26-Year-Old Coffee CEO Lives on $25,000 a Year Outside of NYC: ‘I learned that you don’t need much to survive’
20th December 2022
These are the kinds of immigrants that America needs.
That drive steered him toward studying business marketing at the University of Rochester and, in 2019, he brought a class project to life as a real business. He took a leave of absence from college, with one year left to graduate, to focus on it full-time.
Today, the 26-year-old runs Don Carvajal Cafe, a coffee roasting company out of the South Bronx that sources its beans from the Dominican Republic.
From January to early December 2022, his business brought in roughly $190,000 in sales. From that, Carvajal lives off a $25,000 salary. ”’I just make it work, the same way my mom made it work,” he says.
Some people are just born American; it simply takes them a while to get here.