Tatiana walked away from a billion-dollar budget and a corner office earned over 20 years in her industry. Niki left a steady corporate career at 40, the kind most people spend two decades building toward. Neither woman has ever met the other, yet both ran the same play before they took a risk on their own business.

Put those two decisions side by side, and the skill underneath them is identical. Poker players even have a name for it: reading the board — looking beyond your own cards to see what's shifted around you before deciding whether to play your hand. Tatiana and Niki ran that exact read. Here's what that looked like and how you can use the same strategy the next time you're deciding whether to make a real move of your own.

The Read That Took Tatiana From Energy to Travel Tech

Tatiana has a PhD and spent more than two decades in corporate leadership, the last stretch of it at the C-suite level for one of the largest energy companies in the world. She led a team of roughly 200 people and managed a budget close to $1.5 billion.

But even that wasn’t enough to keep her from flexing her risk literacy when she saw the market shifting in 2022.

That year, after stepping away from her corporate role to build something around her own interest in travel, she launched an immersive tours company. Demand outpaced what she could personally deliver almost immediately. That overflow became the signal that pushed her to change her business model and serve clients at scale instead of running tours herself. The result was TravelUp, a virtual travel guide app.

Her success came from reading the wider market with the same rigor she'd once applied to a balance sheet. Global tourism had fully rebounded after years of shutdowns. Travelers, newly price-conscious after a long stretch of economic pressure, were actively hunting for alternatives to expensive private tours. A number of legacy operators hadn't survived the reset, leaving open space where competitors used to sit. Demand for flexible, app-based travel planning was rising fast. With four strong signals, all pointing the same direction, her board read said it was time to act. 

From Corporate to the Kitchen: Niki's Read on the Board

Niki spent her early career in traditional corporate roles before founding Junior Chefs Kitchen, a children's cooking studio in Chicago, at 40. The idea started at her own breakfast counter, watching her kids cook and clocking the skills gained: they increased their confidence, got more independent, and grew comfortable talking to adults and to each other. 

From there, she read two boards at once.

The first was local. Chicago already had cooking classes for kids — plenty of them. What it didn't have was a full program built around real technique, nutrition, and creativity, structured the way skills get taught, instead of a one-off "fun baking" afternoon. That distinction was concrete enough to build a business on.

The second board was bigger than her city. Coming out of the pandemic, kids everywhere needed hands-on, screen-free time, and a lot of them were still rebuilding the social confidence that stretch of isolation had worn down. Niki read of that specific gap in her local market and a timely cultural condition made this exact window the one to go all-in.

Reading Your Own Board 

Time to take stock of your own table. Before you decide whether to move now, run the same read Tatiana and Niki did:

• What have you noticed shift lately — in your industry, city, or community — that you can't stop thinking about?
• Are people outside your job already coming to you for a specific service or expertise?
• Is there anything different about your savings or skills today compared to six months ago?
• Has a door opened to a new role, expanded market, or important relationship that wasn't available before?

The size of the board doesn't change the process. That's the part that matters if you're reading this from what feels like a smaller table. 

A nine-figure budget and a cooking-studio lease are both proof of the same thing: you don't need a resume like Tatiana's or a location like Niki's to run this read. You need to look at what's changing, think strategically, and muster the confidence to move on what you see.