![]() First of all, I’m a perfectionist as I think a lot of people, and especially most athletes, are. Liukin: The transition from being an athlete to an entrepreneur, you learn so many things in sports that help you. Tell me about some early mistakes or some lessons you learned early on that you wish you would have known day one. Sarabia: You had your dad there throughout your entire gymnastics career, but I know when it comes to being an entrepreneur and starting something yourself, you had to find your passion outside of gymnastics. This Q+A has been edited for brevity and clarity. Here’s a snippet of the conversation below. Liukin (virtually) sat down with fellow Dallasites Christiana Yebra, the CEO of Vouch, and Alanna Sarabia, the co-host of Good Morning Texas, during a Dallas Startup Week event to discuss her journey to entrepreneurship. But all those things I had already experienced at this level on such a huge scale. Being an athlete kind of helped that transition for me. “Whether it’s retiring from a sport, graduating from college and getting a first job, or starting a first company-it is so scary. “I had to completely start from scratch,” she says. ![]() She retired from gymnastics and left Dallas to attend NYU, not really knowing what was ahead. But then she had the rest of her life ahead of her, coupled with the fact that she felt her identity was being taken away. Liukin was only 18 years old when she achieved her first dream, a surreal, life-long aspiration that she says was the only thing she ever really wanted to do. Obviously that first goal being competing at the Olympics and winning an Olympic Gold Medal.” “It kind of made me realize that if they were able to do this then I can do whatever it is that my goals are. As I got older, the more I realized how hard it actually is what they did. “Living through that with them helped me. They were able to do so in Plano and Frisco-a feat that Liukin says, looking back, was probably a lot harder than it looked. Despite both being World Olympic Champions, Liukin says their dream was to open their own gymnastics school. Oh, and she recently moved back to Dallas, where she spent much of her childhood, to do it all.īoth of Liukin’s parents were gymnasts from Russia, but she moved to the Dallas area around the age of three. It has led to collaborations with Nike, Sephora, Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom, Netflix, Visa, Volition Beauty, and more. She also launched an influencer business to directly connect to a loyal fan base cultivated from years in professional gymnastics. A lot of them within the gymnastic space and the massive community.” “And for me, I was so lucky to have so many incredible mentors throughout my entire career. “After I retired, I kind of just realized that my greatest passion was really trying to help inspire, educate, and connect with the next generation,” she says. It was previously called Grander, but is going through “a little bit of a rebrand,” she says, and will now be named The Muse Collective. The app is intended to be a space filled with multifaceted resources and connections to mentors, sports psychologists, nutritionists, college recruiters, and Liukin’s own Olympic peers. Liukin helped start a platform dedicated to empowering future female athletes. What most people don’t know though, is that she’s also an entrepreneur in the technology space. This Olympic year, she plans to be in Tokyo with NBC to commentate on the women’s gymnastics events. She became a gymnastics analyst on NBC, created and designed leotard collections, and founded an Olympic qualifying event called The Nastia Liukin Cup. Liukin, however, didn’t stop with gymnastics there. Overall, she has five Olympic medals and nine World Championships medals, seven of them individual, in her trophy case.Īnd all of that was before retiring from the sport at the ripe age of 22. The elite gymnast became a household name back in 2008 at the Olympic Games in Beijing when she took home the gold medal for the All-Around event. When most people hear the name Nastia Liukin, they automatically think of one thing: gymnastics.
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