The first person Todd Park recruited for a government technology job was someone else. In 2009, Park was living in Northern California after a decade spent building athenahealth, the medical-practice software company he had co-founded at 24. When Aneesh Chopra suggested that Park become chief technology officer of the Department of Health and Human Services, Park declined and volunteered to find a better candidate. He found one, too. Then Deputy Secretary Bill Corr refused to meet him. Corr wanted Park.
This is how Park's career tends to advance: not along a tidy ladder, but through an escalating series of conversations. He flew to Washington to learn enough about the job to sell it to somebody else. A few hours with Corr left him considering it. HHS held immense stores of information from Medicare, Medicaid, the FDA, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health. What if those vaults could become public infrastructure, like weather data or GPS?
At home, the sales process met its sternest customer. Park had promised his wife, Amy, that after athenahealth they would live near her parents and raise a family in California. She did not speak to him for four days. Then she agreed to return east for one year. It was, she told him, his national duty.
The start-up with no budget
The HHS role came with a splendid title and almost none of the machinery titles usually imply. Park later described having no regulatory authority, no statutory authority, no budget and no team. To a conventional administrator, this might resemble a practical joke. To a founder, it looked familiar. Find the people already eager to move. Build a small demonstration. Use the result to earn the next measure of trust.
Park called himself a “data uber geek,” and his first idea was beautifully literal: release useful health data in machine-readable form, invite outsiders to work with it and see what they made. He and colleagues selected a focused set of data, convened two dozen innovators and promised a showcase in 90 days. Park invented a name with the cheerful shamelessness of a good promoter: Health Datapalooza.
More than 20 participants returned with prototypes and product features. Skeptical officials saw their data doing things it had never done in a filing cabinet or PDF. More data followed, then more builders. The gathering eventually filled a convention center with roughly 2,000 people. Park had not made the apps himself. He had made the conditions under which useful apps became more likely.
After two years, Park prepared to go home. Instead, the White House asked him to succeed Chopra as the nation's second chief technology officer. He accepted before President Barack Obama actually had to place the persuasive phone call. Amy's one-year concession was developing the elastic properties of a federal program.
A crisis becomes a pattern
On October 17, 2013, the pleasant abstractions of innovation met a website that was failing in public. HealthCare.gov had launched badly. Park went from White House CTO to full-time fixer, co-leading the recovery with Jeff Zients. The team brought in engineers and product specialists, paired them with people inside government and tried to make the system observable. One shocking discovery was the absence of a basic dashboard showing where traffic stalled and users fell out. Engineers spent a late night building one.
There is a temptation to tell every rescue as the arrival of clever outsiders. Park rejected that romance. He thought parachuting a fashionable squad into an agency “like aliens” would fail. His formula depended on partnership with the capable people already there. Outside experience mattered. So did institutional knowledge, sponsorship from senior leaders and the freedom to work at crisis speed.
Park's recurring operating pattern
The repaired marketplace eventually enabled millions of people to enroll. More important for Park's next act, the recovery supplied a repeatable model. Small teams of experienced technologists could join agency partners on missions that citizens would notice. The teams needed authority from the top without becoming top-heavy themselves. They needed to deliver, learn and move.
Those ideas fed the creation of the U.S. Digital Service. Jennifer Pahlka brought lessons from Code for America and a conviction that the United States needed a counterpart to Britain's Government Digital Service. Mikey Dickerson, who had helped stabilize HealthCare.gov, became the new service's administrator. Park turned much of his own attention to recruiting. The title “chief technology officer” suggested machines; the daily work kept returning to human beings.
His recruiting pitch started with the mission. Talented people would hear about the problems and say they mattered more than their current work, then quite reasonably ask how anyone could change an organization the size of the federal government. Park answered with a pattern and proof. He also had an unbeatable closer: Park said President Obama was the only technology recruiter he knew with a 100 percent hit rate.
The movement spread by design and accident. Park lived in the same apartment building as Defense Secretary Ash Carter and leased a parking space from him. A lobby conversation about digital-service teams led to a Pentagon presentation. Park greeted Carter with a giant hug in a room full of generals and aides. Seven minutes into the presentation, Carter asked for ten teams. The Defense Digital Service was born, in part, between the parking garage and the conference table.
The promise, kept sideways
After five years in Washington, the Park family moved back to California. Obama, having discovered that Amy's deadline had firmer governance than many federal programs, asked Park to find a successor and keep serving from Silicon Valley. The White House devised an unusual remote duty station. Park recruited for the Digital Service and other government roles until 2017. A planned year had become more than seven years of public service, while the original promise was honored by a novel arrangement.
Co-founds athenahealth, helping medical practices move core work to a cloud-based platform.
Co-founds Castlight Health after stepping away from athenahealth's management team.
Moves through HHS, the White House and a Silicon Valley technology-adviser post.
Builds Devoted Health with his brother Ed and serves as executive chairman.
That year brought another return. Park and his younger brother, Ed, co-founded Devoted Health. They had already worked together at athenahealth. This time, their starting point was the family's own difficulty navigating American healthcare and a mission to care for every member as if they were family. Todd became executive chairman; Ed became chief executive.
The phrase “like family” risks dissolving into brochure copy. Park's more interesting argument is that affection must survive contact with the org chart. Devoted combines a health plan, care delivery, technology and member support. In a 2025 conversation with Eric Ries, Park described love as an operating framework, tied to trust, alignment and the willingness to take responsibility for problems that other organizations might declare out of scope.
This is a demanding version of warmth. It requires systems sturdy enough to coordinate complex work and alert enough to notice the person inside it. Park has spent a career in industries where complexity often becomes an alibi. His response has been neither to deny complexity nor to worship it. He organizes it around a plain sentence a team can remember.
The quiet evangelist
The public Park is a pleasing contradiction. A former schoolmate introduced him at Columbus Academy in 2025 as quiet, reserved and remarkably humble. Park's own vocabulary, meanwhile, is exuberant. He speaks of “threads of awesomeness,” “cage matches” among agency proposals and movements that flourish through something like Brownian motion. He made a wonky data conference sound like a festival because, to him, institutional change is allowed to be fun.
At that alumni ceremony, Park called Columbus Academy the “seed crystal” of his American dream. The son of South Korean immigrants, born in Salt Lake City and educated in Ohio, he had graduated as valedictorian and a U.S. Presidential Scholar before studying economics at Harvard. He met Amy when he was 17. He later graduated from Harvard magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Since 2022, he has served on Harvard's Board of Overseers.
Awards have accumulated: fellowship in the National Academy of Public Administration, honorary doctorates from American University and Georgetown, and Columbus Academy's Distinguished Alumnus Award. Yet the more revealing monument is a method now associated with many people, not one. Park himself speaks of the “100 founding mothers and fathers” of the U.S. Digital Service. Movements, he insists, are not centrally controlled.
That may be the cleanest explanation of his work. Park starts companies, but he is most animated by ecosystems. He opens the vault, calls the gathering, recruits the odd couple, supplies a little protection and waits for a useful chain reaction. The institution he wishes existed is never quite finished. If it were, there would be nothing left for everyone else to build.