For 32 years, media executive Rohit Jain says he rarely had the luxury of simply sitting still. Last week, while in Karlsruhe, Germany, after dropping his son Yuhaan at the Carl Benz School of Engineering at KIT, the founder and CEO of Lionsgate Play found himself returning to the same café each day, lingering over a slow coffee that kept going cold.

The reason was less about caffeine than the reluctance to leave: “one more form, one more cable to buy, one more reason to stay an hour longer before I say goodbye to my son.”

The pause, according to a long-ish LinkedIn post yesterday, became an unexpected moment of reflection for a corporate leader accustomed to moving between decisions, teams and deadlines.

Jain draws a striking parallel between his two biggest responsibilities: building a company and raising a child.

“Nobody can truly explain to you how much growing a company resembles raising a child,” he writes, describing both as journeys that demand investment long before they can stand independently.

“You give it everything before it can stand alone. You worry about it at 2am for reasons no one outside your head would understand,” he added.

The analogy acquires particular weight because Jain says he experienced both forms of letting go in the same year.

After becoming a founder in the fullest sense through a management buyout, he found himself confronting another transition as his son left India for university.

“I didn’t expect to learn that lesson twice in one year. Once with a company. Once with a son heading off to start his engineering degree on foreign soil,” he says.

According to entertainment news outlet Variety earlier in the year, US-headquartered Lionsgate announced sale of its South Asian and Southeast Asian streaming operation Lionsgate Play to Jain, the executive who developed the service during an eight-year tenure as president of Lionsgate Play Asia. Jain left Lionsgate to take ownership of the streaming platform, while the studio retains its theatrical distribution and television production operations across the two regions.

Back to Jain’s LinkedIn post — which is also an unusually candid reckoning with the personal cost of a long corporate career. Jain acknowledges that while he was building businesses, it was largely his wife who handled the invisible labour of parenting.

Last week as he handled bedding, paperwork and other small errands for Yuhaan, he says he experienced “a version of fatherhood I rarely had time for.”

His daughter’s teasing observation — “Dad, you’re looking like a stay-at-home dad for the first time” — becomes, in his telling, “a gentle, loving audit of thirty-two years.”

There is a corporate lesson embedded in that sentimentality, too. Jain compares the departure of a child to the departure of a valued employee: both represent the moment when something carefully nurtured has become capable of moving forward without its creator.

Jain says he is not returning from Germany to wind down, but to get back to work — with a raise to close, a team waiting and the business to build.

His guiding principle, he says, is karma, understood not as fate but as “arithmetic”: put in the work, remain honest with people and allow time to settle the accounts. “By that belief, I’m not winding down. I’m just getting started,” he writes.

The coffee, then, becomes more than a sentimental detail from a father saying goodbye to his son. It is a metaphor for the rare pause between two kinds of building.