For Joe Hyrkin, most of his business skills and acumen were formed on the streets and trains of China.
Hyrkin, who spent the 1990s in Beijing and Hong Kong, took everything he learned from navigating cultures — the grit, the discovery, the ability to read people across any room — and built a Silicon Valley career that led to a nine-figure exit as the CEO of tech magazine giant Issuu.
While he went to a traditional public middle and high school, “I always had this part of my life that was sort of esoteric and philosophical,” he says.
That led him to travel to India when he was 16 and study Chinese and political science at the State University of New York at Albany.
“I had this sense that, one, I wanted to get out of upstate New York and … also I had this sense that China was really big,” he says. “They were increasingly important and there would be, if I could start to understand China and, and [speak] Chinese, I’d be able to play an interesting role in whatever kind of was happening between the U.S. and China and the globe.”
Having read stories of travelers like Marco Polo and others who visited the Middle Kingdom, Hyrkin would spend his junior year abroad studying in China and traveling all over the country, being part of the first cohort of U.S. students who went to China after the events of 1989.
“It was 1990, so it was a year after Tiananmen Square,” he says.
The university where Hyrkin studied in Beijing “was sort of the No. 2 headquarters for Tiananmen Square, and I got to know students who had been on the square and watched things unfold.”
In those days, Hyrkin says more U.S. students were in the country than today.
Since then, and particularly post-COVID pandemic, that number has dropped significantly.
“We’re losing a whole generation of people who understand the culture and understand what’s going on over there,” he says.
One of the positive outcomes of spending a year in Beijing was living in a student dorm full of not only U.S. students but also people from all over the world, “from Japan and all over Europe and Africa.”
With those students, Hyrkin traveled all over the country by train, “to some places that were just opening up for foreign students to come visit towns [where] foreign students hadn’t been there before.”
Through those travels, Hyrkin spent a lot of time in markets, where haggling was “almost a sport.”
We’re losing a whole generation of people who understand the culture and understand what’s going on over there.
Through that haggling, a lot of his business skills and acumen were formed “because everything was up for negotiation: What you paid for things was up for negotiation. Where we could stay was up for negotiation.”
That helped Hyrkin learn how to interact with people “in a commerce way that I hadn’t had any exposure to before,” he says.
Not only that, he started to realize that “people are people, and I started to really get a sense of the humanness no matter where people were, no matter what the foundation of their culture was, at the end of the day, we’re human.”
Engaging in such human transactions “became fun” for him.
Following his university graduation, Hyrkin went to Hong Kong, where he lived from 1992 to 1997 before moving back to Beijing for two years.
Upon his arrival in Hong Kong, though, he was faced with one particular challenge.
“I landed in Hong Kong, I spoke [Mandarin] Chinese, but in Hong Kong, everyone in those days spoke Cantonese or English,” he says. “I didn’t know anything.”
PEOPLE SKILLS
The biggest result of that decade spent in China was learning about people, according to Hyrkin.
“I just learned about connecting and I learned about taking risks and I learned about talk[ing] my way out of the ramifications of taking risks,” he says.
Hyrkin also recalls going to China with the purpose of “be[ing] Chinese for a year,” only to find out that clearly he was not Chinese.
“Even though I’d gotten good grades in Chinese class in the U.S., I studied Chinese for two years, pretty intensely, I could barely speak the language when I landed,” he says.
Hyrkin remembers landing in Beijing, getting into a cab and telling the cabbie in Mandarin the address of his university “and he looked at me and he had no idea what I said.”
In the days before smartphones, “there’s nothing to look up. There was no phone, there were no — I didn’t have a map. There was nothing,” he says.
I just learned about connecting and I learned about taking risks and I learned about talk[ing] my way out of the ramifications of taking risks.
“It’s like eight o’clock at night and in those days, Beijing airport was, I don’t know, about 45 minutes or an hour from my university,” he adds. “There were mule-drawn carriages sort of up next to the cars, and I panicked and I’m like, OK, what, what do I do?”
This marked the beginning of a year where Hyrkin was “constantly in these situations where I’d never been before. Wasn’t sure what to do.”
It was a year of him “being in these situations where I had to compromise, I had to navigate, I had to start synthesizing how to put pieces together so I could survive,” he says.
‘MAGICAL’ DISCOVERIES
While the first few weeks were a struggle, Hyrkin still thinks that year was “magical.”
“I traveled, I met people, I learned, I argued, I navigated, I did all sorts of things,” he says.
Those experiences of “discovery” were central to his learning about how to conduct business, according to Hyrkin.
“You have to constantly be in a space of discovering, discovering what’s next, discovering what’s great about this product, discovering what the market needs, discovering what the market is telling me about what I should be doing in my business,” he says.
Nowadays, Hyrkin has a coaching business where he works with CEOs to help them minimize the distractions for themselves and their team.
For many CEOs, while it might be common for them on a Sunday night to sit down and write down the key priorities for the week or the month, “I think you’re pretty lucky if that Sunday night list of priorities lasts until 7:00 a.m. on Monday,” he says. “Things happen all the time. We’re surprised by people around us.”
You have to constantly be in a space of discovering, discovering what’s next, discovering what’s great about this product, discovering what the market needs, discovering what the market is telling me about what I should be doing in my business.
OVERCOMING CHALLENGES
One of the key themes for being successful in the business world is recognizing that when you’re in the midst of a challenge — because there is always a challenge — you have two choices, according to Hyrkin.
“We can focus on the fact that we’ve never done this before and not know what to do, or we can focus on … experiences that can lend themselves to how we navigate through this particular challenge and situation,” he says.
People don’t give themselves enough credit for the “resilience” they have experienced throughout their entire lives, Hyrkin says.
“Our lives are one example of resilience after the next, no matter who we are, where we are, what we’re doing,” he adds.
When a baby is learning to walk, they’re always falling down, which is part of the process, according to Hyrkin.
“I think we have this resiliency built into us as human beings,” he says. “And when it comes to business, we have that same resilience that’s been available to us that we can start to apply as we’re moving forward.”
Check out Culturs’ full interview with Joe Hyrkin below.
