Michelle Yeung runs Matcha House (1), a cafe on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, specializing in the popular green tea drink.
The business is approaching its first full year of operation after opening last summer. What’s more is she expects her business to be profitable in its first year. And she says she has no regrets over the life she left behind to pursue her dream.
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Yeung, 29, told CNBC Make It (2) in a recent profile that she expects to pay herself a $33,000 salary in 2026, an 87% pay cut compared to the income she earned as a software engineer.
The change from corporate employee to entrepreneur might have come with longer hours and the stresses of operating one of the many small businesses in the borough of Manhattan, but Yeung said she feels more connected to her job than ever.
Early career as an engineer
Math came naturally to Yeung in school. She pursued software engineering after her older brother suggested it, she told CNBC. And by the time she graduated in 2019 with an applied and computational mathematical sciences degree, she had already secured her first job at a whopping total compensation package of $160,000, including salary and bonus.
“I was actually in shock,” Yeung said. “It was just a huge number for me, growing up with such small numbers in my family.”
But over time, despite her salary growing steadily as she progressed in her career, she said she felt disconnected from the work.
“I realized pretty soon that I was doing it because of the amount of money that it was providing me,” Yeung said.
By 2023, Yeung began aggressively saving money and trimming expenses in order to build a financial cushion to get out of the software engineering industry altogether.
Opening a matcha place was not always the catalyst for her aggressive savings approach. It’s what she chose to do in the end after some inspiration while going to get some matcha with her friends in the summer of 2024. She thought then and there that there aren’t “any good matcha places in New York.” In fact, she fancied the matcha she’s made herself at home for years to be better.
By early 2025, Yeung accumulated more than $200,000 in savings and was ready to leave the industry behind.
