Cole Brauer
Senior leaders are being asked to hold their nerve through decisions that cannot be reversed, with information that is always incomplete and a team that is watching how they behave under strain. The gap between teams that perform under sustained pressure and teams that fracture is rarely about talent or strategy. It is about the quality of judgement at the point where fatigue, fear, and consequence meet.
Cole Brauer is the first American woman to race solo and non-stop around the world, and she talks to leadership teams about judgement, endurance, and decision-making when the stakes are absolute.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Cole Brauer
- She has a first-person account of what it takes to run a high-stakes operation alone for 130 days, with no option to stop, and can translate that into language a board or executive team can actually use.
- She pairs the solo story with hard professional credibility: 2024 Rolex Yachtswoman of the Year, first all-female team to win the Bermuda One-Two, and a current seat on Team Malizia’s IMOCA 60 programme alongside Boris Herrmann.
- She speaks credibly about risk management and preparation, not as abstractions, but as the specific trade-offs that kept a 40-foot racing boat sailing through the Southern Ocean for four months.
- She reaches audiences outside the usual sailing world; her real-time documentation of the voyage built a following of nearly 400,000 people and changed who pays attention to offshore racing.
- She is a rare example of a young operator, not a retired one, describing lessons that are still being tested at elite level.
Biography highlights
- First American woman to complete a solo, non-stop, unassisted circumnavigation, finishing second in the inaugural Global Solo Challenge in March 2024.
- 2024 Rolex Yachtswoman of the Year (US Sailing).
- Co-skipper, Team Malizia, competing on the IMOCA 60 in The Ocean Race Europe and the Course des Caps.
- Skipper of Class40 First Light; winner of the 2023 Bermuda One-Two with Cat Chimney, the first all-female team to take the race.
- Set a new reference time for a solo circumnavigation on a 40-foot boat, around seven days inside the previous mark.
- Featured across NBC News, The Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, and Robb Report for the Global Solo Challenge voyage.
Biography
Most people who survive 130 days alone at sea stop doing it afterwards. Cole Brauer came off the water in March 2024 as the first American woman to race solo, non-stop and unassisted around the world, and immediately began preparing for the next campaign. That sequence tells you most of what matters about how she works.
The Global Solo Challenge took her 30,000 miles through the three Great Capes aboard First Light, a 40-foot Class40. She finished second overall out of 16 starters from 10 countries, set a new reference time for the class, and did it while injuring her ribs mid-race and managing a bout of dehydration that required her to insert her own IV under instruction from a remote medical team. US Sailing named her 2024 Rolex Yachtswoman of the Year the following February.
The racing record is not a single-event story. In 2023 she and co-skipper Cat Chimney won the Bermuda One-Two outright, the first all-female team to do so, winning both legs by more than 12 hours. In 2025 she joined Team Malizia as co-skipper on the IMOCA 60 alongside Boris Herrmann and Will Harris, racing The Ocean Race Europe and the Course des Caps. Her longer target is the 2028 Vendee Globe.
What a business audience gets from her is the operational texture of decision-making when there is no one to escalate to. She is specific about the preparation, the trade-offs she rejected, the moments she got it wrong, and how she rebuilt composure in the next watch. The voyage was also a communications exercise: near-daily video from the boat built an audience of nearly 400,000 and changed who follows offshore racing. That combination of elite performance and direct, unvarnished narration is what makes her useful to leadership teams trying to understand what real endurance looks like from the inside.
Key speaking topics
- Decision-making under irreversible consequences
- Resilience and endurance in extreme environments
- Risk management and preparation
- High-performance offshore teams
- Leading yourself when no one is watching
- Narrative, visibility, and building a following around hard work
Ideal for
- Executive and senior leadership off-sites focused on judgement under pressure
- Sales kickoffs and company-wide events where the goal is genuine inspiration backed by a specific story
- Risk, operations, and safety leadership audiences who want practitioner-level detail rather than metaphor
Audience outcomes
- A vivid, concrete benchmark for what sustained performance under pressure actually requires
- Specific language for talking about preparation and risk that leaders can carry back into their own decisions
- A different model of resilience, rooted in routine, self-honesty, and recovery rather than willpower
- A reset on what courage looks like at working level, not a motivational abstraction
Talks
A first-person account of 130 days at sea, built around the decisions that made the difference between finishing and not finishing.
Key takeaways:
- How to prepare for conditions you cannot fully anticipate, and what to do when preparation runs out
- The practical difference between isolation and loneliness, and why that distinction matters for leaders under strain
- What authentic communication with a remote team looks like when the stakes are absolute