Michelle Yeung, 29, says she used to earn roughly $250,000 a year as a software engineer in New York — enough to travel, buy almost anything she wanted and stop worrying about money for the first time in her life.
Back in 2022, however, Yeung felt increasingly disconnected from her work. Despite the high salary, she says spending her days behind a computer screen no longer felt meaningful to her.
“It [felt] like fake work,” she tells CNBC Make It. “What am I really doing this for?”
Today, Yeung runs Matcha House, a cafe on Manhattan’s Lower East Side specializing in matcha, a finely ground green tea. The cafe opened in July 2025, and she expects to pay herself about $33,000 in 2026, an 87% pay cut.
Michelle Yeung in her cafe.Mickey Todiwala
Leaving software engineering wasn’t an impulsive decision. Before opening her cafe, Yeung traveled to Japan to research matcha, worked pre-dawn Starbucks shifts to learn operations and battled with contractors to turn an empty Manhattan storefront into her own matcha shop.
Yeung expects the cafe to be profitable in its first year in business. The transition came with longer hours, financial uncertainty and significant lifestyle changes, but she says the tradeoff was worth it: “I wanted purpose and meaning.”
Growing up with little money
Yeung was born in San Francisco, where her family of five spent her first eight years living in a basement studio apartment in Chinatown. After her father left when she was 12, her mother supported Yeung and her two older brothers by running a daycare business out of their home, she says.
“My family did a really good job in not making me feel like we were poor, even though I was fully aware we were,” Yeung says.
Yeung shared a bed with her mother until she left home for college, and she recalls growing up in a household where money was carefully spent and family trips were rare. She says she did not feel deprived because many of the families around her lived similarly.
Even so, money worries shaped many of the family’s aspirations, Yeung says.
“For as long as I could remember, financial stability was the ultimate goal,” Yeung says. “My older brothers and I, our main goal is always like, we got to get rich, or get to a point where we don’t have to worry about money again.”
Michelle Yeung in college.Courtesy of Michelle Yeung.
Yeung excelled in math at school, and software engineering felt like a natural career path after her older brother suggested it. By the time she graduated from the University of Washington in December 2019 with a degree in applied and computational mathematical sciences, Yeung had already landed her first software engineering job in New York.
The roughly $160,000 compensation package, including salary and bonus, felt surreal.
“I was actually in shock,” Yeung says. “It was just a huge number for me, growing up with such small numbers in my family.”
Leaving software engineering
Over the next several years, Yeung’s compensation climbed steadily. Despite the financial success, she says she felt increasingly disconnected from the work itself.
“I realized pretty soon that I was doing it because of the amount of money that it was providing me,” Yeung says.
The dissatisfaction eventually convinced Yeung that she wanted to leave software engineering altogether. By 2023, she says she’d begun aggressively saving money and trimming expenses such as ride-sharing services, streaming subscriptions and travel, building a financial cushion that would eventually allow her to leave tech behind.
Michelle Yeung sips a matcha drink.Mickey Todiwala
In the summer of 2024, while getting matcha with friends in Manhattan, Yeung started thinking more seriously about something she had noticed for years: There weren’t “any good matcha places in New York.”
Having made matcha at home for years, she says she found herself wondering: “Why is my own matcha better?”
While it wasn’t an overnight decision, the realization convinced Yeung that opening her own matcha cafe could be the career change she had been searching for.
Building Matcha House
Even after deciding she wanted to open a cafe, Yeung did not quit her software engineering job immediately. Instead, she spent months laying the groundwork for Matcha House while still working in tech.
In the fall of 2024, Yeung traveled to Japan to learn more about matcha sourcing and preparation. Back in New York, she worked opening shifts at Starbucks from 5 a.m. until 10 a.m. before logging on for software engineering meetings later in the morning.
“I was on my own little mission,” Yeung says. “It was so fun to do something physical and just learn this completely new skill, when I’d been sitting behind a computer for the last five years.”
By early 2025, Yeung says she felt ready to leave software engineering behind. By then, she had built more than $200,000 in savings, money she originally expected to use for more traditional goals like buying a home or attending graduate school.
Michelle Yeung prepares matcha.Mickey Todiwala
Opening the cafe proved more difficult than Yeung expected. She says contractors often failed to take her seriously or finish work they had promised, leading to delays and a series of last-minute setbacks.
Yeung says she couldn’t have opened the cafe without help from friends. They assembled furniture, hung curtains and helped mop up water after the cafe flooded the night before opening day.
In the cafe’s early days, Yeung spent most of her waking hours at the shop, often working 12-hour days and personally whisking every drink. “My entire life is work, and I don’t regret it,” Yeung says.
But she soon realized the business couldn’t depend entirely on her behind the bar. Her brother helped for several weeks, and she gradually built a team of employees to help run the cafe.
Yeung wanted to bring the same level of care and precision seen in U.S. coffee culture to matcha, including how the tea is stored, whisked and prepared. She focused on a limited menu of matcha drinks, which helped keep inventory costs relatively low.
Michelle Yeung pours a matcha drink.Mickey Todiwala
Today, Yeung says she works far longer hours for a fraction of the salary she once earned, paying herself only what she needs while reinvesting much of the business’s profits in the company to support staffing and operations.
But she says she feels more fulfilled whisking drinks and running her own business than she did at her old job.
“I’m not motivated by money so much anymore,” Yeung says. “At the end of the day, I just feel happy about what I’ve done.”
How Yeung spends her money
The cafe is on track to be profitable in its first year, though winter months were closer to break-even, per documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Yeung says she ultimately invested about $150,000 of her own money into Matcha House and is now gradually recouping that initial investment.
Just before opening Matcha House, Yeung gave up her $3,300-a-month Manhattan studio apartment and moved in with a roommate to reduce costs.
Much of her time and energy now goes toward running the business, leaving little room for discretionary spending on things like travel and entertainment.
“My expenses are just what’s necessary,” she says.
In March 2026, her total personal spending came to $2,291. Here’s how her expenses broke down:
Zoom In IconArrows pointing outwardsAlisa Stern | CNBC Make It
- Rent: $1,750 for her share of an apartment with a roommate
- Food: $258 on groceries and dining out
- Transportation: $112 on subway rides and Uber trips
- Discretionary: $94 on household goods, including a phone charger
- Utilities: $38 for her share of electricity and Wi-Fi
- Subscriptions and memberships: $25 for Netflix and Spotify
- Phone: $15
Based on her current income, Yeung qualifies for Medicaid coverage and does not pay a monthly insurance premium.
Yeung says she has no student debt, car payments or credit card debt. She took out about $25,000 in student loans but says she paid off most of the balance through internship income before finishing college and paid off the rest shortly after starting her first job.
Looking ahead
Nearly a year after opening, Yeung says Matcha House runs more smoothly and feels far less chaotic than it did in the beginning. The cafe now employs about 10 part-time workers, and Yeung no longer needs to open the store every morning herself.
Still, she says the work consumes most of her life.
“My life is less about how much money I’m making right now and more about what I’m doing every day,” Yeung says. “A year into the business, I’m just grateful that we’ve survived a year and we can survive another year.”
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