A Killer App for Doctor's Appointments

In 2007, Cyrus Massoumi was flying home to New York after a business trip when he ruptured his eardrum. The McKinsey consultant needed to see an ear-nose-throat specialist immediately, but it took him three days to even find a doctor. Massoumi couldn't believe the holdup: If he could book a dinner reservation online, he thought, why not a doctor's appointment? That's when he came up with the concept for ZocDoc, an OpenTable for medical appointments.

A couple of months later, Massoumi, now 34, took a sabbatical and recruited two partners to experiment with his idea. They beta-tested the concept with New York dentists, under the assumption that Web-savvy young people visit dentists more often than they see physicians. The site quickly generated 5,000 appointments, and Massoumi quit his day job. In late 2007 they launched ZocDoc.