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UTUSN

(77,795 posts)
4. ANnnnnnd HEeeeere's *Jonathan*!1 (cashing in on OBAMAcare)
Sat Jan 24, 2015, 07:37 PM
Jan 2015
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“The nephew of one President and the cousin of another, Bush has seen his company prosper in the age of Obamacare.Photograph by Andrew Hetherington for Fortune”
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"Bush dressed as fictional talk show host Ali G. at an Athena event in 2012, at the White House with cousin George W. in 2006, and driving an ambulance in New Orleans during College."
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"Bush (left) in 2005 with his Athenahealth co-founder, Todd Park.
Photograph by Michael Edwards"
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http://fortune.com/2014/12/29/athenahealth-ceo-jonathan-bush-bubble/
[font size=5]Is Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush in a bubble?[/font]
The Athenahealth CEO believes his company can become the Amazon of health care. But hedge fund manager David Einhorn and others are betting that his soaring stock is ready to burst.

Jen Wieczner December 29, 2014, 7:00 AM EST

Jonathan Bush is having a lot of fun for a guy under attack. As he barrels around his 387-acre Maine resort at night in an all-terrain vehicle, weaving through trees and bumping over curbs, the co-founder and CEO of health care technology company Athenahealth doesn’t appear to be worried at all about a short-selling assault by hedge fund manager David Einhorn, who is very publicly betting against Athena’s highflying stock. Moments earlier, Bush—nephew of President No. 41 and cousin to No. 43—was regaling his guests with tales of the time he nearly had sex at Camp David. Now it’s past midnight, and he should really be getting to bed, because at 7 a.m. he’ll be leading a group on a jog to a serene but bone-chillingly cold pond for a swim. Then the ATV rumbles up to the “afterparty cabin,” where a few dozen venture capitalists, investors, health care startup CEOs, and Athena execs are playing drinking games, and Bush can’t stand to miss out. The night before he had ended up shirtless while playing something called flip cup. And when a Morgan Stanley portfolio manager, Athena’s largest shareholder, joked that he was selling his stock because Bush was buying everyone beer, Bush threw his hands in the air and yelled, “Yayyyy!!!”

Welcome to Athenahealth’s fourth annual More Disruption Please conference, the Animal House of corporate gatherings. The setting for this early-fall event is Point Lookout, a resort Athena purchased in 2011 as an employee-training and client-entertainment facility. A four-hour drive north of the company’s headquarters outside Boston—and some 120 miles up the Maine coast from Walker’s Point, where the presidential side of the family spent summers in office—Point Lookout also doubles as a wedding venue, a vacation destination, and the local bowling alley. Despite the rustic surroundings, there is rarely a quiet moment whenever Athenahealth’s hyperactive, no-filter goofball of a chief executive is around. Bush, who last May published a book titled Where Does It Hurt? An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Fixing Health Care, says the ultimate point of his antics is to foster irreverence for the status quo. At MDP he brings together investors with startups that might someday make his own company obsolete. Bush’s rallying cry, as always, is the need to reform the U.S. health care system through innovation—and by whatever means necessary. And he’s not afraid to look like a doofus in the process. “I’ve got to go past the rules of this game to the new game,” says Bush, 45, in a typical moment of rhetorical crescendo. “And I’m going to win the new game, even though it hasn’t been invented yet. You can call that visionary—a willing- ness to withstand emotional pain and isolation.”

Bush’s gonzo approach to corporate leadership has worked spectacularly well at Athenahealth ATHN 1.49% so far. Since the company went public in 2007, its shares had returned 266% through mid-December—more than double the Nasdaq (87%) or the Russell 1000 Health Care Index (130%) over the same period. The rocketing stock price has pushed the market value of the company to around $5 billion. Investors have been attracted to the company’s rapid growth in a vast market that is suddenly undergoing radical change thanks to Obamacare. Athenahealth has seen average revenue gains of 32% a year by selling cloud-based software services to doctors’ offices, including electronic medical records—a business that, spurred by government incentives, has caught fire in recent years. The global health care IT market, now worth about $40.2 billion, has grown 35% in the past five years and is projected to surge another 64% over the next five, to more than $66 billion in 2020, according to Global Industry Analysts. And research firm MarketsandMarkets predicts that health care cloud computing in North America will nearly triple by 2018. ....

Bush co-founded Athenahealth in 1997 with Todd Park, a fellow former health care consultant who left Athena in 2008 and started Castlight Health, before being tapped by President Obama to serve as the U.S. chief technology officer. Since late August, Park has served as a government technology adviser in Silicon Valley. “They were offended as Americans that health care is as dysfunctional as it is, and they had a zealot’s sense of mission to make it better,” says Hull of Bush and Park. ....

The company’s early success surprised even members of Bush’s own clan. Jonathan managed to score a meeting in the Oval Office with President George W. early in his first term. Reenacting that visit, Bush imitates the incredulous look on his cousin’s face when he mentioned Athenahealth: “He was like, ‘You’re CEO of a company?’ And in my head I was like, ‘Well, if you can be President, I can be CEO!’” ....

As Bush plots the future path for Athena, he’s also redefining his own life. He’s going through a divorce from his second wife. Now he’s trying to find balance between running his company and spending time with his five kids from his first marriage. Bush took a step back this year when he took an eight-week sabbatical, taking advantage of an Athena employee policy. He skied, he traveled to the Sochi Olympics, and he spent a week shadowing an Army colonel at Fort Hood to glean leadership lessons. He says he never checked Athena’s stock price once. ....


This story is from the January 2015 issue of Fortune.
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