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Adrienne Chan‘s pivot away from a career in tech could more aptly be considered a pirouette.
The former Microsoft product manager is the co-founder of a new ballet school in Redmond, Wash., where she’s reconnecting with the dancing she practiced growing up, and seizing on a desire to run her own business.
“I knew I had to do this because I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” Chan told GeekWire. “I loved my job at Microsoft, and I wanted to do both … but 24/7 my mind was only thinking about the ballet school.”
Bellevue Classical Ballet opened in September in Redmond Town Center with a mission to serve students of all ages and skill levels. Chan is serving as executive director, and her co-founder, Eric Hipolito Jr., a former dancer and instructor with Pacific Northwest Ballet School, is artistic director.
Chan first interned at Microsoft in 2017 before spending almost four years at the tech giant working on Azure products. She left in 2022 to get her Master of Science degree in entrepreneurship from the University of Washington before returning to Microsoft for another 11-month stint.
While at the UW, Chan utilized her engineering background and worked on a dance education app as part of her degree program.
“Something still felt a little off for me,” she admitted. “I felt that maybe I wanted to stray a little bit more away from tech.”
She met Hipolito and made the leap back into dancing. And along the way, she found tech was still a suitable partner.
Chan grew up in Toronto and transitioned from gymnastics to ballet as a kid, falling in love with the art form at age 9 thanks to her teachers. She eventually took up other styles of dance in productions within the Chinese community in Toronto.
She studied systems design engineering at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and as an undergrad, her first internship was at a startup incubator.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Chan said. “The drive that people have, the motivation — they just want to get work done. They’re so passionate. And that really sparked my interest in entrepreneurship.”
Her feelings were lining up with memories she had of a “career class” she took in high school where she had to list 10 things she might want to be when she grew up. Engineering was on the list. And so was CEO of a dance company.
Although she wanted to pursue her master’s directly after undergrad, she had already committed to Microsoft and moved to Seattle to begin her career.
Chan’s parents and others were a bit surprised when she left a high-paying tech job to go back to school, and even more so when she left that job again to open a ballet school.
Even though she was touching products used by millions of people, Chan wasn’t connecting with those people on a day-to-day basis. She wasn’t using those products herself, and they didn’t align with her aspirations.
“I really did enjoy my job at Microsoft, but I knew it wasn’t what I wanted long term,” she said. “I wanted something more meaningful, something that felt like I could make an impact on people.”
Chan is a big believer in the notion that everything has led her to where she is today. And she feels that her tech background is making an impact on the ways she thinks about running a small business — something she’s been writing about in posts on LinkedIn.
“If I pursued dance in college, I don’t think I would be as successful doing this now,” she said. “I think that tech background really helped me do this.”
Managing a product is a lot like managing a business, Chan said, calling out the ambiguity of both. At the ballet school, she finds herself leaning on the adaptability and decisiveness that helped her at Microsoft, and iterating as she goes — a mindset she calls very common in tech.
But she’s not using AI.
When she had to crunch 100 different schedule options for the school, Hipolito asked why she didn’t just throw all the variables into an AI model and ask for the best result.
“I said, ‘No, I want to use my brain,'” Chan said. “I trust my brain.”
Chan also chuckles at the irony of her life now — teaching the kids of Microsoft workers while some of those parents are outside her dance studio working on laptops, doing code reviews or whatever else.
When people call her a risk-taker or commend her courage for the change she’s made, Chan doesn’t see it that way.
“It’s stressful. But I’m stressing for what I really want to be doing, what really matters to me,” she said. “I don’t think that’s replaceable at all. I don’t think there’s any other option.
When Marissa Coughlin left her latest tech job to open a romance bookstore and crafting hub in Seattle, she didn’t leave technology behind completely.
In fact, alongside her partner, Constantine Vetoshev, who still works in tech, artificial intelligence has become a major player in this next chapter of their lives.
Coughlin worked in a variety of communications and content roles for companies including Airbnb, Textio, Highspot, and most recently, T-Mobile. Vetoshev is a software developer at Brook.ai, a Seattle-area health technology startup that uses AI to help clinical teams deliver remote care.
Both big readers, the pair first started looking at spaces and developing a bookstore business plan in 2023. But with two small children, they were waiting for better timing. When a space became available on Market Street in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood they finally made the leap, and opened Swoon City last month.
While Coughlin has no interest in seeing AI used to write the books or illustrate the covers that line her shelves, she’s a big believer in how the technology can help the back end of the business.
“I think more businesses should be using this stuff, especially small businesses, if they can figure out how to tap into it,” Coughlin said. “It’s super useful, but you have to know that it’s there and what it can do, and be a little bit creative and figure out the solutions.”
Here are some of the ways Swoon City is tapping into AI, leveraging Coughlin and Vetoshev’s know-how:
“I feel like there’s a lot of things that we’ve created for this store that other people who might be curious about doing something like this could tap into and be able to leverage for their own stuff,” Coughlin said.
Vetoshev said he can come home from his day job, put the kids to bed and then focus on something that needs to be built for the store.
“A couple of hours of work with a [large language] model, and we’re off to the races,” he said.
The technology is all in service of a genre that is exploding, especially among young readers.
Romance is the leading growth category for the total print book market thus far in 2025, and the volume for the category has more than doubled compared to four years ago, with 51 million units sold in the past 12 months, according to industry analysis.
NPR credited romance interest driven by Gen Z readers, especially on BookTok, a subcommunity of TikTok for recommending, reviewing, and discussing books.
Swoon City is hoping to follow in the successful footsteps of The Ripped Bodice, an independent brick-and-mortar romance bookstore with locations in Los Angeles and Brooklyn, N.Y.
Coughlin looks forward to bringing people together not just around books, but by hosting various events and building out crafting classes for embroidery, stained glass, jewelry making and more.
“I feel like part of what was exciting for a romance bookstore is the community, because it is often not a genre that’s as well respected in the book community, even though it’s huge,” she said.
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