Ambassadors

Jason Caldwell is a world record-holding athlete, business owner, author, teacher, husband, and father. Jason was born in Walnut Creek, California. Growing up, he played the classic American sports of baseball and American football, playing baseball in college and eventually semi-pro for the San Francisco Angels. Injury prevented Jason from pursuing baseball at the professional level but paved the way for the introduction to the sport of rowing.

Jason rowed for his collegiate team at Sonoma State University. Upon graduation, Jason was invited to row for Vesper Boat Club in Philadelphia. Vesper – the most successful rowing club in the United States -invites 16 of the countries’ best rowers to their elite year-round team. For the next three years, Jason trained and lived at Vesper, going from the last invited athlete to eventually earn his way to the top boat, winning two gold medals, a silver, and a bronze at Nationals along the way.

After his career at Vesper, Jason founded Latitude 35 (Lat 35), a leadership development company that trains global 500 companies in leadership and high performance. Currently, Lat 35 works with over 40 global organizations, including Salesforce, Roche, Nike, AWS, and Mckinsey & Co. Jason complements his work with these companies by teaching at a number of universities through their Business Schools, including Wharton, Columbia, London Business School, and Haas School of Business.

As an athlete, Jason continues to push his personal limits while challenging the boundaries of the impossible. To date, Jason has rowed 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean twice (2016 & 2017), the second time breaking the World Record as the fastest team to ever row across the Atlantic Ocean. Most recently, Jason built and led a team to row across the Pacific Ocean (2021), where they broke the world record by just over nine days. Jason has also trekked, unassisted, across the oldest desert in the world (Namib Desert, Namibia, 2018) and has rowed from mainland Spain to the Balearics (2019). All of these adventures were built, trained, and performed under the Lat 35 banner – a way to exemplify his teachings of leadership and teams.

Jason has documented his adventures and the lessons learned by writing two books. The first book, titled What If, tells the story of Jason’s journey from a career-ending baseball injury to a world record holder and those coaches and teammates that helped get him there. This book was eventually picked up by the Oscar-winning Producers of Free Solo and made into a documentary titled Chasing. The second book, titled Navigating the Impossible, is a business application version of the above story, packed with useful lessons on how the business professional can lead his/her teams as well. Jason’s accolades have been shared on the Rich Roll Podcast, among others.