I can sympathize. When I worked at Sendmail I was tasked with running DNS for the company, which included Sendmail.org. The first thing I had to do was find a secondary DNS. Our founder said to “email his friend Paul”.
It turned out his friend was Paul Vixie, the inventor of BIND, who responded in just a couple minutes that he had set up a-root to secondary the domains I was running.
Here I was, 22 years old at my first job, emailing with the inventor of critical internet infrastructure who was relying on a database I ran as a source of truth.