Jonathan Bush and the art of starting over

Jonathan Bush once burned his business plan. In his telling, this was an actual disposal method, rather than the sort of bonfire that exists only in a consultant’s presentation. The company he and Todd Park had started in 1997 was struggling. A prospective investor wanted the software they had built along the way. Bush decided the accidental product deserved to become the business.

It is a useful place to begin with someone whose surname usually sends a story in another direction. Bush is a nephew of George H. W. Bush, a cousin of George W. Bush, and the brother of television presenter Billy Bush. The family tree has rather more public offices than most municipal buildings. His own career, however, has repeatedly involved the less ceremonial business of changing a plan after reality has objected.

He co-founded athenahealth, took it public a decade later, and left its leadership in 2018 under pressure from an activist investor and revelations about his conduct. He subsequently founded Zus Health. In 2025 he announced a run for governor of Maine. That attempt ended in the Republican primary in June 2026. By October, he was putting money and attention into municipal politics. The sequence is untidy enough to be worth examining.

A famous name, a quieter child

Bush grew up in Manhattan and spent time in Maine with his family. As an adult, he described his younger self as shy, quiet, and overshadowed by the larger personalities around him. It is a revealing counterpoint to the talkative executive who later became familiar on conference stages. The family name had arrived long before the company or its public profile.

He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1993 with a degree from its College of Social Studies and earned his MBA at Harvard Business School in 1997. Before founding a company, he worked at Booz Allen Hamilton. There he met Todd Park, the colleague who would become his business partner. The professional connection mattered as much as the educational credentials: a venture needs someone willing to share the risk, argue over the plan, and remain in the room after the encouraging adjectives have run out.

At Wesleyan, Bush interrupted his studies to enlist in the Army during the first Gulf War. He later recalled the pleasure of surprising people on a campus whose politics differed from his own. The war ended before he was deployed. His account of returning to college dwelled on classmates becoming more open to someone in uniform. Even in an early anecdote, he seems interested in what happens when a person refuses the role the room has assigned him.

The useful thing hiding inside the failed thing

The original venture was in San Diego. Its administrative difficulties helped turn Bush and Park toward internet software and business services. Ed Park, Todd’s brother, helped develop the technology. This history gives the founding story its practical interest: the tools made to keep one operation running became something other organizations could use. A problem that had looked like an expense became a product.

Bush’s account of the pivot includes an investor’s offer of $11 million for the software. The offer forced a decision about where to put the founders’ effort. He had to persuade Todd Park that changing direction still served a purpose worth pursuing. Founding, here, meant being willing to abandon a particular business while keeping the working relationship and the ambition behind it.

Todd Park later spoke against the solitary hero version of entrepreneurship. That is a useful corrective to the inevitable photograph of the chief executive standing alone. Bush supplied a recognizable voice and a willingness to sell an idea. Park and the people building the systems supplied essential parts of the company. The work required several kinds of temperament, even if only one of them tended to dominate an interview.

In September 2007, athenahealth went public. Its shares were priced at $18 and finished their first trading day at $35.50. A decade had passed since the founding. The business plan that went into the fire had proved less durable than the partnership that replaced it.

Belfast, where the numbers had names

One of Bush’s more tangible decisions was to expand in Belfast, Maine. Athenahealth took space in a former MBNA office complex and opened its operation there in 2008. The setting matters. These were existing offices in a coastal city, with room to fill and a workforce to recruit. A company’s expansion could be read in occupied desks as well as in a financial report.

By April 2013, the Belfast operation employed 574 people. Local economic development director Thomas Kittredge welcomed the diversity that the business brought to the regional economy. Five years of hiring had given the expansion a significance beyond the company itself. For a town, hundreds of regular paychecks are a more legible form of progress than a founder’s theory of disruption.

The growth kept making itself visible in ordinary ways. A 2015 account described employees filling previously vacant wings of the building and the parking lot becoming busier. Even the old MBNA wallpaper gave way to athenahealth’s colors. Corporate transformation is often presented as an abstraction. Here it involved decorating, finding space, and deciding what to do with a nearby warehouse.

In 2016, Bush spoke with particular pride about the Belfast operation’s culture, praising its workers’ combination of ingenuity and empathy. The site employed roughly 900 people by then. A March 2018 report put employment at 950. Those dates make the scale clear without turning every later valuation into a personal accomplishment. The Belfast office was built during his leadership; the business continued after he left.

The founder’s chair belongs to the company

Public ownership brought another set of people with views about the business. In 2017, Elliott Management acquired a stake in athenahealth and pressed for changes. The company faced scrutiny over its performance and direction. A founder could still explain what he wanted to build. Shareholders could insist on discussing what the existing business was producing.

Bush resigned on June 6, 2018. His departure came amid Elliott’s campaign and reports of inappropriate workplace behavior and domestic misconduct. He had publicly acknowledged and apologized for assaulting his former wife. Those facts belong in the account of his exit. A dispute over strategy does not explain them away, and a later return to business does not remove them from the record.

Jeff Immelt became executive chairman as the company considered its options. Later in 2018, athenahealth agreed to a $5.7 billion acquisition by Veritas Capital and Evergreen Coast Capital, an Elliott affiliate. Bush was already gone from the chief executive’s office. The distinction is small on a timeline and substantial in a biography.

When a subsequent $17 billion sale was announced in 2021, the number again became part of the athenahealth story. It described a later transaction under different ownership. Placing those events in order lets the company have its own history, rather than making every rise in its value an extension of one person’s tenure.

Another company, another definition of the job

Zus was founded in 2020 and publicly launched in June 2021 with $34 million in Series A financing led by Andreessen Horowitz. In March 2023, it announced another $40 million in financing. Bush had returned to the particular work of convincing investors and colleagues to commit to an organization that still had much to prove. An established reputation could help open the conversation; it could hardly do the work that followed.

By 2025, he was drawing a distinction between starting a company and running a mature one. Asked whether he would take Zus public, he said he would welcome the prospect but would not expect to be its CEO at that stage. That is a more interesting ambition than simply wanting his old position back. It leaves room for the possibility that the organization might eventually require a different leader.

“Failure is good for you, but it’s not fun,” he said. The sentence has the advantage of withholding the customary motivational refund. The experience of losing a job does not become pleasant because it can later be used in a speech. His public account combines an appetite for another attempt with an acknowledgment that the previous one hurt. Zus currently lists him as its founder and chief executive.

“Failure is good for you,
but it’s not fun.”Jonathan Bush / 2025 interview

Maine is a place to stay

Bush’s Maine involvement eventually extended beyond an office campus and family summers. He and his wife Fay made their home in Cape Elizabeth. He is a father of seven. The family photograph accompanying this story offers a quieter scale than the business figures: several generations, a patch of lawn, and a dog that has made it into the frame without submitting a résumé.

Through Maine for Keeps, the organization he founded, Bush has argued for an economy in which younger residents can build a future without leaving the state. His stated priorities include housing, energy costs, education, and a business environment more welcoming to new ventures. These are his positions and aspirations. Whether his proposals would deliver the results he promises is a question for public argument.

He also began hosting the Maine for Keeps podcast, interviewing business owners and other figures about the state’s future. One early guest was Luke Holden of Luke’s Lobster. The format gave Bush a way to connect his interest in enterprise with specific employers and local questions. The conversations preceded a more direct request for public authority: his October 2025 announcement that he would seek the Republican nomination for governor.

The June 2026 primary supplied a definite answer to that request. Bush did not win the nomination. Maine’s completed ranked choice tabulation eliminated him before the final round; Bobby Charles won. A surname, an entrepreneurial record, and a campaign argument had not added up to enough votes. Elections have a rather firm approach to unsolicited revisions.

Back to the local meeting

In October 2026, Bush turned his attention to local elections in Bangor, Lewiston, and Waterville. He announced a municipal political initiative with a $100,000 goal and a personal commitment of $50,000. The stated emphasis was government accountability. The scale was smaller than a statewide campaign, and the work brought him closer to decisions made in city halls.

There is a recognizable line from the early pivot to this latest change of venue. Bush keeps returning to the idea that an organization can be made to work differently, then looks for a place to intervene. The record gives that instinct both substance and limits: a company that grew, a departure that remains consequential, another venture, a nomination lost, and a fresh political effort whose outcome is still ahead.

Belfast remains a useful measure of the business years because its story can be counted in people hired and space occupied. Maine’s election result is equally concrete. Holding those two kinds of evidence together produces a more human portrait than either a triumphal comeback or a permanent epitaph. Bush is still making plans. Experience has already established that he is willing to replace them.