She quit venture capital for pro cycling. She has no regrets.
Kristin Faulkner left her life in Silicon Valley for the unpredictable world of professional cycling. After a major victory in Spain, she’s hoping to realize a childhood dream at the Olympics.
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 U.S. racer Evelyn Stevens, another ex-college athlete and finance professional who’d gotten hooked on bike racing while training in Central Park. Stevens competed with Team USA at Rio 2016, and Faulkner harbors Olympic aspirations, too: She’s aiming to earn spots for Paris 2024 on the U.S. road and track teams.
She’ll be hard to keep away.
“She’ll rip your legs off," USA Cycling boss Brendan Quirk told me. “Such an overachiever in every aspect of life. Her wins will just keep getting bigger and bigger."
Faulkner’s already won major races in Europe, including this year’s Omloop van het Hageland, a single-day cobblestoned race in Belgium. At the Vuelta, Faulkner and pesky EF Education First-Cannondale have served an early notice. Earlier in the week, Faulkner provided a ferocious “lead-out" to teammate Alison Jackson—taking Jackson to the front of the race, pushing the pace and shielding her from the wind until the closing meters, when Jackson cannonballed ahead for a sprinting stage win.
“She’s super strong," Jackson said. “I’m glad she’s on my team and I’m not against her."
Now based in the training hub of Girona, Spain, Faulkner said enjoyed her experience in venture capital, emphasizing her pivot to full-time cycling was driven by her childhood dream of competing in the Olympics. At Threshold, she specialized in early Series A funding for software companies, mostly in business-to-business tech but also healthcare and consumer.
Her former boss, Emily Melton, remains a mentor.
“She’s just a rock star," Melton said of Faulkner. She described Faulkner as a colleague who took as much satisfaction in team accomplishments as individual ones—a mindset she sees in Faulkner’s approach to cycling, too.
“Venture Capital can be an individualistic game," Melton said. “People can view it as zero sum. There are sharp elbows and big egos. One of my favorite things about Kristen is that she just sees the world differently…we were lucky to have her as long as we did."
Last year, Faulkner suffered a frightening setback when she was struck by a car while on a training ride in California, fracturing her knee. The injury forced her to miss last summer’s Tour de France Femmes, and Faulkner acknowledged lingering anxiety when she’s out riding open roads on her aerodynamic time-trial bike. “That fear is definitely still there," she said.
But Faulkner is more committed to bike racing than ever. When she quit venture capital for cycling—a career shift with, yes, a rather startling pay cut—she assumed her stay would be brief.
“I was like, ‘This will be a two-, three-year thing,’" she said.
Instead she’s fallen even harder for the sport—the competitiveness, the constant balancing of risk and reward, the camaraderie with teammates, even the grind of training. Faulkner is already in the upper tier of world-class riders, and she’s still getting better.
There’s also this: Riding a bike for a living means Faulkner gets to live most of her life outdoors, which takes her back to Alaska, where her whole story began.
“I found something that I really love," Kristen Faulkner said. “I think that’s the most beautiful part."
