Unavoidable Collisions: Dr. Oliver Kharraz of Zocdoc

Trace Dr. Oliver Kharraz’s successes back just a few years and you’ll find a trail of chaotic failures, pivots, and lawsuits worthy of a corporate thriller. Keep going and you’ll find a family dynasty of physicians that stretches into the early 1700s.

What does it mean to succeed in healthcare for Oliver, CEO of Zocdoc? In the inaugural episode of Commons Healthcare, journalist Britta Lokting (The New York Times, VICE, Rolling Stone) follows the threads connecting past to present, offering a triangulated view of the physician and entrepreneur behind one of healthcare’s most well-known companies.

Chapter markers

00:00 · The Call Before It All: A no-name, no-audience podcast secures its first subject

04:15 · At Zocdoc HQ: Journalist Britta Lokting meets with the Zocdoc executive team

09:30 · Talent Brings Responsibility: The Kharraz family tree and the clues from his youth

14:10 · Business Model Implosion: Examining Zocdoc’s brutal setbacks

20:58 · Start of a New Era: Oliver’s ascent and Zocdoc’s renaissance

28:04 · Brushes With Death: Thoughts on legacy follow a car crash and his father’s passing

Key quotes

“At our very launch, Guy Kawasaki said, ‘I would never, ever consider finding a doctor on a website.’ That, from the core evangelist of Apple, was obviously a hard thing to hear.”

— Dr. Oliver Kharraz, CEO | Zocdoc

“This is not the Oliver Kharraz show. This is Zocdoc, an institution that should go on doing what we determine is right a long time after I can no longer contribute.”

— Dr. Oliver Kharraz, CEO | Zocdoc

“Most people aren’t very good at difficult things. Most people are bad at them and run away … but if you didn’t and you said, ‘No, I’m gonna do this hard thing,’ that’s a more unusual thing, and so we created a whole company culture around that.”

— Richard Fine, Chief Business Officer | Zocdoc

Credits

Reporter: Britta Lokting
Audio production: Joe Steptoe and Anthony Dionne
Hosts: Tom Castles and Jack Murtha
Executive producer: Christie Chisholm
Sound engineer: George Steptoe
Editor: Mark R.
Head of growth: Wynn Hansen

Resources & links

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Transcript

TOM CASTLES: My leg’s twitching. It happens before every call. Every time it’s my turn to persuade someone to see things my way, there goes the leg. The truth is, I’m a reluctant sales guy. I never particularly loved asking people for things, and today, exactly 30 seconds from now, that’s what I gotta do.

Today, I’ve gotta convince Jess Aptman, chief communications officer at Zocdoc, that Commons Healthcare, which in this moment I’m describing, doesn’t exist, doesn’t have an audience, doesn’t even have its name yet—I’ve gotta convince her that this podcast is worth several hours of Oliver Kharraz’s precious time. Oliver is the CEO of Zocdoc, a company that helps patients book doctor’s appointments online. Oliver could spend hours of his time and hours of his executives’ time with us on this upstart, no-name podcast, or he could get back to running his roughly 1,500-person, household-name company. Well, here goes nothing.

TOM CASTLES: So that’s really it. What do you think? Is this a story we can tell together? Is this something you wanna do?

JESS APTMAN: I think it’s interesting. I mean, full transparency, we get a lot of podcast interview requests. Send me your materials. I wanna take it back to chat with the team, but intrigued and open to considering.

TOM CASTLES: Now, it’s important to point out that we knew Jess kind of well at this point. A few years prior, we’d worked on two small projects with her team, but please note that Zocdoc is not a client, didn’t pay us to produce this episode, and has no say over anything you’re hearing today. So when Jess said, “Send me your materials,” I figured all was lost.

But two months and four meetings afterward, our request snaked through the Zocdoc machine and made it to Oliver’s desk. On Jess’s advice, he was in. So were several of his closest confidants at the company: Jess for one, along with chief business officer Richard Fine and chief strategy officer Alex Doyne. About a week before going live with this episode, I asked Jess what made her want to pull the trigger.

JESS APTMAN: You were really passionate about the idea, and this type of storytelling doesn’t really exist, so we think it should.

TOM CASTLES: And now it does.

TOM CASTLES: I’m Tom Castles.

JACK MURTHA: And I’m Jack Murtha.

TOM CASTLES: And this is Commons Healthcare.

JACK MURTHA: Commons Healthcare is the podcast where we investigate what it means to succeed in healthcare.

TOM CASTLES: It’s all to help healthcare leaders like you build a career that’s successful by any measure, especially yours.

JACK MURTHA: If you like what we’re doing here, please rate, subscribe, and review, and sign up for our newsletter, Healthcare People, so you never miss our behind-the-scenes stories and ideas, straight from the journalists and the leaders they cover.

TOM CASTLES: Today on the podcast, we profile Oliver Kharraz, the CEO of Zocdoc.

JACK MURTHA: Oliver built a healthcare company that has done something so few have, and that’s survive the boom and bust cycles of the last 20 years.

TOM CASTLES: Like anyone who tries to build something new, Oliver has found himself on the ropes. He’s caught haymakers from the market, from regulators, even from his own customers and colleagues. The outlook has often been dire, and the end has often been near. He even survived a head-on collision in the Italian mountains.

JACK MURTHA: And yet Oliver and Zocdoc remain.

TOM CASTLES: For Oliver Kharraz, what does it mean to succeed?

JACK MURTHA: Our friend Britta Lokting, whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, VICE, and more, has the story.

BRITTA LOKTING: On the morning after Labor Day, I walked to the 68th Street station near my apartment on the Upper East Side and got on a downtown 6 train.

I work from home, so I’m not used to the craziness of the morning commute in New York City. I forgot how crowded and stressful it can be. Masses of people filed on and off at every stop: Grand Central, 33rd, Union Square. People stared at their phones, listened to music, and squeezed through the closing doors. It felt like we were all getting back to work, like summer was over.

After 10 stops, I exited the subway, climbed the stairs, and found myself staring down Broadway. I was flanked by old industrial lofts that are now home to just about every brand store and flagship shop you can imagine: Uniqlo, Prada, Nike. This was SoHo.

Amid this commercial activity, I found the Prince Building, the 12-story mid-rise built in 1897 that houses the Zocdoc headquarters. The Prince Building seemed glamorous at first, until I walked inside the dark lobby and saw one of the elevators was broken. A line of impatient people formed behind me, and we waited 10 minutes before the working lift arrived.

A slow, rickety ride took me to the ninth floor, where I entered an open-plan workspace. With its industrial vibe, it felt a bit cookie-cutter, more like the offices of a startup than a digital health company that’s been around for almost 20 years. But then an assistant led me into a corner conference room, and I sucked in my breath. The panoramic views of downtown Manhattan were insane. Even though this was only the ninth floor, I was looking out over dozens of buildings with no obstruction in sight. Plus, it happened to be a clear, sunny day, so maybe this was the pinnacle of success after all, up here in the sky with One World Trade glinting in the distance.

So Zocdoc has been headquartered in this building since 2010, just three years after the company was founded in 2007. Oliver co-founded Zocdoc with early partners Cyrus Massoumi and Nick Ganju. As Cyrus once told The New York Times, “I met my co-founder, Oliver Kharraz, a medical doctor, while I was with McKinsey. We got to know each other better when we were flying back and forth from Europe every week for about six months. We struck up a friendship. I ran my Zocdoc idea by him, and the rest is history.”

The early days were full of experimentation and invention.

JESS APTMAN: I remember thinking, “This feels like a really big group project, like a school project,” and everyone was really proud. I think Zocdoc was driving a lot of the innovation at the time.

BRITTA LOKTING: That’s Jess Aptman, Zocdoc’s chief communications officer, who you met in the intro. She’s been with the company since 2012 after being a patient herself.

JESS APTMAN: I booked a dentist on Zocdoc maybe a year or two before. I was like, “This is smart. What a great idea.”

BRITTA LOKTING: When she joined, Zocdoc only had about 100 employees and was live in just a handful of markets, maybe three cities or so, Jess explained. The goal was to bring Zocdoc to as many new cities and patients as possible.

Back then, everyone was rolling up their sleeves and digging in. Today, things aren’t all that different. Jess remains one of a handful of Zocdoc executives with decade-plus tenures in Oliver’s inner circle. Now, nearly 20 years after the company’s founding, they’re spearheading the latest in a long series of company-wide pivots, several of which we’ll examine soon. The big idea this time around? Reposition Zocdoc as healthcare access infrastructure. The move decentralizes patient bookings from the Zocdoc marketplace so people can book appointments anywhere they seek care, including places like Yelp and in LLMs like Google’s Gemini.

I was eager to understand Oliver. Were all these pivots indicators of success or failure? Was Zocdoc a household name because of or in spite of his leadership? I followed the threads as far as they’d go.

Oliver grew up in Germany, one of six kids who represented the latest generation in a 300-year family tradition of becoming doctors. That was a lot of pressure. Here he is.

OLIVER KHARRAZ: I think the defining experience for me growing up was that both of my parents were idealists, and they raised us with this idea that talent brings responsibility. That was not just something they said. They did not just say, “Hey, for 300 years, your ancestors have been doctors.” They made that something that we could really feel.

BRITTA LOKTING: This idea that talent brings responsibility is a refrain for Oliver because his parents, in particular his dad, a neurologist and psychiatrist in Germany, made it a family mantra when Oliver was growing up. Oliver’s dad instilled in the kids that talent wasn’t just a trait you could sit on passively. You had to use it for good.

OLIVER KHARRAZ: My father turned our house into a hospital. People would write to him, or he would find people that needed care that were not located in Germany, and he would put them up in our house and find them the right doctors.

BRITTA LOKTING: All of this created competition within the family.

OLIVER KHARRAZ: I never wanted to be the low tide to this flood of achievement that came before me.

BRITTA LOKTING: Oliver’s older brother became a physician, following the well-trodden path. But young Oliver exhibited a range of interests: math, science, physics, philosophy, politics. Soon, his home life became unstable. His parents went through a rocky divorce, and Oliver’s grades suffered as a result.

OLIVER KHARRAZ: When I got my final report for the year, I knew that I had to change something, and I began really directing myself. I didn’t want to depend on anyone else, based on the experience that I— and what I had observed during that divorce.

BRITTA LOKTING: He began to chart his own course during this time, eager to step out from under the weight of familial pressures. In high school, he traveled to the US for the first time to study abroad. He lived with a host family in California, a step that nurtured his growing independence. To get his grades back on track, he told me he set his alarm for 4:00 a.m. every morning, studied until late at night, and sometimes dunked his feet in ice water to stay awake.

OLIVER KHARRAZ: Hard work is an acquired skill that allows you to have agency in your life in a way that just doing whatever is put in front of you next doesn’t cut it.

BRITTA LOKTING: A trip across the world wasn’t enough to outgrow his family’s legacy.

OLIVER KHARRAZ: Now, even after that, I still went through med school, and I was incredibly interested in medicine. I still remember reading physiology books. Gives me goosebumps when I consider how the body is constructed and how refined the mechanisms are that make us all work. So I don’t regret anything, but it did— I felt empowered both through my experience as sort of salvaging my school career on my own.

BRITTA LOKTING: I want to pause here to say that Oliver is being fairly candid with me, or at least seems quite chill and willing to answer my questions. Insights from our pre-reporting and tips from his team suggested that he could be pretty reserved, buttoned up, and not super willing to go deep into his personal life. Employees even told me he’s intensely German and likes to joke that he doesn’t have emotions.

I could see where they were coming from, but this was clearly a human being. We weren’t just talking shop or running through scripted talking points. I was getting to know Oliver. I asked his execs what it’s like to work with him. They kept telling me how he liked others to challenge him, to push back or direct him when necessary, how straightforward he is. Here’s Jess Aptman.

JESS APTMAN: One of the first things I tell people when we hire them and they’re gonna work closely with Oliver is never compliment him. Never tell him, “Good job.” Never tell him, “That was great.” He’s very sensitive to flattery.

RICHARD FINE: If you compliment Oliver, his skin crawls.

BRITTA LOKTING: That’s Richard Fine, Oliver’s chief business officer. At first, hearing his top execs repeat these lines seemed like its own form of flattery, a way to paint Oliver as modest. But then Oliver walked into the conference room.

Before we began the interview, I asked him to speak over the microphone, not into it, as people are apt to do. I assumed he’d probably heard these directions a dozen times. “I know you’ve done this before,” I said, but Oliver insisted.

OLIVER KHARRAZ: No, no. Tell me, tell me.

BRITTA LOKTING: This response, however small, tracked with how people described him: that he often took a back seat, letting others talk and brainstorm and figure out problems on their own, that he wanted to hear from other people first. Jess described his leadership style as “Socratic.”

OLIVER KHARRAZ: I’ve curated a team around me that tells me when they think I’m wrong.

BRITTA LOKTING: But there’s a balance in all this, right? Accepting counsel is wise, but you still have to be decisive to lead. At times, Richard told me, that’s been a difficult balance for Oliver to strike.

RICHARD FINE: At the extreme end, you could imagine a world where you just say, “We’re gonna do this big, giant thing,” and then everybody knows exactly what to do individually in their place, and that’s sort of unrealistic as a hope.

But Oliver didn’t wanna do the other thing, which is, “Everybody do exactly this, this individual thing ’cause I’ve planned it all out for you, and you have to do this, and you do exactly these things in this way.” And so how to create the right situation for different setups has been a journey for him, and I think in early, he wanted to believe that he could really step back and just let everybody do their own things, and I think that didn’t work out.

BRITTA LOKTING: Before we get to the part where Oliver pisses off a legion of his most loyal customers and almost kills his own company, you should know a bit more about his dad. After Oliver got a master’s in philosophy, a PhD, and his MD, he went to work for McKinsey. He wanted to learn about business, a huge departure from the career in medicine that he’d been pursuing in Germany, the career his family wanted him to pursue. His dad didn’t approve of the change.

Oliver told me his father is his hero, but he also imposed high expectations on his children. I could sense an undercurrent of tension, like Oliver was trying to forge his own path while adhering to his dad’s expectations. I wondered if it was possible to do both.

OLIVER KHARRAZ: The main friction with my family was actually leaving the academic career and joining McKinsey, which was something that my father really regretted, and it was a topic of conversation for a few years. Zocdoc was, in some ways, a little bit of a path back to that.

BRITTA LOKTING: But Oliver’s dad was skeptical of Zocdoc, and he wasn’t the only one. Big players in the startup space sowed doubt, too.

OLIVER KHARRAZ: At our very launch, Guy Kawasaki said, “I would never, ever consider finding a doctor on a website.” That, from the core evangelist of Apple, was obviously a hard thing to hear. And initially, it looked like he was right. In the entire first month of Zocdoc, we got five bookings. Five. And three of those were from competitors that were just trying to figure out how the site works.

JACK MURTHA: Jack Murtha here. So, remember how we said at the beginning that Zocdoc got off to a shaky start? The issue, as Oliver told Britta, is that the problem they set out to solve was much harder than they thought. It was very difficult for the stars to align so that patients were able to find an available doctor in their preferred zip code who also took their insurance. Over time, early growing pains turned into serious, business-threatening problems. Making money, for one thing, plagued Zocdoc. When Alex Doyne, the current chief strategy officer, interviewed for a job in 2013, Oliver was looking for someone to tackle this issue.

TOM CASTLES: And Tom Castles chiming in here. The business model then, when the company initially launched, was subscription-based. Every doctor paid a flat fee per month to join the service. No matter how many patients Zocdoc referred to their practice, everyone had to pay the same amount.

JACK MURTHA: So, kicking it back to you, Britta: Did that work?

BRITTA LOKTING: It didn’t work. Here’s Alex, Zocdoc’s CSO, explaining the issue to me.

ALEX DOYNE: It doesn’t matter if you get one more patient or 1,000 more patients. They make the same, the company makes the same amount of revenue. And Oliver’s like, “Well, that’s the problem, so we’re gonna change that.”

BRITTA LOKTING: For Alex, hearing Oliver say this before he’d been hired was pretty surprising.

ALEX DOYNE: It’s very rare to interview at the company where the person recruiting you tells you that the foundational business model underlying the company is inherently broken.

BRITTA LOKTING: But it also signaled to Alex how Oliver operates during hard times. He admits he’s wrong. That’s a first step towards self-correction, but in this case, it still wasn’t enough. By 2015, two years after hiring Alex, Zocdoc was losing money on every sale. That year, Oliver hired Richard Fine, now the company’s chief business officer, as VP of marketing.

RICHARD FINE: And I got here and sat in my first exec meeting and was like, “Oh my goodness, the last thing we need right now is marketing,” ’cause the business didn’t really work.

OLIVER KHARRAZ: We had to change our regulatory approach. We had to change our product. We had to resell every single doctor that was already on the platform, and we had to do it reasonably quickly because we were going to run out of money.

BRITTA LOKTING: This despite the fact that Zocdoc had raised $130 million in funding and was valued by that point at $1.8 billion. But there was a serious discrepancy between the company’s public image and its P&L. Zocdoc was a health tech unicorn and a media darling, but the company was unprofitable and bleeding cash.

JESS APTMAN: How do you tell 1,000 people that your business model is not really working, and that we need to totally change what we do to get to a better future?

BRITTA LOKTING: In Jess’s words, this meant, “Go pretty loud internally, but pretty quiet externally.”

TOM CASTLES: Jack and I want to jump in for a minute here, because there was a lot going on behind the scenes during this period. In 2015, as Zocdoc was trying to balance being on fire with putting out fires, things got even more complicated.

The board of directors removed Cyrus Massoumi, the Zocdoc co-founder and then CEO, who’d befriended Oliver during their McKinsey days, and replaced him with Oliver the next day, who, until that point, had been chief operating officer. Five years later, in 2020, Cyrus filed a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court that painted Oliver and others as scheming and unfair. Cyrus alleged that he was pushed out and removed from the building in what he called a coup before he could, quote, “exercise stock options that would have given him control of the company,” according to the filing.

JACK MURTHA: Now, the lawsuit is all public information. Zocdoc has called it, quote, “meritless,” and they have also addressed the allegations on their website.

TOM CASTLES: The courts agreed. They dismissed the lawsuit, and now the case is closed.

JACK MURTHA: And Oliver has maintained that the company was losing money like crazy, and really needed to go in a different direction.

TOM CASTLES: Now, the first big test for Oliver following his 2015 appointment as CEO was rolling out the new business model. The flat fee model was dead, and now Zocdoc would charge doctors per patient booking.

JACK MURTHA: Oliver sent an email to participating doctors all across New York. Here’s a quote: “We have realized that our flat subscription fee is a financial barrier that excludes too many providers from participating in Zocdoc. Importantly, it also limits patients seeking care from finding providers.”

TOM CASTLES: Let’s toss this back to Britta. Britta, what happened next?

BRITTA LOKTING: So Zocdoc had tested the model in several markets where it did really well, and decided to roll it out in New York, their hometown, their base, their biggest city. The vision, it was gonna be great, but here’s Jess Aptman, the company’s chief communications officer, with the reality.

JESS APTMAN: And that is not what happened in New York. We just underestimated how big of a change that would be for the providers, and they pushed back.

BRITTA LOKTING: These doctors were pissed, mainly the ones who saw a lot of patients, because they got charged way more. Some doctors filed lawsuits over the change. A dermatologist named Peter Chien started a Change.org petition called “Block Zocdoc from Violating Professional Medical Ethics and Making Healthcare Expensive.” It got over 1,200 signatures.

Oliver decided to pause the rollout and listen as doctors aired their frustrations, but soon the majority of the doctors who stopped their subscriptions rejoined, with Peter Chien, who still won’t use the service, representing a notable exception. According to Zocdoc, the new model provided stronger returns for doctors who retained patients over time. Oliver had averted a customer crisis and a near-business-model implosion, all while dealing with a co-founder’s bitter departure, but none of it led to the immediate, long-lasting turnaround that he was hoping for. Some perspective from Jess.

JESS APTMAN: The years between 2015 and 2022, it just felt like we were hitting one obstacle after another, and it was the New York pause, and then it was going well and we were taking the show on the road, and then we ran into COVID, which was wild.

OLIVER KHARRAZ: So I think in a crisis such as the pandemic, it is important to develop a plan pretty quickly and make sure that everyone is focused on the plan.

BRITTA LOKTING: When the world shut down, people stopped going to doctor’s offices, but Jess said Oliver had read books about pandemics and knew what to expect. He understood the need to stay put and ignore the instinct to make drastic cuts. In fact, he foresaw the pandemic as a temporary disruption.

JESS APTMAN: We didn’t lay anybody off, and a couple months later we stood up telehealth really quickly. We got all of our doctors’ offices open virtually. We kept access to care continuing through lockdown orders, and I think because we had been in the foxholes together for years before that, when COVID hit, everyone just manned their battle stations and knew what to do.

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BRITTA LOKTING: There have been so many tumultuous moments at Zocdoc that, as a small test, I asked Oliver and the three executives I interviewed why they stayed during these periods, or why they joined the company if they knew it wasn’t working. They told me a lot of employees left in 2015 when the business model and executive team were in flux, perhaps understandably so. I thought my question might shed some light on Oliver as a leader.

JESS APTMAN: Number one, I just— Zocdoc needs to exist. It should not be so hard to access care.

BRITTA LOKTING: I thought that was a pretty decent, if short, answer from Jess. Then Oliver said this to me.

OLIVER KHARRAZ: Well, the rational thing for leaders and team members at Zocdoc was to move on, to leave. Some did that, but most stayed, and many are still here today, right? And when you ask them why that was the case, they said because they felt that Zocdoc needed to exist.

BRITTA LOKTING: Huh. Oliver’s response made me wonder whether the “Zocdoc must exist” answer was a canned response. I teed up the question for Alex Doyne, chief strategy officer, next. Here we are at Zocdoc headquarters in SoHo.

BRITTA LOKTING: I asked Jess this question. I’m gonna challenge you to come up with a different answer. So I asked her, “Why have you stayed this long through all this?” She said she believes Zocdoc should exist, and then Oliver also made a mention about this is often an answer. But I’m curious if you can come up with a different answer of why you’ve stayed all these years.

ALEX DOYNE: I only have one life. Is this where I wanna be spending my days solving these problems? Is it a big problem? Is it big enough to make an impact? And the final piece of it is, do I enjoy doing it? And for me, yes, I think this should exist. Was that different enough?

BRITTA LOKTING: There’s some overlap, but it’s— okay, okay. I got it.

Now I was really determined to get a different answer out of Richard. Why Zocdoc? Why had people stayed through the turmoil? Was it the incentives? Sam Blumenthal, the head of external communications, told me that the company orders lunch for everyone at the New York office every day. As someone who mostly eats tinned fish and saltines at my home desk, I thought this seemed like a pretty sweet perk, but there had to be more. So I asked chief business officer Richard Fine to dig a little deeper.

RICHARD FINE: Most people aren’t very good at difficult things. Most people are bad at them and run away, and I won’t blame anyone, but plenty of people ran away from Zocdoc, and they did it for totally reasonable reasons in reasonable ways that I can understand and everything else. But if you didn’t, and you said, “Well, no, I’m gonna do this hard thing,” that’s a more unusual thing. And so we created a whole company and culture around that, and we’ve been able to keep it, and that’s pretty nice.

BRITTA LOKTING: He went on to say the days of Zocdoc being the “cool, hot tech company” that it was in the late aughts are over, and that’s a good thing.

RICHARD FINE: Now we’re maybe not that cool, but way more successful and way more grounded in reality.

BRITTA LOKTING: Oliver knows that building a certain culture is important, but he’s also said before that he doesn’t think of Zocdoc as his child. I wanted to ask him about something he hasn’t really talked about publicly, curious to see if the experience changed his view. Two years ago, he and his family were vacationing in Italy and driving along what he described as “serpentine roads” in the mountains when a drunk driver sped around the corner.

OLIVER KHARRAZ: I knew a collision was unavoidable.

BRITTA LOKTING: Time slowed. Only a split second passed from the moment he saw the car barreling around the bend to the actual impact, but to Oliver, that moment felt like forever.

As he stared at the oncoming car, face-to-face with his own mortality, he wondered whether his wife and children would be okay without him. And, curiously enough for someone who said he doesn’t view Zocdoc as his child, he wondered whether his company would be okay without him, too.

OLIVER KHARRAZ: It really reignited my entire thinking around what does it mean to build an institution versus just a company.

BRITTA LOKTING: When we talked, mortality and legacy were top of mind for Oliver. In addition to the crash, his father’s death in 2021 sparked some profound reflection.

OLIVER KHARRAZ: I ask myself constantly, “Am I doing the right thing?” This is obviously more acute now that he has passed away.

We have a yearly discussion with the board on how succession should run. We have a deep cascade of successors ready for me, and the mechanism of transfer are already clear, which gives me the peace of mind that I know that they are sort of aligned with the overall mission that I’ve founded Zocdoc to fulfill.

BRITTA LOKTING: Because as Oliver said to me...

OLIVER KHARRAZ: This is not the Oliver Kharraz show. This is Zocdoc, an institution that should go on doing what we determine is right for a long time after I can no longer contribute.

TOM CASTLES: In 2023, two years after Oliver’s dad died, Zocdoc finally reached profitability for the first time in its then-16-year history.

OLIVER KHARRAZ: It was hard for my father to understand that you can start a company that initially doesn’t make any profits, so that was an ongoing friction point.

TOM CASTLES: Then, in 2026, Zocdoc hit two big milestones. On October 14th, the company announced its first acquisition. They purchased health tech platform Sohar Health to automate patient insurance eligibility checks. And earlier, in May, Zocdoc announced a tender offer, the very first opportunity for many employees to cash out their shares in the company.

JACK MURTHA: For some of them, that was life-changing money. In a letter to employees, Oliver reflected on all the sacrifices they’d made to achieve the milestone his dad had wondered about since the company’s earliest days.

TOM CASTLES: “In healthcare, there are no shortcuts,” he wrote. “You either build something durable, or you cease to exist.”

JACK MURTHA: That’s it for this episode of Commons Healthcare. If you like what we’re all about, please remember to rate, subscribe, and review. Head over to commonshealthcare.com and sign up for our weekly newsletter, Healthcare People, and find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

TOM CASTLES: Britta Lokting reported, wrote, and narrated this episode. Special thanks to her for taking the downtown train to do the job.

JACK MURTHA: And thanks to Joe Steptoe and Anthony Dionne for their great work on audio production.

TOM CASTLES: The Commons Healthcare team is executive producer Christie Chisholm, sound engineer George Steptoe, editor Mark R., and head of growth Wynn Hansen. I’m your host, Tom Castles.

JACK MURTHA: I’m your host, Jack Murtha.

TOM CASTLES: And this is Commons Healthcare.

Unavoidable Collisions