It was after a divorce that Jeremy Fischbach learned how difficult it can be to get mental health support.

“I learned that in the twenty-first century you can get a fluorescent dog diaper delivered to your door in one click and twenty-four hours, and it takes dozens of steps and several months to get basic mental health support,” the New Orleans resident and RealLIST Innovators honoree told Technical.ly.

He is now CEO of Happy: Frictionless Mental Health, a mental health company that provides proactive, nonclinical support through regular check-ins.

“We couldn’t shop our way to a better answer, so we built one.”

elizabeth Tilton, OS Benefits

More than 70% of technologists who filled out the 2026 RealLIST Innovators survey said they didn’t know a role like their current one existed when they were growing up. Their in-survey comments help explain how they got there, describing personal problems that became professional missions, curiosities that unexpectedly became careers and people who gave them opportunities before they had conventional credentials.

Fischbach’s path grew from a problem he urgently wanted to fix. He spent years building Happy around a simple premise: Make mental health support come to the person instead of requiring the person to navigate a long series of steps to reach it.

Baltimore-based Daniel Lawrence credits his career to his youthful obsession with massively multiplayer online games. He led a guild of other players, organizing the group and building programs to help it perform better. Years later, he recognizes some familiar elements in running a company.

“Turns out running a company is basically the same job — recruit good people, build the tools, steer the raid,” said Lawrence, who is CEO of OBM, a software company that helps data centers manage power use. “Except now the loot is payroll.”

A career can start before you know it’s a career

Philadelphia’s Aaron Couch learned to code while participating in local activism in the mid-2000s, when organizations he worked with needed websites.

“I thought, ‘Hey, I can try that’ and the rest went from there,” Couch said. He’s now a principal engineer at Nava PBC, a public benefit corporation that builds and modernizes digital government services.

Arlington resident Will Angel took an even less deliberate route. A college classmate knew someone who needed a data analyst intern. Angel needed a job. The opportunity introduced him to what became a career in data and AI, and he’s now executive director of the nonprofit network Data Community DC.

For Pittsburgh-based Benjamin Hunt, the spark came in an 11th-grade chemistry class. His teacher wrote the Schrödinger equation on the board and told the students they wouldn’t understand it.

“That felt like a supreme intellectual challenge to me,” Hunt said. He took that challenge and ran with it: He’s now an associate professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon University.

Sometimes the problem becomes the work

Lived experience often shapes the problem an innovator decides to tackle.

Pittsburgh-based David Betts, founder and board chair of StoryFlight Labs, a public benefit company developing communication tools for people with speech-limiting disabilities, began searching for new technology after he was diagnosed with ALS.

“When faced with the pending loss of my ability to speak, I went in search of a better tool that might help me and others like me to stay connected to one another,” Betts said.

That search led to Talk to Me, Goose!, an AI-enabled text-to-speech app intended to help people communicate while typing less.

In New Orleans, Elizabeth Tilton’s path to founding the hospitality benefits platform OS BENEFiTS developed over years in the industry. She saw uninsured workers respond to illness or injury with GoFundMe campaigns and later encountered health insurance options she said didn’t fit an industry built around hourly schedules, high turnover and thin margins.

“We couldn’t shop our way to a better answer, so we built one,” Tilton said.

Baltimorean Adrian Johnston traced his pursuit of cancer research — and founding cancer biotech startup  DUA — to losing his father to lung cancer at age 14. IndyGeneUS founder Yusuf Henriques, also based in Baltimore, said an early fascination with medicine took on new urgency after his identical twin daughters were diagnosed with a rare inherited retinal disease.

Someone still has to open the door

Even highly personal career paths need community support.

Innovators credited colleagues, bosses, mentors and their entire local communities with helping turn an interest into an opportunity.

Philly engineering leader Satya Veerendra Vegulla described his progression as a “chain of people vouching for me.” Others talked about bosses who gave them difficult assignments before they had much experience, professors who pushed them toward entrepreneurship and colleagues who made introductions.

Nicole Oliver, founder of the AI healthcare revenue platform Medvient, said the Baton Rouge innovation community “runs on introductions, not gatekeeping.” MilestoneMate founder Shay Claiborne, based in New Orleans, similarly credited local programs and mentors with continuing to “put my name in rooms I wasn’t in yet.” In Baltimore, Happy founder Lawrence said his ecosystem is small enough that when someone needs help, “an intro is one text away, not a networking event.”

Ultimately, tech is rarely just about tech.

For Erin Henley, an innovation associate at Pittsburgh-area utility Duquesne Light Company, connecting people with ideas is itself part of innovation work.

“I’m a firm believer,” Henley said, “that innovation is really about people, not technology.”