Gadgetory

you I'm here in Soho now this neighborhood is usually known for shopping for fashion for lots of tourists but I'm here because of a very special building on Broadway which is home to a bunch of very famous New York tech companies startups like Foursquare Thrillist and ZocDoc which is a company I'm here to see this is a company that was started here in New York to tackle a really really tough industry healthcare and to revolutionize it by making it just as easy to set an appointment with your doctor as it is the order delivery and that story has now grown that company has now grown and it all began right here in New York City I'll get the next one I got a bunch of cameras hello I'm here to see Cyrus you guys either have very lacked security or you are expecting me more this is a lovely office you guys have here it'll be like an episode of cribs so Cyrus right off the bat thank you for taking the time building a company on the one hand is hard building a company in a sort of historically not tech-savvy industry as the health care profession is even harder so so how when you were getting this started why why did you even consider trying to go into such an industry that was not at the cutting edge and then how the hell did you do it my entire family is in health care and so I think at a very early age my parents are disappointed that I didn't want to be a doctor but I grew up with houses they grew up with health care all around me and so I understood the needs of I think doctors very acutely people traditionally prior to ZocDoc would always say doctors don't want to pay money for stuff and they're gonna be slow to adopt stuff and it's actually not true doctors are really very smart and they're only going to adopt things that make financial sense for their practices a lot of the technologies that people have tried to introduce to them may have been good for healthcare but it may not have worked economically for the practice and so it doesn't get adopted very quickly I think that we can all agree that the US healthcare system is fundamentally broken it's frustrating it's complicated and we at ZocDoc are doing our small part to fix the US healthcare system by making it simpler thank you very much of this opportunity great job great job another strong and a performances may be tough to give so many fifty thousand dollars I can tell you that honestly it would just never occur to me to go to any site to pick a doctor you go to a site and just oh you know Lisa McIntosh looks cute she went to Harvard I'll have her operate on my heart I mean from obviously from a heart condition that's a very unique issue but I can say that if you had a rash on your butt you probably would come to our site a because you wouldn't want to hear anyone making that call and B it might be after six o'clock and maybe the doctor's office isn't open okay yo man don't you end up the Kawasaki dude why don't you deposit this cheque if you look at the date this is the heart of the financial crisis that we won this competition we entered this competition with forbes.com it Forbes gives us 100k here's what we'll do we'll build a customer service team across the USA appointments will be made online from New York to LA so cast your vote for ZocDoc a company in rhyme will give you easier access to health care in no time and we actually use this money after we made New York successful we didn't really have extra money to very quickly launch into the next market and we weren't able to access investors because it was a financial crisis we use this money to expand ZocDoc outside of New York oftentimes we think about consumer apps right if you build a site like Reddit as long as you make it useful for a user there are a user right you have a sales cycle you actually have to call up a doctor and convince her she needs this so what like when you're a nobody no offense but you're just starting this company it's got a weird name ZocDoc like how do you cold call a doctor how do you get your first client so we went it was through pure grit I was the original sales person for ZocDoc so I have two other co-founders as I mentioned and I was responsible for selling the doctors during the day and I do QA on the website at night and basically we had a month before we were going to launch we started onboarding doctors and our goal was to get enough doctor said there would be a scroll our search results those and we only dislike there's plenty yeah we only had Dennis back then and so we started with Dennis in Midtown in downtown we ring the hyperlocal we're gonna get people near their work in Midtown in downtown and I remember it was a couple days of poor launch we only had maybe three or four or five dentists that were on the website and I didn't really have much of a scrollbar going on that was my one major strategic class people exactly so I back then I I spent six hours in one Medical one one dental practice trying to get five dentists on and I got them all on and it was literally I've been thrown out of other doctors offices in the past so so we launched me at least had a scroll bar that we were able to function correctly on the site and then I proceeded to sign on the next 50 doctors myself in that process I was probably thrown out of three doctors offices with security and I'm proud to say that every single one of those doctors now uses dot doc we're here in midtown visiting a doctor that's been using ZocDoc for a few years now he's sort of one of the OGS of the platform hello I'm here to see dr. Ramani oh yes of course that's good ah yeah about that I don't lovely office you guys have here all right thank you very much doctor will see me soon hello oh hey doctor just testing the equipment I've always wondered what the stuff uses this just show up in giant spools at the office we buy them by the case yeah ok then by the and what is how do you what do you call this table paper table painted okay okay I give you a purple ribbon to give thank you then this is my office where I am if I need to consult with patients or where I do all my work okay so you got a very lovely office here now how did you mean how do you first learn about ZocDoc I start getting faxes not get your name on axes faxes bats then cutting out is just started there's actually faxes huh and what I do with the fact is I do them out captain trying them out I probably got a dozen finally someone started calling me they said it's going to help your practice doc it's a small price if you don't like you can cancel at any time I say you know it doesn't hurt I'm moving when I moved to the new place I'll use your service yeah and when I moved to this office we started using it and you know immediately we noticed that there are a lot of benefits from it and today I'm still using it and really taking advantage of it interestingly the doctors are often not the people who are using the doctor facing that we call it doctor facing but it's really its receptionist its office managers they're used to the consumer web they're not necessarily used to like professional tools so you can trying to make it as easy to use and simple as as the consumer web without making it only a power user can use it I actually put on my business card please make your appointment via doctor there it is yeah that's true you know what so I actually put it on the card and sure enough my returning patients are using Java it didn't tie up the phones for my staffed everything would be made online patients will get reminders so myself doc patients actually show up all the time on time and if they need to cancel the cancel online so we get a quick pop-up window that it's cancelled so we are in are notified in advance so in that sense it really it was great art all right I think giving you a cut for all this free advertising you're giving them talk to someone I will change they don't but you know like we cyrus let him know yeah I feel so often and you can please please level with me when when building a product that has two phases one sort of consumer and one to the sort of user whatever that might be usually the the sort of internal not widely consumer facing side languishes because it's the afterthought right it's like let's make this good to the masses and we'll make these internal tools or these tools for users just sort of good enough yeah where that like that wasn't all of that so we've been here for Ally I mean the company's been around for like five years right so I've been here for only two years and it was kind of in that state when I when I until you showed up and figure it's not that but no it's like as the team grew we got enough bandwidth that we could you know isolate a team and be like alright now you have to improve this thing and make it awesome so that's what we're doing now I don't know we don't need to necessarily role play here but like so I'm a doctor I'm a dentist I'm spending most of my time you know just trying to make sure my patients are well along with running a business and managing employees everything else how do you convince me that this is worth me giving you money yeah so learning literally at the beginning it was me with the PowerPoint deck we didn't even have the website live and so that was the first thing I would doing you were sure you were pitching it before the site was even built yeah or live yet that's great because we had to do both concurrently in order to launch at this conference and that took me a lot you know I probably to get the first ten doctors I probably spoke to like several hundred and it just kept getting no after no after no but if you know something about sort of how the conviction we had this is the future this is like the way that everyone's can be booking their healthcare appointments and people would latch on with that and you know there's a certain sub segment where they really love that idea so it took us three years to really get to the point where everyone thought that sock-doc we owned who would succeed in our heart of hearts and we had this conviction we powered through but it took us three years to really prove it to the outside world and then there's only been for the last two and a half years that everyone says I wish I thought of that for the first private three years people wishing you know they'll get out of my office at my office if we never we never go away finding a doctor isn't ulti getting an appointment in the timely manner seems to be even more difficult than that but there's that for that now there's not for that there's an app for that there's now an app for that zOC dock dock dock dock dock dock dock dock dock dock dock dock dock dock dock dock dock dock dock dock dock dock dock dock you know the great thing about these apps is that they're in our phones so they're always with us kind of like our tissues oh right so what is this three years running cranes best place to work in New York three years in the row we've made the cranes best places to work list this past year we were in the big fortune top 50 best places to work in America list and second year in a row best place to work in healthcare and so it's something we really pride ourselves on you know we're not lavishly putting Aeron chairs throughout our offices etc a lot of our furnitures refurbished we bought it we got it for free and so it's not about like how much money we spend on the actual physical infrastructure of the space it's really about what we do to enhance people's lives number-16 best small places to work in America from Fortune magazine so who are the other 15 ma'am I don't know yeah gotta crush them yes but surely it has to be more than just handing out some beers and playing ping pong like any a lot of companies do that but they aren't winning back-to-back Awards so we what what else when there was a hurricane hurricane sandy came put a lot of our employees out of a place to fight to live we found homes places basically for all of our employees who were displaced and we actually made sure we found every single employee there was one employee who actually was went missing and I went with my co-founder we actually found her during the aftermath of hurricane and so that was something that they know we really care about everyone that works here lots of startups talk about hey you're never more than a few feet from a snack but it's usually not that healthy a lot of candy a lot of chips whatever you guys have one of the healthiest walls of food that I've seen that a start-up and it really it shows you guys really do believe in you know being well eating well and all that other good stuff we feel as though improving people's health is something that's paramount to our brand and so we're gonna give away snacks you want to get away healthy snacks and try to make our lunches as healthy as we can with salads except for folks if I came to you and I said listen I really want there to be a hidden cache of snack junk foods because all this healthy stuff is great and I know it's good for me but sometimes I just want to eat in a hundred Snickers bars many think you're always welcome to go out and get what kind of food you want yeah you guys really do care I mean one of our healthy granola bars of chocolate in them does that count a little a little I don't I string cheese yeah maybe if it were covered in chocolate so if you rewind a little bit in my professional history I started my career in tech and so Raab College I work for a software company and then a year out I started my first Internet company that I ran for three years I learned a lot of what not to do mean the company had a great premise which is we made software for e-commerce companies to help them manage their e-commerce returns and back then no one really cared about managing returns effectively they didn't care about customer service like they do today they're very oriented around only focusing on top-line so it was very difficult for us to sign up the initial sets of e-commerce companies and then the commerce bubble burst and all the e-commerce guys wanted business so it was really tough and I think recovering from failure was one of the most difficult things I ever had to do in my life and I end up going to grad school spent some years at McKinsey and I knew that I wanted to go back in to something entrepreneurial but I didn't know what it was clearly the entrepreneurial spirit was still there clearly it was just waiting for the right thing but how did you go about evaluating what the hell you were gonna do so the first thing is I had to I was living in Austin Texas at the time and I was a 25 year old failed CEO and I remember actually what I did is first I wanted to revert the maturity like there was weight on me a lot no I had 35 very close friends that were working with me and I had not been successful and I feel like I failed them and I put so much everything I had into this first company and I remember I went out I was out with some friends and literally they were I think they're even older than me and someone asked why they brought their dad out because I think it looks so so just like whether in Encino does age and so I went I went backpacking across rural China for six months and I literally wanted to just shed that old responsibility and sort of start from the beginning and that's sort of what led me to grad school and then Mackenzie and the night you know I felt like I had that aha moment and I had to jump in all the way as the guy who created the Hipmunk chipmunk and the reddit alien like I think a lot about building brands and branding and your two adorable cartoon doctors must have a story right these are ollie and be there maybe after my co-founder his wife Oliver and Vita and we thought that it was a great way to humanize what ZocDoc that was about and we're friendly brand and you know these are very friendly doctors when I and I think it does really matter because most people are used to you know having pretty sterile online experiences with anything related to medicine like it's either the awful stock photo of the doctor with the stethoscope or just like it just feels janky there's no other way to describe that's how we started about three years ago we redesigned the site and we literally introduced the cartoon characters we did a couple of tests to see what people responded to well we all will for all AMD to sort of wind a be test I'm not sure if our developers may have just like rigged the test so they would win but we haven't looked back and they've been a cool part of what we've done we always think about how we can replace repetitive tasks with software one of the common ones that I as a patient always forget is like oh yeah every syncs six months I got to get my teeth cleaned every year I got to go for a physical software makes this trivial I don't need to remember no one in your office needs to remember I just get a notification how important is that preventive medicine how important is getting those checkups for maintaining our long-term health I actually was born and raised in Japan and Japan preventive care is very important to the point that you can't go to work on January 1 unless you've done your previous year's annual physical what the company requires it so I grew up in Japan with the thinking that we all have to go for annual physical every year they come here there are many people I've seen as patients I haven't had a physical for 20 years I've never had a physical which for me it's mind-boggling you get a physical yeah when you're young you're probably healthy but later on you will probably detect something that you're going to get eventually early on get it early on you get a couple warnings you can avoid pills medication getting admitted to hospital so it does make a difference what stops you from getting complacent when you feel like all right we really know we're doing we treat our customers very well we treat you know we've built this this startup that has now achieved you know a certain amount of success by no means done but how do you keep everyone hungry how do you stay hungry so we're as I mentioned before we're a mission driven organization and there's a big problem United say it's healthcare in my opinion is the problem of our generation and something that people are not aware of is that there's a huge shortage of doctors and that people expect not just the United States but worldwide in the next 10 years I think that there'll be a shortage of about 150,000 doctors in the United States you have the baby boomer doctors that are retiring you have other countries that were previously economically not as vibrant that are becoming more vibrant where the doctors would normally never great the United States they're staying there we're not producing more doctors in the United States we actually don't actually graduate enough doctors to satiate the demand that we have so we need influx of physicians it's a huge issue and it's one that I know that we can solve and we by no means have solved it every doctor in America is not yet on ZocDoc every patient in America does not yet know about ZocDoc and yet they're waiting on average because of the shortage of doctors if you look at Massachusetts where they've had similar health care reform then we've had unites the rest of the United States they had it since 2006 and it is spike a five hundred thousand patients right as a result of the new health care reform laws we have a spike of thirty million new patients the United States coming you spike demand you haven't even spiked supply and you have these other things that are really harming supplies there's all this and balance and people are waiting in Massachusetts 60 days to see a doctor like people are dying as a result of that like literally if you can't get into the doctrine you need one there's lots of things that going to get regular preventative health care if you just do it routinely they're going to prevent you from from from passing away and and we're not we have the potential to solve all these problems and we haven't done it yet and so to be honest I feel guilty that we're not nationwide in every single doctor's office yet and and that's what drives us because ultimately this is good for health care it's it's our way of changing one part of the health system and making sure the access is solved across the country you know Steve Huffman and I started reddit right out of college and that's sort of the typical idea that we have for startup founders but you know ultimately there is no blueprint we met a guy in Cyrus who started sockdoc years after starting and failing his first company after getting an NBA after even working at McKinsey and so it just goes to show that it takes a lot of hustle takes a lot of cold calls and cold faxes but it can happen it is happening as software is eating the world and really really the question is you know what the hell are you waiting for Clif bars good for a hike just like skittles Luna yeah introduce you to my friend Reese's Annie's cheddar bunnies yeah meet the tiger actually where's your leopard no cheetah right Snickers better Oh the doctors pay a monthly fee the gave you patients and they're happy in four cities and then stir on the growing fast Mazel Tov Zach doc what a funny name