of people in the company saying, oh my God, you're on 20 Minute BC. That's amazing. Fucking love it. And the lesson here is, I'm sure in your life, and when we first met in 2017, you did not think that that's the level you would get to. I would imagine you didn't. And the bar consistently shifted upwards for you. You would not, I mean, back in this, you had a computer, obviously I'm not Elon Musk. That's like an obvious comparison. Why would I compare myself to that silly or whatever? Just like you wouldn't compare yourself to Messy, right? Like playing soccer looks easy. Like there's a guy running past the ball to the fucking guy, right? So you're British, so you've had your share of soccer pain. And the bar just shifts up. As long as you understand that part, I think it's actually not a bad thing. I mean, the mere honor of being at a point where you can even think the sacrilegious thoughts of, well, maybe I could do more than, you know, the next guy or whatever is a great place to even get to in life, I think.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “You know, trying to configure this database when Elon Masters just win all these things all the time. I ask my coach, should I try to fire more people or whatever, like more executives? Should I be just like, you're not good enough? You get out the door now, whatever. He's like, well, it's not weird you do. So if you do it, you can't play acts. You have to do it all the way and every time and with everybody and throughout all of your life. You can't be inconsistent about these kind of things. And I thought that simple thing was very good. For better or worse, you are what you are. You might as well stick to the, understand that better and then stick to that and try to design organization around those things. That introspection is good. But to then say, good CEO advice is to have more to-do lists. That's your genetic makeup and the makeup of your brain, the embedding space that you live in or whatever else. It's not necessarily the thing that ever you should be pulling.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “A huge question. There's a lot of stock advice VCs give you and books give you whatever. And I used to wonder from like a purely scientific view, how is it that we could get dietary advice so wrong over so many years, right? We told people for a while you should not eat fats. And they were like, oh, oops, never mind. You should eat fats, but don't eat carbs or whatever. And then oops, never mind, like, do another thing, whatever. Well, now they have the drugs, so now we're all fine anyway. The only explanation scientifically is not people are stupid or cheat in their scientific papers. 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 CEOship as well. I actually remember a conversation with an executive coach as well. And I'm sure every founder has had the question of what would Elon Musk do? There should be like a bumper sticker. What would Elon Musk do with my company? And I so many times thought when I watched another fucking rocket launch, I'm like, what the fuck am I doing?”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “I mean, I'm certainly bad at some things that I think professional CEOs should be good at. If we're bad at delegation, I'm probably bad at operationally managing people, like saying, hey, I told you to do these three things. Did you do those three things next week?”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “With it. So the repetitions do matter. So that goes to the Jensen-Wang's thing. If you can, at a low stake situation survive getting shot at a couple of times. It does get easier than really go on the battlefield. And by the way, the other thing I would say is now they are real wars in the world, right? And none of us is fighting any of those real wars. So sometimes the rhetoric in Silicon Valley of like, oh my God, life and death, whatever, is also just fucking stupid. Like none of us”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Yeah, yeah. Josh, my co-founder likes to say this. The world doesn't end that often. That is actually one of the things you do realize that you don't get from reading books that experience, the more you go through the stuff, it does get easier. You sort of pattern matching, you say, well, I did survive this before. That at least gives me the opportunity of surviving it again. And Lamovoscar I had dinner with a couple days ago. One of the great things when people leave your company and then they start companies themselves, right? And they get bigger even than Oscar, I hope, certainly. And that guy asked me, oh, I have somebody leaving who was with me from the very beginning. What should I do? I said, what you should do is not say fuck yeah. It's great that you're leaving. It's great. I love it. Best of luck for you for your next steps. And mean this from the bottom of your heart. So many people will leave your company. The first time you will freak the fuck out. Like, what did I do wrong? How can I do? People don't like me anymore or whatever. I'm too stupid to do this. It just is not the case. People have all kinds of other reasons. But you can't do anything about those reasons. So whatever. Just be okay.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Quite a bit as well. I'm like, well, I'm a shitty CEO, apparently, and I don't know how to do math, because otherwise the stock price would be better. So now I'm mad at my son for being not the worst, best mathematician either next time. That's another thing I think that actually kind of the drugs help with that a little bit, to not have that extrapolation of stuff you think about yourself in too many other situations. But a family life of people who support you, love you is a great thing. And I have a great relationship with my, I think certainly my wife and kids and my parents also, and just going back to German, my childhood home, for example, was one of these places where you really felt like, you know what, fuck it, this is the same Donald Duckcomics ever back in the days. I lost investors a lot of money, but I can still read that comic book. That was in a weird way stabilizing.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Yeah, I mean, I do think the old trope of family life, that is not in itself unstable, right? Ideally, you have a stable family life does help in these situations. It is definitely a thing that if you come home and you, I don't know, you can lie down next to your kids. And they will ask you whatever, what's going on, stuff like that. And you say, oh, shilly day, stock price is down or whatever. I mean, I honestly, I did not even look at the stock price. That was one way which I dealt with it. I didn't look at it. The other day I got very mad because Chrome doesn't keep your full history, apparently. It deletes it after two years or whatever else. Because I wanted to show on Twitter how often I looked at the stock price in the last three years. And I look at it when it goes up. I don't look at it when it goes down anymore, which makes me a bad financial trader for sure. I couldn't be that. But going to your kids and just doing nothing with them is a good sort of safety blanket for the soul. It just is. Then not making the mistake, by the way, of projecting your frustrations with your own life into your kids.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “I asked this Mike Psychiatrist, he does not have a good answer. My concern is that what is the real world? Are you perceiving the real world when you're on the drug or are you perceiving it when you're off the drug? And I just don't know there's a good answer. Like you talked earlier about entrepreneurs have something great early on that you can sort of see, right? The flip side, as I mentioned, is yes, but also the things that you don't see won't come in. On Twitter now, there's this video of the cognition AI guy who won this math competition when he was like nine years old, whatever else, like four years old. I don't even know. He looks pretty young in the video. I don't have that ability. That means there are certain things I should not try to do in life. I should not try to build a company, for example, that relies entirely on a scientific breakthrough, for example. It's just a silly thing for me to try to do. 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, that should flood into your consciousness. And I don't have a good answer there.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Mario talk, and I put the name of the person who had talked to it back in there. So I have a full record of everything I do. And I categorize it by was this thing for me? Was this thing for the company? Whatever else. I think actually my joke is now that I can train my AI replacements on this data very easily. I haven't tried that, but it'll happen at some points. I started putting mood into that too, scale of one to ten. And it's like OKRs, objections and key results, 7 is the expected, so seven is like where you want to get to. With the drug, it's interesting, you really are just always at seven. It's fascinating to see. When I look back at that charts and without it, you go down a lot and then you stay down a lot as well, at least in those days, and you climb back up again, you crash down again. And that is an incredibly interesting to me in a qualitative data sets. That helps me even look at, do I need to go back on this thing or whatever when certain things happen?”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “I never had a psychologist before a psychiatrist, but then I was able to get somebody. I had an executive coach who's a fantastic IHF hunter from Bridgewater, and he referred me to somebody. You know, he said at the time there were other founders in New York, he was also coaching, and we sort of had almost a community of those folks who all were beaten up at various points in time. But Oscar was down before everybody else was down. That period of 2021, when crypto was still riding high, when companies were still going public, like DoorDash came after us, for example, they were all still going up and doubling on the first day. So there's a time when it was very lonely stock down. And that psychiatrist was helpful. But frankly, the chemistry helped. I took a thing called surgerine. That was a unique way to do this thing. It was very, I do this thing where I track my moods. So I do this thing. I started doing this in 2012 and I started Oscar actually. I write down every day, when do I start doing something? When do I stop doing it? So like I would now say 11 o'clock from whatever 1230 like Harry.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Back there, the stock exchange invited us back for our three anniversary literally two weeks ago. I told everybody, I'm not going until the prices.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Oh, no question. I mean, I don't think I've told the story, but we went public, right? I think it was March 3rd or whatever, 2021. You go on the stock exchange. And it is really the pinnacle of an entrepreneurial career when you go there and you ring the bell. Was Josh and I ringing the bell? And that prompted it wrong, by the way. I like pushed a button and took the hand away. You were supposed to push the button and keep it there. Maybe that was the omen that put the price down. And you wait for the opening option and you have your market makers on the trading floor come to you and say, here's the crosses we're seeing. Here's how we think that some man bouncing out. And that morning we initially looked like we were going to go up from the opening price. We're like, fuck yeah, this is going to be great. The dream career of an entrepreneur and everything else. And then we open and the thing falls. It opens low right away and it falls right away. And so I had to give the CNBC interview where you stand in front of the TV in the backgrounds, in the stock exchange, and the price is down. And it is so incredibly embarrassing and so painful that to this day I couldn't go.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Would potentially have gotten sold in Canada business or whatever else it was necessary. And we were lucky we did when we did.”

    2024-04-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Oscar Health: How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap, "Why I Stood Aside as CEO" and The Rebound Journey to $5.8BN in Revenue with Mario Schlosser, Co-Founder @ Oscar Health · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source