Jaqui Rice Gold

Jaqui Rice Gold runs a company whose name is a nickname. G.O.A.T. - Greatest Of All Time - is what the sports world calls her father, wide receiver Jerry Rice. Today it is also stamped on cans of a sugar-free energy drink sold in more than 20,000 stores, from 7-Eleven coolers to Gold's Gym fridges, and poured courtside at the Los Angeles Lakers.

She is the CEO. Her father is the chairman and co-founder. Her husband, Trevion "TJ" Gold, is the chief brand officer. It is, by any reasonable measure, a family business - but the person setting the strategy, closing the retail deals, and standing in the distributor meetings is Jaqui.

The idea did not arrive as a grand vision. It arrived as an irritation. She was deep in the grind of an earlier startup, Tressly, a peer-to-peer marketplace for buying and selling hair extensions, and she was tired. "When you are an entrepreneur, you are tired, you are grinding it out, you are hustling," she has said. To keep going, she and TJ reached for whatever energy drink was cold at the gym. None of it sat right.

"I was drinking whatever energy drinks were in the cold section at the gym, and I didn't feel good about it," she recalled. "We never felt like any of the drinks that were available to us aligned with our values."

There was one more ingredient in the origin story, and she says it plainly: "I got a little jealous of my daddy." Jerry Rice was a beverage investor. The family started talking. What if they made the drink they actually wanted?

In January 2020 they launched it. The formula leaned on natural caffeine, green tea, ten essential vitamins, branched-chain amino acids, and a functional mushroom most shoppers could not pronounce: cordyceps militaris. No sugar. No aspartame. No preservatives. No high-fructose corn syrup. It became, by many accounts, the first Black-owned energy drink on the American market and among the first to build itself around adaptogen mushrooms.

Then March 2020 happened. A major GNC retail deal - the kind of shelf placement young beverage brands pray for - froze as the country locked down. It could have ended the company before it started.

Instead of waiting, Jaqui pointed the whole operation at the internet. She convinced consumers stuck at home to buy full cases of a brand-new drink they had never tasted. It worked. The direct-to-consumer scramble turned into explosive early growth, and the retail deals eventually came back around. What looked like a death sentence became the brand's proof of concept.

The pioneer status was not planned either. "We didn't really know that when we got started," she has said. "But once we got into our meetings with various stakeholders in our space and distributors, we started to notice that there weren't a lot of people who look like us." The response was not to shrink from it. "We decided to just lean in and felt even more inspired about the opportunity ahead of us. We thought that maybe we can pave the way for others behind us."

Consider the arithmetic of her decisions. She has a government degree from Georgetown and a seat she once held at Fordham Law. The safe path was obvious and paved. She left it. She grew up in Silicon Valley, watching her father approach fitness and nutrition with the same discipline that made him the most productive receiver the game has seen, and she absorbed the idea that a body is something you fuel deliberately. When she describes his role in the company, it is not sentimental. "His work ethic is legendary. I have witnessed it firsthand," she says. That is a standard, not a compliment.

The cordyceps were the wager. Most energy drinks sell the promise of energy while delivering sugar and synthetic caffeine, a spike followed by a slump. "People talk about being jittery and crashing," she has noted. "With natural caffeine and the addition of these cordyceps mushrooms, you don't have those jitters with G.O.A.T. Fuel." It was a bet that shoppers would accept an unfamiliar ingredient if the payoff was a cleaner lift. The bet has held. The brand now ships in flavors that read like a candy counter - Blueberry Lemonade, Tropical Berry, Peach Pineapple, Watermelon Fruit Punch - while the substance underneath stays functional.

Fundraising is where the famous surname could have done the work for her. She refused to let it. Money in a beverage startup is scarce and skeptical, and the pitch of "my dad is Jerry Rice" only opens the door; it does not close the round. "They had to believe in me and the business," she says. Reported figures put the money raised anywhere from $12 million to roughly $22 million across rounds, with backers that include a former Walmart e-commerce chief and, more recently, former NFL tight end Vernon Davis. The through-line is that the checks followed the numbers, not the name.

Then came the arenas. In 2021 G.O.A.T. Fuel became the official energy drink of the Los Angeles Lakers, a first-of-its-kind deal for the franchise that put a young brand on in-arena signage, inside the team app, and across social channels. The Lakers partnership, she has said, "opened a number of opportunities." In 2025 the brand crossed leagues, signing on with the WNBA's Chicago Sky as the team's first official energy drink - a move that says as much about who she thinks is drinking G.O.A.T. Fuel as it does about marketing reach.

The distribution map filled in behind the deals. From a single frozen retail contract in 2020, the drink spread to more than 20,000 doors: 7-Eleven, Walmart, Target, Publix, HEB, QuikTrip, plus the fitness channel through Crunch Fitness and Gold's Gym, and even the military. Headquarters sit in Plano, Texas, at 6900 Dallas Parkway - a deliberate distance from the coastal beverage establishment. Building a national consumer brand from North Texas is its own kind of statement about where the next generation of food and beverage companies can come from.

What holds all of it together is a mindset she inherited and rebranded. Greatest Of All Time is a boast when it is on a jersey. On a can, in her hands, it is closer to an instruction - a demand to keep raising the bar, to treat a frozen deal as a pivot rather than an ending, to walk into a room where no one looks like you and decide to lead it anyway. "There's nothing more gratifying really," she says, "than seeing something that you've put your blood, sweat and tears into become real."