Describe a professional failure that changed your trajectory.
One of my first jobs out of college was in the Philippines in the early 2000s, when the internet had just arrived there. I worked for a new media company—one of the first in the Philippines—as a project manager. My job was to sell the idea to big corporations that they needed a website. I remember being at a meeting with an association where we had to stand up and give our spiel. I was young, and I said that in a few years, if a business didn’t have a website, it wouldn’t exist. All the CEOs, marketers, and others laughed at me, thinking, “Who’s this dumb Filipino‑American kid telling us what to do?” I was angry. This has happened a few times; I’ve predicted, or told people, that AI will destroy the call‑center industry in the Philippines. That moment as a project manager for the new media company changed the way I think about making bold statements—people remember being laughed at by powerful people, but also the satisfaction of being proven right over time.