Koel Thomae was always a smart, engaged student as a child. But, like most high school teens in Australia, Thomae had to start plotting out her career path in the 10th grade.

“It’s a lot of pressure for a 15-year-old to be thinking about what she wants to do for the rest of her life. So I picked something practical and decided on accounting,” she said during an interview for Yahoo Finance’s Breakout Breakfast series Thursday.

Today, at 45, Thomae is the co-founder of Noosa, a creamy, whole milk yogurt brand established in 2009 that topped $220 million in sales last year. The yogurt is available in 25,000 stores across America, including Whole Foods, Target, and Kroger. But, it took a combination of courage, serendipity, and most of all unhappiness, for Thomae to become an entrepreneur.

“I was so miserable, I didn’t see myself as an accountant, but I was already two years into a degree.” she said. “I was not passionate about what i was doing at all.”

Things got so bad that Thomae stopped attending classes and ultimately ended up on academic probation. While the average mother would chastise her child for ripping up the rule book, Thomae’s mom encouraged her to clear her head and bought her a plane ticket to any destination of her choice.

“I never had a parent who said ‘This is what you need to be doing.’ The question was always, ‘Are you happy? If not, do something different.’ That kind of support was so critical for me,” she said.

Thomae ended up picking Boulder, Colorado, drawn by the picturesque scenes of white water rafting along the Colorado River and lived there for a year before returning to Australia to finish her degree (in marketing). Still fascinated by Colorado, she moved back to Boulder and took odd jobs at restaurants and a nonprofit children’s theater before landing a job at an IT company.

She thought that being in beautiful Boulder had forever squelched the feeling of being trapped. But, much to her chagrin, that sinking feeling revisited her a few months into the job.

“I was sitting in a cubicle, having my soul sucked out of me. It took me back to my university experience — feeling so bored and unhappy. It forced me to make a dramatic shift and change. I went on a hike and thought about what I was passionate about. Here I was living in this mecca of natural food. It took a while, nearly 12 months, for me to make that breakthrough. I needed to work in the food industry,” she said.

The aha! moment

In May 2004, she finally landed a gig as an operations coordinator at Izze Beverage Company, then an 18-month old startup. While still working at Izze, she took a trip back to Australia to introduce her boyfriend (now husband) to her family. Her mom had moved to a small town called Noosa, a beach town along the Sunshine Coast. One day at a local corner shop, Thomae spotted a clear tub filled with yogurt and a vibrant pop of passion fruit puree.