Cover Jane Lee wears many hats: as an adventurer, corporate leader, author and entrepreneur (Image: courtesy of Jane Lee)
Jane Lee wears many hats: as an adventurer, corporate leader, author and entrepreneur (Image: courtesy of Jane Lee)
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After more than two decades of reinvention—from mountaineering and management consulting to launching a skincare brand inspired by her own frostbite scars—Jane Lee has learnt that a successful career doesn’t have to follow a straight line
“We are all capable of doing something extraordinary.” That is what Jane Lee wants readers to take away from her recently published book, Small Steps to Big Summits: Persistence and Imperfection in Mountains and Boardrooms.
Today, Lee is an innovation leader at multinational food and agriculture corporation Cargill. But the résumé behind that title reads like several careers stitched together: professional mountaineer, McKinsey consultant, author and now founder of a skincare brand for active women. It is a path she calls her “portfolio life”—and it started on the world’s highest mountain.
An unlikely ambition
In 2004, Jane Lee and fellow National University of Singapore undergraduate Sim Yi Hui set out to build Singapore’s first all-woman mountaineering team, with the goal of reaching the summit of Mount Everest. It was, by most measures, an improbable ambition for women from a tropical city-state whose tallest natural point rises just 164m above sea level. When the team announced their plans, The Straits Times ran a cartoon lampooning a woman in lipstick and high heels attempting the climb. Yet, more than 30 women responded to their public call to join them; after fitness tests and interviews, the team was whittled down and, over five years, trained relentlessly while wrestling with a more challenging problem: funding. Early efforts to land a handful of major sponsors stalled, prompting the team to pivot and invite the public to sponsor a metre or two of Everest’s then 8,848m peak (since recalculated at 8,849m following a survey in late 2020) instead.
Above Lee co-founded Singapore’s first all-woman mountaineering team with the goal of reaching the summit of Mount Everest (Image: courtesy of Jane Lee)
Above Lee climbing Ama Dablam in Nepal, with the summit in view (Image: courtesy of Jane Lee)
Lee co-founded Singapore’s first all-woman mountaineering team with the goal of reaching the summit of Mount Everest (Image: courtesy of Jane Lee)
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Five years after that call for participants, the six-woman team—by then pared back to its final roster—set off for Nepal. While team co-leader Sim was forced to turn back with chest pains before the final ascent, five members successfully made history. Among them was Jane Lee, then just 25, who became one of the first Singaporean women to stand atop Everest.
Beyond Everest
Above Lee on Denali in Alaska, one of the Seven Summits (Image: courtesy of Jane Lee)
Lee on Denali in Alaska, one of the Seven Summits (Image: courtesy of Jane Lee)
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She did not stop there. Lee went on to complete the Seven Summits—the highest peak on each continent—becoming the first woman from Southeast Asia to do so. In 2013, she skied 560km across Greenland, an expedition memorable, by her own account, for being the longest she had ever gone without a shower: 26 days.
Above In 2013, Lee skied 560km across Greenland (Image: courtesy of Jane Lee)
In 2013, Lee skied 560km across Greenland (Image: courtesy of Jane Lee)
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At the height of her adventuring career—with sponsors keen for more—Lee chose to stop. She enrolled at Yale University for an MBA, a decision she traces back to reading Richard Branson’s autobiography Losing My Virginity during downtime on expeditions. Branson’s example, she says, showed her “there’s more to life and defining what success looks like beyond this immediate experience ... I felt like I had done enough climbing to experience enough of what a sliver of success in that realm felt like, [and that] now, it’s time to go explore something else”.
A different kind of challenge
That “something else” was just over eight years at McKinsey as a management consultant, a role that took her through Southeast Asia, Japan, South Korea, the UK, New Zealand and Australia. She subsequently joined a food-technology start-up before moving into her current global role at Cargill.
Lee is quick to push back on two assumptions people make about a career like hers: that jumping between fields signals an inability to focus, and that a generalist is, by definition, a master of nothing. “We don’t give ourselves enough credit for having multiple talents or multiple passions,” she notes. “We think we need to pick one and then that’s our one thing. You engage different parts of your brain and bring different aspects of your personality to different parts of your life, and I think we forget that we are capable of code-switching between some of these roles that we take on.” There is also a rhythm to it, she adds. “There’s an ebb and flow and a timing to things. I’m not at the same level at all of these things at the same time.”
Above Lee currently works as an innovation leader at Cargill (Image: courtesy of Jane Lee)
Lee currently works as an innovation leader at Cargill (Image: courtesy of Jane Lee)
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Lee is candid, too, about how much of her success has depended on factors beyond her own effort. “I talk a lot about failures, the role of luck and the accidental pivots, and just picking things up and crossing my fingers, because I think that’s the reality of sometimes achieving ‘success’,” she says. “I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve managed to successfully climb these mountains or have a successful career, but I don’t want to downplay the role of having the right team, having the right mentors, luck, or sometimes just being in the right place at the right time.”
So how does she know when it is time to move on from something? As Lee explains: “When I find I have the answers right away, when I have a method or set way of doing things, when I no longer feel slightly afraid or uncertain—I think that, for me, is a sign that I’ve now done this thing for too long.”
The power of reinvention
Above In 2026, Lee founded Stoke, a skincare brand with active women like herself in mind (Image: courtesy of Jane Lee)
In 2026, Lee founded Stoke, a skincare brand with active women like herself in mind (Image: courtesy of Jane Lee)
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Lee recently embarked on another new adventure. “My discomfort right now is learning how to be an entrepreneur,” she says. In January 2026, she launched Stoke, a skincare brand born directly out of an injury she sustained on Everest. High on the mountain—close to the summit and above 8,600 metres—her oxygen mask failed. She went without face protection for over an hour, freezing the superficial layers of her skin. It has never fully recovered, and remains unusually sensitive to both hot and cold temperature extremes. “Someone once told me that you should only start a business in something that you’re passionate about,” she shares, but “I didn’t start out being passionate about skincare—it was a dire need”.
What began as a personal fix became a business once Lee realised how many other active women shared the same problem. “As I started talking to more and more of my female friends who were athletes and adventurous, I realised they had the same issue,” she says. “We want to make sure we take care of our skin and that we’re comfortable, because if we’re physically uncomfortable, it ruins the experience of the sport.”
From injury to entrepreneurship
Above Stoke’s first two products are a serum and hydrator (Image: courtesy of Jane Lee)
Stoke’s first two products are a serum and hydrator (Image: courtesy of Jane Lee)
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The insight became a two-year research project with a lab in Australia, investigating what happens to the skin microbiome under perspiration, high UV exposure and saltwater—and what a formula needs to shield and preserve it against all three disruptions. “So much of skincare is like, I’m beautiful when I’m indoors, and I don’t sweat,” Lee says. ‘But I’m not like that, so what’s my use case?”
Stoke currently sells a moisturiser and a serum, with a suncare range due to launch in November. The line is organic, vegan, reef-safe and free from what the brand calls toxic chemicals, and built, as Lee puts it, for women who run, race, climb and dive.
Today, running Stoke alongside her role at Cargill means accepting that not everything can move at the same pace at once. Her discipline, Lee shares, comes down to focusing on aspects of the business that only she can do and delegating the rest—even when there are parts she would love to be more hands-on with. “Extraordinary starts with a beginning,” she says, “and you don’t have to be the expert at the beginning. Sometimes, we just need to trust ourselves and have the ability to problem-solve along the way.”
Jane Lee will be the keynote speaker at the Front & Female Awards Singapore 2026 on September 2, taking place at Raffles Sentosa Singapore.
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