When I returned to campus after shutting down my startup, the question I heard most often was, “Don’t you regret it?” To many people, starting a company looks cool. I thought so too. I had romanticized it—pulling all-nighters with a great team like the startups in films and dramas, watching an idea scrawled on a whiteboard grow into a product that changes the world, and growing explosively through that intensity.

So I took the leap and founded a coding education platform. In the beginning, every day felt like a dopamine rush. Building the service, developing features, watching users respond—it was genuinely fun. Code that used to end as a class assignment started reaching real users, and I felt, for the first time, what it meant to have something I built out there in the world. That people were actually using what I had made was more powerful than I had expected.

But as time passed, startup life looked a little different from what I had imagined. Running a startup demanded faster decisions and a sharper instinct for survival than I had anticipated. Instead of thinking about better structures, I had to build whatever was needed right now. Short-term decisions piled up, and at some point, the feeling of growing was replaced by the feeling of holding on.

What struck me most through all of this was that the range of problems I could solve corresponded exactly to the boundaries of what I knew. My ability to build and execute quickly has improved. But in the end, I could only solve problems within the scope of my existing knowledge. If I had a deeper understanding of systems and a broader research background, I think I could have tackled far more.

This realization struck me as something of an irony. I had once dismissed working through thick textbooks as impractical and disconnected from the real world, which was partly why I chose the faster, more hands-on path of entrepreneurship. Yet it was through running a startup that my hunger for deeper knowledge began to grow.

So I wrapped things up and came back to campus. I wanted to dig a deeper foundation before building anything larger.

The way I look at coursework has completely changed. Concepts that once felt abstract on the page now connect to real products I have worked on. I have seen how a single database structure affects service costs, and how a system design decision directly shapes user experience. Studying feels like expanding the range of problems I will one day be able to solve.

These days, I am working through low-level systems and the foundational principles of computer science, topics I had little interest in before. The deeper I go, the more I feel the ceiling of what I can design quietly lifting. I now dream of becoming an engineer who solves larger-scale problems with greater impact. The fact that knowing more means having wider possibilities is the strongest motivation keeping me in the library right now.

Some might call what I did a failure. But to me, the startup years were closer to a period of finding out what kind of person I want to grow into. Entrepreneurship taught me speed and a sense of reality. It also taught me that deeper understanding and more fundamental growth were things I could not do without.

If anyone reading this feels anxious comparing their pace or results to others around them, I hope you take a moment to look up and think about where you actually want to end up. Because the scale of the problems we can take on in the world will never exceed the depth of the understanding we bring to them.