Christie Jenkins has led an extraordinary career, reaching elite status in three separate sports before turning to the ultra-competitive world of venture capital.
The former trampolinist, beach volleyball player, and CrossFit athlete transitioned to an investor role at Blackbird Ventures before taking the managing director role at Techstars Sydney.
She is now launching her own accelerator, Ampere, to delve deeper into the startup sector. Jenkins is also preparing to speak about her vast experience at SmartCompany and Startup Daily‘s Growth Summit in Sydney on June 18.
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SmartCompany spoke with Jenkins beforehand, learning more about her competitive mindset — and how business leaders can apply those lessons to their careers.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
SmartCompany (SC): I’m curious to hear about the start of your trampolining career. What thought processes were you going through when completing a new trick, or trying to stick the landing?
Christie Jenkins (CJ): I started when I was four and a half, so technically, I can’t remember that, but I’ll tell you a couple of early, pivotal moments. So when I started, I was pretty good, identified early as talent, and put in a good training class. I had great coaches, and I started winning all the club-level competitions. And then the youngest age group for formal competition is under 11. I won the state championships when I was eight, and qualified for the national championships to compete in the under-11s. And then the judges tallied up the scores, and they awarded the medals, and I came dead last.
I remember sobbing in my dad’s arms, inconsolable. He said, “You know, we’re so proud of you, you did your best. And I was like, “My best was last place”.
We have a saying in our family. When I went off to trampoline competitions, my mum would always say, “Have a great day. Have fun. That’s the most important thing”. And I would always look at her and be like, “Mum, winning is fun”. So I remember that moment, and just turning around and coming back from it and thinking, “Okay, I don’t want to feel that again. I have seen the standard and what it takes to win and be the best in the country. I have to be better than that”.
I came back to training and talked to my coach, who wanted to push me up a level. I hadn’t wanted to do it because I didn’t know anyone in that group of older athletes. I told my coach, “Yep, I’ll go in the older squad, yes, I’ll try that new trick you’ve been wanting to teach me that I’ve been terrified of”. And I was begging my parents, like, “Can you drive me more than three times a week?” And so I think that was an early formation of the loop that all athletes end up getting, which is: set a big goal, put hard work and effort in, and see that effort pay off.
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There are a couple of other moments. When I was 13, one of the older athletes in the gym, John, was one of the top athletes in the world, actually. He got lost and disoriented in the air and came down on his head, and there was a crash. And then the whole gym was silent, and my coach was the only one moving. He’s leaping onto the trampoline, and he’s grabbing John’s hand, and John is just saying, “I can’t feel my legs. I can’t feel my legs”. And that day, John got in an ambulance, my coach got in with him, and didn’t come back for a year.
It’s pretty hard to find a new trampoline coach, as it turns out. I had a full year of pretty apathetic coaching, I would say, and then my actual coach came back. I would say a huge lesson there is feedback. I talk about feedback tonnes. I’m obsessed. Sport teaches you that feedback is a sign of care, not criticism. Because if you have a coach who is there coaching you, you’re paying them to coach you, and they are effectively saying nothing, you kind of want your money back, right? This attitude from sport, where, “Oh, someone’s taking the time and thought and care and attention to give me feedback”, that is what coaching is. Then we come to work, [and] suddenly we don’t welcome that anymore. But someone is investing in your growth and development. So there’s another pivotal moment.
SC: You need bravery to compete in elite sport, especially trampolining. When you think about bravery on face value, it almost sounds like something intrinsic — you have it or you don’t. But I’m curious to hear your thoughts about how it can be developed.
CJ: I would completely disagree that bravery is intrinsic. That is absolutely a skill you develop over time. The mental model I have for this is like three concentric circles. In the inner circle is effectively what feels like your comfort zone. One circle out is confidence. Let’s say you were doing public speaking. Here, you think, “Well, I’ve spoken in front of 50 people, I can probably do it in front of 100”. The far circle is courage. And the dominant feeling there is fear. You actually have no idea how it’s going to work out. We want it to feel easy, we want to feel comfortable, we want to feel confident. Actually, all growth happens in the courage zone. But it’s almost like we’ve demonised and diminished this effort. “You’re meant to make it look easy” is just not true, right? It’s hard for all of us.
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So then, how do you actually train bravery? First, you witness other people do brave things. Surround yourself with people who are courageous.
Then you have to be honest, which is tied to clarity: if you were scared of starting a business, which part actually scares you? Is it that your friends might not support you? Is it that you’ll run out of money? Is it the fear it’ll blow up in your face? Once you have clarity, then you can start to work through it and mitigate it.
The third way is self-reflection. If you reflect on the brave things you have done, you will feel braver. I used to have a training diary for trampolining, and every time I did a new trick, or got a new PB, or did something scary, I would highlight it. I could literally flip back through all the pages and be like, “Oh my God, here is 50 pieces of evidence that I’m a brave person”.
The fourth way is encouragement. We always try and do things on our own, in the dark and the quiet, but actually telling everything the scary thing you want to do and letting them cheer you on is often enough to get us over the line.
The fifth one is [to] take brave action. The more times you do brave things that are scary, the more you will build this loop of, “Oh, this was scary. I took a risk. Either it worked out and that’s amazing, or it didn’t work out, and I was okay, and so I can take another brave action”.
SC: Looking at your career trajectory, you obviously reached an elite level of trampolining, and then elite levels in two other sports. Did it require a degree of bravery to pursue those at an elite level as well, transferring out of something you had been doing since you were four years old into these new pursuits?
CJ: Yeah, the jump from trampolining to beach volleyball was pretty brutal. I basically never played a ball sport, so I just had no hand-eye coordination, and so I would go to practice, and I would jump in the air, and I would swing my arm at the ball, and I just missed the ball completely. And I put my arms out, ready to pass the ball, and the ball would come in and just ricochet off in a random direction. I was tragically bad when I started.
The first piece of courage is to show up to training and be worse than everyone else when you have been better than everyone else for two decades. The second piece of courage there: I announced really early that I wanted to play for Australia in this sport I had just started. I was already 23, which is pretty old for an athlete, but I just went from never having played the sport to training eight times a week, and I was like, “No, I want to play for Australia”.
The answer to accelerating progress is usually immersion, and all the best players in the world lived in California, in this little area called Hermosa Beach. So I quit my job, with $2,000 in my bank account, and booked a one-way ticket. I didn’t know anyone in California. The day I landed, I was walking up and down the beach looking for a volleyball court. There’s hundreds of beach volleyball courts there, and I was looking for a court that had three people on it that needed one more. I thought, “I have to make friends, because I have two nights of accommodation booked. I don’t have not enough money to afford to pay for accommodation, and I have no one to train with, no one to play with, no one to stay with”. So yeah, that required a little bit of bravery at the start.
SC: You touched on quitting your job just there. I’m curious about how you balanced your professional life and your sporting life at that point. How did you square those two?
CJ: I gave up my social life is the short answer. The longer answer: a standard week in the first few years of my career was, effectively, training 6am to 7.30am, shower, go to work, work all day in the office, and then back at the gym, training by 6pm, train for another two hours, two and a half hours, and effectively do that every weekday. And then also train on the weekends, and maybe take one day off training a week, so eight to 11 sessions a week.
People say, “Oh, that’s such a sacrifice”. But that is where all of your energy comes from. I definitely was not going out drinking or doing any of that, but I also just loved my sport so much.
SC: Can you describe the transition fully into the startup and venture capital world? What did that look like at that point in your life and career?
CJ: I guess I was looking ahead and thinking, “Okay, I have a few more years left of being an athlete,” and so I can start to think about prioritising my career from that point onwards, as opposed to only sport. I was doing management consulting and strategy work, and sort of looked around and was like, “I’m good at this, but effectively I’m making PowerPoint slides and Excel models that people are mostly ignoring. And do I want to do this for the rest of my life?” And the answer was no, but I had zero idea of what to do, and I had never even heard the term ‘startup’. Like, we didn’t teach that at school, at university.
An adjacent friend said to me, “You should do startups.” I was like, “What are startups?” And he sent me the link to the Antler program, which was effectively recruiting people at the time. I just threw myself into it. I was like, “These are the coolest fucking people ever. All these people are so excited and passionate about their jobs, which is not the vibe in corporate. And everyone’s ambitious and optimistic and willing to take risk. These are my people”.
What I enjoyed most about the Antler program was helping everybody else with their ideas instead of necessarily working on my own. I came out of that thinking I should go on the venture capital and investing side, rather than the founder side. Turns out VC is a hot job at the moment, and hard to break into. I landed at Blackbird, an incredible, top fund in the country, with an immense amount of effort. I effectively treated this like I was training for an Olympic sport. I think in a six-month period, for instance, I took over 100 founder meetings. I met 50 people who worked in VC. I wrote three investment thesis. I took a course on how to invest. I treated it like you would when trying to become world-class in a sport.
SC: What sort of advice are you giving today to would-be founders, folks who are entering into this space with a great idea, but potentially don’t have the expertise that you might?
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CJ: So my view is always human first, founder second, right? You have to be a high-performing human before you can build a high-performing company. And so much of the coaching that we do for founders is focused on the human. The skills of building a company are more teachable and more scalable than ever. The real differentiating thing now is: are you a great leader? Can you attract people to work with you? Can you attract customers to follow you and be fans of your company? Can you attract people to invest in you? Are you the type of person that we would want to follow in the future? Startup founders these days often they’re running companies that have budgets bigger than governments. And so who are the people that we would want to follow in the future, and how do we help them right at the beginning?
SC: And the thought processes and techniques you used earlier in your life and career, are these the things you’re still turning to today?
CJ: So much of what I learned from elite sport I apply at work, and in the startup sector in particular, there’s a lot of parallels with athletes. The one thing that’s changed substantially for me, over the past decade or two, has been going from individual to team, right? Trampolining is a super individual sport; you are in control of everything. You get all the glory, or you crash and burn, and it’s all your fault. When we come to the business world, it’s not ‘gold medal or not’, right? There are many successful businesses and so many more people who touch that journey along the way. So tell everyone what you’re doing. Ask them all for help, build leverage by working with people who have talents in different areas. That has been my biggest 180, going from like, “Okay, how do you be an excellent individual performer,” to “Okay, how do you be an excellent team member and leader of teams?”
SC: Going into the beach volleyball world, learning to work with teammates, that would be a massive jump.
CJ: I thought everyone was like me, too. I love pressure, right? So you put more pressure on me, I usually perform better. And I would tell one of my beach volleyball teammates, “Okay, like it’s match point. You have to make this serve, everything’s on the line”. It turns out not everybody performs better under even more pressure. It was so cool to just learn how different people think. How do you bring out the best in each person?
SC: The topic of your Growth Summit session is Seizing the moment: How to make the most of where you find yourself. Without giving too much away, how do you think about that?
CJ: I think we go through different phases in life. There’s the ‘expansion’ phase, where you ask, “What am I going to do next?” and the ‘focus’ phase, where you lock in and become world-class. When we talk about seizing the moment, it depends a little bit on what stage you are in. In ‘focus’ mode, it might be asking if you are prepared enough so that you can perform under extreme pressure.
I am broadly of the view that most people are wildly under-prepared, which is maybe a harsh thing to say. I’ll give you a speaking example: I did a three-minute TEDx speech. I wrote it, had it edited by five people, rewrote it, memorised it, and then practiced it 100 times. So, what is the most important thing? What are the high-leverage opportunities? And how prepared are you for those things?
The second thing: I don’t really think about motivation. I think about standards and identity. In elite sports, you have a range of performance. That is true for any skill you develop. About 95% of your training is not to improve your best time, but to bring up your worst time. The way to do that is standards like, “I will not slip below this level”. And the way to replace motivation is identity. If I believe I am an athlete, I am not going to skip training, because that’s not aligned to my identity.
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