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Leadership
Kush Das, CEO
Molly Viscardi, COO -
HQ
Arlington, VA | USA -
Industry
Healthcare
Kush Das acquired Ennoble Care through his search fund, Circa Health, in 2021. He launched his fund in 2020 with a detailed thesis on home-based care for Medicare patients, including how to best implement value-based care programs.
Kush kicked off his search just at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which he recalls as “a pretty unbelievable time for a search focused on serving the frailest patients in the home.”
Nevertheless, he founded an Accountable Care Organization (one of the original and few Medicare Direct Contracting organizations, which was subsequently merged with Ennoble Care under the Circa Health umbrella) early in the pandemic, and he met the founders of Ennoble Care early in his search. “This was exactly the business I wanted to run and it fit the ACO approach perfectly, but of course, it wasn’t for sale at that point,” he recalls.
After almost another year of searching, and many discussions and letters of intent with other businesses, Kush was able to negotiate the purchase of Ennoble Care with support from search and growth equity investors, and he became CEO in late 2021. He recruited fellow McKinsey & Co. alumna Molly Viscardi to serve as COO even before the deal closed, and recruited as CTO the former owner of a business he had evaluated during his search. He now has seven McKinsey & Co. alums as part of an executive team that is best in class among healthcare organizations of all sizes.
Prior to launching his search, Kush was a consultant in the healthcare practice at McKinsey & Company. He also was a practicing healthcare lawyer at Foley & Lardner and is a long-time EMT and first responder. Kush lives in Arlington, Virginia with his wife Kirsten, a pediatric gynecological surgeon, and their two boys.
Aaron serves on the Ennoble Care board, which has evolved as the company has scaled across multiple states and tens of thousands of patients served.
Q&A with Kush
Tell us a bit about why you chose to search.
Entrepreneurship through acquisition was a great model for me. As I was leaving McKinsey with strong conviction about a specific healthcare thesis and wanting to operate, I felt that I could scale more quickly and serve more patients if I started by acquiring an existing business. I felt there was no better approach that could leverage my previous experience and ideas for what I could build in healthcare, while balancing the risk and reward of doing something outside the box. And I examined nearly all of them, from pure startup venture capital to becoming a private equity operator to joining a strategic as a business unit leader. ETA was the best fit.
Ennoble has been a remarkable growth story and is now materially larger than most search-acquired firms. How do you work with your search investors?
My original investors have been incredibly supportive of our growth strategy, even as I did things outside of the fairway like closing a first tuck-in deal 9 months in and bringing on a first growth equity partner 12 months in. As we scale, there is of course a need to bring on new expertise, but also tremendous value in relationships with partners that have been there from the beginning and that can bring continuity and shared ownership of vision and consistent first principles problem solving. This is true of our whole team, from investors to executives.
Aaron adds: “Kush is incredible to work with — driven, intense, but also super fun and an inspirational and kind leader. Supporting Kush and his team as they grow has been a great privilege, and we’ve also had the opportunity to partner with some exceptional healthcare investors and operators along the way."
You started your family during your early years at Ennoble. Any reflections on the timing?
A business does best when as many teammates as possible are in ‘founder mode’, to use a term Aaron once used to describe us. We’ve done that at Ennoble and essentially require it of all our top executives, and many of our families have facilitated that in an incredible way. It took some help, but Kirsten and I have managed to be a dual-career couple with two great kids.