Serena Williams made it known after her first-round victory at the U.S. Open Monday night that she is ready for her next act with her San Francisco-based venture capital investment fund.
Less than a week after she rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, the 40-year-old tennis superstar was interviewed by CBS host Gayle King, who asked Williams in an on-court interview after her victory what “winning” will look like in her upcoming post-tennis life.
“I have my VC company, Serena Ventures,” she said. “We invest in a lot of people — we invest in women and people of color — and men as well.”
The 23-time Grand Slam singles champion was quick with her answer, showing that her mind is already very much in the VC game.
“It’s like Serena 2.0 — I’m still going to be crazy. I’m still going to be intense," she said.
Founded in 2014, Serena Ventures raised an inaugural fund of $111 million earlier this year, with the money coming from family offices and individual investors, and has so far invested in more than a dozen unicorns. According to Serena Ventures' website, 53% of the companies in its investment portfolio are founded by women, 47% have Black founders and 12% have Latino founders.
Earlier in August, she said in an interview with Bloomberg — just before she announced her retirement via an article in Vogue — that one day she hopes to be at the helm of a billion-dollar fund. “I like talking to founders and asking questions and learning about businesses," she said.
She echoed those sentiments in the Aug. 9 Vogue article: "Every morning, I’m so excited to walk downstairs to my office and jump onto Zooms and start reviewing decks of companies we’re considering investing in."
That excitement for business, she told the New York Times back in March, is also what drew her to her husband, Alex Ohanian, co-founder of San Francisco-based Reddit: "When I met my husband, that was our first conversation. That’s how we met. I was talking about investments.”
Williams already has endorsement relationships with several of the world’s biggest brands, including Nike Inc., PepsiCo Inc.’s Gatorade, Delta Air Lines Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., though she stepped down from Redwood City-based clothing reseller Poshmark Inc.’s board in April.
Nevertheless, she told Bloomberg that she's driven to be on top of whatever she's doing, but that in this case of mastering the venture capital game, she has "a ton of work to get there." Nonetheless, she said she's now ready to do "what it takes to be at the top level.”
Of course, she's also not really a newbie in this world as she was also an active angel investor over the past 10 years, putting money into scores of companies including Redwood City-based Impossible Foods and San Francisco-based MasterClass.
For years she's also been a steady advocate for more Black female founders in Silicon Valley. In 2020, she penned a column for CNN Business Perspectives about breaking barriers in the predominantly white sport of tennis and connected it with the challenge Black female entrepreneurs face when they try to raise to money in the predominantly white and male venture capital industry.
And aside from her investment fund, she also owns a stake in the Miami Dolphins and has a fashion line called S by Serena.
Maybe it's fair to say we've been been looking at Serena 2.0 for some time now, and just didn't realize it.
