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.

In our house, difficult was not a personality trait. It was a flaw.

We had ritualized study hours every evening at the long library table. My mother would drift through and compare our progress with surgical efficiency. James always had measurable accomplishments. I rarely had the kind that counted. While they thought I should be drilling equations or essay prompts, I was secretly teaching myself to code. I built my first crude website at eleven. At fourteen, I made an app for students at my school to track assignments and share notes. None of it impressed my parents because it had not come through the proper channels. There were no trophies for self-directed obsession, no prestige in teaching yourself to build things after midnight on an old laptop.