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.
