In this Hustle Con presentation, Sam Parr introduces Chip Forsythe, founder of Rebel Coast Winery, the first winery to emerge from a tech incubator. Chip recounts his journey from making wine in college to meet girls, to bootlegging wine for dorms, to launching his first legitimate winery, which grew rapidly and caused a fallout among co‑founders he calls the "great divorce." After selling that winery, he started a second venture but built a product he didn’t care about, prompting a candid intervention from Adam Draper of the incubator. Realizing he was faking his business, Chip scrapped the misaligned product, incurred a $30k loss, and relaunched Rebel Coast with a single wine that fully expressed his personality. He describes a prank of printing co‑founders’ phone numbers on 10,000 corks, which generated massive, free attention in the traditionally conservative wine industry, spawning a cult following and a flood of unsolicited resumes. Chip emphasizes hiring people attracted to the mission rather than the paycheck, building a sales team that mirrors the founders’ passion. He explains how this authentic, purpose‑driven approach makes fundraising easier, as investors and backers fund the "why" more than the product itself. The talk concludes with a call for entrepreneurs to inject more passion into their work, noting that genuine enthusiasm attracts talent, investors, and community support.
Chapters
So Chip Forsythe is the founder of Rebel Coast Winery, which is actually the world's first winery to ever go through a tech incubator. And the reason why I wanted him to come, because he is the most unorthodox startup founder I've ever met. He's a pretty wacky dude, but he's been able to successfully have his personality bleed into his brand. That's what he's going to be talking about. So please welcome Chip Forsyth.
So my brother and I started making wine in college originally to meet girls, and that did not work out at all. So we ended up having a ton of wine to sell. So we ended up selling it to all the kids in the dorms. For the next 3 years, we would steal grapes from people's vineyards, bootleg it under a bridge, and then just sell it to anybody that had, you know, $5, $10 for a bottle of wine. When I had to graduate, the idea to actually build a legit winery came around. We raised a seed round, started building this company. I brought on two of my friends to help me do this and it turned out to be one of the most painful lessons I ever learned because a year and a half later, we're growing really rapidly and— so a year and a half later, we're growing really rapidly and we're no longer friends. We had what I like to call the great divorce. I don't know if any of you guys have started a company. It's tough, tough times. And I ended up selling the winery. So then took some time off, goofed around, and decided to make another winery to get back into the business. So I raised another seed round and started building a product that I did not love or care about at all. And I was faking this product. I was trying to do what everyone else in the space was doing. About that time I got into Adam Draper's incubator and he took me aside and he was like, "Hey man, what's going on? Like you're struggling, this is tough. You're not building anything that you can actually get behind. Like build something you can live and build something you can love." So we ended up scrapping everything that we were doing because I was faking it. I was building a product that I was faking it. Everyone could see it. It was so obvious. So we scrapped what we were doing. And started over. And it ended up costing around $30,000 to get rid of this product that we had already started making and put out on the market. And that's when Rebel Coast, my new winery, was born. And we decided to build something that we could be really passionate about and build a brand that was really, really enjoyable. So that was me up there. And we ended up only making one wine and putting everything of our— every part of our personality into it. And the goal was to make something that would tell our story even if we weren't there. And we absolutely loved what we were doing. And the good thing about when you love what you do, you're more— you've got more leeway on everything. So as a prank, I put my other two co-founders' cell phone numbers on about 10,000 corks each, and I didn't tell them about it. Then we bottled this wine, and it worked out really well in our favor, and it was something really fun we did. The good thing is, is we were in a really antiquated, archaic industry. So if you go against the grain in any way, you get a lot of attention. And we ended up building a cult following effortlessly overnight, and it's really helped drive everything that we're doing. And the good thing about that is, in any industry that anybody's in, attention's huge. And it didn't cost us a dollar to get this huge amount of attention that we got. And it wasn't just for the wine we were making, like that was a secondary thing. Everybody was excited about why, why we were doing this. To this day, we still get unsolicited, a couple hundred resumes a month. And it's from people who have never heard about or never even tasted our wine, the majority of them. They're like, hey, what you're doing looks really fun, how do we get into it? And if you're building a company, getting people that are interested in working with you and helping build is awesome. And this is a traditional sales team on how people in our industry normally sell wine. And it is— we learned very fast that this was not us and that nobody could sell wine better than us. So we cloned ourselves and built a sales team. This is half of our team, you know, this is a couple of— 6 months ago. But we just— and not a single one of these people is in this for the paycheck that they get. They're in it because they love what they're doing. They love being around us because we're passionate about everything. The good news is, is if you're passionate about something, not only do other people see it, but potential investors see it. And it makes it a lot easier to bridge that gap between, "Hey, I need money," and, "Hey, do you want to be part of this?" So we've been able to gather a great group of investors to help us get started. And that's very true with even Kickstarter campaigns. The most successful ones are because people are funding why someone's doing something, not the actual end product. So if you can incorporate that into your actual business, it makes life a lot easier. Speaking of easy, I know everybody's either started a company or fundraised or trying to fundraise. It's very, very difficult. Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise. And if you can have just a little bit more passion in what you're doing, then it's going to make life a lot easier. That's pretty much it for my speech. I tricked my co-founder into taking this picture, so I wanted to work it in here. But yeah, if you can be passionate about what you're doing, then life's going to be a lot easier, and everyone's going to see it, and people are going to want to be around you and help you out along the way.
