Your Cofounder’s Resume Is Useless. Regard’s $350M Was Built on Ten Months of Bad Trains and No Exit.
(SeaPRwire) – By: Lucas Caldwell
Everyone wants to talk about the valuation. Regard hit a $350 million Series B in 2024. It pulled in more than $150 million in revenue. Nice numbers. But none of that tells you why the company survived. Nate Wilson and Eli Ben-Joseph did something most founders skip. They spent ten months traveling together before they built anything. No office. No roadmap. Just bad trains and no easy way out. That is the part worth stealing. The money is a lagging indicator of something that got settled years earlier.
Here is the raw sequence. Wilson trained as a biomedical engineer. He was heading to medical school. He pivoted to consulting instead. Then he started a data science firm. Ben-Joseph was a bioengineer at MIT. He was also pointed at medical school. The two met in Boston. The connection came through a Craigslist sublet. Neither had a plan. They had time. So they traveled. China first, with stops in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai. Then the Philippines. Then Colombia. Wilson called it a daisy chain of trips. Two engineers, no agenda, and a lot of uncertainty.
The conditions were not a vacation. Wilson described bad trains. Power outages. Remote towns. Stretches with little money. No easy way out. He called the whole thing a cofounder boot camp. High stress. Deeply ambiguous. They kept losing control of the plan. That is where you see a person clearly. He learned Ben-Joseph stayed cool under pressure. They built a shared default. When something broke, they would simply work it out. Wilson compares it to a marriage. You start, you work together, and there is no clean exit. The trip surfaced all of it early.
Step back and look at how venture actually prices risk. Investors love a clean resume. Two MIT-adjacent engineers with med school tracks look safe on paper. But the deadliest failure mode in a startup is not a bad market. It is two people who break the first time things go sideways. Diligence almost never catches that. Nobody tests a cofounder pair under real stress. They test the deck. They test the traction. Wilson is arguing for a different screen. Spend serious time with the person. Pick a setting that is not smooth. Then watch what happens. The resume is the least useful signal.
Regard did not stay small. The company is now used across several hundred hospitals. It analyzes medical records to flag diagnoses physicians might miss. That is slow, regulated, high-stakes work. It takes years, not quarters. You do not survive that with a partner you merely tolerate. Wilson says the highs feel higher with someone who shares your worldview. The lows sting far less. That is not sentiment. It is operational leverage. In a long-horizon sector, the cofounder bond functions like infrastructure. It absorbs shocks the org chart cannot. Founders chasing AI healthcare dollars should read that line twice before they sign anything together.
Within five years, the founders who survive the next funding winter will be the ones who tested their partnership in the chaos long before a term sheet ever appeared.
Author bio: Lucas Caldwell, a tech opinion leader with millions of followers on X, writing about startups, venture capital, and the messy human side of building technology companies.