He built a newsroom for 30 million millennials. Now he is building a salary spreadsheet for burned-out doctors - and he is dead serious about it.
// Jake Horowitz. The grin of a man who keeps starting over.
Jake Horowitz thinks doctors have data for everything except themselves. They will run a dozen labs before a diagnosis, weigh every number, trust the chart. Then they sign an employment contract knowing almost nothing about what the person down the hall makes. Offcall, the San Francisco company he co-founded and runs, exists to close that gap - a confidential tool that lets physicians benchmark their salary and benefits against their peers, plus a database of side gigs and a community to compare notes.
The pitch is unfashionably blunt. Burnout, the wellness industry insists, is about resilience and breathing exercises. Horowitz aims a level lower, at the paycheck. "By focusing squarely on physicians' financial health," he says, "Offcall is tackling one of the leading causes of burnout nationwide." It is a finance company wearing the clothes of a wellbeing company, or maybe the other way around.
He launched it on December 4, 2024, with his co-founder Dr. Graham Walker - an emergency physician with sixteen years on the floor and the builder behind MDCalc - and a $2 million seed round. The cap table is the tell: Bloomberg Beta and Roar Ventures, yes, but also 26 practicing physicians who put their own money behind it. A company built for a crowd, funded by that crowd.
// the toolkit, in plain terms
Illustrative - relative emphasis of Offcall's features, not survey data.
"By focusing squarely on physicians' financial health, Offcall is tackling one of the leading causes of burnout nationwide." - Jake Horowitz, on why money belongs in the burnout conversation
Before any of this, there were two kids at Horace Mann who both played the saxophone. Jake Horowitz and Chris Altchek met there, stayed friends, and in 2011 turned a hunch into a company. Young people were pouring into the streets and onto their phones in ways the old newsrooms could not read. So the two of them started PolicyMic - later just Mic - to write the news for a generation that the news kept getting wrong.
It started as a two-person operation. It did not stay that way. At its peak Mic employed around 160 staffers and reached roughly 30 million people a month, most of them under 34. Horowitz became the face of its video - on-air correspondent, editor-at-large, the one in the chair across from the famous. He interviewed Barack Obama. He interviewed Bill Gates, David Cameron, Shimon Peres, Queen Rania, Kim Kardashian West. In 2014, Forbes put him on its 30 Under 30 list and the UN named him a Youth Leader for the Sustainable Development Goals.
Then the floor gave way. In November 2018, after Facebook pulled the plug on a video deal Mic had bet on, the company laid off most of its staff and sold to Bustle Digital Group for under $5 million - a brutal number for a business that had been talked about in the hundreds of millions a year earlier. It was a hard, public lesson in building on someone else's platform.
Obama. Gates. Cameron. Peres. Queen Rania. Kardashian West. Before 30, Horowitz had sat across from heads of state and household names - learning that a good question travels further than a good headline.
Mic's video machine ran on Facebook's reach. When the deal vanished in 2018, so did the business. The next company would own its own relationship with its audience.
"A company built for a crowd, funded by that crowd."// the through-line from Mic to Offcall
The path here was not a straight line. At Stanford he fell for Middle East history and U.S. foreign policy, and he chased it - working at the Carnegie Endowment in Beirut, living and working on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict, then landing at Change.org before Mic. Storytelling and advocacy, over and over, in different rooms.
What pulled him toward medicine was closer to home. His wife is an emergency room nurse. He spent years advising venture-backed healthcare startups and watching, up close, how much the people on the front lines were struggling. Offcall is what happened when the journalist's instinct for a hidden story met a problem at his own kitchen table.
Stanford University - history and Middle East politics.
Carnegie Endowment in Beirut; advocacy work at Change.org.
Co-founds PolicyMic with Chris Altchek.
Forbes 30 Under 30; UN Youth Leader for the SDGs.
Mic sold to Bustle Digital Group after the Facebook deal collapses.
Co-founds Offcall with Dr. Graham Walker; launches Dec 4 with $2M.
Offcall ships its Physicians AI Report and compensation data series.
He and his Mic co-founder met at Horace Mann playing the saxophone. The company came later; the friendship came first.
He once ran a newsroom of about 160 people. He now runs a startup of roughly 12. He seems to prefer the smaller room.
His wife is an ER nurse - the front-line view that helped point him at physician burnout in the first place.
Biking, hiking, and toddler-powered adventures around San Francisco when he's, fittingly, off call.
Both companies run on one idea: hand a community its own data and watch what it does next.
26 practicing physicians wrote checks into Offcall. The users are also the investors.