Live From Driving Performance in New York
On this episode of Driving Performance, the boys crack open a few cans of SUNBOY with founder Yair Tygiel—and what unfolds is a story that starts with a single coconut in New York City and ends with a nationally distributed beverage brand redefining “all-day drinking.”
Yair grew up in the Bay Area as the son of Stanford professors, surrounded by ideas, experimentation, and early exposure to entrepreneurship. He went to UC Santa Cruz, where he fully embraced the school’s hippie, free-spirited energy—and an appetite for adventure. During college, Yair hitchhiked from Santa Cruz to Honduras and spent six months traveling, learning, and seeing what might happen when you say yes to the unknown. That mindset—experiment first, figure it out later—would become a defining theme of his career.
After graduation, Yair moved to New York City. One day in Chinatown, he tried a fresh coconut—and something clicked. Looking for a creative outlet beyond his day job, he bought a stack of coconuts, set up a small stand in Prospect Park, and began making coconut cocktails. People responded enthusiastically. When Yair told his friend Luke McKenna—who would soon become his co-founder—the two didn’t overthink it. Instead, they built a 500-pound bamboo tiki bike capable of holding 200 coconuts, rode it onto the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset, and threw a one-hour party suspended over the East River. They knew they were onto something.
That moment sparked CoCo & Co., a coconut-centric experiential brand that quickly caught the attention of major companies. What began with Chinatown coconuts evolved into large-scale collaborations with Bacardi, American Express, and music festivals across the country. They upgraded their sourcing, working directly with suppliers in Thailand and buying coconuts 20,000 at a time. The momentum was real—until it wasn’t.
Then COVID hit.
Festivals shut down. Brand deals disappeared. And suddenly, Yair and his team were left with thousands of coconuts and a hard choice: walk away, or reinvent everything they’d built. They chose reinvention.
Yair refused to leave the coconut world behind. Over the next two years, he experimented relentlessly—testing formulations, refining taste, and rethinking what coconut could be in a modern beverage. The result was SUNBOY: a lightly effervescent, 5% ABV coconut-water cocktail made with Thai coconut water, designed for all-day play—without the heaviness or bloat of traditional drinks.
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