If you haven’t caught up with Fortune‘s Leadership Next podcast, check out this recent episode where my colleagues Diane Brady and Kristin Stoller sit down with Alexis Ohanian. They talk about the full breadth of his career, across Reddit, AI—and, of course, women’s sports.
Ohanian was one of the founders of the women’s soccer team Angel City, and more recently is behind the track and field competition Athlos. He told Diane and Kristin that, interestingly, his wife Serena Williams actually tried to talk him out of getting involved in women’s sports when he first had the idea.
When I first told her I was investing in women’s soccer and starting a team, she actually tried to talk me out of it. In part because she had lived the other side of being an athlete in this sports and women’s sports system. And the WTA is one of the best, right? Because of Billie Jean King, you had pay equity. Because of that pay equity, you had a couple of girls in Compton decide they wanted to devote their lives to tennis. So without Billie Jean King, you don’t get Serena and Venus, but without Serena and Venus, you don’t get generational talent that then takes the sport out of country clubs and makes it one of the most popular sports in the world. Because these tournaments were all at the same time, they could say, all right, fine, we’ll market the women too. Then you get this amazing talent that grows the game in such a big way.
Seeing women’s tennis bring in big dollars made Ohanian confident that top-tier marketing would have the same outcome in other sports. “I can market excellence all day long,” he says.
Listen to the full episode on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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PARTING WORDS
"I have a platform because there is interest in my family. I can use that to uplift and amplify the organizations that I work with and share the wealth of information that I have access to."
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