Grit and perseverance define how Sarah Kraft builds. When things get hard, she doesn't slow down — she leans in. That relentless drive is what has made Koil what it is today and has also made her a world champion sailor.
She pairs it with an obsessive habit of listening to customers and holding her hypotheses loosely, refining them quickly as she learns. It's how the business stays future-proofed rather than fixed.
What fuels her is a genuine love of building businesses and an obsession with the problems she chooses to take on. With Koil, that obsession is deeply personal. She has drawn on a difficult chapter of her own past to shape a product that helps young people do something she wishes she'd had more support with: figuring out who they want to be, and how to actually get there. Sarah had a tough time finding the resources she needed when she was young, and so, lacking clarity, knowledge, and direction — she became pregnant at 18. Her daughter is now happily adopted and a teenager, making Sarah determined to give both her daughter and her younger self the resources she wished she'd had at the time. The platform gives teens the resources to build clear, forward momentum in their own lives and kick-start their careers.
The victories that matter most to her aren't the metrics — they're the moments she watches that clarity land for a young person who didn't have it before. The clarity she wishes she'd had herself, so that getting to where she is now hadn't taken as long as it did.
She wants deeply to help. She is also, by her own description, wildly ambitious and competitive. Koil is what happens when those two things point in the same direction.