Serena Williams has always been interested in business, and she's been very active in it in recent years.
Williams spent much of her life totally dedicated to tennis. As she got older, her interests started to expand, and she started to become more active on the business side of things.
That increased exponentially after her marriage to tech executive and investor Alexis Ohanian. Since then, Serena has invested in many companies through her venture capital fund, Serena Ventures.
She talked about that side of her life during a recent video on TikTok, where she explained why she started investing and said it was all about having a backup plan. Nothing was guaranteed for her as an athlete, especially not her career, so she always wanted to have a backup plan when her career ended.
"Hey everyone, I thought it'd be really fun to kinda talk about things that I do now that I don't play professional tennis anymore. Kinda evolved from that. One thing that I have been doing, that I'm doing for years and years is investments."
"So I invest in a lot of companies, early companies, so think early stage, where companies have just started. And, I've always done this, I've actually been investing for over 14 years."
Athletes investing isn't a new concept. We've seen it for many years, especially lately, as basically more and more people who have some sort of capital turn to invest. We've seen athletes like Nick Kyrgios and Naomi Osaka do the same, as well as some older players like Roger Federer.
"Just been an entrepreneur, while I was playing tennis, it's super important for me to make a plan B while I was doing my plan A. Sounds weird, like a plan B."
"But it was fun, it was really important for me to do that. So, in my personal portfolio, I have invested in over 85 companies, maybe? Also, 14 are unicorn and a few decacorns."