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

“There was a lot of walking involved. We launched in Manhattan, so you can literally go down the street and you see. The science, and you walk in.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, showing them a PowerPoint page. And this is really a testament to Cyrus' sheer will and determination. If you think about what it means to really start a company early on, there's nothing to show, right? Maybe you have a PowerPoint, but there's no website, there's no patience, there's no other doctors, no social proof. And it has to run on passion. And I was very clear that that is Cyrus' superpower”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With doctors, right? So we actually debated for a few hours whether we should even try to go for that. But we ultimately said, yes, we can get the website working. And we wanted to have enough doctors just to have a scroll bar so it wouldn't look pathetic. And so Nick and I coded night and day. And Nick really busted his butt. He did the patient facing side of the website. And that was the programming side, what was potentially even harder because we were trying to launch a marketplace was to actually get the initial supply on there. And remember, the website wasn't there yet. So Cyrus ended up going door to door for doctors' offices.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a startup competition. And we were the first class of this. It was much less known. We budgeted two hours to fill in the application and really, we just sent it off. We didn't think about it. We'd have to be ready by September 18th. That was three months sooner than we had originally planned to launch.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we worked out of respective apartments many times. We came to Nikki at the nicest apartment and we could bring my breakfast burrito and wake him up. And the reality is that we originally had a pretty ambitious launch plan, right? So we got together around July. We wanted to launch by December of 2007. But then something interesting happened where Nick sent an email suggesting to look at what was then called TechCrunch 40. And TechCrunch is one of the now household name. But the draw for us back then was there was a $50,000 prize.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, look, I think in many ways you couldn't have built it much earlier. In the early days when we went out there, we were the ones installing internet in the doctor's offices. They were many times just migrating from paper books to scheduling systems. We were sort of at the cusp of digitization for healthcare and we were just lucky in our timing to get this right and start offering the service when that also happened.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Imagine if that happened half the planes would fly empty. It would be a massive pain. And that was exactly the state of healthcare.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no meaning behind it. And in hindsight, that was precisely the right thing to do because it really was a blank slate for us to fill with meaning and really build a brand around. There were exactly zero search results for ZockDoc when we started it. And it resonated, right? Like once you know that it takes more than three weeks from picking up the phone and dialing for doctors till you actually see someone, you realize, oh, there's really not much else that we have to wait so long for to get. And this is more important than most of these other things where you already have fantastic access modes, right? If you imagine if air travel worked the way that healthcare works, there wouldn't be an expedia. There wouldn't even be a delta.com. There would be individual phone numbers for every plane.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not initially. We went through several phases on what the right name could be. For a while, we wanted to have a descriptive name. So we looked at physicians.com and doctors.com and we actually tracked down the owners of one of these domains and they wanted several million dollars for the domain name and we were funding the company ourselves so that was completely out of the question so then we just sat in a room and we brainstormed a list of 50 or 100 names and then started eliminating names until we arrived at Zogduck.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a company that they both previously worked at together. And Nick just brought a totally different perspective and really educated Cyrus on me on a lot of things. And he was really the one who understood building a seamless experience for the consumer. And in many ways, Nick was sort of ZockDoc's early genius.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely not. So I had coded, but at that point I had really not touched a computer for a long time. We knew we need to have a technical co-founder. And so Cyrus knew a guy named Nick Ganju from the time together Trilogy Software”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody's gonna know the story. Yeah, I had enough money to live off for several years. But I also, Cyrus and I both financed the company early on out of our own savings. So that clearly diminished how much money we had left over after that.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I very deliberately had never raised my living standard to the money that they were paying me at McKinsey. And I had saved every dime so that I could be in a position where I can fund this and where I can afford not to take a salary for a couple of years.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone told us we're crazy. And we got a lot of negative feedback on the idea too, right? People would say this just won't work. I would never pick my doctor on the internet or I already have a doctor or doctors wouldn't accept patients that are looking on the internet. There were all kinds of projections that people had when they were thinking about their own situation. When you talk to people in Starbucks, they actually thought about it much more positively. So we were encouraged enough to say, well, this is going to work as long as we get out of our circle. And if you don't ask McKinsey consultants and doctors, the response will be better.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The PowerPoint was just what we thought this website would look like and we would ask them, is this a service that resonates with you? Would you use it? And we got incredibly valuable feedback here and really set us in many ways on the right track.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, I think there was a lot less rejection on this than you might think. People are actually quite open. I'd sort of suggest you try this out, but if you're unthreatening and look harmless as we probably did, then they will be pretty open.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was weeks. What we started doing is actually mocking up the site and how we imagined it back then in PowerPoint and just a image of a website, a wireframe, exactly. We would go to Starbucks and we'll chat up strangers and say, hey, here's a $5 gift card. Give me your thoughts.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you go through the four criteria that I had, right, it's a great mission, right? We're making one of the most personal needs more accessible for patients. We can help the patients to get in faster. We can help the doctors become more efficient. We can make the entire healthcare system more cost effective, give people out of the emergency room, things like that. And it's a marketplace. So there's a strong mode. And clearly anything in healthcare is a large market. And I think the contrarian insight that we had was the fact that, yeah, like most people thought it's normal that people have to wait 24 days to see a doctor because there's a doctor shortage. And our insight was really that no doctors have. Last minute availability because of these last minute cancellations, no shows, reschedules. And so I felt very good about this idea.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we both very quickly realized the potential of this idea from working at Project McKinsey. We knew that health systems were actually spending millions of dollars for marketing to grow their patient base because they had wasted inventory. They had something that I like to call hidden supply, which is these last minute cancellations, no-shows reschedules that go to waste. And then on the other hand, there were the patients who had a hard time accessing this.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we kind of fell in love with this new idea that came about at one of these lunches where Cyrus told me about how he had recently ruptured his eardrum while flying with a cold. And then he found it very difficult to actually find a doctor. And he had asked people for recommendations and he had called down his insurance directory listing, started with the A's and some of these doctors weren't accepting new patients. Some no longer accepted his insurance. One provider actually had passed away. And so he said, well, why? Does it take me four days to see a doctor when I'm in pain? And why can't this be much easier?”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it was absolutely an option. The reality is that we had both founded companies before McKinsey, and we both knew that we wanted to do it again. And Cyrus was always great about being very honest rather than just nice. And I value that a lot.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's American, yes. But that closeness in how we work together, that really started a friendship and we stayed close after the study. We caught up over lunch pretty regularly to bounce different business ideas of one another. And, you know, I think we connected. Because we had similar interests on some levels, we were equally passionate about what we were doing, Cyrus' passion was more visible to others than mine, but we had worked close enough together that we both accepted the other as an individual that we could learn a lot from.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“while we got put on a study together that required us to travel globally. And if you've ever done that, it meant for us we were 16, 18 hour days together for three, four, five month on end. And we really got to become great partners in that. And what we realized is that we had some very complementary skills. Cyrus is one of the most charismatic and gregarious individuals you'd ever meet. He's very passionate. He could be more forceful, which sometimes was needed to be effective with clients. And you've talked to me now for a little bit, as you can probably tell. I'm more dispassionate and logical and more measured. I'm more German in many ways, right? That also sometimes was effective with clients, right?”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is actually very hard to find good ideas. And my definition of a good idea was that it needed to have a great mission. I wanted to make sure that we actually do something good and that we stay true to sort of talent brings responsibility. But I also wanted it to be a large market and to have a great mode around it. And also I wanted it to be based on a contrarian insight because I thought that all of the best companies have that at its core.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Follows everyone around me, I would have to be dramatically better and really work much, much harder than anyone else. And so that really induced a very strong worth ethic in me.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I didn't have a second identity. We only spoke German at home. And yet, as you say, I was also not always fully accepted. So if I give you an example, my school, there were 1,200 students and you could pick out two that didn't look like everyone else. And I was one of them, right? And even an enlightened country like Germany, that is noticeable. I had what I call a visual accent where people would see me on the street and they would ask me how I learned to speak German so well. But they also, it's cool, it skipped my name when reading out scores because they weren't sure how to pronounce my last name. And I had opportunities taken away and even was physically threatened. So I think that really shaped me in many ways because I realized very early that in order to be as”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For me, it really starts in some ways with my dad and the time he grew up and yet had every reason to become a social activist. And so he came to Germany from the Middle East when he was very young, around 20 and with no money in his pocket, no language skills. And I personally then worked a lot of odd jobs, but he eventually became a psychiatrist. But what has really shaped me much more than being born in Berlin is this social activism that I saw him live and that he really made our family mantra. We always talked about talent brings responsibility and sort of the need to use whatever talent we had to help those around us that we can and make a difference.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He got a lot of nose. 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
“Death is selling to doctors is one of the hardest things to do Well, first of all, the office managers are trained to protect the doctor from people walking and selling them stuff”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cyrus ended up going door to door for doctors' offices, actually showing them a PowerPoint page. And this is really a testament to Cyrus' sheer will and determination.”
2020-08-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT