Noor &
Abdullah

There is a specific category of job in a technology company that does not have a good name and does not have a clean job description, and it turns out to be one of the more important jobs in the building. The company sometimes calls it Executive Business Partner. Sometimes it calls it Chief of Staff. Sometimes it just calls it "the person who makes the CEO's day work." At Regard, a 95-person, Series B, New York-and-elsewhere healthcare AI company, this job belongs to Noor Abdullah, and if you understand how a startup actually functions - which is to say, imperfectly, at high speed, on a budget of everyone's attention - you understand why.

Regard makes a clinical co-pilot. The product plugs into a hospital's electronic medical record system, reads through the patient chart, and generates the kind of documentation that physicians have spent the past two decades typing into computers at 11pm. It is one of a small number of companies that has decided the highest-value application of large language models in healthcare is not diagnosis, exactly, and not therapy, exactly, but paperwork. This is possibly the most Silicon Valley sentence ever written, and it is also, on the merits, correct. Physicians hate paperwork. Hospitals lose money on paperwork. Insurance companies deny claims on paperwork. If a machine can do the paperwork, everyone shifts up one rung of the productivity ladder.

The Office Behind The Office

Regard has raised $81.4 million in total, including a $61 million Series B in July of 2024 led by Oak HC/FT, one of the more disciplined healthcare-focused venture funds in the country. That kind of money buys you engineers, and the engineers build the product, and the product sells to hospital systems, and the hospital systems sign multi-year contracts, and at some point in this cycle the CEO has to travel to see a hospital in Ohio or Texas or Missouri, and someone has to book the flight, and manage the calendar around three other meetings that were already scheduled, and rework the board deck for Thursday, and make sure the offsite venue got the deposit, and answer the CFO's question about the AWS bill, and read the CEO's Slacks when the CEO is on a plane.

That person is Noor Abdullah. That is not a small job. It is the connective tissue between a founder-CEO's ambitions and the physics of a twenty-four-hour day.

The New York Career

Before Regard, Abdullah's resume reads like a walking tour of New York institutions arranged by someone who wanted to visit every industry in the borough of Manhattan. She has worked at Sesame Workshop, the beloved nonprofit behind Big Bird and Elmo. She has worked at Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the oldest white-shoe law firms in the United States, founded in 1879, headquartered on Broad Street, best known for representing the Rockefellers and Andrew Carnegie's steel deals. She has worked at Take-Two Interactive, the video game publisher behind Grand Theft Auto and NBA 2K. She has worked at New York Public Radio, home of WNYC and Radiolab. She has worked at Fordham University, at the accounting and advisory firm Geller, at the enterprise database company MongoDB, and at Normal Computing, a research-forward AI startup working on next-generation computing architectures.

Then she went to Regard.

That is an unusually varied resume for anyone. Most people, at some point in their career, pick a lane: media, or law, or finance, or tech. Abdullah picked all of them, and picked them in New York, and picked them in the specific configuration that seems to produce the best operations people - a mix of institutions that care obsessively about detail (S&C, MongoDB), institutions that care obsessively about audience (Sesame, NYPR, Take-Two), and institutions that care obsessively about numbers (Geller).

What Fordham Gabelli Trains You For

Abdullah holds a Bachelor of Science from Fordham University's Gabelli School of Business, which is one of the quieter feeder schools for New York tech and finance operations roles. Gabelli is a Jesuit business program - which is to say, it teaches you accounting and management with a philosophical overlay that includes a lot of ethics, a lot of stakeholder theory, and a lot of the phrase "cura personalis," which roughly translates to "care of the whole person." This is not the training that Silicon Valley computer science programs give you, and it is arguably the training that a founder's chief-of-staff-adjacent partner needs more than any other. The whole job is caring about people who are, at any given moment, forgetting to care about themselves because they are trying to raise a Series C.

What Regard Does, Actually

To understand the job it helps to understand the product. Regard's platform sits on top of a hospital's EMR - Epic, Cerner, whichever system the hospital happens to have paid millions of dollars for and now cannot easily leave. The Regard software reads through the patient's chart, applies a series of clinical and machine-learning models, and surfaces two things: (1) documentation that a physician can review and sign, and (2) suggested diagnoses that the physician may have missed or forgotten to record. That second one matters more than it sounds, because hospitals get reimbursed based on the specificity of the diagnosis codes they submit, and physicians, being humans in a hurry, routinely under-code. When Regard's system catches a missed diagnosis, the physician saves time and the hospital captures revenue it was already owed. Everyone wins, except the paperwork.

This is what Silicon Valley calls "physician burden reduction," a phrase that manages to be both perfectly accurate and completely unromantic. The romance is in the details: a physician who gets home before 8pm because a language model did the note. A hospital that submits a cleaner claim because a machine-learning classifier read the chart at 3am. A back-office team that spends fewer hours per week arguing with insurance companies. These are small wins measured in minutes and dollars, and they aggregate quickly across a health system with tens of thousands of patients a year.

The Career Tour

The order of Abdullah's stops matters. The most recent stops before Regard were Normal Computing and MongoDB, both technical companies, both New York, both with the kind of operational density that trains someone to think about compute, contracts, and calendars in the same breath. Normal Computing is a frontier AI research startup working on thermodynamic and probabilistic computing hardware. MongoDB is a publicly traded database company that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar business by making it easier to store and query non-relational data. If you want a fast education in what it means to run operations for a technical CEO, those are two very good rooms to have been in.

Before that, the tour goes backwards through the layers of New York's economy. Take-Two Interactive is a Fortune 500 video game publisher with a long history of releasing violent open-world games and then having to explain them to state attorneys general. Sesame Workshop is a nonprofit media organization with a mission of educating children, which means every operational decision it makes is filtered through pedagogy. Sullivan & Cromwell is a law firm where the average associate bills 2,200 hours a year and the average partner earns millions of dollars, and everything is measured in six-minute increments. Geller is an accounting and advisory firm that services high-net-worth families. NYPR is public radio, which means it is understaffed, underfunded, and ferociously professional. Fordham University is a Jesuit school with a 240-acre campus in the Bronx and an undergraduate business program that seems to keep producing operators like this one.

Why This Job Matters More Than It Sounds

There is a durable myth in Silicon Valley that companies are built by founders and engineers, and that the "operations" people are somehow lesser, or secondary, or support staff. This myth persists even though every successful startup, without exception, has a small number of operators who quietly hold the thing together while everyone else builds product and closes customers. The Executive Business Partner sits at the top of that operator hierarchy. She is not the CEO. She is not the chief of staff, exactly. She is the person the CEO calls at 6am when the flight to Chicago is delayed and the board dinner is at 7pm and the new hire's offer expires at midnight. She is the person who reads the room, who sees the calendar three weeks ahead, who knows which meetings are actually load-bearing and which are optional. She is, in a very real sense, the operating system on which the CEO runs.

Regard is at the stage of company where this job gets harder, not easier. Series B is the stage when the headcount is doubling, the customer base is expanding, the board is meeting monthly, the investors are pushing on the growth curve, and the CEO is trying to raise a Series C while also selling to hospital systems while also hiring a new head of engineering. That is a lot of concurrent processes. Someone has to manage the queue.

That someone is Noor Abdullah. She probably doesn't want the attention. That is, in fact, one of the qualifications for the job.

Quiet Details Worth Noting

Her stops include both Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that runs Big Bird, and Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the oldest white-shoe firms in America. It is a rare pairing on a single resume. The rooms could not be more different, but the job of getting things done in each of them looks, from a distance, surprisingly similar - which may be the whole point of a career like this one.