Serena Williams, a 23-time Grand Slam tennis champion, announced Tuesday that she plans to retire from the sport after her next tournament this month. Williams told Vogue magazine’s cover story that despite her deep reluctance and rejection of the word retirement, she plans to end her tennis career to focus on her venture capital firm and growing her family.
While the announcement marks a shift for a player who won her first Grand Slam title in 1999 when she was just 17 years old, it’s not sudden. Williams has been an early investor in the company since founding San Francisco-based Serena Ventures in 2014. The venture capital firm, which has raised $111 million to invest in underrepresented founders, already has a portfolio of 60 companies, including Sendwave, MasterClass and Daily Harvest.
“In my life, the balance is slowly shifting toward Serena Venaers,” she told the Vogue story. “Every morning I look forward to going down to my office, jumping into Zooms and starting looking at the decks of companies we want to invest in.”
Williams started investing nine years ago, and “fell in love with the early stage,” whether it was a pre-seed startup or just an idea. One of her first checks was MasterClass, and it’s now one of 16 unicorn companies worth more than $1 billion that Serena Ventures has funded. During Black Tech Week in July, she expressed her interest in companies that “impact everyday people in different ways” and that are located or doing business in Africa.
The icon is also looking to expand her family. Williams says she and her husband, Alexis Ohanian, co-founder and executive chairman of social media site Reddit, have been trying for another child, and she doesn’t want to get pregnant again as an athlete, as she told Vogue. When she won seven matches at the Australian Open, including the final, her twenty-third Grand Slam singles title, this one against her sister, Venus, she was two months pregnant. “I need to be two feet in or two feet out of tennis.”