I really hope the accusations against consumer-facing physician scheduling company ZocDoc aren't true, for a lot of reasons.
Over the weekend, Business Insider reported that a former entry-level saleswoman at New York-based startup ZocDoc is suing the company for sexual harassment and for generally creating an unpleasant working environment that allegedly was infested with mice. The ex-employee said ZocDoc subjected her to a "frat house"-like office, in which women were objectified, sexual encounters were openly discussed and management favored male staffers.
"There was a distinct difference between the way upper management talked to and treated the women in the company. Many employees expressed concerns that were ignored. Some were told 'this a sales floor,' it was brushed it off as just being part of the job. The male employees were at a great advantage and very buddy buddy with each other and the women (who weren't sleeping with someone in upper management) were on their own," the woman wrote anonymously on Kinja earlier this month.
"They have several mice who run around the office during the day and late at night, defecate in mugs kept in the kitchen. Cleaning mice feces out of your desk was a daily routine," she continued. And that was not even the most salacious part of the missive. Read the original for yourself, because I won't repeat some of the words here.
The accuser reportedly forwarded the Kinja link to Business Insider on Saturday. The publication said it verified the her identity and confirmed that she did used to work for ZocDoc.
ZocDoc didn't flat-out deny the charges in offering this vanilla statement to Business Insider: "As a company, we pride ourselves on being a great place to work, and we have a long-standing policy against any forms of unlawful harassment or discrimination." However, this is America, so the burden of proof is on the accuser.
ZocDoc spokeswoman Amy Juaristi said the company would not be providing any further comment.
It would be a sad day if the allegations do prove true, not because of ZocDoc's management, but for what the company represents. The word "disruptive" gets thrown around a little too much in the world of health IT startups, but ZocDoc truly has been a disruptive force in how people book doctor's appointments.
Five years ago this month, at the 2009 American Medical Informatics Association's annual meeting in San Francisco, I heard Dr. Mark Smith, then president of the California HealthCare Foundation, pining for something in healthcare that was as easy to use as
In healthcare, Smith added, "We have fast, smart, cheap machines connected to each other by slow, dumb, expensive humans."
ZocDoc promised to change that, becoming an OpenTable of sorts for healthcare: easy to use for consumer and business alike and truly disruptive to an ingrained, inefficient process. It has grown fast, now contracting with physicians in 2,000 U.S. cities and towns, and opened an office in Scottsdale, Ariz., last year to serve Western markets.
In June, Forbes reported that ZocDoc was in the process of raising $152.6 million in a round of funding that valued the company at $1.6 billion.
If the accusations by the ex-employee are true, ZocDoc may not disappear, but a lot of that value will. Worse, the company could become yet another symbol of the macho, sexist culture in that is all too common in venture-funded tech startups. Healthcare needs disruption, but it doesn't need a "frat house" where half the work force feels threatened.
