OPEN Forum recently spoke with Massoumi about his background, the early days of ZocDoc and his four-step formula for entrepreneurial success. With a reported $95 million in funding, the service is active in 1,900 cities across the United States, and more than 4 million people use ZocDoc on a monthly basis. Today ZocDoc has more than 500 employees in New York (its headquarters) Scottsdale, Arizona and Pune, India. The trio persevered and their hard work paid off. “Security escorted me out of at least three offices,” he remembers. The early days were tough Massoumi was in charge of sales, and convincing doctors to sign up for the service (doctors are charged $300 per month) was trying. They all quit their jobs, and by September 2007 ZocDoc was officially born. He then turned to Nick Ganju, a former colleague (“We shared a folding table for three months at a company after college,” he says), to be the engineering brains behind the operation. He contacted Oliver Kharraz, a doctor who was working for McKinsey, to be ZocDoc’s domain expert. Unlike his attempts to find a primary care physician, Massoumi knew exactly who to turn to when it came to starting his latest venture. A former entrepreneur whose company had crashed years earlier in the tech bubble, Massoumi decided to give it a go again and create ZocDoc, a site that would streamline the booking process by allowing patients to reserve appointments with doctors online. But his troublesome medical experience continued to bother him. Finding an available appointment proved annoyingly difficult and it wasn’t until four days later that he was finally seen by a medical professional.įeeling better, Massoumi went back to work as a consultant for McKinsey, a global management consulting firm. Why didn’t he already have one? “Because I was 29 and immortal,” Massoumi now says. Upon landing and arriving in his Manhattan apartment, he logged onto his health insurance website to find a doctor. It was 2007 and Cyrus Massoumi was a few minutes into a flight from Seattle to New York City when he abruptly felt, as he puts it, “Someone jamming an ice pick into my ear.” In reality, his eardrum was rupturing.
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