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Mario Schlosser

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70
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2024-04-05
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2024-04-05
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  1. “No, not at all. Not at all. I mean, this is the famous Winston Churchill Court, right? Nothing better than getting shot at and surviving it. Nothing more exhilarating. And I definitely think that's true. There's nothing better to get kicked in the nuts violently. At some point, I will have turned around and I will only immediately get kicked in the butts, you know? So I'm in the process of turning 180 degrees. I still think that is fantastic. I think you get better at this stuff over time. I would not want to miss that period in my life for sure. And frankly, also Oscar wouldn't be around having not gone public. It's a very simple thing. We raised a billion dollars in the IPO and the night before, this is still one of my proudest moments, I insisted in the pricing call, have a recording of the pricing calls. It's like really funny that they see all the bankers say all these things. This will happen. That will happen. None of that which happened, by the way, whatever. And I said, what's the highest amount of money we could go and get from the market? It's probably one reason why the price went down on the first trading day, not the only one. But we needed all that money. Otherwise, we would have had to raise at bad points in time and we would have gotten diluted in the 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

  2. “rates would go in credit cards whatever, which is one of the things driving capital one's business, of course, right? So once it is in the details, they're not stupid. They have incredibly smart, you are playing a game with some of the smartest, most motivated people in the world. If you trade against anybody who was it or via company, we have a handful of analysts as a small company at that time covering us. Those guys don't necessarily have enough attention span. And the big long only funds don't have enough attention span to make this all work. That's the issue.”

    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. “I don't know. It's not that easy, by the way, okay? Let me tell you two stories. I used to work at Bridgewater, a big local macro fans, right? I mean, people say smartest hedge funds, you know, the returns are not showing that much anymore, but certainly smartest Google people, I think I've worked with so far. And at British, 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, okay? There is no almost no information in analyst price targets. And I say this with the greatest due respect to analysts because now here's the second part. Scott Blackley's our CFO came from Capital One, and I used to tell him that stories like the analysts don't matter when they downgrade like Amazon matter or whatever gives the prices already moved and all that stuff. And he's like, yes, but he said that capital one, the analysts in their models, they built these elaborate models, whatever, actually were always leading the publicly available data on credit defaults. Like the analyst had a very good idea of where the faults were.”

    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. “Much money, how are you going to like get out of that by having a nice red button, sort of a blue button? You just had to get out of that 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

  5. “Him our talk, like he makes things sound so simple and straightforward. And I said to him, just can you give me some feedback so I can learn for next time I do this stuff? What did I not say? What did he say that I didn't say? And he's like, yeah, I think he said all the same things, but he sent a bunch of more stuff that was also more complicated. Some people think people just didn't want to listen to that anymore. And so he thought I was explaining the details he as an engineer wanted to hear in a good way I sort of lay out these dynamics we were seeing. You know, here's the claim system. We're paying 10% faster. Therefore, next year it'll be another 10% faster. Therefore, this will all work in this way. Public markets don't care about that. They just don't, they have limited hension spans at least for companies like ours. And so my long story short to you is, yes, we try to show these things. If you look at our analysis of reports and all that stuff, we try to always say here are the things we are seeing and how our systems are influencing economics and outcomes. But when you lose $400 million a year, what the fact do I care?”

    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. “Ha, for sure, an efficient market is not efficient if you go down by 95% and then up by 8x. You know, that's not a hallmark of an efficient market. I mean, the story of Oscar and the data we published, if you go back through time, you change dramatically at the Ebita level for sure, but the underlying figures, the medical loss ratio moved from eighty six to eighty two, whatever, right? That does not seem like an unbelievably massive move. It's a pretty big move in healthcare circles, but it wasn't something that was completely out of the question when we were at 86. So clearly the markets were not understanding or hearing something I was saying. And here is one learning actually from the public markets about this. A funny story recently, Mark Bertolini, the CEO now, he gave a talk at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference. That's like the Mecca and the Christmas of healthcare investing. You know, it's every first week of January in San Francisco, whatever, and everybody gives speeches and gives guidance for the year and all that kind of stuff. And one of our VPs of engineering is a very smart guy, came to me the day after and said, oh, it was great.”

    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. “I would say two things. A simpler one is people thought we're running out of money. And that gets discounted in the stock price. And then you have this sort of vicious circle that spins you down because analysts write reports that say, Oscar be out of money.”

    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. “I love that one. That's a fantastic idea. I actually really think it's exactly what happened with Oscar. It was very easy to stand out with quirky ads and, you know, a couple articles whatever, and Josh doing a little bit of like the dance in the sea of unbelievably boring and uninspiring insurance companies. And then you get five great software engineers and they're going to build you a cool system. And you go from 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

  9. “So, if I wind the clock back to 2012 and we started, yes, because at that time the idea of starting an insurance company as a startup wasn't at all on anybody's radar screen. I mean, Oscar really was the first insurance company startup and there was no category insure tech whatever that didn't exist. Everybody else came after us. And that aspect I loved the most. I loved the fact that people weren't doing it. Again, I didn't have had no illusion about the fact that I know anything about healthcare operations or anything like that. But I love the fact that other smart people were not trying. That's not the case anymore. Healthcare is not that area. There's plenty of people who are smart, technology oriented, who now have started startups in healthcare. But that aspect I love back in the days. And so I would today go into an area that has that aspects. Like, what is that? Is that agriculture in Kenya? Is that quantum computing in Iceland? Is that drugs in space or whatever? It needs to be something that is just not on people's radar screen.”

    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. “Definitely not somebody who doesn't realize that and wouldn't want to bring that in. I think you can have a head of sales or somebody who's a head of a commercial chief or whatever else who understands healthcare as the relationships and things like that. And you can make that work. But I've gotten more cynical about this. I will tell you that. Look, there's definitely the possibility that we will all have an LLM-based doctor next year and that something else will happen that completely changes the way healthcare works. It hasn't happened in the last 15 years and hasn't happened in the last 40 years.”

    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. “I think it's misunderstanding the market dynamics. You have very few market segments in U.S. healthcare where you get paid more for delivering higher quality because that market isn't being created. You know, the employer market that buys insurance, for example, and has to buy digital health services is not necessarily driven by a deep understanding of, if I buy this product, exactly what will I get somehow can beat the price down. Like when Walmart decides how to stock their shelves, they know exactly what to look for and how to get the best price for the best quality. There is no such broker metaphorically speaking in the US healthcare system. And so entrepreneurs don't understand this. They have the simplistic view of, oh, I build a faster and cheaper car and people will come and buy it. That's not how it works in US healthcare. And so you get this broken market and therefore the wrong approach is. And I used to say that there is, 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.”

    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. “You should make sure to be nice to him and give him a good tip when he serves you coffee in 10 years from now. That's a high-risk game, obviously. Now, I'm more with you there as well. I think this is, again, to go into a territory that I understand very well, U.S. healthcare. That is one of the issues in U.S. healthcare. The big ideas and the big disruptive approaches to just changing this four children system have not worked all that well for the most part. Nobody's completely reinvented primary care. There's an incredible amount of very pedestrian, simple workflows and ideas where some amount of companies make a ton of money in US healthcare and replacing their 40-year-old Cobalt code base with what you just said. Just a good startup that makes money early on, I think is a huge opportunity. And by the way, these guys who invent the cool chips, they gotta sell those chips in that compute to somebody, and I think that'll be your companies. We'll buy 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

  13. “For how quickly you can build an Excel model, I'm like, this is magical powers. And so you just need someone to show you where that bar is. And if you don't have that, it's a big 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

  14. “It's literally the grammatical tens of the imperative, like the commands. Young people are not going to do research. And I did a bunch of work on that, and I built an early eye tracker. So it was a camera on the computer, it's like 1996 and would film you, and then the mouse would move based on where you would look. And so I have the Apple Vision Pro and I still don't think the vision tracking is that great even now, you know, whatever, 26 years later. But point being, that competition was the first time for me where I saw people who were doing stuff that I could not even imagine doing, like designing ships or writing code or inventing cool stuff or saying they want to start companies. I'd never heard anybody say that. And so that was an interesting bar. The other one I'll tell you is I was a Stanford in computer science as a visiting researcher and I went to McKinsey and do an internship there. And I remember to this day when my Stanford advisor called me after I'd been there for like a couple of weeks or so and he asked me how is it? I said it is so incredible how fast you can build Excel spreadsheets. And I meant this from the bottom of my heart. It was an incredible bar range.”

    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. “We're going to talk about organization later on in startups and so on, but that is absolutely something that happens in organizations as they grow. That's the bar just and everybody will tell you this just sort of goes down because people do not have a few standout folks or teams to look at and say, okay, that is the bar I could get to. That is actually what's possible when you see somebody else 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

  16. “That is 100% something I subscribe to. I had incredibly low expectations through my whole life, really. I mean, you know, when you grow up in a small town in Germany and not like in a poor upbringing or whatever else, I was lucky that my parents were just basically very normal German middle class people, then you don't necessarily see yourself going to Stanford or Harvard or whatever else. That's in a completely different world. And in fact, actually, when I was at university and university of Hanover in the north of Germany, this is like 2001, so I kept reading about Napster was a big deal. Hank Berrier taken it over. And it was the most incredible thing to me in the world when two years later I met Hank Barry, and a buddy of mine was friends with him, and we talked to him about peer-to-peer and file sharing and whatever, something that I didn't did some academic work in as well later on. Just the magic that you feel as someone with low expectations, when you finally get to the place where all the people with the high expectations are, like for me, Silicon Valley, is absolutely incredible and uncopyable.”

    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. “I think it is almost unfortunately the case, and I say unfortunately because I hate for the world to be one where you're locked into your own destiny, into your own fates early on. I mean, that does not appeal to me as a socialist European, you know, as I know you're a fellow socialist European. I don't know about the socialist part. I think it's a very multivariate problem, though. But I don't think necessarily that we know exactly how to break down who's going to do something incredible based on just one aspect or a measurable test or something like that. I do think there is this dimension of sort of like how much you care about what others do, how much cognitive capacity do you have, and then how much persistence do you have? Maybe that's Z-Axis, you know? There is an efficient frontier somewhere in there. And when I was in school, for example, they were definitely always, I think one or two people had better grades than iHats and they were not to become theoretical physicists. They didn't start companies and they never will. And so there is something else in this sort of embedding dimensionality of what drives performance that is not easy to put the finger on.”

    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. “I always had a high degree of totally intrinsic motivation and just not really caring what others told me to do or what others thought about what I was doing. And so I got a Sinclair ZX81, which had, I think, one kilobyte of RAM relatively early on from not my paris on my father's middle school teacher, mother's a nurse, and so they had really no mathematical or computer science inclinations whatsoever. But a friend of my father gave me that little computer, and so I would type in listings and learn all that stuff. I don't think I was always that smart in going about and learning it. I remember actually a summer where I kept trying to figure out how to have the computer draw lines. And I would just on square paper, draw lots and lots and lots of lines and see how would you have to place the pixels to draw a line. The guys who invented Doom, for example, would have probably figured out a clever algorithm there. I couldn't figure it out. And eventually I realized, okay, floating point numbers, that's the thing you need there. But it took me way too long. So the persistence in the intrinsic motivation and then the sort of not caring whatever, think about it, it's 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

  19. “I hope I've improved as an interviewee, as an entrepreneur. We were both just starting out, I feel like, when we last talked. So it's great to be back on.”

    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. “I don't think I've told the story, but we went public, right? I think it was March 3rd or whatever, 2021. 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. The world doesn't end that often. That is actually one of the things you do realize. 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. Sometimes the rhetoric in silicon value of like, oh my God, life and death, whatever, is also just fucking stupid.”

    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