Meet Siena: A Big Tech Employee Turned Bubble Tea Entrepreneur

( SEATTLE) — When Siena Tetali decided to leave her job at Microsoft in August of 2025, she didn’t know that it would be to start a South Asian-inspired bubble tea brand. 

“I left to be present in my life,” she said, “and Chai High just evolved out of that.”

Siena and her fiancé, Rahul Raina, had been together for about seven years by the summer of 2024 when they got engaged at sunset in Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park. The wedding date was set for fall of 2026, and the list of festivities to plan — in keeping with the Indian traditions of their families — ran long.

Siena decided it wasn’t a time she wanted to spend in “constant fear” about whether or not she’d survive the next round of job cuts. By August 2025, Microsoft had laid off roughly 6,000 employees in May and another 9,000 in July, with no sign that it was over. 

“Maybe just lay me off? Maybe laying me off would be even better than the fear of being laid off,” she said when recounting that period. 

After numerous reaffirming discussions with Rahul, Siena decided it was time to pivot. 

A year later, the young couple could be found smiling, hand-in-hand, beneath orange marigold garlands strung between the interlocking frames of a pop-up canopy tent. Siena had recently started Chai High Spirits, a Seattle-based, South Asian-flavored boba tea business.

Rahul and Siena have been busy wedding planning throughout the creation of Chai High Spirits. [Credit: Cosette Loper]

Raised as an only child in the southeastern United States by a mother from Vermont and a father from Visakhapatnam, India, Siena had experienced a variety of cuisines, but she often missed the flavors her family shared when everyone was together.

“It was like, if my Indian aunts were visiting … someone’s gonna be making chai,” she said. “So that they feel welcome when they come. Or they’re making chai themselves. But there’s gonna be chai in the house no matter what.”

Siena describes herself as “mixed” and “racially ambiguous for the most part,” and the bio on her website says marking “other” on every demographic form was isolating. It’s why she markets her drinks as “South Asian-ish,” with the “-ish” about “the space where cultures blend, stories intersect, and nostalgic flavors meet the present.”

Siena markets her drinks as “South Asian-ish.” [Credit: Cosette Loper]

The October after leaving Microsoft, Siena developed her idea in a three-month course through Business Impact NW, a business-coaching nonprofit for Pacific Northwest entrepreneurs. She created a plan based on recapturing the flavors of her childhood and uniting them with the fun of adulthood — combining chai and vodka. 

Before long, she realized that including the alcohol component would make her flavors much harder to get in front of her consumers — a challenge at odds with her goal of observing customers’ reactions to her beverages.

“I need to see their face when they take a sip. I need to know what they do when they walk away,” she explained, her undergraduate degree in neuroscience and Big Tech background in user experience peeking through. “I wanted all of that. I wanted all this data, and so, okay, we’re gonna launch non-alcoholic,” she decided. 

To keep the concept novel, but still culturally rooted, she kept the chai and added the boba. 

“I’ve always loved boba. It’s always been a treat,” she said, reminiscing about how she and a close friend used to treat themselves to boba at a local Vietnamese restaurant growing up in Atlanta. 

With the guidance of a PNW-based kombucha taproom owner, Siena came across The Boba Pop-Up Shop, an Instagram account with more than 100,000 followers run by pop-up business mentor Bella Cattani. Armed with Bella’s content, Siena began testing recipes and formalizing her operation in preparation for the summer farmers markets. 

The name and logo came first, and with them, an LLC, the relevant health permits and licenses, and a rented commis

Siena gathers the drinks while her fiancé, Rahul, rings up customers to her right. [Credit: Cosette Loper]

Now, in the days before each market, she’s up at 3 a.m. to drive to Woodinville for her four-hour kitchen shift, where she’ll batch syrups, prepare drinks, and cook fresh boba on market mornings, all before driving back home to Green Lake in time to hand off the car to Rahul before he heads to work.

Rahul also works in tech, but Siena said he’s better at separating his work life from his personal life. And in their personal life, he’s been among her earliest user testers. One of her menu items, an Indian rice pudding-inspired milk tea called the Payas-Yumm, is a particular favorite. 

“It really tastes almost exactly like, you know, [how] my mom would make it, the actual rice pudding version,” Rahul explained. “Having that in drink form … my eyes just lit up,” he recalled. “It was kind of nostalgic for me.”

Making drinks like the Payas-Yumm requires specific ingredients, which Siena sources locally whenever possible. Some are single-origin spices from India and Sri Lanka, and others originate from Washington, including saffron grown by another female entrepreneur in the area.

“I want as much as I can [to be] supporting the people who are actually growing these things,” she said when asked why local sourcing matters to her. At Microsoft, she said she didn’t always know why certain decisions were being made. 

Cosette shared photos of Siena interacting with families at chalkboard stations Siena created like this. [Credit: Cosette Loper]

It’s that intention and commitment to authenticity that inspires members of her circle, like Cosette Loper, a friend who has attended two of Siena’s market days.

“It’s just been fun to watch her build this from scratch, like everything, and create community,” Cosette said, explaining how Siena lights up when interacting with the families that come to her stand.

To kick-start her market experience, Siena reached out to the African Community Housing & Development (ACHD), a nonprofit dedicated to promoting housing and economic development for African Diaspora immigrants in the Greater Seattle Area. ACHD also runs the Delridge and SeaTac farmers markets, where Siena said “everyone who is a vendor there is at least 50% BIPOC,” like her.

Siena has now sold her beverages multiple times across these two markets along with the IACS Indian Night Market. On Saturdays, customers can find Rahul helping with the front of the house. 

“You see some repeat customers,” Rahul noted when talking about his time manning the register.

Looking to grow her business, Siena said she’s recruiting her friends who have been laid off to join her and is researching additional markets, such as the busy Sunday market in Ballard. But taking stock of Chai High Spirits’ first summer showing is her immediate priority. That, and being present as she and Rahul add yet another happy memory to their list with the celebration of their wedding later this fall.