🇺🇸 Rachel Zietz

The problem, and the company

The origin is the plainest kind of product story. A serious junior player practises against nets and rebounders daily; cheap ones tear. Zietz founded Gladiator Lacrosse at thirteen to sell equipment built to survive that use, aimed at the players who were her own peers.

The first year produced 200,000 dollars in revenue. By 2016, when Fortune named her in its 18 Under 18 list of young innovators on 15 September, the company was reported to be on track to pass two million dollars a year. Those are the numbers of a functioning business rather than a school project with a logo.

Shark Tank and the year of lists

Her appearance on Shark Tank was broadcast on 13 May 2016, putting the company in front of a mass American audience and its founder, then sixteen, in front of investors on national television.

The same year TIME placed her among its 30 Most Influential Teens, published on 19 October 2016, and Entrepreneur included her in its round-up of successful young founders in August. Being listed by three national titles in a single year is a measure of how unusual a profitable teenage manufacturer was, and remains.

Shark Tank functions as a proving ground rather than a funding round for most of the companies that appear on it. A network broadcast puts a niche sports product in front of more coaches, parents and retail buyers in an hour than a season of trade shows would reach, which is worth more to a young manufacturer than the capital on offer.

Equipment at the top of the sport

Entrepreneur reported in August 2018 that Gladiator Lacrosse gear had been used at the World Lacrosse Championship, the sport's international tournament, in matches broadcast by ESPN.

That is the detail that separates the company from the genre of teenage ventures that exist mainly as a story. Equipment used at an international championship has to meet the standards of the governing body and the tolerance of elite players, neither of which is impressed by the founder's age.

Where Rachel Zietz is now

Entrepreneur reported in 2018 that she was studying at Princeton while continuing to run the business, which is the most recent position documented in the sources used here.

What has happened to the company since, whether she sold it, and what she does now are not established in this record. Those are the questions readers most often search for, and this page marks them as open rather than answering them from assumption.

Why teenage founders are rarely this real

Most youth entrepreneurship is a pitch competition: a slide deck, a prize, a photograph. Zietz's case is different in the boring ways that matter, because it involves physical products, manufacturing, inventory, shipping and warranty claims, all of which are hard to fake and hard to outsource to enthusiastic parents.

The pattern is also instructive. She built for a market she belonged to and understood in detail, which is the single most reliable advantage a young founder can have. The customers were people she trained alongside, and the defect she fixed was one she had experienced herself.

The market was also unusually reachable. Her customers were the junior players, coaches and parents she already trained alongside, a group she could sell to directly and question honestly about what kept breaking.