#54 - Navigating Successful Exits: Joe Hyrkin on Leading Issuu to a Nine-Figure Sale

Hello everybody and welcome to Pearls on Gloves Off. I'm your host, Mary o', Carroll, Chief Operating Officer at Goodwin. Today my guest is Joe Herkin, Chief executive officer of Issuu. Joe comes to us with more than 30 years of experience in startup and growth technology leadership, covering stints in Silicon Valley, New York, Asia and Europe from early stage through IPO, including two exits to leading global digital platforms. Joe served as CEO of Issuu for over 11 years, leading the company to a nine figure exit earlier this year. During his time there, the company dramatically expanded the product offering, increased both revenue and profitability many times over, built integrated partnerships with leaders in the industry like canva, Adobe and HubSpot, expanded globally, and so much more. Joe is a frequent thought leader and industry contributor to countless organizations, media outlets and publications. Despite 2024 being a relatively slow year in M and A and capital markets, overall, Joe successfully led the sale of his company, issuu this year. I wanted to have Joe on the podcast because he has a great story, he's got lessons learned and a lot of advice to give on the entire journey he has taken as CEO, running, growing and eventually selling that company. During our podcast episode today, we dig into how he grew, how he led, and how he was very intentional about surrounding himself with the right advisors and talent to be able to drive both company growth and success, but also importantly, to position themselves to have as many possible outcomes and options for their future. This of course includes hiring the right legal team and the advisors needed to best understand your business and the market in which you operate. I also loved our talk today because Joe gives great advice to both company leaders, but also to the lawyers on how best to work together and how lawyers today are no longer just legal advisors. Right. This is a theme we've heard in many episodes now, but they're really business advisors. We talk about how lawyers should think about approaching working with a CEO rather than just an in house counsel or a general counsel, which I'm sure many are used to. It is a nuanced difference, but it's important to know your audience. Joe talks about how to navigate that nuance. So overall, I love an episode where I learned something in my conversation and I certainly did that today. I hope you will too. Joe. First, congratulations on the recent sale of your company. That must feel like a huge accomplishment.

Yes, thank you. I really appreciate it. It was a big team effort and really nice to have completed it, particularly in this current challenging environment.

Yeah, no kidding. I mean, as someone who lives and works in Silicon Valley, I Know, that's probably like a life goal of so many founders and people at startups that I come across. I'd love to hear kind of the story about your time at issue and how the sale of the company kind of came about and the journey that you've had there. And then we can go a little bit into your background too, because I know this is something you've done several times.

You know, in terms of a life goal, I think when you're a CEO of a tech startup, you've got four outcomes, right? You can go bankrupt, you can get sold at a fire sale deal, you can get acquired and have really good positive outcome, financially positive outcome for the customers and the product, or you can go public.

Right.

And of course you want to do one of the latter two. We were fortunate enough to be able to get acquired for a really good positive outcome. Again, both had a dollar amount and also in terms of a really good opportunity for our customers to get ongoing support and ongoing product enhancements and things like that.

Tell me, because you are not the founder, you got brought into the company, you were running it for some time, was that always kind of the goal is to pursue that as an exit and you know, was it, were you thinking IPO at all?

So I get asked this question all the time. Anybody who interviews with Issue, where I'm interviewing candidate, often one of the questions is, what's the goal? What's the outcome?

Yeah.

What I've discovered over the years is any CEO that can specifically tell you what they want the outcome to be is either lying or foolish. Because you know, you can't create, create, build and run a company for a specific outcome because there's so much that is out of our control.

Right.

If you asked any CEO, tech CEO or otherwise, in November of 2019, give me the top 50 things on your priority list for 2020, nobody would have said managing a company in the midst of a pandemic.

Right.

You know, many of us thought there would be a rate cut in February or Q1 this year. Didn't happen until just this week. And so there are so many components of a business that are just beyond our control. The economy, politics, pandemics, hr, challenges, opportunities, both good and bad. You know, sometimes you'll think one thing, and after years of hard work, a particular aspect of the product takes off. Good market fit. And all of a sudden, instead of one level, you're a totally different level. You know, again, I think what I wanted and what every tech CEO wants is a positive outcome and the foundation of a positive outcome is a positive product that is really valuable to the people who need it for whom we're building it. And in a market that's massive. So you have to have that combination of delivering real value with the product you have and a big enough market. And then I think the third thing is a set of customers that rely on that product in a way that they're building their business around it, often in association with other products as well. But if you have that environment in place, then you set yourself up for options. And one of the options is an exit. And I think every VC funded company, it's just part of it. It could be we're going to go buy a number of companies and create a roll up and in that we create an exit or standalone exit in one form another. So I think it's more nuanced than just saying, at least for me, that the goal was a specific kind of exit because it's impossible to predict so many of the challenges that get thrown at us in the midst of running a company.

Yeah, that's so wise. I mean, so much of what you need to be successful in the world these days is just the flexibility and the agility to read what's happening with the competitive space and the market and all the other factors.

Yeah, flexibility and tenacity, you know, you. And I think resilience is a really key component because again, set of goals, whether it's KPIs, revenue goals, number of customer goals, product launch goals, product capabilities, all of those sorts of things, of course you want to have. And then we could have a list of here's the 10 things we're doing and I'll guarantee you, you know, somewhere between a third and halfway through just the first, there's going to be unknowns that come up and it's how we address them, how we work through those challenges with the team and customers that I think really determines a lot of the success or failure of a company.

Amazing. Okay, so let's just back up for the audience. You know, ISSUU was founded. You got brought in how long ago?

I got brought into Issuu in 2013. So I was with the company 11 and a half years. Company was founded in Copenhagen, Denmark and I got brought in in early 2013 with a focus on expanding and growing globally, expanding and growing the partnership ecosystem. And also we flipped it to a US entity from a Danish company. So there was certainly complexity in that. But for me, part of the rationale for that is I, I have decades of experience in Silicon valley and with U.S. companies. I don't know anything about Danish law. It's fine running a Danish company. There's no challenges there. But I didn't know anything about those elements and I wanted to make sure that I was able to come in and hit the ground running in an environment that I was familiar with so that I could make the most positive contribution to again, to the business. The team, customers, the product.

Yeah. And this is not the first time that you've kind of been in this rodeo, right?

ASU is actually the third company where I've come in as a CEO. The first one was sold Alibaba. The second one, I was there for about a year and a half and that also ultimately had an outcome after I departed. And, you know, it was again an opportunity where a really nice foundation had been laid and it was time to drive the business forward and, and really enhance the foundation that was in place with real growth trajectory and focus.

Great, great. And so now you've had at least two experiences with M and A. I guess my question for you is how do you know when you're ready to pursue that exit? Did the opportunity just come up? Do you have thoughts on how do you put yourself in the right position to at least have more options?

You know, on one hand what I said earlier is as a CEO, you can't just say, I'm focused on this outcome because you'll execute often for the wrong reasons. You want to focus on great product, big market, being able to grow and having a good team exactly at the same time. You always want to be ready for an exit. So it's two sides of the same coin. And certainly one of the things that we did at issue is spend time identifying, in the event that an exit was time appropriate, identifying who are those folks and really getting to know them. Who are the right strategic players? Who are the kinds of PEs, financial backers, sponsors that are the right kinds of fits for your company. I'll come back to that in a minute. One of the things that I think is important to keep in mind for everybody as they're thinking about an exit. So many CEOs, CFOs, leadership in the tech world think there's a huge number of exit opportunities for us. We think There's a dozen, 20 strategics. We think there's three or four that are really the great ones. But then we think there's 20 more or more strategics. We think there are dozens of PE firms, especially once we're at a certain size and you have to build relationships with all those folks. The list should be long for a couple of reasons. The first is building those relationships and understanding what they are looking for and then comparing that to what everybody else that you're talking to is saying will help you understand. Okay, here are the key themes. These are the four or five things that a company like us is going to need. So if I talk to 15, 20 PE firms, even if they're not necessarily right, the kinds of things they're going to say, they'll start to be patterns. Same thing with strategics. On the strategic front, it takes way longer to build those relationships. It's very rare that a strategic will swoop in without having some kind of relationship. So one of the key reasons for moving issue to Silicon Valley was to start building those relationships with the right kinds of content, SMB oriented, you know, digital tools, efficiency kinds of businesses. And then you have to start building integrations with them. But I'll talk, if we talk a little about the integrations and head and sort of the readiness piece. But what's interesting is in this list of 20, 30, 50 ideal perfect acquirers, I think in almost every instance it boils down to three to five where there's really going to be some traction and momentum. And that doesn't mean that the remaining 20, 30, 40 are not appropriate. It just often means in that time frame when you are ready for a sale to happen, they may not be. There might be an acquirer with whom you've built a really good relationship over a number of years that is already looking at buying something else, not even competitive, but that's what they've got the bandwidth for, or they may have just bought something or the primary person in the company got sick and is out for three months or whatever. On the PE side, one of the things that I learned there were dozens of P's super interested in ISSUU over the years and we would start to dig into things. And ISSUU was a company that was, as we were, a self service product led growth business. And we cater primarily to SMBs, agencies, smaller businesses. And so what you need to find is buyers who understand that category. So many buyers initially would be very positive about us. They would evaluate us or look at us through the lens of a huge 5 million multimillion dollar deal enterprise kind of company. We're not. And so it's important right in the beginning to start to understand here's my lane, here's what we're good at. These are the kinds of buyers who understand this and that limits things very quickly. You know, buyers, particularly buyers, whether it's strategic or pe, have teams of folks who are focused on M and A and so they want to talk to you so you can get lots of attention. It's important to narrow it down quickly to, here are the folks that understand our business, understand our metrics, understand and evaluate our metrics. And then here are the strategics and start to pursue that in answering the question that you started this off with is how do you know? You know, I think there's a mythology that says companies get bought, not sold, you know, and I think it's really a combination of the two. I think you want to always position yourself for a buyer to want to buy. And then you have to start identifying if we were to get bought. Here are the folks who could have built those relationships. And so in our case, there were a range of different contributing factors.

We ran issue profitably from 2016 to 2020. Then we made some investments in innovation and growth and then started running it profitably again last August. So August 23rd, and we were on a nice growth trajectory. We were back to profitability. We had surpassed 30 million in revenue and we were starting to get people coming to us asking about our interest in getting acquired. So we started to get some interest. And then the other thing actually that was interesting for us is it also seemed like there was going to be a rate cut in the beginning of this year, which would be an indication that the buyers would be. There'll be way more buyers and more people interested, both because debt becomes cheaper for a purchase, but also because strategics start to, you know, open up more in that kind of environment. So we timed things based on profitability growth. We had really nice deep integrations. Product was in the best shape it's been in, and we thought the environment would be really good. The environment part didn't happen in the way that we expected, but we still got a good, you know, we still got good offers and decided to move forward.

Awesome.

I think you also always want to be in a position where you can say no. And that was important for us. Again, being a company was growing profitable. We. In the same way you want to have choices about what your exit is, you want to try to have the company positioned to have choices about whether you say yes or no.

Absolutely. You want choices in all your paths. And more options are always better along the way. Of course, I assume you would need to surround yourself with the right types of advisors and. And counselors and, you know, people who can not just Facilitate the growth of the business and the running of the business, but helping you think about the future and your options. How did you know lawyers fit into your, your past and what role do they play?

So we use, you know, we use Goodwin as our lawyer and you know, all disclosures aside, super happy with the Goodwin team, with, with Larry Chu and the team who really helped us. And then on the banker side, one of the interesting things about us is we had multiple. Once we started getting offers and people had interest in prior offers, but once we started to get real interest, we spent time identifying a bank. We worked with a firm called Lightning Partners. And so in both of these instances, in the same way that I spent time with potential acquirers and potential potential partners over the years, I spent time with bankers and lawyers to really understand when the time is right, who do we want to work with? In the case of the banker, we work with Lightning Partners. They had done deals in and around our space on multiple occasions. They were a mid tier bank. We had some of the biggest banks in the world wanting to work with us. I felt like one. They were quite expensive. But more importantly, I knew while we were a nine figure deal, we weren't a multi billion dollar deal. And I was concerned that some of the bigger players might get bored with us as things progressed. So I think identifying in the same way, you want to make sure that the buyers understand you want to partner with on the banker side, people who get your opportunity that you're going to go for within a range. On the legal side, Larry and I got to know each other eight years ago. We had Goodwin as our corporate counsel. Partly because I think you want to have a very good overall legal firm to help with all the different elements of the business. Also because I think when you sell having a legal firm with you that knows the business, you know, Larry Chu, Katherine, we're in our board meetings, Larry's in our board meeting for six years. And so he knew the challenges we had, he knew the opportunities, he knew where we were as a business. He had a sense of what the right timing might be. I think the other thing is you want to have advisors, and particularly in the case of someone like Goodwin, who has really good pattern recognition and knows what's happening in the ecosystem, all of that is getting ready. Right. So when serious interest starts to build and then you start to move into talking about term sheets, this stuff happens really fast.

Yep.

And there is massive amounts of data and documents and information that needs to be part of the due diligence process. That's not the time to go bring in legal resources. So we had the team ready to go. We raised money from VCs, we had some debt financing. We were an interesting company. We're a US based company. We had a subsidiary in Denmark with sub subsidiaries in Germany and Portugal. And if I brought in a lawyer even six months or a year before the sale, they would have to learn all that stuff instead go to an all that stuff. For us, that accelerated the process and made things more efficient. The other piece is I think we underestimate the value of lawyers in the deal itself. So in our case, we had lawyers who knew a number of the potential buyers in our ecosystem and they could have some conversations with them. Larry was able to help think through elements of the deal based on the business itself. What other buyers might be looking for could help us talk to potential buyers. Dealt with the buyer's lawyers before. So that level of familiarity with us as a business, with the ecosystem, with the buyers, with the lawyers, with the due diligence, made the process more efficient and I actually think enables us to move forward with a transaction that had almost no deductions and was very strong financially.

Yeah. What I think is so interesting about what you're saying is, you know, even when you, when I first asked the question, you thought about the value that the lawyers on the deal have brought, you mentioned a lot of things that really are more business advice, you know, rather than straight up classic legal advice. And surrounding yourself. Right. With people who truly understand your business as well as the ecosystem and the industry and the other players and have those deep relationships is so like a force multiplier to all the work that you are doing.

I think it's mandatory. I mean I like I unfortunately a lot of businesses bring in the M and a lawyer too late and you miss not because the lawyers are bad, but because they haven't. There's not enough time. Right, to learn all the nuances and identify, okay, here are three elements in this deal that we're going to make sure we push for because of this particular scenario or what's happening. And so I don't actually think there's a distinction between legal advice and business advice. I think they're part and parcel of being together. And I think every CEO of a tech company, again, I'm contradicting what I said earlier, but in this way that you can't say, you can't fully prepare and say what the outcome is going to be. You need to be ready for it and so bring in that legal Advice way sooner than you otherwise might.

Yeah, I don't think you're contradicting yourself at all. I mean, I think the only thing we know is that everything will be unpredictable and you know, life and the world will throw all sorts of wrenches in our plan. So you can't stay focused on your plan. But to what we said earlier, the most important thing is setting yourself up for success. And that is very intentional and surrounding yourself and making plans and, you know, planning for all scenarios really.

I think the number one job of a CEO is to limit distractions for the CEO and for the team.

Yeah.

Often it said the number one responsibility of the CEO is to make sure the company has money. But running out of money is a distraction. And so in limiting distractions, aligning yourself with strong advisors who themselves can do multiple things, really valuable, then you have input, then you can make choices.

Right. Okay, so that's great. And I think a lot of folks who are new to working with lawyers, law firms and such, will look around and go, they're all the same. Right? These people are all the same. Every firm is the same. But they're really not. And it might be hard to figure out how to separate the good from the mediocre. How do you go about determining what is great? How do you find these great lawyers that you've been successful with in your past?

So first of all, there are well known successful law firms. Right. So if you're in the tech world, you have a choice of folks to work with. I think ultimately it boils down in many cases to the lawyer, the person you're working with.

Absolutely.

It's the same about raising venture capital. You can raise from very established known VC firms. And the person, the human being you're working with matters a lot. So I believe generally we love in this ecosystem we live in to talk about lawyers and VCs and AI and technology and all the different buzzwords that spew out of our mouths all the time. At the end of the day, we are building products that are used by human beings that are used by human beings. And it's the same thing with legal advice. We're working with human beings. And so I think the first piece is, do they have a track record? Have they done this stuff before? Throughout my career, I've been doing tech for well over 25 years at this point. And I'm not a lawyer, but I've been in situations where the lawyers I've worked with knew less about a particular legal deal than I did. And I don't want to be a training ground for an advisor. I'm okay if there are junior people on the deal, but I want to make sure that who I'm working with has clear pattern recognition, has done this before, has done deals of the kind of size that makes sense. If I'm working with a lawyer who's only done, who's an amazing M and A deal, M and a lawyer, but they've worked in shipping in Asia and done multi billion dollar deals, they're not right for me. So pattern recognition, familiarity with the space, what's the track record look like? And then who are they? As a human, can you connect with that? Because you're right, there are so many people to choose from. Different people will resonate with different people. And I think in our case that human connection mattered a lot because it then sort of motivates both people to give even more, to contribute even more. And you don't always know. So it's also part of the reason to bring in the person who you think is right sooner rather than later so you can get a sense of who you're working with again. Like in the case of me and Larry Chu, we met, we were at an event, we were post go in to get something to drink, and we like bumped into each other and started talking. It wasn't about him becoming my lawyer or him looking for a new client. We talked as people and got to know each other better. And then we met. And then actually when we first met, he spent some time thinking, am I the right lawyer for you? Is there someone else in the firm that might be a better fit? And we actually had a couple of conversations about that.

Oh, that's fantastic.

Yeah.

How have you thought about, you know, hiring a law firm, someone like Larry externally versus hiring a general counsel to do the work? And I know you had legal team members. You don't have a specific general counsel. You know, what was the thought process there?

So in our, and I think size of the company has something to do with this. You know, I think in our case we did have internal legal folks and they focused on particular aspects of the business deals, those sorts of things. And we're very strong in that area. In the case of actually the M and A side of things, I think like the bottom line, it is a lot of work. Yeah, it's a lot of work. I've been doing this a long time. And in this process, there were documents that were required that I'd never heard of, and there's new regulations that come out. And so Having a firm that specializes in this stuff, again, I keep coming back to this notion of reduced distraction. Even if we'd had a really great season, internal counsel who had done multiple deals, if you have an internal counsel, by definition, if they've been with us for five years, how many transactions have they done in the last five years? Zero. Right. So it doesn't mean they're. That's not a negative on them at all. What you need is people who are in this all the time. And in the case of Goodwin, I mean, I'm not sure there's a law firm globally that's done more M and A deals. And so a lot of the.

You know, for us you can use internal counsel. You get all the top level stuff. Easy. Where deals go wrong is often in the stuff that's in the weeds that we're not anticipating or hasn't been properly understood or properly thought through. And that's where having a seasoned lawyer as part of the process works. And having a team as part of the process, it's also hard just to have one lawyer.

So on that. So my background, I've worked at firms, I've worked in house with legal departments, I've counseled many GCs and CLOs. But you know, firms and outside counsel typically get hired by legal departments. They're used to working with lawyers as their clients. That's obviously not the case when you're working with the startup and that team doesn't exist. I would imagine it is a pretty different experience directly advising a CEO. How should lawyers be thinking about that when they're working with a CEO? How can they be helpful? How should they, you know, navigate? What's different about how they present information? What you know, what you don't know, how to be helpful.

That's a great question. A couple of things come to mind. So in my case, the first half of my career was in sales and business development. I guess I've been a lawyer now longer than I was in those roles. But in those roles I interacted with legal all the time, both internal and external, dealt with contracts, deal contracts. I was involved in raising money. So there was a lot of elements in the legal component that I was familiar with. And so I think it's important for lawyers to actually ask the CEOs, what's your experience in the legal world? Where. And not just as that straight up, but dig in. Are you familiar with indemnification, liability? Where are the areas that you are going to need the most help? And if a CEO has an answer for that it probably means they have some familiarity and will know where their strengths and weaknesses are to some extent. And then the lawyers can say, okay, here's how I can help. If they don't have answers, also really good, because it means they don't have that much information. So I think then a lawyer should start to break things down. Okay, as your lawyer, here are the kinds of things we're going to be working with. Everything setting up the company but fundraising. Next set of fundraising, are you thinking about debt? Hey, we've got experts within our firm to talk to you about what that means and how that works. Many CEOs are really good at a thing, but don't have expertise in a whole range of other elements that they're going to have to know something about in managing the company. They need to hire experts in those particular areas, but you have to have some sense of the elements there. So I think lawyers should really ask, sort of lay out. Here are the 10 different elements of what we as lawyers bring to the table. We can help you with fundraising. We can help you with HR challenges that are coming up. We can help you with content related lawsuits. And here's how we do it. We can also help you with due diligence related to a potential sale or, or an acquisition. And here are the kinds of things that we need you as a CEO to be aware of. And here are the kinds of things we bring to the table. I will say that it's important for a CEO, ask lawyers questions like, you know, because with all due respect, lawyers charge by the hour and like, it's important to understand when and where do I need my lawyer's help and then leverage it and take advantage of it. And don't try to save a few hundred dollars here and there if you're going to get shortchanged on advice that matters. Because when you're in a situation that requires legal help, getting a really good lawyer matters a lot.

You know, so much of what I'm thinking about these days is the future of law firms and all the changes happening in the legal ecosystem and the changing roles that we see in house at companies. And you know, I'm sort of constantly going back to this business advisor versus legal advisor. What you said there about, you know, all the different areas that a full service law firm can help you is really helping you do your job and bringing the experience of, hey, we've seen a million companies like you grow up. Here's where we can help you. Because are you thinking about this? Are you thinking about that and the mentality, you know, I think has really shifted from lawyers and law firms being really reactive to waiting for a CEO or GC to pick up the phone and say, hey, I have a question about this HR issue today. And what I believe the future, if it's not in here already, is that the law firm should be thinking about what you need and saying, you know, Joe, I'm going to call you today because I'm thinking this might affect you.

So here's a couple of points on that. One is, again, we were working with Goodwin for seven years.

Yeah.

Larry sat in our board meeting. So he could sense there were multiple times in a board meeting where he would say, I've got a client who is dealing with this. I'll connect you. Super useful.

Priceless, right?

Yeah, super useful. You know, I'll give you another example right now. AI. Everyone's talking about AI. And AI has a whole range of implications. It's not just about whether you are an AI company or applying AI to your product development or the product itself. There's a whole set of elements related to the AI technology. How is it being trained? What are the issues around copyright protection, how is AI interacting? How are your engineers interacting with AI? What's going to happen around AI and open source? A whole set of elements. And so on one hand.

There are things that are changing a lot in our ecosystem. AI is a big piece of that. But on the other, this is one of those areas where having strong legal advice is really beneficial because there are very few issues that are just one dimensional. There's often multi. And so having that element becomes useful. I think the other is like most CEOs, most executives, again throughout their career have been very good at US things. A particular discipline, engineering, marketing, sales. And so if the situation is we lawyers wait for the CEO to call, often the CEO doesn't necessarily know what the CEO doesn't know.

Yeah.

So I have plenty of situations where if we waited for me to make the call, it's almost too late. I'd rather be in a position where I'm informed of, hey, Joe, in about three months, given what I'm seeing in this situation, you're going to need to call me. And if we wait for the call, often by the time a CEO calls a lawyer, there's been a problem. And again, minimize distractions. Let's address those problems before they come up. And having that interaction with a lawyer can be really valuable. And so I think it's. I think the best lawyers are asking those questions and Helping to feed and anticipate. I don't think whether it's a lawyer or an executive, one of the most important qualities is synthesis. Can you start to connect dots, put ideas together in the example of, hey, we talked about this product development, you know, here's the roadmap. This product's coming out in six months, by the way. Lawyer can say, here are three things you need to think about. And a CEO can say, yep, we got those two. We know we built it into the product plan. Wow. That third one I hadn't thought about. What are you seeing? And it could be, here are the legal challenges that are going to come up. What I always want to know as a CEO, I want to know the risks. So what's the issue? What are the risks? Because we're constantly taking risks. And most lawyers will say, here's the legal advice I would give you. And you can't run a company based on legal advice. So you'll run a company based on a balance of the advice, the legal advice you get and the risks you're willing to take. And there's an evaluation there. And so synthesis around what's happening and what could happen matters a lot.

Yeah. So well said, you know, and as I think about your role and as you're talking about, you know, the One thing that CEOs are good at, it is so important to surround yourself with that strong set of advisors and counselors. And you mentioned earlier, you know, you have banks, as I think about banks, they're probably working really closely with your numbers, your financials, your cfo, your budget, your planning, your metrics, but they're not seeing the full picture. Lawyers and I used to say this about, you know, GCs and in house teams advising our internal CEOs are so uniquely suited to be, to have a full picture of the higher entire business.

The good ones are.

The good ones are. And that's the skill set that needs to develop for the future, I think for the future lawyers.

Yeah. And I think particularly early lawyers in the early stage of their career. That idea of my job is not about legal advice. My job is about holistic business synthesis. And when lawyers understand that's their key role, then they're in a position to be really valuable.

And again, like they're the ones who are in with you on tough HR issues and conversations, your next financing round, before that starts, you know, your product advice and the risks involved, internationalization, I mean, the list goes on and on. You always got the lawyers involved there. So they really have as big as full a picture of the organization as you do.

And they get, they start to understand how we as CEOs operate and think. So they can start to see our shortcomings. So if we think about HR issues, they can be extremely challenging. And from an outside perspective, you see a particular situation happen and a CEO may think, I really need this person to do these three things, I can't fire them. Is there a way to do this? You know, there's a lot of massaging that happens for good or bad reasons and often if it's time to let someone go, particularly for an HR violation, do it. And a lawyer can help you think through that. They can say, hey, here were other examples of this. Here's where a CO didn't do this and what happened. Even in a case where a CEO makes the right call, a lawyer can see, oh wow, that CEO made the right call five times in this situations, this situation, or they didn't in that one, or they almost did. And then a lawyer starts that pattern recognition, not just about the ecosystem, but about the client. And then again, the better ones can then start to provide really valuable advice. So I think that relationship between a lawyer and CEO, even in the case where you have a large inside counsel, at the end of the day, when a company is taking risks, doesn't matter who in the company makes the call, the results, the CEO's fault, good or bad. So I certainly delegated plenty of legal or legal related decisions to people more directly connected. I understand like the buck stops with me as a CEO. And so I'm foolish if I'm not educating myself on what risks we're taking. And sometimes people within a company and the leadership team might take a bigger risk because they know the CEO is the final arbiter anyway. You need to be in a position to understand what's going on.

Yeah, yeah. Joe, this has been a fantastic conversation. I've. I think there's been great advice given to both sides, to both CEOs and people within companies as well as the lawyers who serve them. Any other advice you want to give to either of those parties?

I would just not underestimate the importance of the human connection. And for CEOs to remember bringing in the counsel you are going to work with across the lifetime of your company, across all the different elements, including an acquisition, you cannot bring them in too soon and start building that relationship. Get them to know your business because then they can be useful. Too many transactions do not have the ultimate outcome because the lawyer's brought in too late. And they can't optimize for the outcome because they don't have enough information.

Fantastic. Great advice, Joe. Thanks so much for your time and for being here and sharing so many words of wisdom with our listeners. Until next time everyone, thanks for listening.