YouSaid · the spoken record

Oliver Kharraz

lines on the record: 80
first: 2020-08-17
most recent: 2020-08-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I believe that there's really three ingredients to success. In the order of importance, there are luck and talent than hard work. And the only one that's completely under your control is how hard you work, right? And working harder gives you more shots on goal. It helps you stay on the top of what your talent allows. And absolutely, we started at the right time, the right place. I'm proud of in all of that journey is only that when we were wrong and when we had to revise and when we needed the grit to actually make it work, we lived up to that. And that's really all that anyone can ask of themselves to do.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, look, do I think we'll work 14 hours together again? Maybe not, but I... I've gone through tougher breakups and reconciled in my past. And so I think we're in good shape. And honestly, we are meeting. We're talking from time to time. to do and places to be. So we're not hanging out all the time. But it's now also five years ago. So we're very much focused on making our joint baby successful.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's great because it just gives us a window on what the next phase of ZocDoc will be. I'm really looking forward to that. In my mind, we're at the point where Amazon started from selling only books to also adding CDEs. We have just gone from doing only in-person to also doing telehealth. And I can't wait to see how this unfolds.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely not. I think what has been really fantastic to see is how we really finished two years of roadmap in two months.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a lot of the advice I was getting was to sort of lay off people and make sure that we hunker down to weather the storm. But I saw an opportunity to build windmills, right? So I thought, well, we need to be there for our patients. We should be expanding into telehealth. And I need every team member to help me do that. And so we really went all in and supporting video visits. And our product engineering team redesigning the entire marketplace to support virtual care. And so we actually released the ZocDoc video service and we made the service available to any physician, whether they are on ZocDoc or not, for free.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So when the lockdown started happening, we saw in-person bookings declining anywhere between 50 to 90 percent by the end of March.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2019 was a fantastic year. And honestly, we had so much momentum coming into 2020. And it felt like, hey, we worked really hard for three years and it's profitable. And this guy was the limit until.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Within a year, we finally had some incredible momentum. It was really going better than we had expected in our wildest dreams. Our existing client churn went down to essentially zero. I mean, people still retire and move jobs, but no one really left the service. And we were adding more and more providers because the barrier to entry was low. And so in 2019, we began growing profitably.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so look, after the conversation with the dermatologist, I actually put down the phone and I thought, you know what, he's right. And so I pause and we regrouped. And we did a couple of critical things during this time. The first one is we just went on a listening tour. We talked to providers. We got their feedback. We just adjusted our transition plan to give providers a much longer grace period to decide whether they want to transition to the new model or not. And then so then we relaunched New York six months later and it went dramatically better.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you look in New York, we facilitate roughly one in five new patient doctor relationships in the entire city on ZocDoc. And so the economic impact for the providers in New York was much greater than for the providers in Georgia, Colorado, or Washington. Give you one example there's a dermatologist in Soho, and he paid under the old subscription model, he had 10 doctors, so he paid $30,000. And under the new pricing model, his cost was going to go up from $30,000 to roughly $340,000”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we didn't because we actually didn't see the doctors leave the way that we had anticipated. In fact, while we had very much worried that they would be upset, and some of them certainly were upset, we were providing so much value to them that one of them just said, you know what, what took you so long, I knew was getting a great deal all along. So that worked really well. And we had piloted it in Georgia initially in April 2018. And then that had worked. So we then rolled it out in Colorado a few weeks later. That worked too. And from there, we went to 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.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From a risk profile, worse than that, right? The worry is that you lose all your best customers. And with it, all the bookings that they used to be getting. And so we needed to be ready for a very significant drop in bookings and revenue. And the second challenge was here that the beauty of the subscription model is that we got all this money up front, right? Sure. And now to one where we're getting paid after the booking with a 30-day payment period. So we had a huge working capital requirement to make that happen.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Completely insane to us, and in particular because when we talk to other companies that had gone through similar changes and even pricing experts, their number one advice was make sure whatever you do never charge your best customers more. And for us it would be precisely the opposite. And the thing that was counterbalancing this in our mind was, well, maybe we'd be able to bring on a lot more doctors because the barrier to entry is now much lower. That was the back and forth in the team to figure out whether that's really the path we want to go.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little bit. We only charge for new patient booking, so the existing patients to a practice. We made free. But yes, that was the fundamental idea. And it sounds like such an obvious thing to do. But here was the problem with it and why we thought it was incredibly risky to try this. Our best customers that had been on for a very long time, they got lots of bookings. And if we start charging them per bookings, their prices Go up very significantly in some cases 10 times more. And that seemed”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, there's a couple of things about this, right? We are a technology company, but we had set ourselves up too much about execution and celebrating wins and really too little about being adaptable and learning and building the trust required to try things that had the risk of failure. And so one of the first things I did is to change our core values, to emphasize those behaviors, one of our values is adaptable, not comfortable. Another one is progress before perfection, learners before masters, right? And we only kept really one value constant, patience first. That was more of the culture that I thought was right for ZocDoc to succeed on many dimensions.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, look There were a number of articles in 2014-15. They didn't absolutely get everything right, but what I certainly can say is that at the time, Zock had a very large sales team and we were still scaling very quickly. Maybe it was too focused on hitting targets and not focus enough on creating a strong culture. I hear these stories from six years ago, from time to time from you now, from candidates. And really every time this happens, it's like a gut punch. Because we know we're a completely different company now on so many levels.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not at all, but I think you want to raise money from a position where you know what your alternative is. And for us, it wasn't clear that the business model would work in a way that we could just flip a switch and be profitable.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think the challenge is that it's not as if there was an analytical way to decide what the right path forward is. As long as investors wanted to give us money, growing at all costs was a fine strategy. The question was just how dependent you wanted to be on the continued goodwill of investors.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh look, I mean, we were very close. We're not only friends, we had worked for eight years building Zock together 14 hours a day. And we probably talked more to each other than to anyone else in our lives. But Saras and I are still in touch from time to time. And I think he's cheering us on from the sideline.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All I can say is it was a very hard and very emotional period for everyone involved. And it was certainly a departure. But it was also true that given these two divergent choices, you couldn't. Not both of us could be useful to Zog Dark.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, there were two fundamentally divergent ways how the business could go forward, right? One way was to continue to work on optimizing the unit economics of our subscription model. And the other way was to think about how to make a more transformative leap and find a new, more profitable and more sustainable model. Look, I can certainly understand the reluctance in taking this leap. Very few companies really change their underlying business model once they have a certain scale and then live to tell about it, right? We know the names of the companies that have done this. Netflix went from DVDs to streaming, Adobe Cloud, from box software to the cloud. But there's not a lot of That do that, and Docker needed to make a choice which direction wanted to go.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To make sort of the cost of the sales team back. And this was clear that this is what make us dependent on external capital for a very long time. And now I'd say clearly there are many companies that have taken sort of a grow fast at all costs approach. Held on to this for an extended period of time, but it clearly puts Octoc into a dependency to investors and their mindsets.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there were also doctors that got a lot fewer bookings. And for them that fixed costs was actually too expensive. And some of them were starting to leave the service. And so we got into a situation that required us to invest a lot, just stay where we are and then invest even more to continually grow our overall provider base, which means we had to build out a massive sales team to always sign up more doctors. And at some point during this time, Nick actually ran an analysis that showed that it would take us several years, if ever, for us to make our money back on May.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we charged doctors $3,000 a year. And that was a flat fee no matter how many bookings ZocTok actually facilitated for them. And the reality was for some doctors that got a lot of bookings, that was a great deal.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had launched New York successfully with years of hard work. We've gotten it off the ground. We've transported that to DC. It had worked well on DC. And now we said, well, why are we not in more cities? And so we actually raised a series B with Founders Fund and 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 then ended up raising a CGC in 2011 from Goldman and DST. And we primarily used this to grow our CLS team and sign up more and more doctors. And from 2011 till 2013, we launched roughly 30 new cities.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we obviously invested heavily in customer service. We wanted patients to have a great experience. And we had quite a sizable engineering team because that was actually a major engineering effort.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. We had a couple of sales reps at the time. In first, our very first employee ever was a sales rep. He's still with the company today. And he was great. He figured out how to really charm his way to the doctor. So there were no more security guards escorting anyone out.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they had given us this publisher clearinghouse size check, but they failed to give us the small check for a three month and we were getting really nervous whether we would still get it. But ultimately we got that $100,000. And that's what we used to launch in our second market in DC.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were promising a $100,000 prize. And at this time, we won. And you know what they did? They gave us one of these large publisher clearinghouse size checks and very useful actually. We used it to cover a hole in our only conference room. There was a hole in the wall and we covered it with that check.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At a minimum, right But we also realized that it took us a fair bit of time and money to get it going in New York and we couldn't with the money we had left from the 5 million easily expand into a new city. At the same time, raising money was going to be difficult because the next generation of investors wanted to see that it works in other cities as well. So we were a little bit in this catch-22. We ended up Applying to this force boost your business competition.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was very, very difficult to get someone to the website. But when they did, they loved it because it was such a step change from how healthcare used to work for them. They used to have to pick up the phone and wait on hold and then play scheduling tetras with the office manager. Can you do Wednesday morning? How about Thursday at noon? No, about Friday afternoon. And now they could do the same thing in a minute and have complete overview about the availability. Patients loved it and they told their friends. So we started to get the word of mouth going. And so we saw New York really ticking up and we felt like, okay, this is going to work in New York.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About startups never being able to raise money. Rest in peace, good times. So we got the strong advice to make the money stretch and we probably learned a lot during this time. This was really our first go round making hard choices and we learned to be frugal and not to do things we can't afford. And we learned to not let money replace critical thinking and creativity. But we continue to grind away at New York. And at some point, we felt, well, if we want to get to the next level, We have to prove that DocDoc isn't just a New York City phenomenon, right? We had to prove that it would work in a second city. But at that point, we didn't have the money to do this anymore.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Precisely these $5 million were literally earmarked for making New York work, make our first market work. But immediately after raising the money, the financial crisis hit, right? And you may remember there was this rest in peace memo that went around.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, interestingly enough, we had raised some money from friends and colleagues. And many of those, they invested in us business plan unseen, just based on the fact that we were giving up our careers at McKinsey to pursue ZOCTOC. So that felt really great. And as we started changing how we appeared and how we introduced ourselves to venture capitalists, we started to get offers. In August of 2008, we ended up raising $5 million from Coastlaw Ventures Business Expeditions, Mark Penioff”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. And we introduced ourselves not as MBAs and McKinsey consultants, but we introduced ourselves as previous entrepreneurs that are starting their next company.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, they were not pleaded. But after hearing that feedback, we very quickly just went to the next gap and bought jeans and t-shirts. And from then on, the convos with the VCs went a lot better.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sand Hill Road. We hit Sand Hill Road initially we weren't very successful at all. We got Polite nose and really no feedback until someone took us aside and told us, you know, what the idea seems good, but you're a consultant. And the perspective was that consultants can't get anything done. And what we realized is that even though we had both founded companies before our McKinsey pedigree and our khakis and button-down shirts, they were really hurting us. And so we went.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, that happened. So in the spring of 2008, we decided we should raise Series A. And we make the rounds, we get in front of a number of the big name VCs.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Many you summarize our sales challenge, right? It was very hard because even if you wanted to, we couldn't easily share how many patients their competitor down the road got. Like that was something that was confidential.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, 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 fix it, right? So I was our customer service. I personally would call the doctor and confirm the appointment was all said. And if it wasn't, I personally contacted the patient to let them know. 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 they were already in the subway to the doctor. And so I raised them to the doctor's office and picked up a bouquet of flowers on the way there and met them in person to apologize. And that was really a turning point where I said, well, this service has to work. And we need to have this patient's first attitude in terms of how it works, completely ingrained in the...”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm out next Friday. And then what does David do? Does he go into the calendar and block out next Friday? Or does he take a post-it note writes on a doctor out next Friday and sticks this to his monitor? And in the real world. These posted notes, of course, happen. But once you know that math is your friend and you can start filtering this out. And that's one example. There were literally a thousand point one solutions that we had to figure out to make this work.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was incredibly complicated to think the doctor's calendars with ours because none of the software was actually made to sync, where even in the places where we had things up and running, we would frequently get feedback that the appointment didn't happen because the doctor wasn't available. And we really couldn't figure out why this was the case because when we did screen shares with the office and we looked at their calendar and our calendar, it was identical and we couldn't figure out why that's happening. So I ultimately decided to sit next to the office manager. I went there and got to know him and his family. He showed me photos of his dog. I fixed the printer. I taught him better strategies to play minesweeper. Still couldn't figure it out until one day the doctor would come out and she'd say, hey, David.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we just kept going. We put up a huge map of Manhattan on the wall and then actually put little flags on it where the doctors were that we had on the website and which insurances they accepted. And we just knew that perseverance is the name of the game.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think we were obviously hoping that we would eventually get more bookings. And in the beginning, we probably refreshed the bookings report 100 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 ZocDog, it was even trickier, right? When you think about it, healthcare is hyper local 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 quite low. And so the best. Path forward was to methodically build up supply.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the hope, but it actually took three days before we got our first legitimate patient. And in this entire first month, we only got five bookings.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we flew out to San Francisco and so we launched OcToc in front of 800 900 people. A lot of them were journalists. When the judges opened up with feedback, Guy Kawazaki, who we knew and valued as an evangelist for Apple, he came out and just said he didn't get it. He would never use this. In front of everyone, right? 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 my brain. And what was worse is that he seemed to be right. We didn't get a single booking that day. We were hoping that this PR would get us our initial badge of users, right?”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the bits that Nick built looked awesome for the time, I think, and was quite impressive. We were very satisfied that we had a scroll bar, that we had a map, that we had back then already the insurance selector. And a lot of features that just weren't to be found really anywhere else.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we began with dentists Because our thinking was that people go to dentists most often and we wanted to make sure that we have an offering that is relevant for patients as often in their lives as possible.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He got a lot of nose. But he'd go there and he'd just simply not leave until he got a chance to speak to the doctor. And a few times he was even escorted out by security. I really think one in a million could have pulled this off.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, it is very, very hard to even speak to a doctor, right? They are being shielded, their time is very valuable, their office managers are trained not to let anyone talk to them to protect the doctor from people walking and selling them stuff. Then secondly, many didn't want to give up control over their calendar, which we asked them to do, right? We asked them to post times that a patient could book into it. And it was just a far-fetched idea for many of them that patients would actually do this”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT