Oscar has always been a unique company: we’re the first commercial, greenfield health insurer in 15-20 years in states like New York and California. Insurance companies, for many reasons, simply don’t get started a lot. But what really puts us into a category of one is that, in this industry, we are by our DNA a technology company. We don’t solve everything with a snippet of code - we wouldn’t be one of the highest-rated and the most viral insurers without making members happy by guiding them through their healthcare decisions with a lot of passion and direct interaction. Having technology in our DNA means that we create extremely short feedback cycles: learning from every single member interaction how to improve our overall system. It means obsessing over the entirety of the product experience: every big and small moment we create or go through with our members. It means solving problems through ingenuity and invention, not through process. It means tracking and monitoring everything, to see how we are doing at all points in time. We do these things for one reason: to make sure our members have the best possible and most transparent experiences as they navigate the normally opaque world of health care.
Having technology in our DNA also means striving for technical and scientific brilliance. So I’m extremely pleased that we’re welcoming a technical and scientifically brilliant mind to the Oscar leadership team. Alan Warren is joining us as CTO and SVP of Engineering.
Alan is one of the most experienced and accomplished engineering leaders in the world. He comes to Oscar from Google, where he helped grow the New York office from 50 engineers to close to 3,000, and was the VP responsible for the Google Docs and Drive suite. He started his career with degrees in Physics (with a heavy dose of math and computing) from Ga Tech and MIT. He then spent 10 years in IBM Research where he worked on next-gen devices and materials before shifting to graphics, productivity apps, and distributed computing infrastructure. He soon moved on to work on business software and analytics as Chief Architect for Hyperion Software. Next he got the startup itch and co-founded Juice Software in NYC, creating a platform for accessing distributed business data in real time, before joining Google.
Over the past three years, we have built genome-like data structures that parse the structure of medical episodes; systems that alert our care managers in real time to impending emergency room admissions; algorithmically guided workflows to manage members’ care; simulators that allow us to simulate our hospital and doctor network architecture in real time; and large-scale stream processing engines for our healthcare data. Alan embodies the technical brilliance, the obsession with our members’ experience and the dependability that pervades everything we do. We’re extremely happy to welcome him on board.