Dive Brief:

• Health care startup Zocdoc announced the appointment of Edward Liu as CFO. Liu has spent more than two decades as the head of Americas Technology Banking at Morgan Stanley, and will oversee all of the digital healthcare marketplace’s finances. 

• Just prior to Liu’s hire, Zocdoc overhauled its pricing model, which used to charge practitioners a flat $3,000 annual subscription fee. Over the past 18 months, it’s charging between $40 and $140 per new patient in an effort to lower the barrier for entry for smaller practices.

• Liu is succeeding Netta Samroengraja, who has been with Zocdoc since 2008, serving in roles including CFO, chief business officer and chief people officer. Samroengraja has stepped into the newly created role of Zocdoc’s chief corporate development officer.

Dive Insight:

At Morgan Stanley, Liu provided counsel on hundreds of transactions for prominent internet and software companies, including Chewy, DraftKings, Etsy, Grubhub, Indeed, and Kayak. He also advised Red Hat on its $35 billion sale to IBM, the largest enterprise software transaction in history. 

While at Morgan Stanley, Liu was on the investment committee of the in-house startup accelerator, Multicultural Innovation Lab. 

The pandemic prompted the permanent change to the new pricing model, Zocdoc founder and CEO Oliver Kharraz said. Last April, it began allowing consumers to book telehealth appointments. A month later, it launched a program allowing medical providers to meet patients via the Zocdoc app.

As a result of the company's model transition, it's grown 50% year-over-year without a significant cash spend, which Kharraz says "really points towards us being able to grow much more aggressively with appropriate investments."

"I've known Ed for over over a decade, and he's incredibly thoughtful, knowledgeable and resilient," Kharraz told CFO Dive. "He [helped take] HomeAway public." 

HomeAway, which was acquired by Expedia in 2015 and now exists as Vrbo, is to Airbnb what Zocdoc's old business model is to its new business model, Kharraz said. "Ed has directly seen the impact of having a correct business model for a company like ours, and since we now have that transition in the rearview mirror, we're very excied to keep building with him."

In February, it received $150 million through a debt-and-equity financing from investment firm Francisco Partners, on top of the $220 million in equity funding raised from other investors last year. It has raised a total of $376 million over ten funding rounds; Kharraz declined to comment on any IPO plans or future capital raises.

Zocdoc, founded in 2007, “is finally bringing market forces — choice, competition and transparency — to one of the largest sectors in the U.S. economy,” Liu said in a statement.

His first priority in the role will be spending time meeting with his finance team, currently about 20 people, senior management and the board, he told the Wall Street Journal. With the company’s new pricing model in place, he plans to establish growth priorities. Zocdoc employs 650 people.