The hardest decision of my career wasn't starting companies. It was stepping away from one that worked.
By 2021 I could run The Funnel Hill Creamery by feel. And that was exactly the problem. Feel is a founder's first superpower and final ceiling: it doesn't scale beyond what you can personally see, it doesn't transfer to a team, and it can't compete with instruments. Every consequential decision I made, pricing, expansion, inventory, was intuition plus a spreadsheet, while the companies I studied were deciding with data pipelines, experiments, and the early wave of production AI.
I could also read the direction of the market. The next decade of business advantage was going to be built on data and AI, and the people who would shape it were the ones who understood both the commercial side and the machinery. I had the first half. The second half wasn't going to arrive by osmosis.
So I made a founder's decision about my own career: I paused the operator's path and moved to Germany for a Master in Data Analytics and Decision Science at RWTH Aachen. I took applied roles alongside it deliberately, business analytics at E.ON, explainable AI at Boehringer Ingelheim, because I wanted the German enterprise context, not just the theory. Pharma and energy turned out to be the perfect classrooms: industries where analytics has to earn trust before anyone will use it.
People sometimes read the move as leaving business for technology. It was the opposite. It was going to get better instruments for the same job: understanding what a business needs and building what serves it. I didn't change careers. I upgraded the toolkit.