One thing that makes you respect someone more and more over time is seeing them refuse to be defined by one thing. As a single player, Serena Williams won 23 Grand Slam titles and made the tennis world look almost unfair for 20 years. When most people retired, they thought it would mean endorsement deals, charity events, and maybe even a clothing line. Something completely different and much more interesting actually did happen.
When Serena started Serena Ventures in 2014, it looked like a lot of other celebrities’ side projects: quiet, ambitious, and easy to not give much credit to. The company wasn’t taken seriously in the financial world until 2022, when it announced a $111 million first fund. The list of companies had grown to over 80 by 2024. That number isn’t just for show. It shows years of careful decision-making, the kind that comes from having a strong thesis and not just a well-known name.
The thesis is where things really start to get interesting. Serena Ventures looks for founders who are women and people of color, not because they want to make people feel good, but because it’s smart business. About 2% of all venture capital funding in 2023 went to startups run by women. Even less was given to black and Latinx founders. Because they mostly work with a small group of people across the country, traditional venture capital firms have been missing out on huge parts of the market. That’s not a problem with society. It’s an inefficient use of pricing. It was smart of Serena to see that before most fund managers even put it that way.
The pattern is clear from her early bet on Coinbase. When she moved in, the crypto infrastructure looked like it was just a guess. Before the creator economy became a real business category, MasterClass seemed like a high-end curiosity. When Impossible Foods first came out, plant-based alternatives were still seen as strange. In all three cases, the investment came a long time before the mainstream conversation. You’re not just lucky, or at least it’s not luck. It means that someone is paying close attention to where technology and consumer behavior are going before the rest of the market does.
Propel is one of the most interesting investments in the portfolio. It is a fintech company that makes financial tools for low-income Americans, many of whom get help from the government. This is exactly the kind of market that traditional Silicon Valley money tends to miss, in part because it requires understanding problems that most Sand Hill Road investors don’t feel like they have to deal with every day. Serena’s background and the fact that she has long had to deal with race and being seen in a sport that is mostly white gives her a unique perspective. Some of her best calls have come in places where most VCs don’t bother to look, which is hard to miss.
It’s still not clear how the overall portfolio will do over the long term, since venture investing is known for being very uneven. Losses are something that all funds do. And it’s not the same thing as making smart early bets when you’re trying to build a firm that will last through staff changes, market cycles, and raising a second or third fund. It’s too early to say what will happen to Serena Ventures because she is still young.
One thing that is clear is that she took this change with the same stubborn seriousness that she brought to tennis. Seeing this from the outside makes it seem like Serena Williams isn’t trying to grow her brand. She is setting up a business. Those are not the same things, and the difference is more important than it seems at first.
There aren’t as many athletes who can turn their success on the field into long-lasting financial impact as the headlines make it seem. Most of the time, celebrities don’t have a plan for their investments. So far, this one isn’t.
