(BizJournals) - It almost sounds like something done on a drunken lark: Barefoot Wine founders Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey bought a wine business without a drop of industry knowledge. But if they weren’t a couple of naïve risk-takers who jumped into a startup with both feet would they have ever gotten rich?

After selling Barefoot Wine, with its signature barefoot logo, to the legendary Gallo wine family's E&J Gallo Winery for an undisclosed sum in 2005, the founders are sharing what Harvey jokes is their “get rich slow” scheme in college classrooms from Syracuse, New York, to Santa Barbara, California. Startups can surely relate to it.

“Our two biggest deficits [at the beginning] were we didn’t have any money and we didn’t understand the industry,” says Houlihan. “But it turns out, fast forward 10 years later, and those two problems were the greatest assets we had because no money forced us to be innovative, forced us to be resourceful, forced us to be very efficient in everything we did."