My father shook his head. “When this California fantasy fails, do not expect us to bail you out.”
As I packed up my apartment, Aunt Meredith was the only one who came to help. “You know what the difference is between you and the rest of the Harpers?” she asked, taping up a box of books.
“What?”
“You are brave enough to fail on your own terms rather than succeed on someone else’s.”
I left Boston with two suitcases, a laptop, and $2500. In my family’s eyes, I had cemented my status as the disappointment, the failure, the cautionary tale. Little did they know that this failure was actually the first step toward building something beyond any of their imaginations.Generational wealth planning
Landing in San Francisco with just $2500 to my name should have terrified me. Instead, I felt an overwhelming sense of freedom. For the first time, I could define success on my own terms without the Harper family measuring stick constantly finding me too short.
I rented a tiny studio apartment in Oakland, all I could afford, and took a job at a midsized health tech company as a junior developer. The pay was modest, but the learning opportunities were immense. My boss, Harold Wagner, quickly became the mentor I had always needed.
“You have a unique way of looking at systems,” Harold told me, after I had redesigned an internal process that saved the company thousands of hours of manual work. “You do not just see what is, you see what could be.”
Unlike my family, Harold actually valued the way my mind worked. He gave me increasingly complex problems to solve and included me in meetings with stakeholders despite my junior position.
It was during one of these meetings, 8 months after I started, that the idea hit me. We were discussing the challenges of medical data interoperability, the ability of different health care systems to exchange and interpret shared data. The existing solutions were clunky, expensive, and still required massive manual intervention.
