Booking platform for healthcare professionals ZocDoc has named former U.S. Senators Tom Daschle and Dr. Bill Frist to its advisory board.

ZocDoc, which launched at TechCrunch in 2007,automates a task that can be incredibly frustrating and time-consuming for consumers. ZocDoc allows users to book their doctor appointments online, even for same-day appointments.

Patients can see real-time availability of doctors in their area, confirm who accepts their insurance plan and read feedback and reviews of doctors from other patients.allows consumers to find and book appointments with doctors, dentists and other health professionals online. And the service is free for patients.

On the health care side of things, ZocDoc integrates with doctors’ calendars in real-time and helps taps into the hidden supply of medical providers’ availabilities, such as the 10 to 20 percent of medical appointments that are cancelled or rescheduled at the last-minute. Doctors pay $250 per month for ZocDoc.

Cyrus Massoumi, co-founder and CEO of ZocDoc, tells me that both Daschle and Frist’s experience in healthcare will help the company strategize their growth plans going forward.

Frist, a former Republican Senator for Tennessee, is also a physician, and made healthcare policy one of his major legislative issues while he was in office. Daschle also championed healthcare issues while in the Senate (as a Democrat), focusing on universal healthcare in particular. He was also nominated by President Obama for the position of Health and Human Services Secretary.

ZocDoc, which has received $95 million in funding from DST, Goldman Sachs, Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, Marc Benioff and Jeff Bezos, is available in 13 metropolitan areas, six of which were launched in 2011. ZocDoc currently offers nearly 6 million available appointments with doctors and medical practitioners from among over 40 medical specialties, and is used by over 800,000 patients each month.

Check out our recent Founder Stories segment on ZocDoc here.

You need a doctor and you need a doctor who takes your insurance. Instead of having to fumble through antiquated lists complied by your provider, ZocDoc seeks to expedite the process of locating care by displaying physicians in your area who are available for immediate and long-term appointments.

Doctors pay a fee to join ZocDoc, which has secured $95 million in funding, spread to more than a dozen United States cities and has hired 200+ employees since 2007.

In part II of Cyrus Massoumi’s Founder Stories interview with Chris Dixon, Massoumi tells Dixon why he thinks ZocDoc found a following and offers advice to other entrepreneurs.

Massoumi attributes ZocDoc’s success to hitting the nexus of easing friction for both patients and doctors. Patients save time booking appointments and doctors easily fill vacancies, including vacancies in the “hidden supply of health care” formed from last minute cancellations.

He calls it a “win-win” situation.

While ZocDoc found a recipe for success, getting there wasn’t easy. Massoumi tells Dixon his team caught a lucky break in 2008 when it won $100,000 for “the top small business in America” and continues, ”had we not won that money we didn’t have enough money to actually expand to our next market.” He believes the expansion silenced doubters who didn’t think ZocDoc could flourish outside of New York City.

As the interview winds down, Massoumi offers of several pieces of advice. In particular he recommends entrepreneurs to pay attention to “one of the old adages of fundraising [which] is never raise money when you need it.” Having previously worked at a company that ran of money, he speaks from first hand experience.

Massoumi shares plenty more insights in this interview, including why he thinks the financial downturn helped ZocDoc. Be sure to view the entire video to see why.

Past episodes of Founder Stories featuring Mayor Bloomberg, Charity: Water’s Scott Harrison, TripAdvisor’s Stephen Kaufer and leaders of many other startups are here.

In 2007 Cyrus Massoumi ruptured his eardrum on a flight to New York and turned his distasteful experience of trying to track down a physician into ZocDoc – a service that enables customers to quickly book appointments with doctors and dentists online. In a relatively short time, his streamlined offering has attracted considerable interest from both consumers and investors. Supported by doctors who pay a fee to be listed on the site, ZocDoc is now available in more than a dozen United States markets, claims 200+ employees and has tallied $95 million in funding.

In this episode of Founder Stories, ZocDoc’s CEO and co-founder Cyrus Massoumi tells host, Chris Dixon how ZocDoc was built.

Rewinding to ZocDoc’s origins, Massoumi says after landing in Manhattan with one healthy ear, it took him four days to secure the services of a medical professional. He search was hindered by the substandard list of doctors compiled by his insurance company – so inadequate were the choices that “one doctor was actually deceased” he says.

Disgusted with the status quo, Massoumi rounded up two co-founders and went to work building something better, but tells Dixon those early days weren’t easy. ”We had no website, I was literally taking a power point page and walking into these doctors offices and trying to convince them that online booking was the future of healthcare.” He continues, ”in one case I literally sat in a waiting room of an office for six hours and then I got three dentists to sign on.”

After shaking hands and iterating for “two-and-a-half years” Massoumi says “everything clicked and we have been expanding ever since.”  He tells Dixon patients now have access to “40 different specialties” and “probably north of 6-million maybe even approaching 7-million available [doctor] appointments over the next 90-days.”

Massoumi shares plenty more insights in this video, so be sure to watch the entire episode to hear them all.

Past Founder Stories episodes featuring leaders of TripAdvisor, Charity: Water, Bump, Redditt, TurnTable.fm and may other start-ups are here.

Episode II of this interview is coming up.

After raising $50 million in funding from DST in early August, ZocDoc, has raised another $25 million in Series C funding from Goldman Sachs. This brings ZocDoc’s total Series C round to $75 million, with total funding reaching $95 million to date. Previous investors include Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, Marc Benioff and Jeff Bezos.

ZocDoc, which launched at TechCrunch in 2007,automates a task that can be incredibly frustrating and time-consuming for consumers. ZocDoc allows users to book their doctor appointments online, even for same-day appointments. Patients can see real-time availability of doctors in their area, confirm who accepts their insurance plan and read feedback and reviews of doctors from other patients.allows consumers to find and book appointments with doctors, dentists and other health professionals online. And the service is free for patients.

On the health care side of things, ZocDoc integrates with doctors’ calendars in real-time and helps taps into the hidden supply of medical providers’ availabilities, such as the 10 to 20 percent of medical appointments that are cancelled or rescheduled at the last-minute. Doctors pay $250 per month for ZocDoc.

A year ago, the service was only offered in four cities and now ZocDoc is available in 11 metropolitan areas, six of which were launched in 2011. ZocDoc currently offers more than 5.3 million available appointments with doctors and medical practitioners from among over 40 medical specialties, and is used by over 700,000 patients each month.

The new funding will be used to expand into new cities, and towards international expansion as well.

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a Patient Relationship Management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice consulting to 25 hospitals and was the founder of Microsoft’s Health business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.

ZocDoc just announced a $50M round from DST. Where many have failed, ZocDoc has shown that a disruptive new model executed properly can actually work in healthcare. Healthtech startups can take several lessons away from the ZocDoc experience observing from the outside what they have accomplished.

Scrappiness matters. ZocDoc’s CEO & Co-founder, Cyrus Massoumi was tenacious in getting close to his first customers and doing whatever it took to close his first customers. He has shared that he waited in a doctor’s waiting room for 5 hours to speak with one doctor he wanted. In another case, he was escorted out of the building by security due to his persistence.

Focus pays off. ZocDoc appears to have ignored the siren song of any number of diversions from their core. This could have included getting into pricing elasticity or electronic health records. They do one thing exceptionally well — they fill open slots on doctors’ and dentists’ appointment calendars. Now that they’ve proven this, there’s logical places for them to extend. For example, think about what happens after scheduling an appointment (insurance eligibility, reminding patients about appointments, etc). With the credibility they’ve established, they can increase revenue per customer if they offer those services to a doctor.

Great investors help. While I’m sure their investors would give the ZocDoc team most of the credit, it can’t hurt to have Vinod Khosla, Marc Benioff and Jeff Bezos as early investors followed by the Founders Fund and SV Angel.

Honing their sales model. It appears they don’t use their website for sales to clinicians. Their website is almost entirely focused on consumer acquisition. Their strategy to acquire their paying customers may be viewed as “old school” (i.e., field and inside sales) but it has been effective. It sounds like they make a significant investment in sales development which is a great way to maximize the value of a salesforce.

Word of mouth still works. Doctors and dentists talk with each other and by providing them a great experience, they are getting plenty of inbound lead generation. Too often, startups rush growth and it bites them back with a bad customer experience and negative word of mouth. No doubt, this is helping drive inbound interest.

Start small to go big. As Salesforce.com and others have shown, starting with small customers is a great way to get initial traction. In ZocDoc’s case, they went to individual doctors rather than pursuing hospitals and large clinics. No doubt, that opportunity exists if/when they want it but they’ve shown you can build a business with small providers first. This can open up later opportunities with hospitals.

Stage rollout by geography. This is particularly critical in their model but I think it will matter for many healthtech startups. Having critical mass in a particular geography makes sense from a sales and marketing standpoint helping compress the sales cycle and learning curve. An alternative to this would be staging by specialty – i.e., focus on one specialty before moving to another.

Lead with the doctors. As Google Health’s failure demonstrated, leading with the consumer and expecting them to pull in physicians isn’t likely to be successful. ZocDoc focused first on getting doctors on board to have a critical mass of available appointments. While they have done consumer marketing, my impression is that doctors are now encouraging their patients to schedule appointments this way creating a virtuous cycle. If a doctor (or any business) tells you the preferred way to interact with them, most consumers will do it. In contrast, most doctors wouldn’t heed a patient or two telling them to use some new tool.

Technology-enabled services appeal to healthcare. Doctors, for the most part, don’t care about the technology. I doubt they think about the underlying architecture of ZocDoc’s solution. Rather, they care about the outcome ZocDoc provides – filling empty appointment slots. For many of their customers, they are the #1 source of new patients. WhiteGlove Health is another startup providing a technology-enabled service having success — their IPO is this week. Technology as an enabler, rather than as the centerpiece, matters more the smaller the target customer as a general rule.

Congratulations to Cyrus Massoumi and the ZocDoc team for knocking it out of the park. This is a great example of the disruption in healthcare that is greatly needed. Read more on Cyrus’ blog post.

Have you heard about ZocDoc? The company launched at TechCrunch in 2007. Their goal – to let people find and book appointments with doctors, dentists and other health professionals online.

The company has raised $50 million in a new round with DST. The company was valued at $700 million or more in this round, we’ve heard from various sources. ZocDoc won’t comment, though, on valuation.

They started off with just a few dentists and 5,000 appointment slots. It took them two years to get to a million available appointments. They now have 5 million over the next 90 days, up from 3 million in February. They’ve also more than doubled the number of employees in the last six months, to 150.

Doctors pay $250 per month to be part of ZocDoc. I’ve tried every way possible to get to a good revenue estimate for the company. It’s simple math once you know the number of doctors in the system, but they won’t disclose the number of average open appointments per doctor, or otherwise reveal revenue.

Some interesting things about the company -

- They were mentioned by the Wall Street Journal in 2007 after launching at our event as part of an article talking about how there was a tech bubble at the time. Of course, valuations from 2007 look downright cute in today’s world.

- The company has an atrocious, ridiculous non-logo. They don’t seem to mind it at all. Apparently it hasn’t slowed down growth.

- ZocDoc wanted to launch as Doctors.com, but whoever owned it wanted $4 million for the domain name, says CEO Cyrus Massoumi. So they bought zocdoc.com for $6 instead.

- DST is on a tear. Forget previous investments in Facebook, Groupon and Zynga. Just in the last several months they’ve invested in Twitter, Airbnb, Spotify, and now ZocDoc.

- There are obvious comparisons to be made between ZocDoc and OpenTable. One interesting point brought up by a fan of the company is that the health care industry is far larger than the restaurant industry. ZocDoc could be a big winner.

Disclosure: I’m not an investor in ZocDoc, but I’ve asked to invest. Either way, I’m a fan. Bad logo and all.

This is ZocDoc’s sixth location, and while the roll out is methodical, the service has grown bookings by more than 42% in the last month alone. As a consumer, I’m a huge fan of ZocDoc– it’s stunningly efficient and the customer service is stellar. But is the site too good to be true?

We interviewed CEO and co-founder Cyrus Massoumi via Skype to talk about the new location, and how even with $20 million in venture capital the site can roll out to every metro market and continue to provide expensive customer service from SoHo– the antithesis of outsourcing. (We also discover a surprising secret about Massoumi’s past around the 11 minute mark…)

To lobby for ZocDoc opening in your city, go here.

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Guess what? It’s actually easier. For the first time in my life, I’m thinking it’s a shame I don’t go to the doctor more often.

Within minutes, and after entering a bare minimum of data, I found a doctor near me, read some quick reviews of him and made an appointment for tomorrow morning. Thirty minutes later, I got a call from the doctor asking if they could move my appointment a bit later in the day. No big deal, I said. I’ll still feel lousy in the afternoon. An hour or so after that, I got another exceedingly friendly call from ZocDoc apologizing that the doctor had to move my appointment and offering me a $20 Amazon gift card for the “hassle” of having to answer two exceedingly friendly phone calls about the appointment. The operator swore that this had nothing to do with the fact that I’ve written about the company before, and that it’s standard procedure if there’s an inconvenience or glitch in the booking system.

There are just so many great things about that. First off, ZocDoc clearly isn’t just catering its service to the doctors that pay its bills, it is catering to the patients too. So few Web companies do both well, because frequently the interests of a “buyer” or “seller” (for lack of more broadly appropriate nouns) are at odds, especially when you are talking about a service that books reservations without a credit card authorization. The seller doesn’t want to turn away business and have a buyer flake, but the buyer is booking online because they don’t want to have to jump through hoops to make a reservation.

There’s a strong temptation to make things harder for the buyer, since the seller is the one putting the perishable time-slot at risk. But that’s a short term gain, if an annoyed buyer doesn’t come back. Especially when it comes to something you (hopefully) don’t do all the time like making doctors’ appointments. The impression needs to be a strongly positive one, because so little healthcare is electronic and it’s such a change in how we interact with doctors. There’s a natural trepidation against doing things differently when it involves something like your health.

But beyond that, so many engineering-centric Web companies are content to take an annoying offline process, put it online and just hope that the sheer convenience keeps people coming back. They stop short of a full-on Zappos-like assault of friendly customer service, because things like US-based call centers are expensive. It’s so nice to use a service and not have anything to complain about– especially when the consumers of that service are probably at their sickest and crankiest when they call.

ZocDoc launched at TechCrunch40 and has rolled out slowly, operating in only four markets to date: New York, Washington DC, Chicago, San Francisco and Dallas. They recently raised $15 million from Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures, and are planning to expand by another handful of cities this year, including Los Angeles, Boston and Houston. The company is clearly taking the time to get each market right, and it shows. If you’re not in one of those markets, trust me, the wait will be worth it.

ZocDoc, a medical appointment scheduling startup that launched at TechCrunch 40, has raised $15 million in Series B funding led by Founders Fund with existing investor Khosla Ventures participating in the round. This brings the startup’s total funding to nearly $20 million. Marc Benioff and Jeff Bezos have previously invested in ZocDoc.

ZocDoc automates a task that can be incredibly frustrating and time-consuming for consumers. ZocDoc allows users to book their doctor appointments online, even for same-day appointments (around 40% of ZocDoc users schedule same-day appointments). Patients can see real-time availability of doctors in their area, confirm who accepts their insurance plan and read feedback and reviews of doctors from other patients.

The service currently offers patients more than 1 million available appointments across 20 specialties. The company has launched regional sites in New York, Washington DC, Chicago, and most recently San Francisco.

One of the biggest barriers to expansion is the challenge of signing up and indexing all of the doctors in a given city, says founder and CEO Cyrus Massoumi. But as the site’s notoriety has grown, Massoumi says that doctors are now approaching ZocDoc to be listed. And the new funding will be used to help ZocDoc expand its network of practitioners and accelerate its nationwide growth. ZocDoc plans to expand to a number of cities in the next year, including Dallas, LA, Boston and Houston.

Massoumi adds that with the recent passage of healthcare reform, an estimated 30 million new patients will have access to healthcare while the number of doctors will remain the same. ZocDoc can help doctors mitigate this increased traffic by putting doctor’s schedules online.

Zocdoc, the health appointment scheduling startup that launched at TechCrunch 40, has announced that Marc Benioff and Jeff Bezos – two of Silicon Valley’s most prominent figures – have joined the $3 million Series A funding round it raised last month that was led by Khosla Ventures.

ZocDoc allows users to book their doctor appointments online, even for same-day appointments. The site is especially useful for urgent visits and procrastinators who may wait until the last minute for an eye exam or prescription refill. Doctors can also maximize the number of patients they see by using the system to help reschedule missed appointments or fill in last-second cancellations.

Since launching last September, ZocDoc has seen a 2,000% increase in the number of available appointments on the site, largely because of its base of doctors and patients expands by around 50% every month. Unfortunately the site is still limited by region, with support for Brooklyn and New York City. Given the healthcare industry’s resistance to change this is understandable, but if ZocDoc doesn’t expand to fill this need soon, someone else will.

Spottt (Adbrite)

Spottt helps like-minded sites promote each other for free. Just put a Spottt on your site, blog, or MySpace profile. Every time you show someone else’s ad, they’ll show yours. Spottt was created by AdBrite, with the assistance of Tony Hsieh, co-founder of LinkExchange.

Simple model, 1:1 exchange model. Same as original link exchange program bought by Microsoft.

More useful than original program. Original co-founder of LinkExchange.com on board

Clickable

Clickable provides a service for creating and managing online advertising. Their technology provides campaign management tools and an intuitive interface to view and manage performance and direct spending across all major ad networks. In addition, advertisers are empowered to self-manage their ad buying to yield transformational results.

TC40 anouncements: Ex AOL CEO has join board, adding Adbrite on site, and released in beta.

advertising aggregation tool, slick interface. Manage campaigns on Yahoo, Adwords.

GotStatus

GotStatus is a community-driven systems management and monitoring tool that is aiming to become “Google Analytics for servers.” Users are able to place a snippet of javascript and start managing and monitoring the server side of their web applications in the same way Google Analytics does for their browser side. They will be able to track metrics on items like new accounts per day, database size, and Amazon S3 usage.

Intro is a comparison to Google Analytics, but states that Google only solves half the problem, no coverage of the server.

Another nice interface, provides server stats including email.

Multi-user platfrom, supports customers/ clients. Can customize results with dashboards, widgets.

“User Generated Monitoring”

PubMatic

PubMatic is a meta ad server that sits between online publishers and online ad networks like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network and Value Click. Their service helps small- and medium-sized publishers manage and maximize their advertising inventory by seamlessly communicating with multiple ad networks to help them find the optimal ad layout and the highest paying ad network. They also provide them with a central dashboard to track all their ad networks and ad configurations.

Pitch: we’re the first company presenting at TC40 that offers revenue opportunities for publishers.

Pubmatic works as the middle man.

Offers optimization tools as well, color choices, sizes.

In alpha testing until today, now in open beta

Sites using the service have seen 70-110% increase in revenue.

Data is pulled from other ad networks.

Also offers dashboard widgets.

Nice idea, I’ll be keen to try it.

ZocDoc

ZocDoc is an online service that lets consumers find, search and book dentist and doctor appointments. Their service is integrated into dentists’ and doctors’ appointment systems so that last minute cancellations can be filled by other patients. ZocDoc also provides consumers with information on specific dentists’ and doctors’ office including what insurance they take.

Intro: there is a problem with easily finding doctors.

Online way to find and book medical practitioners. Site has just gone live now.

Nifty feature: site shows available time slots.

Play acting on stage, guy trips over, role playing using ZocDoc, something different.

Doctor listing include bio details + user ratings…I can feel a law suit coming on in the next 12-18months…but nice to get reviews of doctors from the user view point.

Experts panel and spotty Wifi. grrrr.

Guy likes Spottt…because it’s the only model he understands.

Esther Dyson likes Clickable, heart is with ZocDoc

Some good discussion around ZocDoc and lawyers, no live blogging as Wifi was down.

Experts seems to like ZocDoc, Clickable, Pubmatic. A strong session, I’d think Pubmatic just as the best product but only because I’ve got a publisher bias.