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.

I took a modest job as a junior developer at a midsized health-tech company. The pay was unremarkable. The opportunities were enormous. My boss, Harold Wagner, became the mentor everyone deserves and few get. He noticed not just what I produced, but how I thought. The first time I redesigned an internal workflow and saved the company thousands of hours of manual reconciliation, he told me, “You don’t think like most engineers. You think like a systems translator. You don’t just see the problem in front of you. You see the machinery behind it.” It was one of the first times anyone in authority had described my mind as an advantage rather than a defect.