Why Losing Made Him a Better CEO — with Kent Thiry

In this episode of The Bear Roars, Dan sits down with Kent Thiry — the legendary healthcare executive who led DaVita's turnaround from the brink of bankruptcy into one of America's most admired companies — for a candid conversation about leadership, failure, and what it takes to build community, in business and across a state.

Kent traces an unlikely path from a small town in Wisconsin to Stanford, Harvard, and a partnership at Bain, before deciding he'd rather build things than advise them. He's refreshingly honest that his defining lesson came from failure, not success — a turnaround that lost half its investors' capital and humbled him completely, and which he says is the only reason he was ready when DaVita called. He walks Dan through taking over a company six weeks from missing payroll for 7,000 people and, over 21 years, growing it into the "DaVita Village" — 75,000 teammates across 13 countries treated as citizens, not employees, its value climbing roughly a hundredfold.

The conversation then turns to Kent's second act, which is now about 80% civic: a healthy, functional democracy, the environment, economic mobility for low-income high school graduates, and the shared prosperity of Colorado. He and Dan dig into political polarization, how a state governs itself well, and polling Kent commissioned showing more than half of Colorado's voters now identify as independent — most by choice — and want both parties to moderate and simply get more done. They don't agree on everything, which is the point of the show, but they share a hopeful, pragmatic argument for community-first leadership that asks "is this good for Colorado?" before "is this good for my party?"

Learn more about Kent's civic work: https://kentthiry.com/kent-thiry/about/leadership/

Order Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/book

To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com