She quit venture capital for pro cycling. She has no regrets.

livemint.com:

Kristen Faulkner was talking about endurance, and suffering, and how comfortable she was when it comes to pushing her physical limits. I asked her where that stamina came from, if it was something she’d honed as a professional cyclist, or as a collegiate rower, or even in her early grinding in the world of investing. She had another answer: Alaska.

Faulkner was raised in the coastal city of Homer, Alaska, one of five children of Jon and Sara Faulkner, who’d settled there as a young couple, buying and running a resort called Land’s End. Kristen worked there like everyone else—housekeeping, landscaping, busing tables, stocking the soda machines—but there was always family time outdoors, epic, dayslong hikes, in the rain and rugged wild, among the bears, from when she was young. Alaska shaped her more than anything, she felt.

“It definitely made me tough," Faulkner said. “It made me really resilient." Faulkner was telling me this from a hotel in Spain Wednesday night, where her cycling team, EF Education First-Cannondale, was spending the night. A few hours prior, Faulkner had escaped from the peloton to take a solo victory at the La Vuelta Feminina, a prestigious stage race in Spain.

It was an exceptional win for an up-and-coming American cyclist, and won’t be the last. The 31-year-old Faulkner’s late bloomer rise is already something of a legend in U.S. cycling: An Alaska-raised, Harvard-educated rower turned venture capitalist who’d never done competitive cycling before trying a clinic in New York City’s Central Park.

Obsessed immediately, Faulkner kept cycling after moving to Silicon Valley to work at a shop called Threshold Ventures. In early 2021, she committed to the sport full time. Her ascension recalls the retired