0:00Introduction

Welcome to Give It A Nudge. Today we have got someone I have known a little while now who has had such a variety of things happen in life. Christie Jenkins. Welcome, Christie. Good to finally have you in Melbourne and in the studio.

For everyone who does not know who you are, give us a quick synopsis of your sporting career. I don’t know that I am actually famous because none of the sports I’ve played are very well known. But I have played three different sports for Australia. I started my career in trampolining, hold 12 national titles, top 10 in the world. My parents actually met on a trampoline. They put me in trampoline lessons when I was just a little kid. I went to my first Nationals at eight, won my first Nationals at nine, and did that into my early 20s.

5:00The switch to beach volleyball

When I was finishing uni I still wanted to be an athlete. My whole family had played beach volleyball. So I made a list at 23. I thought it is going to take a decade to get good at another sport, I will be 33 then, what sports can you still play in your 30s at a pro level? Beach volleyball was obviously on the list. A lot of the Olympians are in their late 30s. The last Olympians that won the women’s gold medal were 40. I gave myself six months, started training eight to ten times a week, and within a couple of months a really good player asked me to be her partner and that was it. I only just retired six months ago. I played for Australia on the world tour around the world and won national title events across Australia.

8:00Adding CrossFit

I wanted to stay fit for volleyball and going to a regular gym was too boring. A friend dragged me along to a CrossFit class. I did this crazy workout and could not straighten my arms for three days and I was like that is the thing for me. I ended up joining this very elite gym, CrossFit Athletic here in Sydney, and they were like you are pretty strong Christie, do you want to be part of the team? I did not quite realise what I was committing to, which was 11 training sessions a week, two to three hours a session. We ended up winning the Asia Pacific region, all of Australia and Asia, and then competed in the world CrossFit championships placing 11th. After that I just had to make the call between playing two sports at a pro level. That is unsustainable.

11:00Management consulting alongside sport

I spent a decade or so in management consulting, initially for in-house strategy teams at ANZ and CBA and a little bit of Bupa, then to support my sporting career I went freelance. I was spending six months a year in Australia working and training and six months a year living overseas and playing and competing. Beach volleyball sounds like a pretty nice life. Yeah, there is a beach every day and that is your job.

13:30Retiring: identity and emotional extremes

Retiring and we have had a few sporting people on here. When you retire from full time it is a massive change. You have got this identity, 12 years of beach volleyball, doing something at such a high level. To speak to the mental challenges of retiring, it was not easy. In mastery, you have always been good at something and suddenly you are not good at anything. And you look around and feel like everyone else has a head start on you professionally. The identity piece is a hundred percent a part of it. For 30 years I said I am an athlete. Suddenly you are like I do not know who I am anymore. And then you miss the emotional highs. Standing on the baseline on the final point of a championship match with the whole stadium cheering you on, then making the serve and winning. Or standing on the podium when they play the national anthem for you. Where will you get that elsewhere in your life?

18:00Founders and athletes share the same mindset

One of the things I did was go and speak to a whole bunch of athletes and also founders. Founders have a very similar mentality to athletes. You are chasing this extremely improbable goal with very low odds, and you are going to commit decades of your life to it. Founders said exactly the same thing about their transition that athletes say. Investing in VC is really about the founder first. The very best founders have an almost identical mindset to the very best athletes. That has been a strength for me in assessing founders. But also in helping founders develop that mindset. I bring a much more growth mindset. Of course you can learn the skill set of being a founder. Of course you can learn the mindset too.

21:00Athletic Ventures

Athletic Ventures was founded by Matt who played for Greater Western Sydney in AFL. I saw an article in the AFR and thought it was sport plus venture capital, my dream meeting of ideas. I got an intro to Matt and said I just want to help. That was two and a half years ago and I am still involved. Athletic Ventures has grown to a syndicate of 150 professional Australian athletes. We invest deal by deal, like an angel group. If you think about the value that having those athletes on your cap table could bring, it is enormous. Profiles obviously, but we have also helped on things like team culture, leadership, and bringing mindset lessons from sport into startups.

24:30Blackbird and learning what you love

I work at Blackbird as well. Blackbird is a generalist fund so I got to do everything. The best thing to come out of that is I now know what I like. I love investing in consumer, human performance, health, sport, and AI. Not many investors like anything involving hardware because of the capital intensity. I know that deep tech, web3, and enterprise software are not really my jam. I prefer earlier stage. That self-knowledge is really important.

29:30The Startmate Athlete Fellowship

I helped launch the Athlete Fellowship that Startmate runs. We have taken 50 athletes and are helping them break into startups as founders, operators, or investors. I have been campaigning for that for a long time. There is this intersection of sport and startups that I keep coming back to through everything I do.

32:00Plans for the US

I plan to go to the US. If you want to be the best in the world you should surround yourself with the best in the world. Sport is such a central part of American commercial culture. College sport is a massive machine. Professional sport is a massive commercial entity. You are seeing funds in the US that are starting to invest in women’s sports teams. You are seeing individual athletes like Serena Williams start their own fund. I am really pumped to continue in this vein there. VR I am also bullish on as a training tool for athletes. Computer vision is going to be game-changing for sport too.

36:00The unexpected things about transitioning out of sport

What surprised me the most was things like: am I still friends with the people I used to train and play with? Suddenly you do not have the structure that means you spend time together, and you have to reach out outbound. And you find you do not have anything in common anymore except history. I also found it hard to talk to my family about making the retirement decision. Beach volleyball is so closely tied to my family. My parents played, my brother played, my dad passed away and it was the volleyball community that rallied around us. Because it was so tight-knit with family I felt they could not give me an unbiased perspective. So I ended up testing the idea with people three degrees removed first. People close to you feel hurt when they find out, even if they understand why.