Rachel Tipograph

EARLY ENTREPRENEURIAL HUSTLE. Rachel Tipograph’s entrepreneurial journey is a testament to her natural business acumen, relentless drive, and ability to recognize and seize opportunities. From a young age, Rachel displayed an uncanny knack for business. Growing up in a household where work and life were deeply intertwined—both her parents were small business owners—Rachel was immersed in entrepreneurship from the start. “Work was life,” she recalls. “I had an enormous amount of exposure to two entrepreneurs.”

Rachel’s early ventures were as varied as they were ambitious. At just 13 years old, she became an eBay power seller, turning her unwanted Bat Mitzvah gifts into cash by selling them online. This venture quickly grew into a small business where she sold her neighbors’ items, taking a cut of the revenue. Her entrepreneurial spirit didn’t stop there; in high school, she was burning mixtape CDs and managing a band, always finding ways to make a dollar.

After high school, Rachel attended NYU, where a chance encounter with comedian Judah Friedlander on Second Avenue led her to start an early talent management business via Facebook. “He had never heard of Facebook,” Rachel recalls. She explained how he could use the platform to book gigs at college campuses, and before she knew it, she was helping him and other comedians do just that.

Graduating in 2009, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, Rachel found herself in a market where digital and social media agencies were among the few industries hiring. She landed a job at the ad agency Undercurrent, working with major brands like Pepsi and GE. Her work led to a career-defining opportunity: becoming the youngest executive ever hired by Gap as the Global Director of Digital and Social Media at just 24 years old.

During her time at Gap, Rachel witnessed the rise of direct-to-consumer brands, but she saw something others didn’t—the future of e-commerce wasn’t in these new D2C brands but in major retailers like Amazon, Target, and Walmart. “Gap’s competition wasn’t just J.Crew or Uniqlo anymore. It was anyone who could launch a Shopify site and buy Facebook ads,” she explains. Convinced that she was right, Rachel took the bold step of leaving Gap in 2014 to launch MikMak, a company that would enable brands to own more of the customer journey while driving sales through their largest retail partners.

The early days of MikMak were challenging. Rachel initially launched the company as an iPhone app but soon realized she needed to pivot. “I made a rookie mistake,” she admits. With the support of her early investors, including Gary Vaynerchuk, Rachel restructured MikMak into an enterprise software company. It took two years to find the right product-market fit, but by 2019, MikMak had become a fast-growing and profitable SaaS business.

PIVOT TO SUCCESS. Rachel’s strategic foresight paid off again in 2019 when she bet on the future of e-commerce in grocery and alcohol, just before the pandemic caused a seismic shift in online shopping. “We had the right product at the right time,” Rachel says. The pandemic fueled MikMak’s growth, leading them to more than double their revenue in 2020 and again in 2021. In 2022, recognizing the need to consolidate the competitive space and expand globally, Rachel led MikMak through the acquisition of two companies, an international competitor based in Paris and a competitor that was part of a publicly traded company. Today, MikMak is the global leader in its space, with over 1,700 brands as customers and employees in seven countries.

Rachel’s personal journey is closely intertwined with MikMak’s story. She came out as a lesbian in 2014, the same year she founded the company. “MikMak and who I am today are very interconnected,” she shares, adding that she views her identity as a competitive advantage. “Being queer puts you at the center of what’s happening in culture,” she explains.

Rachel’s advice to new founders, especially those in the LGBTQIA+ community, is to “own who you are” and leverage that uniqueness as a strength. “I love being gay, and I love being a woman,” Rachel says proudly. “Just own it.”