My German was good enough to order bread. It was not good enough to defend an idea. There is a room in Germany I still think about, an interview I had no business sitting in. No local network, and an accent that made every sentence take longer than it needed to. Everything on paper said no. Somebody in that room said yes anyway. Sixteen years of building software have happened since. Four ambassador titles, earned honestly. None of it exists if one person had not looked past a fi...