- In today’s CEO Daily: Serena Williams on showing her daughters the value of hard work.
- The big leadership story: OpenAI finds ChatGPT usage doesn’t guarantee higher revenues.
- The markets: Mixed as investors dial back expectations for a Fed rate hike.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. How do the leadership skills that are needed to thrive at the highest level of sports translate to business? One person who’s thought about that a lot is Serena Williams. She launched her VC firm more than a decade ago, recently changing the name from Serena Ventures to Starfire Ventures, and has launched other businesses. She’s experienced success as an early investor in companies like Coinbase, MasterClass, and Impossible Foods. And she’s also dealt with the failure of her Wyn Beauty and S by Serena fashion labels that are no longer in operation. I recently spoke with the tennis star while she was mentoring young founders in the Reckitt Catalyst program as the first entrepreneur-in-residence for the British multinational.
As a celebrity, one of Serena’s biggest challenges is how to take the spotlight off herself. The bigger the name or gap in achievement, the more important it is to build trust. Talking to fans and mentoring founders are different skills. “I’ve had to learn mentorship. I never really thought about it until I stepped into this role,” she told me. One of the key lessons was “leaning into being more accessible, obviously with time, but also letting people understand that they can call me, text me, and reach each other because we have a common goal of making this business succeed.”
Williams also recognized the importance of finding new role models for this chapter of her career. “I always said I did so good because I watched Venus first … I was sitting in every match and watching what she did or didn’t do so I could take all that in.” She also found a role model in longtime Starfire Ventures partner Beth Ferreira. In a less formal way, she also takes inspiration from her husband Alexis Ohanian, an entrepreneur and VC who co-founded Reddit. “We rarely work together, but the best advice I get from him is when he’s on calls and I listen in … If I have questions, I’ll obviously ask him, but we keep things very church and state at home.”
Having had a father who was so famously involved in the trajectory of her sports career, I asked her what she wants her daughters to take away from this phase. “I’d like them to see how hard we work. We’re not phoning anything in. We’re showing up every day. We’re making calls. We’re spending hours in the office. We’re doing all the work,” she said, noting that her kids obviously have advantages that she and Venus lacked growing up in Compton, California. “I think it’s important for them to understand that in order to have success, you have to continue to do the work.”
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