Businesses Angel Zheng has built by the age of 25, from omakase bars to Isshiki Matcha.
Angel Zheng did not start in food. She started as a fashion influencer, building an audience online before she ever ran a restaurant. Her first ventures did not last, and she made the hard call to shut them down rather than keep pouring into something that was not working.
She used the wreckage as fuel. Zheng took the profits from those early businesses and opened omakase sushi bars in New York, Moko and Shiso, fine-dining rooms that earned her and her co-founder a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for food and drink. Each business taught her something she carried into the next.
Now she is on her sixth. Zheng is growing Isshiki Matcha, a specialty matcha brand she has built through careful event curation and digital branding, all before turning 26, while still keeping a hand in the influencing world she came from.
"She closed the businesses that were not working, and used the profits to build the next one."
Founders love to talk about persistence, but knowing when to shut something down is its own kind of discipline. Zheng treated each closed venture as tuition rather than failure, and that willingness to cut losses and reinvest is how she got to six businesses while most people are still planning their first.
This is the founder mindset ANF keeps spotlighting. Kill what is not working, keep the lesson, and put the profit into the next build. Zheng has done it six times.
Her first businesses closed. Every one of them paid for the next.