On Serena Williams’s calendar—that’s to calendars what Jackson Pollock artwork are to artwork—Saturdays are specific family time. The Saturday I’m along with her in Rome (she became in New York in advance in the week and can be in Paris the subsequent one) contains greater significance. Exactly four years ago, in exactly that Eternal City, she met her husband, Alexis Ohanian, co-founding father of on line network Reddit.
The celebrate, in element, with the sort of trip anyone who’s now not the maximum famous female athlete within the global takes with no consideration: A walk in a resort lawn with their joint task, 22-month-vintage Olympia, in tow. It’s more romantic than it sounds: The Rome Cavalieri is going so far as to call its 15-acre lawn a “private park”, affected by marble and bronze, lions and unicorns.
The regal environment befit a ancient determine of American recreation, who has 23 Grand Slam titles and has blown away any quantity of barriers and stereotypes. And the unicorns? Between Reddit and his $500 million fund, Initialized Capital, Ohanian does his element. But it seems that Williams has quietly been playing that game, too. She’s now the primary athlete ever to hit Forbes’s annual list of the World’s Richest Self-Made Women, with an envisioned fortune of $225 million, the massive majority of it having come through her mind and emblem rather than her backhand. And over the last five years, she’s been quietly losing cash into 34 startups. In April, Williams formally introduced that Serena Ventures is open for commercial enterprise, to fund others and release corporations herself.
Athletes are richer than ever, thanks to the explosion in TV rights fees for stay sporting occasions, which trickle all the way down to gamers. The 50 highest-paid athletes within the international made $2.6 billion ultimate year, versus $1 billion 15 years in the past. And Williams is rarely the first to place newfound disposable income to lively paintings—inside the NBA on my own, LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant have all launched media companies, and Durant, Andre Iguodala and Carmelo Anthony are energetic project capital (VC) buyers. But she is one of the few mainly gearing investments around a single north big name: Herself.