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.

For six months, I worked my day job and built at night. My studio turned into a nest of code, whiteboards, sticky notes, and overheated hardware balanced on old textbooks for airflow. I lived on coffee, noodles, cheap eggs, and stubbornness. When I finally showed Harold the architecture, he stared at it in silence for so long I thought I had misjudged everything. Then he looked at me and said, very quietly, “This is not side-project material, Allison. This is a company. It solves a billion-dollar problem. If you don’t build it, someone else will—and they won’t understand it the way you do.”