Andrew Hayek and the business of belonging

Andrew Hayek once ran toward a stage carrying an Olympic torch. The occasion was SCA’s 2016 leadership meeting in Las Vegas, where a filmed relay across the country ended with chief operating officer Michael Rucker bringing the flame into the ballroom. Rucker handed it to Hayek, who lit the flame and opened the company’s games. There were team flags, skits and trivia. A chief executive’s calendar had briefly acquired the duties of an opening-ceremony committee.

It is a useful place to begin a career that can otherwise disappear into initials. BCG. KKR. SCA. An IPO. Optum. Then TAP, the company-building firm Hayek co-founded with Cory Roberts in 2019. On paper, the sequence looks like a succession of larger responsibilities. In the ballroom, it looked like an executive willing to participate in the slightly embarrassing business of getting people to feel they belonged together.

Both versions matter. Hayek has operated inside private equity, led a publicly traded business and gone back to founding companies. He also teaches MBA students at Northwestern’s Kellogg School and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. His career offers a way into a question that business biographies often hurry past: once someone has learned how to run an organization, what do they choose to build next?

The invitation that changed the job

Hayek grew up in Iowa. He attended Yale from 1992 to 1996 and earned his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude. His early jobs were at the Boston Consulting Group and KKR. These are familiar credentials in an executive biography, and an efficient reader might treat them as stepping stones. The more consequential step was an invitation.

While at KKR, Hayek worked closely with the new chief executive of Alliance HealthCare Services. That executive asked him to join as chief operating officer. Hayek moved into operating responsibility, serving as Alliance’s president and COO from 2003 to 2006. He subsequently became president of VillageHealth, a DaVita division, from 2007 to 2008.

Consulting, investing and operating share a vocabulary. Their consequences arrive on different schedules. An adviser can recommend a change; an investor can evaluate it; an operator has to organize the people who will make it happen on Monday. Hayek’s transition put him inside that final task. The distinction helps explain why his later career includes so much attention to management teams, professional development and the practical shape of an organization.

When the center has to earn its place

In May 2008, Hayek became president and CEO of Surgical Care Affiliates. TPG had carved the business out of HealthSouth the previous year. The new company needed an identity and a workable relationship between its central office and the people running its locations. Owning a network and persuading that network to work together are separate management problems.

An early survey exposed the difficulty. Eighty percent of SCA’s leaders said they believed they would be better off leaving the company and operating independently. Hayek and other leaders worked with employees around the country to select core values. SCA also inverted its stated power structure: the corporate office would work on behalf of its centers.

There is a bracing lack of ceremony in that finding. Before a corporate office can explain its strategy, it may need to explain why anyone should want a corporate office. The response moved the emphasis toward support. People closest to the daily work were supposed to receive something useful from the organization above them. A chart can be redrawn in an afternoon; earning confidence takes longer.

That episode gives the torch ceremony more substance. By 2016, a leadership meeting included groups creating their own flags and colleagues being honored for exemplifying company values. Such rituals are easy to parody. They can also make an abstract promise visible. The challenge is whether the promise survives the trip home from Las Vegas.

Raising the bar, leaving room to learn

At SCA, Hayek’s approach to executive development involved progressively higher performance expectations. Executives who needed new skills to meet those expectations sought development. The arrangement asked people to take responsibility for learning, while making continued learning relevant to the job. Management training had a reason to exist beyond a certificate and a buffet lunch.

The financial results during his tenure were substantial. Between 2008 and 2015, SCA’s revenue rose 88 percent to $1.3 billion. Those figures describe company performance across several years. They sit alongside the work of a management team and a wider organization, rather than providing a tidy measure of one person’s contribution.

The company went public in 2013. Four years later, Optum acquired it in a transaction valued at $3.4 billion, including debt. Along the way, its partnerships increased fivefold between 2007 and 2016. The years are worth keeping straight: the partnership comparison begins before Hayek’s arrival. The wider story is expansion through relationships as well as through an organization’s own capabilities.

An IPO and an acquisition make convenient chapter endings. They supply dates, valuations and the satisfying impression of a finish line. The torch had a finish line too. Running an organization is less obliging: a new owner, a new reporting structure and a new set of expectations simply begin the next working day.

Relationships under pressure

Hayek’s relationship with another former employer also became part of a difficult public chapter. In April 2022, he testified in the federal criminal trial of DaVita and its former CEO, Kent Thiry, over alleged restrictions on recruiting employees. Hayek described agreeing to nonsolicitation terms while concerned about the effect that refusing could have on future business opportunities for SCA.

The jury acquitted DaVita and Thiry on all counts. In a separate criminal case against SCA, the court granted the government’s motion to dismiss the indictment with prejudice in November 2023. Those outcomes belong alongside the testimony. A narrative about relationships and leadership needs room for the moments when commercial relationships become a source of pressure, as well as the moments when colleagues gather under a company flag.

A partnership with a longer memory

After SCA’s acquisition, Hayek led Optum Health. In 2019 he co-founded Triple Aim Partners with Cory Roberts, another former SCA executive. Roberts now serves as TAP’s president. The partnership brought people who had worked inside an established business into the earlier, less settled stages of creating new ones.

TAP’s team makes that emphasis tangible. Its roster includes a head of ideation, a launch CEO, talent leaders, an operating partner, and specialists in finance, growth, product and law. Hayek’s own responsibilities include co-founder and chairman or director roles across companies such as firsthand, Synapse Health, Oasis Health, Diverge Health, Guidelight Health, Steadfast Health and AbriCare. He previously held co-founder and chairman roles at Prospero Health and ArchWell Health.

The distinction between leading one company and helping create several matters. A founder has to make choices before an institution exists to absorb their consequences. Hiring, governance and the allocation of responsibility become part of the product of company-building. TAP’s published values include service, vocation, relationships, simplicity and excellence. These are commitments that have to be interpreted through actual decisions. A value printed on a website has, at least, the advantage of being available for later comparison.

The trip that became an institution

Another strand of Hayek’s career began with a visit to Honduras in 2014. He went to meet Peter and LuLu Daly and explore volunteer opportunities for SCA’s people. An existing project became the focus of a broader effort, with SCA colleagues joining through a nonprofit called SCA Medical Missions.

In May 2017, that nonprofit combined with the Dalys’ existing organization to form One World Surgery. The Dalys, Hayeks and Koehlers are its founding families. Hayek remains chairman and co-founder, alongside fellow co-founders Peter Daly and Reinhart Koehler. Roberts also serves on the board. The organization now operates in Honduras and the Dominican Republic.

Hayek became a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute in 2014, the same year as the Honduras visit. The two developments belong to a career that increasingly included institutional responsibilities outside his executive job. A trip can end when the plane lands. A board role requires the less photogenic work of returning to the same questions, budgets and obligations.

The executive at the front of the classroom

Hayek’s teaching roles extend that pattern into the classroom. Kellogg lists him as an adjunct lecturer, and Wharton lists him among its affiliated faculty. In 2026, he introduced a Wharton course on building companies. His practical experience gives him a sequence of organizational stages to draw on: consulting, investing, operating, public-company leadership and founding.

He has described himself as “determined and coachable.” It is a pleasantly modest phrase for someone who has held so many senior titles. Applied to teaching, it also makes the lecturer available for revision. His stated ambition is to improve the course each year through feedback. Students may be acquiring management judgment; the person at the front of the room is still expecting to learn.

“Determined and coachable.”

Andrew Hayek, describing the mindset he brings to teaching

By September 2026, Hayek was also back on a conference stage in Nashville, appearing on a panel with Eric Evans, Renee’ Buckingham and Andy Bressler. The settings change: a ballroom with a torch, a board, a new company, a classroom. Across them runs a practical question about how people work together. Hayek’s next chapter will be written in the institutions he helps build, and in the judgment of the people who learn to run them.