My Family Skipped My Biggest Moment. But When My $92M Valuation Hit Forbes, Dad Texted…
I sat alone in my empty tech office in downtown Denver at midnight, the glow from my monitor the only light in the room. Outside the windows, the city was quiet—just the red taillights on I‑25 in the distance and the faint outline of the Rockies under the Colorado sky.
On my desk, my phone buzzed with a notification.
I glanced down and saw the logo first: Forbes. My AI startup had just hit a $92 million valuation.
It should have been the biggest moment of my entire life. Less than six hours earlier, I’d stood on a rooftop bar overlooking the Denver skyline, announcing my company’s IPO to a crowd of investors, founders, and hospital executives.
There had been champagne, applause, cameras, and handshakes.
But the table I’d reserved for my family had been empty. My parents, my sister Sarah, and my brother Jake had all claimed they had prior commitments that were more important than celebrating with me. Thirty minutes before the party, they’d texted one by one—sorry, can’t make it, something came up.
Now, alone in the dim office surrounded by whiteboards covered in code and medical data charts, I stared at the Forbes notification as if it might vanish if I blinked too hard.
Then my phone buzzed again. A new text.
From Dad. Family dinner at 7:00 p.m.
tomorrow.
Important discussion. My stomach dropped like a stone. After twenty-eight years of being dismissed as the family failure, this was how they wanted to talk—after they skipped my IPO announcement and after Forbes officially stamped a price tag on the thing I’d spent my twenties building.
Growing up in suburban Denver, I was always the overlooked middle child in the Thompson family.
We lived in a tan two-story colonial on a quiet cul-de-sac where everyone flew American flags on their porches and watched Broncos games on Sunday. The kind of neighborhood where people still borrowed cups of sugar and knew each other’s kids by name.
My dad, Frank Thompson, built his reputation as the owner of Thompson Construction, a company that had poured concrete and erected steel frames for half the office buildings downtown. He wore scuffed work boots even to church and smelled like sawdust and coffee.
When we drove past new developments on Colfax or near Union Station, he liked to point and say, “That’s us.
We built that.”
My older brother, Jake, had been the golden boy from the moment he could grip a baseball and memorize biology terms. He sailed through high school AP classes and into pre-med at the University of Colorado, then on to medical school and a residency that ended with him becoming a cardiovascular surgeon at Denver General. People in our neighborhood would stop Mom at King Soopers just to say they’d read about one of his surgeries in the paper.
My younger sister, Sarah, was the overachiever in heels—a debate team star who graduated top of her class from law school and now ran her own practice specializing in corporate litigation in one of those glass buildings downtown that Dad’s company didn’t build but secretly admired.
And then there was me—Ethan Thompson—the computer kid. I spent my teenage years in the basement surrounded by soda cans, pizza boxes, and the hum of an aging desktop, building websites and coding tiny programs while my siblings earned academic honors and athletic scholarships.
My trophies were hackathon T-shirts and GitHub commits. The family dynamic was crystal clear from early on.
Dad would beam with pride when neighbors asked about Jake saving lives in the operating room or Sarah winning high-profile court cases.
He’d launch into detailed stories about Jake’s twelve-hour surgeries or the time Sarah argued in front of a federal judge. When they asked about me, his smile would fade, like a light dimmed halfway. He’d rub the back of his neck and mumble something about me “figuring things out eventually” or “doing computer stuff.”
Mom—Linda—tried to be supportive.
She’d bring me snacks while I coded and tell me she was proud of how smart I was.
But even she seemed perpetually confused by my passion for technology and software development. When relatives asked what I studied, she would say, “Something with computers,” and look at me for help.
The breaking point came during my sophomore year at Stanford. While my classmates were grinding through computer science theory and problem sets in the engineering quad, I was staying up all night in a cramped Palo Alto apartment, building the prototype for what would become my artificial intelligence platform.
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