They will underprice you before they understand you, and that miscalculation is theirs to carry, not yours.
Underestimation follows a predictable script: a room decides what someone is worth before it has seen the evidence, and then treats its own guess as fact. It happens to the person without inherited access, the one who built credentials the hard way, the one whose competence arrives without the packaging a room was primed to recognize. The mistake is the room's. The cost, if you let it be, becomes yours.
What the Market Gets Wrong
Money used to buy distinction. Now it buys delivery. The people who once controlled access through proximity and pedigree are watching that gatekeeping dissolve in real time. Competence, documented and compounded, is its own currency, and it does not require anyone's validation to clear.
The price of being underestimated is not really paid by the person underestimated. It is paid by every room that made a smaller decision because it could not see clearly. The only sound response is refusing to negotiate against yourself. When the room sets the floor too low, build on higher ground instead of arguing for a lower one.
That is not arrogance. That is just good accounting.
