Regenerous Labs - A Founding Story
If your bandwidth is the bottleneck in scaling your life's work — and you're tired of facing that alone — this is for you.
This isn't an article. It's an invitation. Below is the story of how Regenerous Labs came to exist, who we built it for, and why it might matter to you.
Three Minutes
Three minutes in, a metallic explosion went off at the bottom of my esophagus and started spreading. Then my whole body went hot, turned red. My eyes closed on their own. I started to cry — but I was calm. I even said to my care team, I’m not crying. It’s making me cry.
It was my first round of chemo, and my body was not having it. Anaphylactic shock. Nurses moving fast. That particular kind of clinical urgency where everyone stays calm but nobody’s relaxed.
And somewhere in those first minutes, while my body was fighting the thing that was supposed to save it, my mind got very, very clear.
I couldn’t go back to Microsoft.
Not because Microsoft was bad. It wasn’t. It was extraordinary. I’d been there a little more than three years, leading the Data Center of the Future program — reimagining the physical infrastructure of one of the world’s most powerful companies through the lenses of sustainability and mutual benefit. My team was incredible. The potential impact, at Microsoft’s scale, was enormous. You could change the world from that seat. I believed that. I still believe it.
But there I was in that chair, and two things became real in a way they hadn’t been before.
One: life isn’t a guarantee. This is something everyone knows and almost nobody lives by. Cancer has a way of closing the gap between knowing and living.
Two: I wasn’t really living. I wasn’t able to develop anything other than what I was working on for Microsoft, inside the boundaries of my role. Fourteen-hour days of back-to-back meetings. The gravitational pull of a massive organization that needs you to be exactly where you are, doing exactly what you’re doing, every single day.
The inability to diverge, to explore, to follow my curiosity wherever it leads — that was the greatest risk to living my life. Because what makes me happy, what makes me successful, what makes me me, is divergence. It’s exploration. It’s learning. It’s finding the white space where new things live.
I didn’t have any of that in my role at Microsoft. And from that chemo chair, it became clear that the cost of not having it was too high.
The Messy Middle
I wish I could tell you I walked out of treatment and straight into building Regenerous Labs. The moment of clarity, the bold leap. That’s the founder story you’re supposed to tell.
That’s not what happened.
What happened was a year and a half of oscillation. I’d find the clarity, then lose it. I’d think about the scale of impact possible at Microsoft. Then I’d come back to the cost. Treatment would remind me. Every infusion, every appointment — a metronome beating the truth back into focus.
Underneath the oscillation, there was that something I couldn’t yet name: the sense that what I was reaching for wasn’t just freedom from something. It was freedom to — to think again, to build again, to follow curiosity into the unknown with people I trust. I didn’t have the shape of it yet. But I knew the ache of its absence.
The cost is too high. The cost is too high. The cost is too high.
By the time I finished treatment and was preparing to return to work, I was clear. Not from one dramatic moment, but because I’d lived with the question long enough to know the answer wasn’t going to change. No role, no title, no scope of impact would give me back the time and space I needed to be alive in the way I wanted to be alive.
So I left.
The Wall
What I was living wasn’t unusual. Every senior professional I’ve met in the last two years is hitting some version of the same wall.
I remember finishing a day at Microsoft and needing to stare at a literal wall. Not choosing to — needing to. There was nothing left. I’d get up the next morning and do it again. Saturday afternoon would come and I’d feel a flicker of brain space — the first quiet moment where something new might grow. Then Monday swallowed it. The weekends were never enough to fully recharge, let alone create.
I recently wrote about dormancy — the way a forest’s underground network keeps working even when the branches are bare. The mycelium doesn’t stop when the tree goes quiet. That’s where deep regeneration happens, the invisible substrate work that makes the next season of growth possible. But dormancy needs duration. It needs to not be interrupted. What I had — what every overbooked expert I know has — isn’t dormancy. It’s a gasp between sprints. The underground work never gets a chance to happen. We’re so depleted that when the break comes, we’re too exhausted to use it for the thinking that made us valuable in the first place.
Now add the layer everyone is feeling. At the same time our capacity to evolve is at its lowest, we see our abilities that we’ve spent decades mastering being approximated — imperfectly, but accessibly — by technology that never sleeps, never stares at a wall, and costs virtually nothing.
That’s not three separate problems. It’s one compounding crisis. And it has a clock on it.
The Amorphous Blob
When I left Microsoft, I didn’t build a product. I didn’t write a business plan. I didn’t launch a startup.
I called Kevin.
Kevin and I go back twenty-five years. He was the architect of my very first product. He’s been with me across roles, companies, decades. And the call was simple: Why don’t we do what we do for ourselves? The worst that happens is we make a good living. The upside is infinite — because we know what we’re capable of when we have the time and space to create together.
From there, we went through our bench. The people we love going into the white space with — a behavioral scientist, a sales strategist, a discovery leader, a storyteller, a PR mind, a magic pen. We invited them not to a company, not to a venture. To a conversation.
We called ourselves an amorphous blob.
Eight people, all accomplished, all with decades of building behind them, many of those years together. We didn’t know what we would build but we knew how we would go about figuring it out.
That was February 2024. I was still in treatment. Still technically at Microsoft. Just a gathering of friends, exploring.
We met on Fridays. A couple of hours each week to question, experiment, poke and prod, to see what emerged. We developed a training program. And a speaking series. We built a question-storming app, an experiment generator, a behavioral intelligence engine. Each one solved a different problem. And then Kevin did what Kevin does. He brought clarity.
“You know every one of these is our methods translated into software, right?”
I didn’t. I hadn’t seen it.
He was right. It was our various expertises emerging in a new medium. Kevin saw it before we did. The architect recognized the blueprint.
That’s what gave Regenerous Labs its foundation — not a business plan, but two years of divergence that produced an architecture we never could have predicted. The white space I’d been starving for didn’t just feel good. It produced something. The very infrastructure that could give other experts the same freedom.
The Living System
Along the way, we clarified what the Lab was for, what we wanted to do: to unleash the potential of eight billion individuals to thrive together. A mission that also told us something practical: we couldn’t do this alone. No one could reach 8 billion people on their own.
We needed to bring in other experts — people who’ve spent their careers building methodologies as deep and needed as anything we’d created. People who are extraordinary at what they do, want to expand their reach and impact, and need more time and space to evolve.
Our role became clear too: we are builders and translators. We create bridges between human expertise and technology. Our role is to create the infrastructure and environment that enables experts to be the greatest version of who they are and what they do. With them, we co-create the connection between their expertise and the world that needs it.
We built the Lab to be a living system — a team and technology designed to evolve. An ecosystem where every expert who joins makes the whole stronger, and where the community of peers evolving together becomes as valuable as the infrastructure itself. Because the conditions that created the current crisis aren’t static. As the world keeps changing, we will face it together. Create together. Lead together.
When our experts succeed, we succeed. When the Lab succeeds, our experts succeed. That’s not an aspiration. That’s the structure.
The Open Door
Three minutes in a chemo chair, a year and a half to act on the clarity created in that moment, and two years of discovery and experimentation for the way forward to emerge.
I was the first case study. The expert who couldn’t think anymore — who found her way out by trusting the people she has built with for years. Who discovered, in the white space she’d been missing, the very architecture that could give the same space to other experts.
If you’ve spent years — maybe decades — building methodologies organizations depend on to thrive, and your bandwidth is the bottleneck in delivering or scaling your impact, this was written for you.
Calendar-captive. White-space-starved. Watching the world accelerate while the gap closes on your ability to stay ahead. Your life’s work deserves better.
Life isn’t a guarantee. The cost of being consumed is too high. And you don’t have to figure this out alone.
I’d like to hear your story. No pitch - just a conversation between peers who have hit the same wall. You can reach me at joann@regenerouslabs.com.