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.

Eight months later, during a meeting about healthcare interoperability, I said, almost without planning to, “What if we’re approaching it backward?” Then I turned my tablet around and sketched a universal translation layer—something that could ingest data from any legacy system, interpret it semantically, standardize it, and output a consistent structure any platform could use. The CEO said that if such a thing were possible, it would revolutionize healthcare data exchange. I heard myself answer, “It is possible. I know how to build it.”

That night I went home and stayed awake until four in the morning building the first prototype of what would become Metalink.