About Us
Maksim and Devin met in December 2006 in Tanzania during their successful climb of Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest peak in Africa (5,895 m / 19,341 ft). To the right is their photo on the summit (click the image to expand it).
Maksim proposed the idea of a cross-continental bicycle adventure and Devin, a big outdoorsman, eagerly accepted. We decided to make it a fundraising event against cancer — a source of grief and pain for many families including ours. Devin's dad had succumbed to lung cancer and Maksim's grandfather died from prostate cancer.
John and Troy are Devin's friends from school. They've decided to join our coast-to-coast expedition.
Below you'll find more information about us.
Maksim Kalashnikov (a.k.a. Laur Balaur)
Maksim Kalashnikov is a second-year MBA student at Harvard Business School. He is an avid outdoors enthusiast who enjoys mountaineering, wilderness survival training, snowboarding & skiing, kayaking, and rock climbing. He discovered long-distance bicycling in 1997 in the U.S. Pacific Northwest while on an internship at Microsoft. More recently, under a contrived excuse of a "lack of a convenient way to transport his bicycle to and from school", he organized and rode four times in the semiannual Tour de New England challenge. The Tour is a 250-mile self-supported bicycle ride between New York and Boston. In April 2000, he cofounded the Poxod Outdoors Club of New York. Maksim is a Russian from Chişinău, Moldova and considers NYC to be his second hometown. He holds a BS (1999) and an MS (2002) in computer science, both from Columbia University.
Simultaneously, under advisement from HBS professors Jan Hammond and Dutch Leonard, he is writing a First-Timer's Guide to Event-Based Nonprofit Fundraising. The Guide (Maksim's field study project at HBS) will codify BikeCoastToCoast.org's fundraising, marketing, and organizational takeaways into a concise document that will help others to put together their own fundraising events. Maksim hopes that the Guide will become a living document at HBS, referred to and contributed to by others, eventually evolving into an authoritative guide to many different types of fundraising.
NEW! - Here is a draft of the Guide (PDF, 1.4 MB).
Devin Mattson
Hailing from the bustling metropolis of Pleasant View, Utah, Devin Mattson is a junior at Brigham Young University. He is pursuing a Bachelor degree in international relations. Devin loves climbing and biking and pretty much anything else outdoors; he often goes backpacking in the canyons of Southern Utah. This has been an eventful year for him. Devin recently returned from a two-year Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints mission / adventure in Norway, and then undertook a little excursion up Mount Kilimanjaro with the HBS Outdoors Club's Tanzania trek. When not doing that, Devin fights off his wanderlust by always keeping an issue of Backpacker magazine with him when he's studying (a fifteen-minute break every two hours is perfect). After our New York - San Francisco ride, Devin plans to hit the John Muir Trail in the Sierras with his sister Blaire ...and it looks likely that they'll convince Maksim to join them. "Life's a garden - dig it!" — Joe Dirt.
John Lattin
Born in Spokane, Washington and the
youngest of five children, John has always tried to keep up with his brothers and sister. He is studying chemical engineering at Brigham Young University. John served a two-year LDS mission in Chihuahua, Mexico and considers it the best two years of his life so far. He likes trying to be better and working hard at things. He enjoys skiing, cycling, rock climbing, and many other sports.
Troy Richey
Troy is a junior studying accounting at BYU. He served a two-year Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints mission in Buenos Aires, Argentina where he enjoyed eating steak every day! Troy enjoys playing whiffle ball and baseball, snorkeling, scuba diving, and traveling. Despite being a newcomer to cycling, Troy is excited about his new-found hobby!