Things Oliver Kharraz Has Said on Podcasts

“One kind of counterintuitive bit is that actually the best doctors tend to have the worst utilization because they frequently treat patients that have very busy lives and cancel on them more often and they don't double book.” — Oliver Kharraz, a16z Podcast

Julie Yoo put the cynical question to Kharraz: if you can see a doctor on Zocdoc within three days, isn't something wrong with that doctor? He answers with a medical-school dean who said he was booked three months out, then filled about 40 last-minute slots through the platform in a month.

a16z Podcast · 2026-10-17 Permalink → Listen →

a16z Podcast Around 25:44 into the episode

Oliver Kharraz

…that there's low capacity in one of our specialty zip code insurance quadrants, then we will add providers there. And we're really much more driven by the patient experience and patient metrics than we are by any other metric. And that's because we believe that when the patient wins, everyone wins.

Julie Yoo

…the care? caliber of whatever capacity is available in the system. And do you have examples where you've actually, like where you have teeth behind SLAs, for instance, or if providers do not demonstrate certain outcomes on your platform, you would pull them off. Any teeth behind that content?

Oliver Kharraz

So yes, on both sides. So one kind of counterintuitive bit is that actually the best doctors tend to have the worst utilization because they frequently treat patients that have very busy lives and cancel on them more often and they don't double book. And we actually, there's a funny anecdote where one of the deans of one of the academic medical centers we work with here in New York said, hey, I'm booked out three months in the future. I don't think I should be on ZocDoc. And we said, okay, fine, we'll take you off, but give us just another 30 days and just see how many patients actually end up booking with you. And it was something in the…

Julie Yoo

Thinking ahead, what's next for Zock? You guys have accomplished so much and expanded the footprint of your product, expanded the number of markets that you sell into, evolved your business model, lean into AI. There's so much surface area now to what you do. What is maybe one or two big things…

Oliver Kharraz

Oh, my superpower is sleeping. I don't know if it's exactly. So I don't really stay up at night that long, but I'll say that our goal is to connect every single provider and make sure that every single front door in healthcare opens, right? This is why we've opened up our healthcare access…

Julie Yoo

Amazing. Anything that we didn't cover, Oliver, that you want to speak to?

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

“When you put out a provider directory, frequently you're in the business of publishing the Encyclopedia Britannica. By the time you're able to really put it out there and present it to patients, it's already out of date. … Once you have the transaction, it's much more like Wikipedia. Every incremental transaction actually validates the information you have.” — Oliver Kharraz, a16z Podcast

Julie Yoo had joked that nothing is certain except death, taxes and the provider directory problem: the industry's failure to keep accurate records of which doctors take which insurance. Kharraz, Zocdoc's CEO, claims the problem is largely solved once patients can actually book, because every booking corrects the data.

a16z Podcast · 2026-10-17 Permalink → Listen →

a16z Podcast Around 03:41 into the episode

Oliver Kharraz

…infrastructure that we have built that enables that marketplace and we make it available to third parties. So whether you are a payer, you're an AI platform, you have a consumer audience, you can now give them the ability to schedule their doctors seamlessly, no matter where they start the journey.

Julie Yoo

…who takes what insurance, et cetera. What's your view on why this problem has persisted? What is the fundamental incentive that we've failed as an industry to align that you think is the biggest blocker to having a true golden record for every licensed medical practitioner in this country?

Oliver Kharraz

Yeah, so I think actually the problem is to a large extent solved. If we look at what we're doing, we have the ability to schedule into the providers that are connected to us. We have data that's more than 99% accurate, which compares quite favorably with your average insurance directory. And the reason in the Gordian not here was actually enabling the transaction. When you put out a provider directory, frequently you're in the business of publishing the Encyclopedia Britannica, right? By the time you're able to really put it out there and present it to patients, it's already out of date. You're constantly chasing the problem. Once you have the transaction, it's much more like Wikipedia, right? Every incremental transaction actually validates the information you have. You make any mistake you make exactly once and then you know what's going in. Now, of course, as you know, the actual transactibility and the ability for a patient to book seamlessly was an extremely hard problem to solve. There are hundreds of different EHRs. There's tens of thousands of insurance plans that need to be mapped. There are many, many different ways to work in…

Julie Yoo

Okay, that's amazing. So that is a bold claim. And I'm so glad that you are confident that we have solved this problem. Can we actually double click on that a little bit, Oliver? When I think back to the way that we approach this problem at Kairos, we largely, just to abstract out the problem a…

Oliver Kharraz

Yeah, so I think problem one is distinct from the others, right? This is information that doesn't change as often. Where did they go to med school? Like, where is their practice located? That seems to be the most tractable problem. And that's why most people focus there. The second two problems are…

Julie Yoo

We used to joke that 3M was our biggest competitor because of post-it notes. The other kind of unique distinction that ZocDoc has relative to a lot of others in the space is the fact that you've always been consumer aligned. And to the point I made earlier, you guys are now a household brand. I…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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