For five years, my parents told people I was the Harper family’s cautionary tale—the daughter who had abandoned Boston, run off to California, and never quite figured her life out. What they didn’t know was that while they were quietly mourning my “failure,” I was quietly building a health-tech company that would eventually be valued at $340 million.

Quitting was terrifying, not because I doubted the product, but because belief does not pay Oakland rent. Still, I had saved enough to survive six months if I budgeted like an animal. So I quit, incorporated as cheaply as possible, and turned my apartment into an even more cramped office-bedroom-command center. I coded eighteen hours a day. I stopped caring what my hair looked like. Then, at a small healthcare-tech meetup full of networking wine and jargon, I demoed a working prototype. Afterward, a venture capitalist named Lena Ortiz walked up to me and said, “This solves a billion-dollar problem.” Three weeks later, I had $500,000 in seed funding, a company called Integrated Health Solutions, and a product named Metalink.