"The idea that people go to VCs to retire--that's crazy," said Microsoft's former vice president of worldwide strategic planning, now an investment principal at venture capital firm Atlas Venture.

Jennings, who managed more than 1,000 people involved in the MSN Internet project and supervised the 1998 acquisition of Hotmail, says she spends as much time leading Atlas' Seattle office and nurturing start-ups as she did working at Microsoft. The 40-year-old Seattle resident also spends more time on the road, shuttling one day per week to the office in Menlo Park, Calif., and taking business trips to the company's headquarters in Amsterdam. Even her administrative assistant, Marian Ellestad, says Jennings has "basically no free time."

"My 8-year-old read me the riot act a few weeks ago," Jennings said of her daughter, Margo. "She said she wanted me to go back to Microsoft because I was around more. I'm working pretty hard."

Despite overseeing more than $1 billion in Microsoft investments, including Healtheon/WebMD, VerticalNet, MyPlant.com and Radiant Systems, Jennings didn't intend to become a venture capitalist when she left in early 2000. Instead, she planned to relax and investigate CEO positions at Internet start-ups. But recruiters began calling her as soon as she quit, leaving her little time for a break.

She interviewed with more than two-dozen start-ups, almost all of them in Silicon Valley. After the umpteenth trip to San Jose, she had an epiphany.

"I realized I didn't want to move to California," said Jennings, who took the Atlas job in October 2000. "In the process, I also realized I liked looking at all of these companies. I saw some I didn't want to run and others I wouldn't invest in, but they were all extremely interesting companies. It made me realize that VC would be a pretty interesting field."

Jennings began working at Microsoft immediately after graduating from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in 1988. She has no regrets about resigning and says she "got lucky" when she cashed out many of her options at the peak of the market in March 2000. But she complains that she hasn't taken a "real vacation" for more than a decade.

"The phone kept ringing. There was a feeling that I couldn't be rude, and it was an exciting time," Jennings said of her five-month stint interviewing for CEO positions. "But I wish I had taken a vacation."