Name: Serena Williams: From Tennis GOAT to VC Powerhouse
Uploaded: 2025-07-17T09:20:10.000Z
Duration: 14 min 40 s
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She's one of the most decorated tennis players of all time.

Now she's applying lessons learned in sport to a career in business.

Here at the 2025 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Serena is appearing on stage to speak about her newly announced role as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at consumer goods conglomerate record start-up accelerator programme Catalyst.

After the event, I sat down with Serena for this exclusive interview.

Serena, thank you so much for joining me here at Cannes Lions.

I've come here but I haven't been able to speak here, so this is nice.

What did it feel like speaking here, Serena?

Because obviously everyone knows you as the tennis legend that you are.

And here you are talking about your business, your entrepreneurship.

What are the messages that you want to get across?

Well, first of all, it's nice to be here and it's nice to speak here.

And for people to see the other thing and the other side of Serena, things that I've actually been doing for well over a decade and just building that.

Businesses that I've been building and investing that I've been doing and kind of talking about that.

A lot of people don't actually know that about me.

It felt good to just talk about investing in women and also what we're doing.

But just like it always feels good to talk about empowering other people, to be honest.

It's about what you can do to help others.

And so I like that and I like talking about that as well.

And you've also just been announced as Reckitt Catalyst Entrepreneur-in-Residence.

Yes, and that's super exciting to be there on Reckitt's Entrepreneur-in-Residence.

And I'm really excited about what Reckitt wants to do.

You know, we've been actually working on this for almost two years now.

And so to be able to talk about things that start out as an idea and just like how to build on it and how to bring me into this idea and me wanting to do it very authentically and me saying like, listen, I want to do this, but how does this work?

And then also talking to Reckitt how they were super authentic, like we want to do this and we want to make sure that it is for women, it is for entrepreneurs, it is for innovators.

We don't want it to be about anything else that we do.

It's really just about building up someone else.

And like I said, like just being here to talk about how you're helping others.

So I'm really excited to be there, Entrepreneur-in-Residence.

And I'm really excited to just kind of, you know, back these new innovators through investing in them and investing in what they're doing.

Well, you just said that you've been investing for a long time.

Curiosity.  I love people that are curious, and I love being curious, and I love learning about what's next.

And I feel like we're living in this crazy world right now, but it's also a digital world.

And this might sound crazy, but I just go back to the Industrial Revolution.

Like we're living in a digital revolution, and I feel like every 10, 20 years it's a new digital revolution.

And so, for me, that's how I started investing was just being curious about how do I get on the cap table of some of these companies that are effectively changing how we're living our lives.

We're not viewing transportation the same.

We're not viewing, you know, health care the same.

There's so many things that have changed through technology.

And I was curious about how do I invest in that and be a part of that movement in a different way, like behind the scenes.

We're talking about in front of the scenes.  Your career as a legend, how do you think that's translated to what you do now?

What do you think you learned from the tennis court that you're using now in business?

Yeah, well, I think just being disciplined I think is the number one thing.

Tennis is, you know, every day you have to do it every day.

You have to train, and business is the same.

You also have to be determined, you know, through ups and downs, be determined to keep going.

And that's one thing that I'm excited to do is to talk to these mentors about that determination that I've shown so much in my past career and just bring it out to this new career of mine.

Having shown promise from a young age alongside her sister Venus, Serena started her professional tennis career as a teenager and achieved her first Grand Slam win at the age of just 17 at the 1999 US Open.

Since then, the trophies came thick and fast, and with 23 Grand Slam titles to her name, she's one of the most successful female tennis players of all time.

After almost 30 years in the sport, Serena retired from professional tennis in 2022.

You broke boundaries, you made history, Serena.

Is there anything that you could highlight when you look back at it now, those moments?

It's filled with so much nostalgia and honestly, like, sadness, because I miss it, you know?

And it's like, oh, so I just try not to...

I just do the awful avoidance technique and just avoid it and just don't think about it and, like, I don't want to talk about it, don't honour me, like, don't think about this.

It becomes really emotional for me because I still, like, I still miss it.

Can I just take you, though, to that first moment when you were 17 years old?

That's different, you know, because it's like, I like reminiscing on that because that seems like a lifetime ago and the other stuff seems like it's still in reach, you know?

So, yeah, so that was kind of cool, you know, just being able to...

When I look at pictures and being able to hold up that trophy, you know, that you dream about when you're just a kid and, you know, you're still a kid, which you don't realise at the time until you look back and be like, oh, man, I was so young.

And, like, you think about, you know, being able to hold up that US Open trophy of all Grand Slams to win for the first time.

It was kind of iconic that I was able to win that one.

I mean, Wimbledon, obviously, would have been probably arguably better.

I don't have that experience, so I can't tell you, but I can ask my sister because that was her first Grand Slam was Wimbledon, so...

Another moment which seems iconic, which you talked about recently, was when you won the Australian Open, and you were already nine weeks pregnant, but nobody knew.