In the summer of 2024, Alex Morgan faced a devastating public rejection. 

The star soccer player, who had led the U.S. national team to Olympic gold at the London 2012 Games and added a bronze medal in Tokyo 2020, had been cut from the 2024 Olympic team. The global stage that had showcased her rise would go on without her. 

Morgan had been one of the most celebrated figures in U.S. women’s soccer for well over a decade, so seeing her name absent from the roster sent shockwaves through the sports world. Fans scrambled for explanations: Was it the ankle injury that had sidelined her for a month earlier that year? Or was the cut due to an emphasis on younger, more versatile players? 

Speculation swirled, but when Morgan finally spoke, she made herself clear. She didn’t hide behind niceties. 

“Today, I’m disappointed about not having the opportunity to represent our country on the Olympic stage,” Morgan wrote in a statement on social media in June 2024. 

That single word—“disappointed”—hinted at how deeply the decision stung. Emma Hayes, the head coach of the U.S. Women’s National Team, said at the time that it was a “tough decision” to cut Morgan from the team, but she wanted “to go in another direction” and select other players. 

A few months later, Morgan retired from professional soccer (announcing she was pregnant with her second child). It isn’t how she would have chosen to end her illustrious 15-year career. But by that time, Morgan had also learned a thing or two about coping with disappointments—in both sports and business. 

Now, in a new interview with Entrepreneur, she shares the mindset that got her through it.  “I didn’t value myself as an athlete over me as a human,” she says. “I knew my strengths and what I brought to the table. I just kept going and thought of their loss instead of my loss.”

Believing in the human behind the skills

Most entrepreneurs know what it’s like for your self-worth to be completely wrapped in your goals—to the point that if you fail, it’s easy to feel like you are a failure. But on and off the field, Morgan’s work has channeled an important message: You are not the sum of your wins. You are a human being with strengths you can and will bring to new endeavors, long after this singular loss. 

Three years before her Olympic disappointment, in 2021, Morgan cofounded Togethxr, a platform to tell women’s sports stories. She had long believed there wasn’t enough mainstream coverage of women’s sports, so she created Togethxr to fill the gap. By June 2024, Togethxr had broken through as a symbol of the women’s sports boom, largely thanks to its “Everyone Watches Women’s Sports” line of t-shirts, tote bags and hoodies, which went viral. By mid-2024, Togethxr’s sales of sloganed apparel had already reached about $3 million. 

In 2022, Morgan also cofounded a venture capital firm, Trybe Ventures, with her husband Servando Carrasco, who is also a former U.S. professional soccer player. The firm invests in early-stage companies, with a focus on health tech, sports tech and media. Some of its notable investments include the women’s basketball league Unrivaled and the Women’s Team Golf League.  

Both of Morgan’s companies are about finding value in the skills, ideas and strengths of organizations and people who may be overlooked by others. Whether it’s Togethxr’s coverage highlighting the wins of an up-and-coming basketball star, or Trybe seeing the potential in a new business concept, Morgan recognizes the greatest value is in the person behind the headline-making buzzer moments or the next big tech platform. 

“At the end of the day, what I look for in founders and small business owners is how much passion a person has behind what they’re putting forward,” she says. “Sometimes that means more than the actual product—how much someone believes in themselves and what they’re putting forward.”

The tough realities of being a leader

Of course, running a business and investing in other businesses also means saying “no.” For Morgan, these decisions are difficult, but she’s played on a team long enough to know that you must move in the direction that serves the larger organization. 

Last year, Togethxr achieved profitability, tripled its revenue and announced a global reach of more than 3.5 million users across social media platforms. It also brought in a company-record $6 million in 2024 revenue from merchandise sales. A source told The Wall Street Journal that Togethxr had achieved revenue of $30 million in the first half of 2025. 

Togethxr has grown from a startup media brand into a profitable women’s sports company with significant reach. The company has expanded beyond content in recent years into commerce and major brand partnerships, including with Nike and health insurance company Aflac. Morgan is also personally partnering with Intuit QuickBooks, an accounting software for small businesses, on their latest ad campaign. 

Morgan says that growing Togethxr from a four‑person startup to a company with dozens of employees brought the kind of “good problems” that test a young business. “You outgrow a model that worked at a certain time,” Morgan says. “A lot of what we set out to do was be a storyteller for women, and as we looked over the last couple of years, the studio business is actually not a massive revenue generator as much as showing up in the women’s sports space for live events, doing things with fans, and partnering with brands to enter the women’s sports space. So there have been certain pivots that have been natural.”

Some of these pivots require eliminating positions, which Morgan doesn’t take lightly. “We are a startup where we are continuing to maximize each position,” she says, “and unfortunately, there are times where some positions just don’t make sense anymore, when they were the most important position a year or two previously.”

That’s another way that sports and business aren’t so different. “We’re forever on trial,” she says of life as a professional athlete. “You’re always trying out, and you can be cut at any time.”

But ultimately, as a boss and as an investor, Morgan leads from the compassionate place of knowing what it’s like to be down and out. “When people think of myself or some big‑name athletes, they think of just an upward trajectory in terms of their career, but it’s really anything but that,” she says. “People love to talk about the wins and the successes and the championships, but I’ve had a lot of major losses. I’ve missed shots, I’ve missed passes, I’ve done poorly. My team has picked me up. Resiliency is what’s important.”

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