Starting from zero in a country that was not yours

I was born in Romania. My father is a pastor. I came to Texas and started a company here, and for a long time I thought of the accent as the obstacle.

It was not the accent. The obstacle is that almost nothing transfers.

What does not come with you

Your network does not come with you. Neither does your reputation, or the shorthand that lets people place you in ten seconds, or the twenty years of small favours that a person who grew up somewhere gets to draw on without ever noticing they are drawing on it.

You start at zero on all of that, and the honest thing to say is that it takes years, not months, and that during those years you will watch people with less ability move faster than you because they started with a map.

What you build instead

Here is what nobody tells you. Because you cannot inherit trust, you have to manufacture it, and the only material available is your own conduct, repeated, in public, for a long time. That turns out to be a stronger foundation than the one you were envying.

A reputation you were given can be spent. A reputation you built from nothing but delivered work is much harder to lose, because everyone who holds a piece of it holds a specific memory of you doing what you said.

I would not describe it as an advantage. It is a worse deal that produces a better asset, if you survive the middle of it. There were stretches where money was tight, where projects fell through, and where I had to bet on myself again and again. That is the price. I would pay it again.