Two tech workers took it offline, opening a coffee shop in Seattle that AI can replicate
The meeting was taking a long time, so someone said what they always say: “let’s take this offline.”
For Krystal Graylin, that phrase — the company’s empty shorthand for a deferred, unsolvable problem — has become something else entirely.
Indeed he did.
Graylin, a former Microsoft product manager, and his college friend, Lucy Kong, an auditor at EY, both watched as their industries raced to automate and downsize. They responded by betting on the one thing they thought AI couldn’t replicate – handing someone a drink and watching that person’s face light up.
The result is Offline Coffee Co., a new cafe in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood that opened last month, drawing on Chinese cafe culture with its menu and aesthetic, leaning toward the “third place,” and serving as a deliberate departure from the corporate world both founders left behind.
In a city full of technology and coffee, Graylin and Kong are the unlikely pair to run a cafe. No one had worked as a barista, apart from using their home machines and hosting apartment cafe parties with friends. One was monitoring the health of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. Another was reviewing Amazon books at EY.
“Some people we talked to were like, ‘You guys have no business opening a coffee shop. You’ve never been a barista or run a food business before. What makes you think you can just quit your job and open a cafe,'” Graylin said, adding, “It’s a valid concern.”
Friends since their days at the University of Washington, Graylin said he and Kong toyed with the idea of a cafe for years, but started taking it seriously last April. They considered what it would mean to give up income and signed a lease for a retail space.
“Going into this, it wasn’t like, ‘We hate our jobs so much that we want to escape and do something completely different,'” Graylin said. “We knew it would be dangerous, but we knew that going through this incident would make us change in a way that we would not be able to afford someone to teach us.”
They got the keys to 711 Bellevue Ave E. last July and quit their jobs in August. For several months they worked on building the space, adding their own touches with light wood, a large tiled bar, and furniture purchased before opening in February. The menu is built around floral syrups and flavor combinations that Graylin and Kong would bring back from trips to China — ingredients the cafe said are hard to find in Seattle.
“It sounds crazy,” Graylin said. “I cried five or more times the first week we opened, because I was stressed but I was also so happy to see all the people here.”
Friends were visiting, others were working on laptops in the cafe, and neighbors were offline making regular stops on their dog walks. Graylin said it’s good to be a part of someone’s path.
But the jump from technology to coffee wasn’t just an escape from the corporate grind. It turns out that Graylin said that being a product manager has prepared him more than he expected.
Negotiating contracts, managing people, narrowing down difficult clients, being able to prioritize – it’s all transferable. So is the comfort with AI tools, which he and Kong rely on to close knowledge gaps, whether it’s research machines, navigating legal questions, or estimating costs before bringing in an expert.
But it was also AI, and what he saw it doing to the people around him at Microsoft, that helped get him out the door.
“A lot of the focus was, how can we use AI up to 10x, and minimize the impact of layoffs to avoid losing money,” Graylin said. “Instead, how is everyone on the team doing with all these layoffs? [use AI] to improve work-life balance in the team?”
The cafe, he said, felt like an answer to that question – a deliberate bet on what he believed advanced technology could not touch.
“AI is good at doing boring and boring things for itself,” he said. “But social interaction – those are things that don’t need to be rushed.”
