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OK Oliver Kharraz On a16z Podcast

“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.”

a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · October 2026

“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.

Transcript

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

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