Wisdom From The Top with Guy Raz · Guy Raz | Luminary

Wisdom From The Top Presents: The Way Up, Episode 1 - The Sports Bra with Jenny Nguyen (Presented by Square)

July 10, 2025·22 min·1 clip

Twelve friends walked into a sports bar for the biggest women's basketball game of the year and not a single TV was showing it.

Jenny Nguyen's concept for The Sports Bra began in April 2018 when she and a group of friends arrived at a neighborhood sports bar expecting to watch the women's NCAA basketball championship and found it absent from every screen. The game reached a tie with three seconds remaining and went to an out-of-bounds play, with Nguyen's table erupting while the rest of the bar remained silent. Watching her thrown baseball cap coast across a silent room, she realized she had normalized watching women's sports as a 'second class citizen' without noticing. That night in the parking lot, a friend's comment about watching the game without sound completed the realization. Nguyen sat on the idea for roughly three years, doing informal research and discovering that a women's sports-only bar had never been done anywhere. She brought the concept to a mentor over a beer in 2021, whose first response was 'what's your timeline' — and who immediately told her the Women's World Cup target date of 2023 was too late and she needed to start immediately. He also told her to keep it quiet, calling it a million-dollar idea. Denied by every lender — SBA loans, traditional banks — for three reasons (pandemic environment, no prior business ownership, untested concept), she received unusual follow-up calls from each lender expressing genuine enthusiasm. While waiting to resolve funding, she began scouting locations. Within three weeks she walked into the space that became The Sports Bra, immediately imagined where the TVs, trophy shelf, and flags would go, and decided to proceed without funding secured. In February 2022 she launched a crowdfunding campaign targeting $49,000. After a local magazine ran a 'coming soon' article, the campaign graph spiked. It met the goal in nine days and closed at over $105,000. She deliberately chose April 1, 2022 as her opening date — four years after the game that inspired her — with an April Fool's Day backup to delay if needed. Opening day brought 3,000 people through a 40-seat space, with a four-hour wait at opening and a four-hour wait at closing, and customers who simply promised to return the next morning. In the first eight months, the bar generated roughly one million dollars in revenue. Nguyen describes the bar's design: five TVs, all showing women's sports, 21 beer taps from women-owned or women-employing breweries, and memorabilia exclusively featuring female athletes. She transitioned from a back-of-house kitchen career — having been explicitly told she should never interact with customers — to the public face of the concept through therapy and by framing the mission as larger than her personal discomfort. Alexis Ohanian reached out via Twitter before the bar's second anniversary to signal interest, and eventually became her first outside investor. Nguyen frames franchising as a vehicle for impact rather than profit, describing her vision as 'world domination' with culture and mission intact.

As heard by us

A founder story where a missed moment becomes a business with real cultural weight.

Jenny Nguyen's story is about noticing a gap that should not have existed and building a place where women's sports are treated as the main event.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a founder story that starts with a missed women's game and turns into the first sports bar that only plays women's sports.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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