In the late 1990s, two graduate students in Stanford’s computer science department set out to organize the world’s information. Shortly thereafter, a visiting scholar named Mario Schlosser arrived on campus, set on figuring out how trust could be built into peer-to-peer networks. The original server used by the graduate students, who were now running a little outfit named Google, had formerly been crammed under a desk in the office Schlosser now used.
Now, 20 years later, the graduate students have done OK, and they no longer need to borrow server space. But they’ve continually been stifled by one kind of information that’s very hard to organize: Healthcare data. The industry in America is a mess: Yoked together with confusing regulations, perverse incentives, and computers running Windows XP.
Meanwhile, Schlosser has moved on from academia and created a company, called Oscar, with Joshua Kushner (brother of Jared) to try to solve those problems. The goal of Oscar is to do to healthcare what Uber did to the taxi industry: Use smart digital technology to make everything faster and easier for customers, and then use the data gathered to build radically new services, which can collect more data that leads to new services. (Ideally, Oscar would like to accomplish this without cracking as many eggs on its own head as Uber did.)
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, invested early in Oscar through its venture capital fund Capital G and its health services spinoff, Verily. But today they’re announcing a much larger, and more strategic, investment of roughly $375 million. Neither company will give exact figures, but it seems that Alphabet will now own roughly 10% of Oscar. One of Google’s earliest employees, Salar Kamangar, former CEO of YouTube, will also join Oscar’s board. Wired spoke with Schlosser about the deal, privacy, data, and whether, one day, we’ll actually treat our gastroenteritis through an app.
