Ms. Kunst.

Minority Report is a guest column by Sarah Kunst, who does business development and product at fashion app Kaleidoscope. She’s a black, non-engineer female in tech, but plans to IPO anyway.

Fortune magazine's annual Brainstorm Tech summit is the Lincoln of conferences (the motor company is also a sponsor so kudos to them for nailing their demographic). Not the too-rich-for-its-own-good Bentley like Davos or the flashy Porsche that is TED. Rather, Brainstorm Tech brought together a lot of guys from Ivy League schools who work for companies with giant market caps and little buzz. They're there to listen, network, and cut deals in one of the many hospitality tents at the Aspen Institute.

The listening part was easy as the speakers were relevant and quippy. Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt went all Hunger Games for the crowd, trading blows on stage during dinner in what felt more like a sporting match than a debate about the future of technology. (You'll have to excuse me if you already heard about their exploits, it takes a girl awhile to adjust back down to sea level.)

Back on stage, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson offered Marissa Mayer's some advice on her new role at Yahoo? "Stay awhile." And Zocdoc founder Cyrus Massoumi fan boy'd the use of two-way video screens to keep in touch with remote offices. The PYTs of tech were on hand as well, with the likes of Ben Lerer of Thrillist, Brit Morin, the Bay Area's own crafty Martha Stewart, and Twitter darling Aaron Levine of Box, hosting parties and panels.

The real networking happens after hours, of course. That's when dance-offs are held and "Here let's open this bottle of wine from my vineyard" drinks are shared, transforming panelists turn into drinking buddies, friends, and business partners all before last call. It's a pretty standard use of the wee hours, but in Aspen late nights can take a turn for the vertical.

For the second year, a couple guys spearheaded a tradition best approached with the same mentality as child birth: Do it once, swear never again, forget about the pain, repeat. They were climbing a mountain and I accepted an invitation to join them. Bottles of wine and a lone celebratory cigarette were procured at twice the going rate from some locals and we were off. A motley crew of two CMOs, a CEO and one girl who's memorized the lyrics to "Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better" makes for a lot of big talk...and little to no hiking experience.

The hours that followed were grueling. Our mountaineering skills hadn't included checking to see if there was moonlight to climb by, so the two hour ascent up loose dirt and rocky switchbacks was done in pitch black. We fell into a rhythm, our hyperactive leader running point while those with normal thyroid functions moved at a pace more befitting the dawning realization that this was not a walk in Central Park. At one point, I turned to make sure a fellow hiker had survived a fall and immediately joined him, hanging by my topknot and another hiker's fast reflexes. We were both quickly righted, passed the bottle around for a fortifying nip and in unison, began to climb again. Somehow, drunk at 4am, with zero visibility and in near silence, we had formed a team.

Reaching the summit was a bit of a trick. We found that instead of the snow capped, barren summit of the ski peak variety we were basically just looking for a rock. A really big rock surrounded by other rocks on the side of a sheer drop to certain death, roped off by a neon string that would have a hard time breaking the fall of an ant. But we were at the top of the climb, together. Backs were slapped, pictures taken and as the first rays of dawn appeared in the sky we began to make our way back down. Appropriately for a band of start-upers, the phrase used most on the descent was "How did we do that? If I had known it was that hard I wouldn't have made it!" Drunk on optimism and wine, we had tackled a trail dubbed "aerobic and difficult," by people who are most certainly doing it in the daylight . . . and hiking gear.

The cheesy startup parallels are many: It's all about the people, not knowing how hard it is can be an asset, switchbacks are the new pivots, don't fall off a mountain. (The last one's relevant no matter what profession you're in). However, the real takeaway is that people building the future are people who do awesome, kind of crazy stuff on and off the clock. If you're not surrounded by them, close your laptop and go look for them IRL. No livestream or Twitter feed puts you in meatspace proximity to the smartest, bravest people in tech. Conferences are often called out as a waste of time, but finding likeminded cohorts at 6am on a mountain top--metaphorical or otherwise--is worth a flight to Aspen or $10 New York Tech Meetup ticket. Sharing experiences trumps sharing hashtags. #climbamountain.

ZocDoc team Nick Ganju (CTO), Cyrus Massoumi (CEO), Netta Samroengraja (CFO) and Oliver Kharraz (COO).

"We very much view both these senators joining our advisory board as sort of welcoming ZocDoc to the party in terms of the healthcare establishment," ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi told Betabeat. "We have big plans for how we want to help improve the healthcare system... we're excited that we're going to have the ears and the thoughts of people that really have shaped the healthcare system to date and helped to make it better."

To most of its users, ZocDoc is a convenient way to book doctors' appointments. But to elected officials, it represents an easy efficiency in a highly inefficient system. There is a shortage of physicians in the U.S., Mr. Massoumi said; one way to alleviate long wait times for patients is to ensure all available appointments are being booked.

"Healthcare is so massive that, yes,we are a younger company but we have very large aspirations within the healthcare ecosystem," Mr. Massoumi said, pointing to the opportunities raised by ZocDoc's close relationship with patients and log of their medical appointments. Additionally, healthcare laws could end up impacting ZocDoc. The startup is careful to keep patient information confidential, for example. "It's very important to us that we understand all the different facets of healthcare," Mr. Massoumi said.

The bipartisan duo joins ZocDoc advisors Ron Conway of SV Angel; Emil Michael, an early investor; and according to SecondMarket, blog mogul-turned-VC Michael Arrington.

Adding politicians as official advisors is not unheard but is not common among startups; by adding a former official from each party, ZocDoc sidesteps some of the potential blowback it could invite by affiliating itself with politicians (the men have opposing views on abortion, for example, not to mention a few scandals: here, here and here, for example).

But both ex-pols are powerhouses within the healthcare-industrial complex with decades of experience with the system and healthcare policy. Sen. Frist was a working heart surgeon before his tenure in the Senate, when he performed over 150 heart and lung transplants, according to a press release. He serves as chairman of the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows, Adjunct Professor of cardiac surgery at Vanderbilt, clinical professor of surgery at Meharry Medical School, and "on the boards of numerous private and public healthcare companies as well as the Kaiser Family Foundation."

"I’ve dedicated my life to affecting change in healthcare as a practicing surgeon and professor, a senator and policy maker, and through medical mission work here at home and globally," Doctor and Sen. Bill Frist said in the release. "The same technologies that have fundamentally transformed other industries need to be applied in healthcare, where they will both dramatically enhance patient convenience and markedly improve patients’ overall health."

In addition to co-writing a book on universal healthcare, Sen. Daschle is a member of the Health Policy and Management Executive Council at the Harvard School of Public Health; the Global Policy Advisory Council for the Health Worker Migration; the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation Board of Trustees; and the GE Healthymagination Advisory Board. His day job is senior policy advisor to the law firm of DLA Piper "where he provides clients with strategic advice on public policy issues such as climate change and health care," according to the release.

"In order to see real change in our healthcare system, we all need to work together to help control skyrocketing costs and provide the access to care patients not only need, but deserve,” Sen. Daschle said in the release. "I firmly believe in the power of the private sector—and specifically ZocDoc—to work in tandem with policy makers and the medical community to change healthcare for the better by scaling our system for the future and empowering patients."

ZocDoc also announced it is used by more than 800,000 patients each month; it's the first time we've seen them release this metric. ZocDoc now offers 5.5 million available appointments with doctors and medical providers in 13 cities across the U.S. and continues to expand. The startup has about 200 employees; up from around 50-60 last year, Mr. Massoumi said.

Mr. Massoumi

ZocDoc's CEO Cyrus Massoumi has a soft spot for paper money. The ZocDoc offices sport a giant $100,000 vanity check from Forbes, which its founders debated taking into the bank when the actual money proved to be less than speedy in coming. But today's $25 million investment from Goldman Sachs won't come in the form of a check in any size. And it means the loss of a ZocDoc tradition, Betabeat learned after we got ahold of Mr. Massoumi's memo to ZocDockers today:

Hi, team–

Let me tell you about a lost ZocDoc tradition. Every time we secured new funding, I’d walk up to Trevor and slap the check on his desk, and we’d high-five. Things were different back then - we were very small and scrappy. I was slamming down $25K checks that might keep the lights on for another month, or buy a new server just in time to keep the site up.

Things change. They don’t write checks for investments as large as the ones we get these days – they do wire transfers instead. Either way, I miss those days. Trev, please clear some space on your desk. It’s time to bring the tradition back.

Consider this the official slapping-down of a multimillion dollar investment check from Goldman Sachs! This brings our total Series C funding to an incredible $75 million.

Think of this investment as one more vote of confidence in ZocDoc from the leaders of the finance world. The top investors want to get behind us because they can see that we’re creating the world’s 21st century healthcare infrastructure. They see that we stand true to our principles, and that we’re putting patients first. There’s just one more thing we have to do, and this investment will help us do it: more. We have to grow, to bring better healthcare access to the rest of the nation, and beyond.

Our work is just beginning, but I know all the positive feedback from our patients keeps you as motivated as it does me – so thank you for making it possible. I feel truly fortunate to be part of a group of people so passionate, so fun, and so committed to building a better world.

Best,
Cyrus

Nick Ganju (left, co-founder & CTO), Cyrus Massoumi (back center, co-founder & CEO), Oliver Kharraz, MD (right, co-founder & COO) and Netta Samroengraja (front center, CFO).

ZocDoc just announced a surprise extra $25 million on top of the $50 million the startup recently raised from Yuri Milner and DST, and the money came from high places--Goldman Sachs is investing directly in ZocDoc. That is to say, not through Goldman Sachs Investment Partners and not through Goldman's Principal Investment Area, but with money off its own balance sheets, ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi told Betabeat.

One of ZocDoc's first angel investors works at Goldman Sachs in a "unique position," Mr. Massoumi said. Goldman also manages some of ZocDoc's finances, and can be expected to handle or at least advise them on any acquisitions ZocDoc might make in the future. Plus ZocDoc's executives have personal friends at the firm, Mr. Massoumi said. (He and co-founder Dr. Oliver Kharraz used to be closer to that world--the two previously worked at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, and continued to wear suits and ties after starting ZocDoc until a friend told them they looked too much "like consultants" to be entrepreneurs, which prompted them to hit the Gap.)

"We're just really excited," he said. "There is not a large healthcare institution domestically, perhaps internationally, that does not have a relationship with Goldman Sachs."

Talks with Goldman started a few weeks ago, in a "mutual conversation," after the DST investment, Mr. Massoumi said.

Often when a private equity firm or investment bank gets involved with a tech startup, the expectation is that an IPO is around the corner. ZocDoc is expanding fast and hard, recently launching in Boston, where the average wait time to see a doctor is 50 days.

ZocDoc wants to spend its Series C funding on reaching all 51 U.S. markets, Mr. Massoumi said. 'It's important to us that we keep the promise that we've made and make sure that ZocDoc is accessible in as many places around the country as possible, as quickly as possible."

But wouldn't an IPO to raise a quick pile of cash help with that?

"It's not something we're really thinking about," he said. "I would not expect that from us. We're not planning to go public any time soon."

And why not?

"We don't have to," Mr. Massoumi said.

So $75 million is enough?

"I thought $50 million was going to be enough," he said.

Betabeat happened to ask the IPO question of Mr. Massoumi's co-founder, Oliver Kharraz, who kept the secret of the Goldman funding impeccably under his hat when we visited ZocDoc's office last week. Dr. Kharraz said the same thing--ZocDoc isn't thinking of an IPO, the founders aren't thinking of an exit.

This partnership struck Betabeat as having several additional advantages:

-Goldman's early investment puts it in a good position to eventually underwrite the company's IPO
-the partnership with Goldman could gives ZocDoc's early investors some options for liquidating their stakes, while allowing ZocDoc's executives to have some control over how and when that happens
-optics! Goldman hardly invests in tech startups, and rarely at such paltry levels. The last company we recall getting a Goldman investment was ... Facebook. And remember who co-invested in that deal?

ZocDoc earns $250 a month for every doctor in the system (which is why it keeps the number of doctors closely guaded). TechCrunch reported that ZocDoc, which has raised a total of $95 million to date, was valued at $700 million before the DST investment.

Dr. Kharraz

Betabeat dropped by ZocDoc's ninth floor Soho office this afternoon for some of the startup's famous catered lunch--today, sandwiches and salads from TriBeCa eatery Peace and Love, which employees munched at the cafeteria-style tables, each topped with a bottle of Sriracha.

Betabeat grabbed a salad and followed COO Oliver Kharraz and communications director Allison Braley into the conference room, decorated with an oversized painting of CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta giving Bravo TV's Dr. Gregory House a triumphant high five. "I keep meaning to tweet that picture," Ms. Braley said. "That'd be a good tweet," we agreed.

On Friday last week, ZocDoc had a birthday party. CEO Cyrus Massoumi gave a rousing speech, we were told, as did former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, for whom healthcare reform is a chosen cause. Mr. Daschle talked about how ZocDoc's simple solution--easy online booking, updated in real time, as a way to fill all the holes in doctors' schedules--could play an important role in industry reform. Mr. Daschle, who now works for global law firm DLA Piper, is still close to the current administration and remains knee-deep in the government-led healthcare reform effort, so his endorsement was no small praise.

So, happy fourth birthday, we said. When's the IPO? Where do you see ZocDoc in ten years?

"Oh! Ten years, that's a very long time," Dr. Kharraz said.

Between now and then, ZocDoc plans to continue its push toward getting more Americans access to doctors appointments. Dr. Kharraz is most interested in what ZocDoc can do to close the gap between the number of new uninsured patients brought into the system due to healthcare reform and the fact there's not been a proportionate increase in the number of doctors in the system. In fact, the number of primary doctors is dwindling as older primary caregivers retire and students elect to go into the more lucrative specialist professions. He's also interested in what ZocDoc can do to increase compliance--following doctor's orders after an appointment, which as far as ZocDoc goes, means scheduling your next appointment and following up on referrals. "People don't always care about their fitness," he said, gesturing at his roast beef sandwich. "As you can see I'm eating something completely unhealthy and having a soda with it."

We asked if ZocDoc was partnering with any local startups. We pointed to Fitocracy, which seems like it has some potential for solving that compliance problem.

The answer is, not really, Dr. Kharraz said, although partnerships may be more of a possibility in the far off future. "If you wait for all the other kids to play with you, you will get stalled," he said.

ZocDoc is pretty much staying the course since Betabeat wrote about the company a few weeks ago. Still talking like they're changing the world, still laser-focused on booking appointments online, even with that distracting pile of cash from Yuri Milner. The service just launched in Boston and has started to roll out a new feature--wait lists--which pings patients when a booked-up doctor has an appointment open up. This was one of their most-requested features, Ms. Braley said. They're opting for incremental changes rather than a site refresh, Dr. Kharraz said.

ZocDoc is not even advertising outside of some search engine placement and a few banner ads we noticed scatted across the web. That's because word of mouth has been their biggest referrer, Ms. Braley said, and they'd rather invest in things that will make people talk about ZocDoc. "If you do a Times Square ad, you're replacing four developers," Dr. Kharraz said. He'd rather invest inthe things that drive recommendations, such as product and customer service. "We do overemphasize customer service," he said.

Co-founder Cyrus Massoumi with football helmets from cities where ZocDoc has launched.

THE FOUNDERS OF ZOCDOC.COM, Cyrus Massoumi and Dr. Oliver Kharraz, had just concluded the very first public demonstration of their medical appointment-booking app at the TechCrunch40 conference in September 2007 when they got a review that threatened to put the whole endeavor on life support.

“Honestly, it would just never occur to me to go to any site to pick a doctor,” said Guy Kawasaki, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, early Apple employee and venerable start-up guru, smiling and chopping the air with a pen. “I mean, it’s just sort of too facetious.”

Emphasizing once more that he would never use such a service, he turned to a fellow judge on the panel, the entrepreneur and philanthropist Esther Dyson, and elaborated, “You’d go to a site and just, ohhh, you know, Lisa Macintosh went to Harvard, she looks cute, I’ll have her operate on my heart!”

The audience responded with belly laughs. “A heart condition, that’s a unique issue,” Mr. Massoumi, a bright-eyed, 35-year-old salesman whose first start-up, an e-commerce site called One Size Too Small, was not considered a success, said slyly. “But I can say that if you had a rash on your butt, you would use our site, because a) you wouldn’t want anyone to hear you make that call, and b) it might be after 6 o’clock, and maybe the doctor’s office isn’t open.”

Mr. Kawasaki’s turned out to be the minority reaction. Four years later, ZocDoc has 700,000 registered users and has raised $70 million from investors, including $50 million most recently from Facebook investor Digital Sky Technologies. The website, most often described as the “OpenTable for doctors,” has five million appointments available in 10 markets, including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Phoenix, and it’s hiring like mad. During a phone call with ZocDoc’s public relations director, Allison Braley, Betabeat was interrupted by what sounded like a foghorn. “Oh gosh, they’re blowing the horn,” she said, sounding shaken. “Every time we hire someone they blow the horn.”

On a recent Friday afternoon, Betabeat stood in front of an oversize $100,000 check signed Forbes.com & HP, which was mounted on the wall at ZocDoc’s teal-painted Soho headquarters. It represented a pile of prize money the company had received in December 2008. “It wasn’t until three months later that they sent us the actual check,” said Mr. Massoumi. The check came during the nadir of the recession, and the bootstrapping entrepreneurs, who moved to Harlem and Brooklyn after quitting cushy consulting jobs, considered making a hokey YouTube video of themselves taking the minifridge-size document into a bank to goose the payment.

Mr. Massoumi, at the time working for management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, had the idea for ZocDoc after he ruptured his ear drum during a flight from Seattle to New York. “I was working on a really high-pressure client, and partners from all over the world were calling me at odd hours of the night, so I just got really sick,” he recalled, sitting in one of ZocDoc’s sunny but basic conference rooms. “I had this sinus infection. So going up, it was fine, but coming down, when the air expands in your ear”—he clapped—“it’s like, incredibly painful, and in the end I ended up rupturing my eardrum and I couldn’t hear out of my right ear.”

Mr. Massoumi comes from a family of doctors, though he decided at a young age to be a “businessman” like his father’s friend, instead of an orthopedic surgeon like his father, because he was bad at science. But he knew he needed to see an ear, nose and throat specialist, so after landing, he pulled up his insurance company’s directory, which listed 191 practitioners in Manhattan in alphabetical order. “Being a type-A person, I figured I’m just going to start calling doctors, and I’m sure I can talk somebody in to seeing me same day,” he said.

But after discovering that some of the numbers didn’t work and waiting on hold with the ones that did, he was told repeatedly there was nothing available. “It was amazing. I’m like, I’m in pain! I want to go see a doctor! I can’t hear! And no one would see me.” The earliest appointment he could get was four days out.

After an “aha” moment in the middle of an aisle at Whole Foods a few weeks later, Mr. Massoumi met with his colleague and friend, Dr. Kharraz, 38, an exacting German who graduated magna cum laude from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich with an M.D. and Ph.D. in medicine, for lunch at the Eatery in Hell’s Kitchen. It’s possible to book the next available flight or the first open reservation at a restaurant—why shouldn’t a doctor’s appointment be the same way? he asked.

“I’m a doctor myself, so it never occurred to me that it might be difficult for people to find doctors,” said Dr. Kharraz. “I use my networks to get in and be seen in the last minute. But I heard the situation and, actually, when you look at the data, four days is still pretty good. It takes the average American consumer 21 days to see the doctor, and that’s completely unacceptable. You know? You need to be able to see the doctor when you’re sick.”

You’re right, he told Mr. Massoumi, we should quit our jobs and start this company. “It took me about 10 seconds to decide, which seems like a really long time,” he deadpanned.

On ZocDoc, users search for doctors by insurance accepted, location and specialty: allergist, dietician, urologist, general practice. The site pulls up a list of doctors, displaying a week’s worth of availability for each, so one can book the earliest available appointment if it’s urgent, or the highest-rated (or cutest) doctor if it’s not. The booking requires no payment up front, it’s possible to cancel online, and ZocDoc emails a friendly reminder before the appointment and a thank-you note afterward, encouraging patients to rate their doctors for bedside manner, wait time and overall impression. Doctors can choose whether or not to reveal their ratings.

But while reviews for doctors vary, patients who have used ZocDoc tend to gush about the service. “I have used ZocDoc to find a new dentist and a new primary care physician in the last year, and in both cases it was a fantastic experience,” said Chris Carella, a 33-year-old software developer who lives in the East Village. He registered on ZocDoc after a dentist he didn’t much like told him after multiple appointments that the pain he was experiencing was nothing. Using ZocDoc, he picked a highly rated dentist in his neighborhood who discovered he needed a root canal. “I now have two doctors I really like!”

ZocDoc’s real customers, the dentists, doctors and specialists who pay a flat $250 a month for the referrals (ZocDoc also allows them to add a button to their websites that lets users book appointments online), also tend to be enthusiastic about it. Dr. David Ritholtz, who founded and manages the Premier Dental practice in Lower Manhattan, was one of the first dentists to sign up. Indeed, Mr. Massoumi spent five hours camped out in Dr. Ritholtz’s waiting room, desperate to get the final sign-off on the partnership. The start-up was due to launch at TechCrunch40 in a matter of days and there weren’t enough dentists in its directory to make a scroll bar appear.

Dr. Ritholtz remembers none of this. He thought enabling a patient to make an appointment online and see a doctor’s profile­—their schooling and level of experience—was a great idea. Like many in the medical professions in New York, he was just busy.

“I was just told by my front desk that we got in excess of 35 patients last month from ZocDoc,” he said. He estimates that the service refers a quarter to a third of all new patients.

“I’m a happy customer,” he said. “Please give Cyrus and Oliver my best. Ask them to call me. I’d love to do lunch with them one day or something like that.”

In addition to camping out in Dr. Ritholtz’s waiting room and being escorted out of the offices of three other physicians by security, Mr. Massoumi and his co-founders Dr. Kharroz and CTO Nick Ganju, 35, had to figure out how to collect insurance information directly from doctors­—trying to get it from the insurance companies would have been even more onerous and prone to error—and make ZocDoc work with their myriad appointment-booking systems.

There are hundreds of practice management programs for doctors; ZocDoc says it syncs with all the versions that have more than a 1 percent market share. Doctors who use supported systems will see their appointments open up or get blocked online almost immediately, so a ZocDoc patient can slip in if there is a cancellation. Doctors who use an unsupported system—or rather, their receptionists—manually add and subtract appointments on a separate ZocDoc calendar, a stop-gap solution reminiscent of the kitchen fax machines behind the few-clicks it takes to get a Seamless delivery. The logistical nightmare of organizing and coordinating doctors, insurance information and software is probably the reason there wasn't a ZocDoc earlier--consider that even Seamless, then SeamlessWeb, started in 1999--and competitors are just starting to emerge. “They solved the problem really well on the front end and it was a great experience for the patient, and then the sausage factory in the back-end sort of took care of itself,” said Unity Stoakes, co-founder of the local start-up OrganizedWisdom, a web-based patient management system for doctors.

Most doctors we spoke to had few complaints, although one dentist mentioned he wished ZocDoc would prevent patients from canceling at the last minute, and the Yelp-like rating system does make physicians a bit squeamish. “Most of the reviews are very positive, but I’ll give you an example,” said one Manhattan ear, nose and throat doctor, who did not want to be named for patient confidentiality reasons. “A patient comes in, fills out forms, sits down in the waiting room and gets seen immediately. How is it she can rate me as a four for timeliness?” He acknowledged this was a problem with “the entire internet,” adding, “People have an ax to grind for some reason.”

Betabeat decided to replicate Mr. Massoumi’s experience and make believe we had an agonizing ear infection on an August Friday afternoon. We looked up E.N.T.’s in Manhattan who accepted our insurance and started calling around. There were three doctors at Beth Israel; all their numbers went to the same automated message—“If this is a new patient, or if this is regarding a departmental administrative matter or an emergency, press option one”—which then went to voice mail. The next office was closed. In all, we called eight doctors, by which time, though our ears felt fine, our head was starting to hurt. The earliest opening was five days out. But there were multiple appointments on ZocDoc on the day of our imaginary ear ache, where booking an appointment takes about two minutes.

ZocDoc has the potential to expand into other segments of the multi-trillion dollar health care industry, including medical records and patient management. But first, its founders want to irreversibly change the way patients book appointments. And the efficiency achieved by solving “one small thing that’s a huge pain point for everybody,” in Mr. Massoumi’s words, could add up to billions of dollars saved by Americans a year, just by keeping patients with painful earaches and other calamities out of the emergency room.

Mr. Massoumi, who conceived of ZocDoc after rupturing an eardrum on a flight.

ZocDoc just raised its $50 million Series Cool from DST Global, making the online booking and review site for doctors' appointments the first New York investment by Facebook/Twitter/Zynga/Groupon investor DST Global.

ZocDoc offers five million available appointments across nine major metropolitan areas and "is in the midst of a nationwide rollout," a DST rep said in an email. ZocDoc says it books about 700,000 appointments a month; the start-up was also named the best place to work in New York by Crain's.

ZocDoc gets revenue from physicians and other healthcare providers who pay $250 a month to be listed and book appointments through ZocDoc. "By giving patients access to real-time doctor availability, ZocDoc is bringing radical new efficiency to the healthcare system. The service lists a ‘hidden supply’ of appointment times that would have otherwise gone to waste, including the 10 to 20 percent of appointments made available by last-minute patient cancellations," the rep wrote.

"Our aspiration is to be as big as Google or Microsoft. Our market is that big. We have the potential to be that big. It’s just a matter of how long it takes us to get there,” CEO Cyrus Massoumi said in an April interview with the NYC-based start-up blog Founded. What, $50 million ain't cool enough for you, Cyrus?