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.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
TAP → NEXT PAGE → 👇
