Serena Williams’ $100m Fund – How She Launched It – Capital Raising – Investment Banking
Serena Williams, the world’s best tennis player, raised over 100 million for her private equity fund. I’m going to show you how she created it, structured it, and raised the money, and maybe you can take a thing or two from how she did it by the end of this video if you listen right now. So, Serena Williams, expert tennis player, she actually wanted to create a private equity fund to invest in underrepresented women and people of color in America because not a lot of them were funded in America.
So she created Serena Ventures Fund 1 LP. And basically, I’m going to show you the playbook of how you can reverse engineer the strategy of how she created it and raised the money. She did something called the Regulation D 506B exemption. And she created Serena Ventures Fund 1 LP in Delaware. And when she created this company, the name of the company is Serena Ventures 1 LP, meaning it’s a limited partnership.
And she also created two other companies, a general partnership, And an investment manager, also known as an investment advisor. If you go to the SEC, when people get investors for their deal, they have to notify the Securities and Exchange Commission. So basically the information we got here is, basically she did more of a private, quiet capital raise.
And if you go to Serena Ventures, On the website, you notice that the investors are part of her team, meaning that there was likely a pre existing relationship to the investors. And it was also likely that there wasn’t a big outreach to investors. She already probably had a relationship with these investors because the regulation D 506B exemption, which Serena Williams used, suggests that you don’t have to do a big campaign and raise a lot of money.
Really different than Kim Kardashian’s private equity fund. So, you know, in raising 100 million and above in Washington, D. C. She also has something called SJW Investments LLC, which is the investment advisor. In other words, this is the investment management company, which is going to be connected to all the future funds that she creates.
And then she also has something called Serena Ventures Partners GP LLC, which is the general partner of the specific fund as well. She already created the fund. She already raised a hundred and something million from investor relationships she already knew. And she’s basically focusing on investing in companies and to provide returns for those investors.
And that’s all the information that’s publicly viewable. And she also selected that it’s a pooled investment fund and a venture capital fund. It’s really a venture capital fund, meaning that they’re trying to invest in a few standout deals that will deliver amazing results, and it’s likely that they’re not making control investments because the only lead around is for participating in existing rounds in a nutshell.
If you want to reverse engineer this, she’s already famous and she already has really specific relationships with investors and she established and focused on the niche that needed her help. And in doing that, she was able to really get the capital very quickly and privately, meaning that she didn’t really need to do a big campaign and she was more relational driven than other people were.
She probably obviously used some of her own money to invest in some of the deals. And in creating the fund, they didn’t really focus too much on capital raising, they just focused on deploying the capital it seems. Because there wasn’t a need for a big, loud, and she’s just using her leverage to really originate deals for her fund rather than using it to capital raise.
She did with three companies, a general partner, an investment advisor, an investment manager, and the limited partner, which you can see on the screen right now. And the final thing is that before launching the fund, she invested for nine years before even getting active in it. And then that’s how she probably built the track record and had people around her because there are a lot of people that make money.
Who can’t keep it or who make money from sports and so on, and they don’t know how to manage it by building that track record. It’s likely that she used that with her close connections to build this long relationship with only a handful of really high quality investors and probably put the majority of her own money into a lot of the deals anyway.
So this is probably best suited if you’re somebody who only wants to have a few people into your deals You already have a lot of capital yourself that you’re willing to deploy and you’re more interested in deploying capital and originating amazing deals Rather than raising capital because you may not need to.
There are some family offices and people that Don’t actually need to raise money as much as others And so if you’re in that group, then this type of fund structure may be for you and make sure you head to
Serena Williams’ $100m Fund – How She Launched It – Capital Raising – Investment Banking
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