Hosting Zocdoc’s “Discount Academy Awards”
10:00 am
It’s December 13th 2019, and I’m standing in a spotlight on the stage of the NYU Skirball Center, an 850-seat performing arts venue in downtown NYC. I deliver my first line:
“For those of you who are new here, this is the Zocdoc Value Awards, or ZVAs.”
My arms are crossed tightly in front of my evening suit because, like Will Ferrell in Talladega Nights, I don’t know what to do with my hands. I am a principal front-end software developer. I’ve never hosted an awards show before, not even a fake one.
“Yep, every year we rent out this beautiful, gold columned Broadway-caliber theater to sing, dance and make fun of ourselves.”
That’s Hayley Bingham, my co-host. Hayley is in Sales and, unlike me, actually gets paid to talk to people all day.
“This is a real thing we do!”
Laughter of recognition from the audience. Because dressing up in evening formalwear for a 10 am variety show is a rather silly tradition for a health tech organization.
Hayley continues, “We didn’t know each other before hosting this year’s awards… So I went to shadow Gil, and I still have no idea what his job is.”
I turn to the audience and, as if second nature, casually respond in one breath,
“I use CSS and ES6 with a React-Redux codebase in order to provide an HTML5-compliant browsing experience through a multi-webapp architecture relying on a microservice backend with some remnants of a monolithic legacy codebase.”
In the darkness of the theater, a few hundred Zocdoc employees applaud. I wasn’t expecting this response, nor had I imagined it when I repeated this mouthful to myself at home over and over to get it right, oftentimes to my infant child who would unwittingly coo back.
“…It’s pretty simple, Hayley,” I continue on-stage. She glares at me, just as we’d rehearsed.
Over the next hour and a half, Zocdoc is in store for some song-and-dance performances by their coworkers, a momentous year-end speech from our CEO & Founder, a few clever video sketches, some surprisingly self-deprecating jokes on Zocdoc’s behalf, and the highly-anticipated presentation of our six core values awards to select team members who have been nominated by their peers over the last 12 months.
Or to get a better sense for the tone of the ZVAs, here’s a text I sent to a friend:
“I just watched a bunch of coworkers do a choreographed dance to a parody of Adele’s ‘ Rolling In The Deep’ about the Zocdoc mission statement… am I a side character on The Office?”
Melissa Masia is a software engineer on the Provider Team who started at Zocdoc last August after interning here the prior summer.
“The ZVAs are a big amplification of what Zocdoc’s culture is like,” she explained. Melissa has presented at our end-of-sprint demos and has been to happy hours and our annual dev tubing day, so she’s already pretty settled into the unique culture here.
But this was Melissa’s first year watching this particular tradition, “I had some preconceived notions that it was going to be a lot of singing and dancing with some self-deprecating humor about the company and our achievements over the course of the year… Someone described it to me as the ‘discount Oscars.’ I heard a group practicing a song next door to one of my meetings, and that gave me a bit of a glimpse.”
What surprised Melissa the most was just how involved our year-end celebration was.
“It was obvious that a lot more thought, rehearsal and effort had gone into it than I had expected, and that kind of blew my mind,” she said.
Our coworkers, and recognizing their outstanding contributions throughout the year, are the real reason this whole event exists. At the end of the song-and-dance portion of the show, Zocdoc’s executive leadership team presents six exemplary Zocdoc’rs with awards representing each of our six core values.
“Everyone was really rooting for each other when it came to the actual awards section,” Melissa said. “When someone on each team showed up on the screen, even as one of the nominees, there was applause and cheering from a different section of the company.”
Is this what Melissa had imagined her first post-college job would include?
“I spoke with my friends about their companies’ white elephants or holiday parties, but no one else had a year-end summary in this hilarious, rehearsed manner,” she laughed.
“I took a video of the Lizzo parody and asked myself, ‘Where do I work? This is crazy!’ But in the best way.”
10:40 am
It’s almost halfway through the show and we’re in the middle of the aforementioned Lizzo parody. Up until this point we’ve already seen a “ Rolling in the Deep” spoof about the secret perks you supposedly get if you win a ZVA, and a parody of Queen’s “ We Will Rock You “ performed exclusively by the Sales Team. The responses to both have been enthusiastic, but they’re nothing compared to the moment when our facilities manager and newly-awarded ZVA winner Cesar Vasconcellos storms the stage donning a sequin jacket before launching into a full-on rap.
We’re a healthcare tech company, and yet picture it: We’ve got music, a professional-grade lighting package, and videos of Zocdoc’rs in our other offices dancing all synced up to the movements of a dozen onstage choreographed dancers-slash-Zocdoc employees.
If Hamilton was less about the founding of our country and more about the ability to book appointments with doctors who accept your insurance from the ease of a web-enabled device, we’d surely begin the national tour tomorrow.
Wrangling this many people isn’t an easy feat. Olivia Wong, internal comms senior associate and unofficial Senior Internal talent recruitment director for this year’s ZVA’s, offered some insight on how we get others involved.
“Some people submit themselves. Some we get by culling through people’s new-hire fun facts and seeing who has musical abilities. We have an intro meeting that’s friendly and warm, and then we follow up in person.”
Follow up?
“More like peer pressure. We peer pressure people. People do actually sign up to do this, we don’t force people… but some people just need a little nudge in the right direction.”
If you look closely at the above photo of the Lizzo parody performance you can spot a girl with blue hair, third from the right. Her name is Katie Huang, she’s a software engineer on the patient growth team, and this was her first time performing in a ZVA show:
“I have no idea how I got dragged into it. I did ballet in high school, and lyrical contemporary as well, and hip-hop in college, but I didn’t think anyone actually knew that. Just rehearsing the one song took about 12 rehearsals,” said Katie.
I can relate — as a host, we spent almost four months collaborating on maybe 10 actual minutes of jokes.
As the group got closer and closer to the day-of, it started to feel more real.
Katie continued, “We originally practiced dancing to the actual Lizzo song, and then I came into rehearsal after my vacation and we had singers with Zocdoc parody lyrics in front of them. And that’s when I thought, this was happening. It was great to have people to perform for after rehearsing over and over in front of nobody.”
Olivia adds: “The poor yoga club had the room next-door… we had overlapping practice with the yoga club and every Thursday evening, Taylor would start belting Adele mid-vinyasa.”
Part of the fun of being involved with the ZVAs is not knowing which of your coworkers are involved.
“They were definitely surprised to see me perform,” Katie said, “and were really supportive afterwards. Nobody really knows who will be on-stage at the ZVA’s each year because all the planning and rehearsals are pretty obscured from day-to-day work stuff,” she said.
Now that she’s performed in one, what are Katie’s thoughts on the ZVAs as a whole?
“My first year at Zocdoc, I thought it was weird that everyone was so excited for it. Based on what I’d heard, I had a Kool-Aid kind of situation where I thought everyone was brainwashed. But then I was surprised that there were so many self-referential and self-deprecating jokes. You’d figure it would be really cheesy if it was just a Zocdoc hype show. But there was a good balance where it wasn’t just about pumping ourselves up, and actually holistic about the whole year in review. I felt like the show definitely lived up to the expectations.”
December 2nd, 2019, a week and a half before the ZVAs
9th floor conference room, and a bunch of us are looking over the Zocdoc Superbowl “ad”.
I should clarify: Zocdoc doesn’t actually have plans for a Superbowl ad. This is going to be the closing joke for the ZVAs. Hayley and I will announce that everyone gets to see a “sneak peek” of our 2020 Superbowl ad, and then we show one second of our CEO saying the word “Zocdoc” (taken from our actual national TV ad) before the house lights come up.
Yesterday we did a full run-through of the show for the musicians, dancers and everyone involved, and Hayley informs us that some of her coworkers thought the ad was real.
I find this hilarious. The clip is literally just one second long.
“It’s because we say sneak peek, so they think the joke is that we are only showing one second of a full ad. We need to make it clear that we’re showing them the entirety of the supposed ad,” a familiar voice chimes in.
That’s Shoshana Hochdorf, Zocdoc’s senior manager of internal communications, and the producer of the ZVAs for six years now.
“I do not have a background in production,” Shoshana cautioned. “There’s been eight in Zocdoc’s history, and I’ve done six of them.”
She explained that the first ZVAs had been held in our office, but in time we wanted to up the production value and make it something really special. “The year I started at Zocdoc, our team decided we wanted to host it at an external venue… about three months before the show. We ended up doing it at another nearby university’s auditorium for two years, and then we switched to NYU Skirball after the infamous tech disaster.”
Tech disaster?
“Long story short, they had a faulty wire that broke the connection to our master computer, which led to what most people will say is the most memorable ZVAs in the company’s history. The lights were turning on and off, videos autoplaying…Personally, it took years off my life. It was so bad that year essentially became the Oliver [Kharraz, CEO & Founder] standup show.”
And eight years into this tradition, what’s different?
“The biggest change was when we introduced the ‘hosts’ who make jokes about what happened that year. It was my second year producing the ZVAs, and the genesis was actually just, ‘Hey, we think this is our version of the Oscars, maybe we should have a host,’ which is kind of ironic because now the Oscars don’t have hosts. In reality, it’s halfway between the Dundees and the Oscars,” said Shoshana.
But then again, doesn’t Michael Scott wear a tux?
“None of us were technically trained in this, but it’s really wonderful that all these people who have different backgrounds and talents are like, ‘yeah, I play the drums’, ‘I can play the keys’. Everyone sort of chips in and then it’s like this ragtag team that puts the whole thing together and actually makes a pretty incredible show,” said Shoshana. “It ends the year with a fantastic feeling of team pride and energy in our offices.”
11:25 am
This year’s ZVAs are almost over. We have zinged most of the C-suite, introduced three unnecessarily fancy performance numbers, presented some spoof commercials, showed off a few of this year’s more ridiculous hackathon projects and, most importantly for an awards show, given out some awards.
For a “discount Oscars,” it’s amazing how much a ZVA is something Zocdoc’rs are legitimately excited to win. We’ve watched presenters and winners from our other two offices in Phoenix and Pune video in via livestream, and Hayley and I are closing out the show by riffing on the future of Zocdoc.
Hayley sets us up for the big reveal, “Should we tell them?”
I nod at her, then we say in unison, “This is the year… of the Zocdoc Superbowl Ad!”
My fellow Zocdoc’rs cheer. Most know we’re kidding. Some, I later learn, really believe it for a minute.
“Tell your friends to tune in on February 2nd, because we’re finally doing it! Shoshana, show them the ad!”
House lights go down.
Black title card: Zocdoc 2020 Superbowl Ad.
We hear Oliver: “Zocdoc.”
House lights back up.
It’s my favorite bit we’ve come up with, and the laughter from the audience shows they agree. It feels great.
I quip my tag, “Airing that will cost us 1.3 million dollars.”
We’re in the homestretch. Hayley closes, “That’s our show, thank you for mandatorily attending!”
And the curtain drops. Another ZVAs in the books. It’s surprising how fast it goes by after so many months of preparation.
The rest of my day will involve a white elephant gift exchange with the Core Services team, a subway ride home for a quick nap, and finally the NYC holiday party, which is always on the same day as the ZVAs to round out a really unique day.
But first, Julian needs help debugging a jest unit test.
No problem Julian, I hope you don’t mind me doing it in my evening wear.
About the Author
Gil Varod is a Principal Front-End Engineer at Zocdoc, and is somehow one of three Gils at the company. Amazing.
Originally published at https://www.zocdoc.com on February 18, 2020.
