Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit who’s married to tennis nice Serena Williams, began investing in ladies’s sports activities in 2020. And all of it started with a tweet.
In March 2019, the multimillionaire wrote on the platform previously often known as Twitter, feminine soccer stars “should get paid what they deserve” and that girls’s sports activities is a “massively undervalued asset.”
“The argument that women’s sports don’t bring in the same dollars or viewers is inane,” he wrote—and in got here ridicule from readers who didn’t imagine that folks would need to pay to look at ladies play.
One consumer clapped again, “if you think this imbalance is temporary then you have a great opportunity to invest accordingly.” And that’s precisely what he did.
Right now, he’s the founding management proprietor of Angel Metropolis FC and Los Angeles Golf Membership, and creator {of professional} ladies’s observe and discipline occasion collection Athlos. Earlier this yr, Ohanian turned a minority investor and board member in Britain’s Chelsea FC, and most lately, he expanded his portfolio into skilled ladies’s volleyball.
With Ohanian’s investments rising exponentially, now he’s rubbing it in his naysayers’ faces. He revealed on stage at Fortune’s World Discussion board that he by no means forgot getting “savagely trolled” and has been preserving those that despatched him hate on social media within the loop on his success.
“I saved all those tweets from all the haters who said I was an idiot. No one watches women’s sports. You’re gonna lose all your money,” Ohanian revealed. And each time we hit one other income milestone, I tag them and thank them for the motivation.”
Silicon Valley type development—but it surely’s truly ladies’s sports activities
Whereas mentioning how shortly his investments are paying off, Ohanian prompt that the present momentum behind ladies’s sports activities is extra like the size of a Silicon Valley startup.
“We’re a ways from overheated,” he insisted. “You’re seeing the rise in valuations, the rise in team revenues… that has grown so fast because we’re seeing just how suppressed the investments were historically. It cost me a million dollars—that was the expansion fee, and I overpaid in January of 2020—to start Angel City, that same League, the NWSL, recently charged $150 million to a group in Denver.”
“So expansion fees going up 150x in four or five years—that sounds like a tech story. It’s a women’s sports story.”
The rising sector’s income is anticipated to hit a record-breaking $2.35 billion this yr—a whopping 25% year-over-year improve, in line with a 2025 Deloitte report. However that’s not even 3% of the $80 billion in whole for each males’s and girls’s sports activities.
For Ohanian and others invested in ladies’s sports activities, it means the market is just scratching the floor of its potential—and the “trolls” can count on to get a entrance row seat (within the type of a tag notification) because the wins pile up.
