Today’s Decoder episode is a special one: I’m talking to Zocdoc CEO Oliver Kharraz, and we chatted live onstage at the TechFutures conference here in New York City.
You’re almost certainly familiar with Zocdoc — it’s a platform that helps people find and book appointments with doctors. It’s a classic of the early app economy, right alongside Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, and others — it’s a friendly mobile app that efficiently matches supply and demand in a way that ultimately reshapes the market.
The big difference is that Zocdoc plugs into the United States healthcare system, which is a huge mess. And that means Zocdoc has a pretty big moat — it’s hard to make a database of all the doctors, and all the insurances they take, and understand healthcare privacy laws, and get a bunch of verified reviews from patients that comply with those laws, and on and on.
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So, Zocdoc has a very different relationship to big platforms like Google and new AI tools like ChatGPT, which promise to just take commands and do things like book doctor appointments for you. They all sort of need Zocdoc’s infrastructure to run in the background, and you’ll hear Oliver talk about that pretty directly here. It’s a very different relationship than the one between AI companies and DoorDash, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, and others that we’ve talked about here on Decoder in the past.
You’ll also hear us go back and forth here on the shift from “Dr. Google” to “Dr. ChatGPT” — my entire family is full of doctors, and they tell me that people are increasingly asking AI chatbots for medical advice that runs the range from really useful to outright dangerous. You’ll hear Oliver say Zocdoc will use AI for mundane takes — the company has an assistant called Zo that can help with booking — but he’s drawn a hard line at giving medical advice. There’s a lot in this conversation, and Oliver is very direct. I really enjoyed it.
Just a quick note before we start: the TechFutures stage was on a beautiful rooftop in downtown Manhattan overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, so while we certainly felt charmed sitting there and talking, you might pick up on a little wind noise and even the occasional helicopter. After all, it’s a live production.
Okay, Zocdoc CEO Oliver Kharraz — here we go.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Oliver Kharraz, you are the cofounder and CEO of Zocdoc. Welcome to Decoder.
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