For Those at Spin Who Are Left, Meet Your New Boss

By Dylan on March 3, 2006 12:30 PM

With Spin officially spun to Hartle Media and a dramatic masthead shuffle underway, any new wrinkles to this story — like staffers medicating themselves at Fat Baby — could hardly be considered “exclusive.” But what could be considered an exclusive — though again, it’s really semantics at this point — is appearing in the print version of FOLIO:‘s Entrepreneurship Issue this month: an interview I conducted with Tom Hartle, the dude who’s buying it. Here’s a summary:

Hartle seems like a good dude. And he likes to talk. A lot.

He co-founded Hartle Media with Heather Luplow Hartle, his then-wife. He met her while at Hour Detroit. They hooked up, got sick of Detroit and moved to San Francisco. They split sometime during the launch of Hartle Media, but remain business partners.

“For the kind of growth we’ve had, you have to have somebody you can really trust and talk to,” Hartle says of Luplow, “and at the same time be able to get really angry at them and say ‘You’re a moron.’ It almost strengthens what we do to create a company.” Note: he actually said “f*cking moron,” but this was for FOLIO:.

Before Spin, the company’s revenues had doubled every year in business and are now roughly $10 million, he says.

Hartle says he has an issue with rags-to-riches business launch stories, but credits survival on “a band of ‘young, creative, hungry’ locals who believed in the magazine enough to defer wages until Hartle could pay them.”

“Sometimes people make those stories sound romantic. They’re not romantic, they’re desperate. But you just gotta hang in there.”

That’s some tough love.

Tough Love [FOLIO:]