Joe Hyrkin
CEO & Founder, Care Grit Learning. On 1 show, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executivefounderoperator@yankeejoe ↗LinkedIn ↗issuu.com ↗
He is best known for serving as CEO of digital publishing platform Issuu until its nine-figure acquisition by Bending Spoons in 2024. Earlier in his career, he held leadership roles at Yahoo and Flickr and served as CEO of SingleFeed and Wordnik.
1shows
3appearances
40statements
3resolved
2supported
0contradicted
67%fully supported
3said about them ↓ Everything Joe Hyrkin said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Hyrkin: Non-AI SaaS companies cannot get revenue multiples above 5x
“Not six. I mean unless you're AI right now, you're not getting north of five.”
Hyrkin: Debt lender demanded 1% equity monthly and $1M penalty
“And this firm continued to negotiate with us after we had verbally agreed and kept squeezing and adding in more and more and more and more terms to the point where they started to demand they wanted at one point, an additional point in the company for each mon…”
Issuu raised a $30 million Series C entirely as non-dilutive debt
“All of it was debt. Yep. And the way it works is, you know, there's essentially no dilution. So it's really good for the team and really good for the company.”
Hyrkin: Bending Spoons buys $25M-$200M ARR companies to hold long-term
“What they're doing is they're buying companies that have, ah, some pretty good scale kind of revenue in the 25 to two hundred million dollar range, profitable or close to it, and then they go run them They buy to own. It's not a P firm.”
Hyrkin: Issuu sold for nine figures at $30M+ revenue
“As a company, we're doing just north of thirty million in revenue. Profitable. Not, not very profitable, but sort of barely profitable. And we sold the company for nine figures.”
Hyrkin: Issuu would have fetched 2x-3x higher price in 2022 market
“Given the stage of where issue was when we sold it in July, if we had sold it two years prior in 22, we would have gotten two to three X what we got.”
Hyrkin: Issuu acquisition by Bending Spoons was all cash without earnouts
“Well, it was all cash, no earnouts.”
Hyrkin: Raising equity in 2021 would have required a $1B exit
“So instead of raising, we would have had to raise thirty million on a two hundred and fifty million dollar valuation, which meant that For everyone to feel successful, we would have had to have a billion dollar exit, which may have happened, but I wanted to ma…”
Hyrkin: Issuu missed a quarterly debt covenant by $150K on $7M
“However, about a year into it, we missed our revenue covenant by a footfall. So on a seven million dollar quarter, we missed by about a 150 K.”
Hyrkin: Bending Spoons did not retrade price terms during Issuu acquisition
“One of the great things about working with Bending Spoons, they didn't retrade with us. I don't think they've retraded with others, meaning changed the price. Terms were the terms.”
Hyrkin: Issuu had deep acquisition discussions with Canva and Adobe
“We were, we had really deep conversations with Canva and Adobe.”
Hyrkin: Most acquisitions ultimately come down to only one to three buyers
“Most companies, when they get acquired, there's one to three that really come to the table. So, don't be disappointed if the 20 folks that you thought were gonna buy you, that you thought were gonna keep Raising the price and quadrupling it if that doesn't hap…”
Issuu has been profitable for most of the past six years
“And also for most of our tenure, for most of the last Six years, we've been a profitable business.”
Hyrkin: Standard venture debt loans carry 9 to 11 percent interest
“You know, I don't know what they're targeting, but I think loans in this nature are sort of in the nine to 11% range. Probably some are paying higher.”
Hyrkin claims Issuu is valued in the high hundreds of millions
“You know, we're certainly in the high hundreds of millions of dollars, probably more, depending on on, on, on who's doing the valuation and where things are going.”
Hyrkin: Issuu's monthly gross customer churn is under 2%
“It's kind of in the, it's under two percent a month.”
Hyrkin: Tech platforms moved publishing's center of gravity to the West Coast
“Really the publishing and content business, the center of gravity is shifted dramatically to the west coast because that's where access to content is being made available on platforms like Facebook and Snapchat and others.”
Hyrkin: Issuu had 1M annual free users and 65k paying customers
“We had a million free customers a year, marketers, content creators 65,000 of them paying issue.”
Hyrkin: Received significantly higher equity than typical hired CEOs at Issuu
“I got I got a nice compact, I'm not gonna give you the specifics, but I got a high, a much higher percent of the company than normally when you bring in a CEO.”
Hyrkin: Issuu took $20M of debt in 2021 despite $31M announcement
“We, ah, took on twenty million dollars of debt, actually, and had access to another 10. So it was announced as 31, but it was really 20.”
Hyrkin: Shell, Patagonia, and Miami Dolphins use Issuu for marketing
“Everybody from folks at shell to Patagonia the Miami dolphins use us in, in all those instances, it's groups within the marketing group or the HR group that's using us.”
Issuu serves over one million freemium users
“We've got over a million customers. We're a freemium product. Over a million folks are using us.”
The other half of the tape: Joe Hyrkin's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Nathan Latka 3
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Top Founders 3
2016 3 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Joe's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | CEO & Founder, Care Grit Learning | 3 | 40 | 67% 2/3 | full record on Top Founders → |