Serena Williams is bringing championship skills from the tennis court to the business world.
The Olympic gold medal winner and mother of two has invested in over 85 companies through Serena Ventures, a venture capital fund she founded in 2017. Even more impressive, 14 of the companies have reached unicorn status, meaning each is valued at more than $1 billion.
“I’ve actually been investing for over 14 years,” Williams revealed in a recent TikTok. Just been an entrepreneur while I was playing tennis. It’s super important to me to make a plan B while I was doing my plan A.”
One of the 14 companies includes MasterClass, an education subscription platform, which was valued at $2.75 billion in 2021, according to CNBC. While Williams had been no stranger to the investing space, she said her participation with MasterClass jump-started her investing career.
“I remember finding that company with like eight people in a small room in a garage in San Francisco, and I just fell in love with what they were doing and what they were building,” Williams said in her TikTok. “And I said, ‘you know what, I really want to be a part of this. This is so cool.’”
Williams’ success in tennis spans nearly three decades, including 23 Grand Slam single titles, four Olympic gold medals, and prize money totaling more than $94 million. After her 2022 retirement, Williams’ focus shifted back to Serena Ventures.
At one point Williams attended a conference and learned a troubling statistic that stuck with her forever: less than 2% of venture capital goes to women. And even less investment goes to people of color. At first, she thought the woman who shared the information, Clear CEO Caryn Seidman-Becker, had misspoke. After confirming the information was, in fact, true, Williams then realized the world needed “someone who looks like me needs to start writing the big checks,” she previously told Vogue Magazine in 2022.
Williams reflected on this moment again in her recent TikTok, saying that she “knew right then and there that one day I wanted to raise a fund, raise money and invest in women.”
Serena Ventures is now doing just that. Almost 80% of the founders from its investment portfolio are underrepresented, and more than half are women. Additionally, 47% of founders are Black and 11% are Latino. Minority and women-led companies, Williams said, tend to perform just as well as other companies, or better. The U.S. Department of Commerce found that minority entrepreneurs generate nearly $2 trillion in revenue each year.
Another company Serena Venture invested in is Parfait, a woman-owned wig company that uses AI and facial recognition technology to create custom-fit wigs for customers.
“When people are talking about diversity, that really means everyone having a seat at the table — everyone kind of having an opportunity to win,” Williams said. “And that’s what I like to do.”
Williams traces her entrepreneurial spirit to her childhood in Compton, California, where “we were all entrepreneurs,” she said. “You had to be to survive.”
Aside from Serena Ventures, Williams says she has “a lot of exciting things on the horizon.” She recently debuted her makeup line WYN Beauty, designing products customers “can move in,” according to its website. Williams launched her own clothing line called “S by Serena” in 2018, and launched Serena Williams Jewelry, her own jewelry collection the following year.
With all these wins, Williams’ plan B is looking just as glittering as her plan A.
