A week after Wimbledon… ex-tennis players grow into start-up investors!
3 innovation and digital news in 1 minute. Every Monday. Episode 348
Serena Williams operates with two investment arms: VC Serena Ventures and personal investments
Ex-tennis champion Serena Williams regularly invests in startups, following a strong trend of “celebrity” investors. So much so that she has her own VC firm (own+external capital), Serena Ventures that focuses on investments into startups of minority group founders e.g. women, black people, Latinos, etc. Opinion: Serana Ventures is an early-stage investor with low amounts. Her personal investment is in more exposed start-ups like social trading Shares.io or Impossible Food. She has grown as an important investment player in the US.
No tie-break, Serena is on a winning track in VC.
Maria Sharapova in Public.com
Public.com is a trading app in the US — the number one competitor to Robinhood.
Trading and investing of all assets stocks, ETF, crypto, and alternative assets like fractional shares of art.
With advanced trading and analytics features in a premium version. Opinion: New, Public.com Alpha, a GPT-4 based investment assistant. Ask it questions like “what happened that caused profits of company XYZ to drop in Q1 2022”. No financial advice from the chat, but info on assets and visualization of balance sheets, P&L etc.
Founded by Leif Abraham, from Hamburg (we ourselves come from Hamburg — proud!)
Roger Federer in sports shoe brand On
On’s original product was an innovative running shoe, with a cushioned sole. From there On developed into an innovative sports brand, still focused on running but also into tennis and lifestyle. Since the start with a D2C-only strategy, all sales come through own shops and ecommerce. Opinion: First prototype of its innovative running shoe was cuts of a garden hose glued to the sole of an old pair of running shoes. Impressive that from there it grew into a large company and innovator in the running market.
An innovator with a fancy showroom in London, SLI was there.
