Stan Wawrinka / Ballman

I was introduced to Stan Wawrinka through a mutual personal relationship, not through an agency or a pitch. When we started working together in July 2021, he knew very little about NFTs or Web3, and he wanted to understand the space before deciding anything in it.

His questions were direct. What is this worth? What should I own, and why? What is this project really asking of me? Beyond his image and his IP, he wanted to understand Web3 itself and the investments and opportunities he should consider. I worked with him directly on all of it.

Ballman was Stan’s NFT project: a collection of digital tennis players built around his name and a collector community. I was there from the start, advising him on its strategy and positioning, its community communications, its communications planning and its NFT mechanics. The project itself was built and launched by its own team.

My advice going into the launch was about timing and audience. In mid-November 2021 I recommended pushing the launch back three weeks and using that time to build the project’s Twitter and Discord from zero, in parallel, with NFT creators and giveaways. Make Stan present, as a holder, inside the communities of established collections, and give their holders priority access. Recruit moderators who knew Discord and would carry the project into other servers. Bring in creators and well-known collectors who could speak about it with him.

The plan also protected value. Giveaways would feature other collections, and Ballman pieces would be given away sparingly, so the collection was not cheapened before it existed.

The launch went ahead within days, before the audience had been built, and the first mint fell short. The risk I had flagged had materialised. Stan came back to me, and at the end of November I set out how to correct the course, in two parts.

The first was the community. A dedicated moderator to reassure holders. Stan speaking for himself, in a simple video from his phone: the mint had not gone as expected, early buyers and believers came first, and proposals would be put to a vote on Discord. Regular Twitter Spaces where he would appear as a member of the community working on the problem, not as a star defending a product.

The second was the offer. Transform part of the existing supply into rarer pieces, and create new kinds of items to justify a new entry price without devaluing what holders already owned. At the lower price, the offer had to be richer, not smaller.

In February 2022, Ballman announced that all 5,555 pieces had been minted and the collection had sold out. Friends I had brought to the project bought that day.

Stan’s name attracted offers. In January 2022 a metaverse real-estate company proposed a deal built on his name and his promotion. I helped him weigh what it was worth, how easily it could be resold, what it gave him and what it asked of his name. My advice was clear: if they wanted his name, they had to pay for it or give him the asset free, with no exclusivity and no money paid upfront.

We used that conversation to think about what he could build around tennis instead. I proposed an academy on The Sandbox, and Stan connected the idea to a tennis court that Ballman holders could use.

Most of the advisory happened in everyday decisions. I recommended collections and projects, discussed when to buy, hold or sell, explained allow lists, mint passes, burns and claims, and told him when the best move was to wait. Some of the collections I recommended gained value after he entered them early. Some opportunities he left alone on my advice.

In April 2022 I warned him urgently about a fake token offer circulating around a popular collection, and he stayed away from it. When a suspicious message later reached him about one of his own assets, I checked it against the actual listing before he did anything.

Access was part of the work. I put him on the allow list for TIME’s Slices of TIME and passed on the mint instructions, and I brought him into a private collector group where he wanted to learn and take part. When he wanted an animated version of his collectible, I connected him with the creator of Raptor’s Bench Mob, who made it.

In March and April 2022 we started planning an NFT event in New York around the US Open, which Stan wanted to organise with me for the community. We discussed an art day with Bright Moments and CryptoCitizens, and bringing in Keith Grossman of TIME and Charly Palmer. In May I raised hosting the event with Bright Moments in New York, and the gallery was open to it.

The idea was to grow Ballman by placing it inside the culture Stan already belonged to: tennis, art and the people building digital collecting.

In 2023, when I discussed tennis and Web3 with the French Tennis Federation’s technology team, Stan’s work with Ballman was part of the conversation, and I spoke for what he had built.

Over those years Stan developed his own judgment of the space. By 2025 I was also bringing him commercial proposals from Web3 companies, assessing them with him and negotiating what they asked of his image and his time. My role stayed the same: say plainly what was on the table, and leave the decision with him.