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.

James got into Harvard exactly as everyone expected. My parents celebrated for weeks. When I got into MIT the following year, because I wanted an environment built around engineering and innovation, they treated it like second place. “At least it’s Ivy-adjacent,” my mother said. My father added that Harvard would have given me better connections. I remember standing in our kitchen with my acceptance letter and realizing, not for the first time, that no achievement of mine could arrive without first being measured against James’s.

I made it three semesters at MIT.

People hear “dropout” and assume laziness or instability. The truth was harder and more specific. I loved the work. I loved the pace. I loved being surrounded by people who built things because they couldn’t imagine not building them. But in my second year, one of my professors connected me with a small health-tech startup. The work was real in a way school wasn’t. Messy, urgent, practical. In six months, it taught me more about systems, constraints, and the real-world uses of technology than many of my classes had in a year and a half. By the end of my third semester, the founder offered me a full-time role.