
Julie Uhrman turned a post-World Cup conversation into a Los Angeles soccer club with a startup's appetite and a civic brief. Her 2026 move from CEO to principal advisor reveals a second act built around the hardest founder skill: knowing when to change seats.
A women's soccer club built by Hollywood, venture capital and athletes bet that fans, sponsors and equity could sit on the same balance sheet. In 2024 the market priced that bet at $250 million.
Sixteen clubs, four major media partners and one newly liberated player market have turned the NWSL into a revealing test of what happens when women’s soccer is treated as a durable business, not a charitable cause.
Just Women's Sports is a Los Angeles-based digital media company built entirely around covering, celebrating and growing women's sports. Founded in 2020 by former pro soccer player Haley Rosen, JWS produces editorial coverage, athlete-hosted podcasts, video highlights, a newsletter and merchandise across web and social - reaching tens of millions of fans and treating women's sports as the real, growing business it is rather than a charity case.
Haley Rosen is the founder and CEO of Just Women's Sports, the digital media company she launched in January 2020 to fix a number that had not budged in a decade: roughly 4% of all sports coverage went to women. A former Stanford midfielder who played professionally before injuries ended her career, Rosen built JWS from a single Instagram account into a leading women's sports media platform with podcasts, editorial, live programming, events, and merchandise, backed by investors including Kevin Durant and Joe Tsai. Her core argument, delivered on the TEDxBoston stage, is blunt: stop treating women's sports like a charity and start covering them like sports.

Kara Nortman is a Princeton and Stanford MBA-educated venture capitalist who spent eight years at Upfront Ventures before pivoting to become the defining force in women's sports investment. She co-founded Angel City FC — the NWSL team that became the world's most valuable women's sports franchise at $250 million — and then launched Monarch Collective, the world's largest women's sports investment fund at $250 million. She was also in the room at IAC's Hatch Labs when a restaurant-reservation app called Cardify was reborn as Tinder.