Jaqui Rice Gold and the business of a famous name

When a beverage distributor picks up the phone and hears Jerry Rice, there is sometimes a preliminary problem: convincing the person that the caller really is Jerry Rice. Football fame has carried him a long way. It apparently still needs to get past the switchboard. His daughter, Jaqui Rice Gold, has the less theatrical responsibility of running the company behind the call.

She is co-founder and CEO of G.O.A.T. Fuel. Her father is co-founder and chairman; her husband, Trevion Gold, is co-founder and chief brand officer. It is a family business in the literal sense, with relatives occupying different chairs around the same table. Rice meets retailers, takes part in board meetings and helps raise capital. His daughter turns that collective effort toward the business she leads.

The familiar name makes an appealing opening line. It also makes it easy to skip over her. Look more closely and a different story appears: a Georgetown graduate who left law school, built a marketplace for hair extensions, entered beverages as an outsider and learned to sell an unfamiliar drink by the case. There are useful connections here. There are also decisions that a connection cannot make for you.

A surname with a job to do

G.O.A.T. stands for “greatest of all time,” a phrase already attached to Rice’s football career. In the company’s account of itself, the initials belong to anyone striving to be great. That is a roomy definition. It makes space for customers whose ambitions have nothing to do with a stadium, and for a daughter whose career has taken place well away from a football field.

Early packaging carried Rice’s signature. The founders then decided to remove it from the broader brand presentation, changing the colors as well. Rice later said the idea was his. The point was to let customers form a connection with G.O.A.T. Fuel itself. A signature offered recognition; the founders wanted an identity that other people could inhabit.

For a company with that particular chairman, it was a revealing choice. The brand could use his presence without putting his autograph at the center of every purchase. Rice Gold has consistently described the ambition to make the business stand on its own. You can understand the practical attraction: a customer’s reason to return should survive the novelty of discovering who helped start it.

“We have to stay focused.”

Jaqui Rice Gold, on choosing partnerships

The detour through hair

Rice Gold grew up in Silicon Valley and studied government at Georgetown. She subsequently enrolled at Fordham Law in New York. She left before completing the degree and moved to Los Angeles to pursue creative work. The chronology refuses to behave like a neat career diagram. There is a university, a law school and then a business problem involving hair extensions.

That problem became Tressly, a peer-to-peer marketplace for buying and selling hair. Her work put her in beauty and technology, developing an online business rather than learning the beverage trade. By the time she began thinking about G.O.A.T. Fuel, she had spent two years and worked with two developers on the marketplace. Entrepreneurship had already become something she did, rather than a future title.

There was a domestic spur, too. She would open Instagram and encounter her father’s early-morning workout posts, already finished while she was beginning her own day. She has described the comparison with amused irritation. Many founders look to another entrepreneur for motivation. Hers happened to be Dad, cheerfully arriving in the feed ahead of schedule.

The family conversations that followed drew on different kinds of experience. Her father had prior beverage connections. Trevion came from music. She brought the perspective of a customer and an online founder. Changing industries meant learning new mechanics, but it also gave her a problem she could discuss in ordinary language. The project began among people who already knew one another’s habits.

Twelve cans before the first sip

The company dates its launch to 2020, after a limited-edition test in Los Angeles in December 2019. The first year demanded a change of plan. Retail activity froze during the shutdowns, and Rice Gold concentrated on selling directly to customers online for the first six months. Her previous experience with an internet marketplace suddenly had an immediate use.

The sales proposition was quite a request. A customer could buy a case of twelve cans for $35.99, without having tried the drink. In a store, curiosity can cost the price of a single can. Online, G.O.A.T. Fuel was asking people to bring home a small committee of them. The purchase required enough confidence to move beyond a familiar face on a screen.

Her team used digital marketing, social media and online programs to make those introductions. Rice Gold later described selling 3,500 cases in the first six months. The number belongs to that early period, before the company’s wider retail footprint. It captures a particular kind of founder work: assembling an audience when the usual place to encounter the product is unavailable.

The online strategy gave the company a way to continue, and gave Rice Gold another reason to value the skills from her earlier venture. A hair marketplace and a case of beverages make unlikely neighbors on a résumé. At the level of the transaction, both require a stranger to decide that the offer is worth acting on. Her detour had supplied experience with that moment.

Texas, shelves and a basketball court

In April 2021, G.O.A.T. Fuel moved its headquarters from Los Angeles to Plano. The attraction included access to investors, sports franchises and food and beverage distributors. For Rice Gold, the move put the company in a different commercial neighborhood. Dallas also supplied an entertaining geographic twist: her father had spent years giving Cowboys supporters reasons to be unhappy.

By spring 2022, the company was reporting more than 7,500 retail accounts. It had a distribution agreement with AB ONE, Anheuser-Busch’s wholly owned distributor business unit, and was building a network for deliveries into stores. These are less picturesque details than a famous founder. They explain how a brand can become something a customer actually finds nearby.

A Los Angeles connection remained useful. In November 2021, the Lakers announced G.O.A.T. Fuel as their official energy drink. The agreement gave the young company a basketball setting as well as its football associations. It also placed the brand in front of an audience larger than its own early customer list. A company selling online cases had acquired an arena-sized introduction.

Other partnerships expanded the sporting cast. Miami Heat player Tyler Herro became an ambassador in 2021. In 2025, Vernon Davis joined as an investor and ambassador. Rice Gold publicly welcomed Davis as a friend. The relationships supplied recognizable people around the brand, while leaving her with the recurring task of deciding which connections served the company’s direction.

The question across the table

In May 2023, G.O.A.T. Fuel closed a $5 million seed round led by Stage 1 Fund and Morrison Seger Venture Capital Partners. The company said the round brought funding since launch to $12 million. It was its first institutional round, a change in the kind of backing behind the business as well as another number in an announcement.

Rice Gold’s description of investor conversations brings the story back to her own chair at the table. People knew her father was involved. They also knew he was not running the company. The question she remembered was wonderfully short: “Who’s running it?” A celebrated surname could make an introduction easier. The answer still had to include confidence in her judgment.

She has discussed the headwinds of being a Black woman founder in a field where people were unaccustomed to seeing someone like her. The issue surfaced in meetings, as the family noticed how few counterparts looked like them. She has also spoken about wanting to make room for others to follow. That aspiration has a practical setting: the next founder walking into a similar room.

There is a useful precision in how she describes her father’s contribution. He is active with investors, distributors and buyers. Those activities matter. Her responsibility is to lead the team and sustain the business those conversations concern. The family relationship creates access to people and to experience. It also creates a working arrangement in which everyone’s contribution has to find its place.

A family of names

In October 2024, the company announced a three-year partnership to feature Muhammad Ali on limited-edition collector’s cans. A Jerry Rice edition followed in February 2025, and Babe Ruth joined the lineup later that year. The packaging made the founders’ broad interpretation of G.O.A.T. visible: different sporting figures, different histories, sharing the same brand.

For Rice Gold, the Ali project involved entrusting a small team with a legacy that needed care and precision. She publicly thanked the people who brought it together. It is a telling detail in a business often introduced through her father. The names on the cans attract attention; the people she credits are the ones handling the work that turns a partnership into a finished object.

The company changed its packaging again in January 2026. Rice Gold described the launch as the result of a difficult preceding year and praised her team’s persistence. In April, US Capital Global Securities announced a $10 million preferred equity offering for G.O.A.T. Fuel, intended to support distribution, marketing, operations and further development. The announcement described more than 20,000 retail locations nationwide.

The offering is a proposal to raise capital, distinct from the completed 2023 round. Together, the two announcements show the demands changing as the company grows. There is always another decision waiting beyond the milestone: where to expand, which partner to choose, how to organize the next phase. Rice Gold’s job continues after the celebratory photograph.

Her story began with choices that would have been hard to predict from a university transcript. Law school gave way to Los Angeles; a hair marketplace gave way to beverages; a family conversation became a company. Now her father can make the distributor call, her husband can work on the brand, and she can answer the question across the table. She is running it.