255 - The Best Practices for Navigating Board Dynamics and Entrepreneurial Mentorship with Kevin Korte

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Kevin Corti, welcome to, uh, Listening with Leaders. You are an investor and board member Your website is Cordy.co. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

I'd like to have just a little bit of a backstory. Tell us a little bit about where have you come from to what you're doing today as an investor and a board member.

Absolutely. I actually moved from Germany here about 10 years ago, building out the subsidiary of a German company and kind of fell into sales and leadership. And so many tech people do, was completely lost at that point. And from that, built myself up to leading the organization over here. And now after, what, 10 years in the role or 12 years, 13 years with the company, I'm slowly moving into being an investor, being a board member to some of my investments and some other companies and build out my experience in the non-leadership or non-executive leadership, because board is still a leader, but it's different there than being the guy who says, do that.

So you've been in the— you were— you moved over here with the company that was employing you to build out a subsidiary in your role, and that was— you were the kind of one of the top guys doing that work?

Yep. I went from being a project manager to being one of the top guys here.

That was a pretty big jump.

Absolutely. And yeah, the biggest threatening part was picking up the phone and calling people, like being a sales guy and being the guy who hires people.

So you, you hired, fired— it's what I mean, you were doing— it sounds to me like it was like a startup. So as a CEO of a startup, you're doing everything.

Yeah, you start with doing everything and then you slowly give up, and then you have like managers, you get managers of managers. So it's not the same as a startup because we had a proven product and the product which was financed by the customers in Europe. But a lot of the sales part of the convincing people part to do something was very startupy.

You basically had to build a sales organization because you had the product.

Yeah.

And then go to market in the United States. So you started with, I take it, started with you, number one?

Yeah, and then hired.

And how big did the organization grow in 10 years?

Um, it's mostly contractors thanks to our wonderful state system here that makes it hard to count whether you want part-time or something. You get like somewhere to 30 with the contractors.

Um, so you used a lot of, you used a lot of independent contractors, remote workers, people like that?

Yeah.

It's— I still haven't figured out why you need to register in 50 states if you have a single employee in that state. That's just how the US works. So it's a lot.

Well, you know, we're 50 different, 50 different countries all under one umbrella. That's essentially what it is. So what motivated you to move from executive leadership into board leadership?

It's a lot to do with the sales part and with the people part, because I, I really like doing the strategy part, like looking out where will you be in 5 years and 10 years versus the nitty-gritty of yes, you'll have to cut down on people, or yes, that guy doesn't perform. And that's kind of preference and also personal strengths.

And so what is it about being on a board and being an investor that is more attractive than being an executive?

It's the people you work with. So it's the way people express themselves to express their ideas, generate ideas, and the way you have to approve plans, give feedback on them, and focus on the long-term ideas, strategies. And the kind of the visions really versus the— I think everyone who runs the company knows the nitty-gritty stuff you don't want to spend money with or time with, but you can't delegate away because it's really your job to deal with it. And the board membership flips it around. You don't have to do the nitty-gritty stuff. You get a lot of the things, the research done by the executive, and then it's upon you to listen to what they say and to question whether they considered everything, whether the conclusion is there, and whether there's any risk they overlooked. And whenever, yeah, someone has been in a position long, you overlook risk because you think that will never happen, and of course it does, inevitably.

So you see, you— I, I take it that you like this strategic work that's done at the board level as opposed to the nitty-gritty operational work that's done at the executive level.

Yeah, the operations focus.

And so what is it now? Have you done a complete transition? You're completely out of executive leadership now?

Nearly.

What is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to do your work?

By now it's the aspect which I dreaded when I started. It's meeting new people and getting new ideas and So it's on the investment side, it's hearing the pitches, hearing what ideas people have, and seeing that admittedly a lot of founders are similar to my sales experience saying, I have a great product, everyone will come buy it, right? Which, yes, as a tech guy, it makes sense. You should buy great product. But unfortunately, that's not how humans work. Right. For the board work, it's the same. It's seeing where people go, how the people especially develop much more than the products. But seeing like the 19-year-old founder or 20-year-old founder going from that idealistic guy to someone who's really pushing forward, pushing themselves, and, and reaching new heights. And that are the two things which really get me excited to go.

So it sounds to me like it's almost like consultative work too.

It's especially in the startup world, it's a lot of consultative work, a lot of mentoring work, a lot of, yeah, you could almost say handholding and telling people everything will be fine, keep going, keep on it. You might fail with this one, but we'll find the next opportunity.

So it sounds, yeah, a lot of coaching, a lot of consulting, a lot of handholding and mentoring.

Yeah. And that's what do you see when you're looking at these young entrepreneurs?

What do you see as common attributes that will make them successful? That tends to make them successful as to not, as opposed to not being successful?

I think grit is a lot of part of it. Part of it, especially for the young ones. So they, if you're 19, or if you're even the ones I've worked with now, 24, you don't have a lot of life experience, but you typically also don't have the $100,000 mortgage. Everyone would love to have that, the $500,000 mortgage where you're, you can't put the house on the line for, or your wife doesn't allow you to. So it's for the young ones through the grit and the— that going forward, moving, growing part, and seeing them grow often faster than the organizations. And of course, on the flip side, you have the older generation who have the money to do the startups, and I find it always interesting to see how they challenge themselves more than being challenged by the outside world. I think that's the A bit of the difference between someone who's seasoned and starting a startup at, what's the, 55 is one of my founders versus one of someone who's 19.

So the 55-year-old is trying to, is just doing it to challenge himself and see how much he can grow. And the 20-year-old is trying to figure life out and challenge it. Just, it's getting challenging just to get money in the door and pay the bills.

Kind of, but both want to change the world, so that's what they have in common. But It's a very different work with both of them.

How do you—

how— what are the criteria that you use when you're evaluating ideas? So not about financials, but just about ideas. How do you evaluate whether or not somebody's got a good idea that it's worth getting behind?

My first question is always, can I sell it myself? Because building it is always easy, selling it is a problem. That's kind of— if I say yes, I could go behind it and call people up and say, hey, you want to buy it? That's the first step always. And afterwards is then, would I buy it? Would I buy the product? Would I buy whatever's behind the ideas? And then you look at, is it really making a difference or is it improving something? And then you look at, is the person the right person to drive it forward? And then you get into the nitty-gritty. Okay, Financials in a pre-seed and seed startup are like, nice, you have numbers, but I'll take the numbers to probe you on whether you just wrote something down or whether you have planning. And I think it's actually Eisenhower, it's much more important to do the planning than to have a plan.

That's right. Exactly. How do you evaluate the individuals? You just mentioned that, is this the right person to push this forward? How do you, what are the kinds of things you think about to make that determination?

It's often when you talk to them, it's listening to what they say and then challenging them on what they say and then see how they react. Then you have people who take that as a challenge and build something out of it quickly, think on their feet and do something. You have others who say, okay, I would get back to you. If they do, that's also acceptable. And then you have, of course, the vast majority who get either defensive or completely try to blow you off. And unless I realize my question was stupid, right?

So if somebody gets defensive or tries to blow you off, which is the majority of the time, that's an indicator that there's a problem and this person may not be worth spending time with. They can creatively come up with an answer or say, great, I don't know the answer to that question. Let me check it out and I'll get back to you. That's okay too.

Yeah, rather defer and actually get back to me, right? Because you can't defer and figure it out.

Okay, so what do you think, Kevin? What do you think is unique about you that you bring to the table that makes you successful in all of this?

I think, as with many board members, it's the ability to listen and get people to open up at the same time. And then it's maybe, at least in this position where I'm now, the combination of real technical experience deep down with that financial experience which you build up. Because most board members come either from the sales side or from the CFO side, and despite the SEC pushing for cybersecurity experience on boards or technical experience, we don't have so many. Maybe it's because we don't get the mentoring that a CFO gets or CRO gets.

So you're saying that most board members come in from the financial side or maybe the sales side.

Yeah, which makes sense. We had, especially after Enron, a lot of push to have that kind of experience on all the boards.

Exactly. So you're, you're a little unique in that you bring in technical skills, technical knowledge.

Not unique, but there are a lot less of us than there are financial guys.

And what kind of technical expertise do you bring to the table?

Cybersecurity and IT mostly.

Okay, and that's your former employer?

Former employer, and now everyone's doing AI, so I don't want to say AI.

Right, but AI is a big catch-all covering a vast, broad continuum of applications and ideas.

It's gone from that very well-defined scientific term, right, now the, the awesome marketing phrase. And now that they get charged with GenAI, which is an undefined term, so everyone can think of what they want in it.

Exactly. It's like when people were talking about 4G and 5G, nobody ever knew what the term 4G and 5G meant.

If you talk to someone who's in the field, they can exactly explain to you why 4G is different than 5G and we should be excited. But for most people who say, yes, I know what that is, they'll tell you it's what gives us whichever disease is currently in the news.

Exactly right. This show is called Listening with Leaders, and you've already alluded to the importance of listening. How did you learn how to become a good listener?

It's one of the skills which I think first I had to learn when doing project management, because there's that famous caricature with different pictures of the monkey on the swing, and then it says, okay, what the client explains to you and what he actually wanted and what was built, right? And that kind of taught me, okay, you have to listen to what he actually wants. And then once you go into sales, it gets even more critical because I don't want to really do anything now. Let's do it in 6 months.

Like, oh yeah, put you on the calendar in 6 months with people. Yeah, I got to go talk to my— I need to go talk to the CEO about this.

Exactly. And then you have to actually listen out or find out Does he actually only make a decision in 6 months, or is there something in between which we have to tackle, right? And naturally, when you go into leading, people don't want to tell you, I feel shitty, or I don't like to work with someone. They are like, oh, everything's fine, which here in America is like, I'm going to quit soon.

English is obviously not your German, so English is not your native language. How do you learn how to listen in English?

It's, in the end, it's experience. And I have to also say that Toastmasters helped with their roles and their structures of simply getting to learn it. And then in the end, it's you pick up the habits of what people do around you. And I think it I only recently did a big jump as well, which going on a board, because I was the guy who did particularly take notes. You're not allowed on a board, on most boards, to take notes because it creates a record of the decision and you only want to have one set of minutes.

Got it.

And it apparently makes quite a difference in psychology whether you take notes and then you remember stuff versus listening and actually processing it. And maybe we're teaching it wrong. And especially once people reach university levels where we, yeah, still continue taking notes from your teacher instead of processing, questioning what comes on and building that mental point of, okay, what do I have to retain and what do I just have to discard versus the meticulous notes, which can almost serve as a lesson plan.

I have never heard— this is the first time in my life, and I've been a lawyer for 45 years, a very sophisticated lawyer. This is the first time I've ever heard of a prohibition against board members taking notes at a meeting.

It's either you're not allowed to, or they get collected, so they're pointless. So I know that most boards will probably say, okay, you have to hand them in at the end. But you, yeah.

Huh. So they can control the information.

That's exactly one set of minutes. And if you get sued, it's not, wait, he wrote down something which supports me, but the official notes say something different. Did you manipulate them?

Huh. Interesting. I'm just, I'm thinking as a trial, I was a trial lawyer for 22 years and I'm just thinking about the, from a litigation perspective, what that, what that's all about. Very interesting. So you learn to listen because you can't take notes. You gotta pay attention to what's going on. You gotta retain what's important, toss out what's not important.

And you have to ask questions afterwards.

And you have to be able to ask intelligent questions that are gonna get you the answers that you want. Ever come across a problem where, a situation where people are, people are not telling you what you want to hear, that they're, they are skirmishing around the truth.

It's less skirmishing around the truth than more not telling things, omitting facts which aren't favorable.

And does that happen often?

It's especially with investment and with pitches. You have trying to skirt that, no, the customer hasn't signed yet, we're almost ready with them to sign, and That's, I think, the most common one. We almost have a customer, or we have 3 prospects which are about to sign. Okay, what does about to sign mean?

Exactly.

We have 400 letters of intent. What does that really mean? Yeah, what's a letter of intent?

That's a little different situation though. I can— when you're an investor and people are pitching to you, there's going to be a certain lack of transparency and a certain amount of puffing going on. That's just the nature of the business. But I'm thinking as a board member, when you're sitting there and the executive team is giving you information, I'm curious as to whether or not you're ever in a situation where you feel like this whole story isn't being told to you.

Never where I said they're dishonest or they don't want to tell it. It's often the problem that people think it's obvious. Oh, which is even harder to figure out because they're not skirting around. They think everyone knows it.

And so how do you protect against that?

You have to be brutally honest if you don't understand someone.

Oh, so you have to be able to be willing to say, you said, hold it, wait, I don't get it. You got to explain this to me. Yeah.

And it's, it's funny if you're the guy, the cyber guy on the board, because that if you don't understand it, all the others shouldn't understand it. But it's then so far removed from their knowledge that they say, okay, do I say something or do I just be silent and say, okay, sounds good, great terms to use.

How do you make that? That's a— because cyber is really a big deal. How do you make that judgment call about whether or not to speak up and say, wait a minute, I'm putting my cyber hat on and there, I need to know more?

It's simple. You don't understand it, you ask. It's— there's no judgment call in there. And I know for some points, especially when this goes into the, you said you're a lawyer, I don't have the training that I can challenge a chief legal officer. I'll take the same call then. I don't understand it. Please reformulate it so I, as someone who's not a lawyer, understands what you're saying.

There you go. Good. Yeah, no, I think that's really important to be able to ask people to explain things. And if they can't explain it in ways that the non-professional can understand it, they're not doing it. They're not doing their job.

And then you have to say, okay, let's— can we defer it to a different date? To either I get background material and work myself through it, or where you can work over your presentation again, right? And that's— I think that has happened once where then the outcome was that the guy got a mentor for the next month to, to actually help him make a presentation to someone who's not in the Right. IT business. Exactly.

How do, how do you interact with other board members that may or may not be interested in, for example, when you raising a security issue that you see and the rest of the board members are clueless, they're all CFO types.

It's the same thing. You have to both catch them up that, okay, we have a risk problem here. Explain in, in the language everyone understands. That that's a problem which is not just some IT wizardry, but it's a business problem, right? But you also have to often translate between, okay, what's the IT guy saying versus how does that actually impact us? And it's really hard because you're not supposed to really manage the guy but give like overview of the strategy.

That's right, you're not supposed to manage them.

Yeah. And but It works. It's, but yeah, you have to be mindful of how everyone, what everyone uses as their almost language usage.

So you gotta translate the cybersecurity risk into how is this gonna affect our P&L and our balance sheet?

Yeah. Or, or how does it affect our legal liabilities? Or our legal liabilities, our corporate culture, or, right. And yeah, that has to happen. And if no one else does it, you have to pick it up, or you have to tell them, okay, translated, what does it mean to spend that much money on it? Why should we?

Right.

But you have to say, okay, come back with us next time, or take $100,000 and do an actual study on it.

And how is— and I would imagine that's generally well received by other board members.

Yes, much more than when I say, okay, explain to me that legal term again, or explain to me the financials again, where I—

right, most others have the experience, but they have a certain level of professional expertise that you don't have, and so you've got to learn their language.

Yeah, it's not the basics, but when they get more sophisticated, it gets more— but sometimes there are questions which I don't get, and I don't have to feel like, I don't feel bad about them saying, okay, explain to me. And I have to also admit that sometimes the guys who are really financially or legally sophisticated say, okay, can you explain that to everyone here again? Because I don't think anyone will understand it.

Right. And whoever, chief legal officer or whoever it might be, they're usually okay re-explaining it, right?

It's often not just okay. It's also the almost like an aha moment where, oh, I've never thought about that. People wouldn't understand that. Citing 3 legal cases in my one slide would cause people to think, okay, what are you talking about?

Right. Interesting.

Where do you go from here?

You're going to be, you're going to move into being an investor and board member, and you still look like a pretty young guy. What do you, what holds the future for you?

That's probably for at least the foreseeable future, the position I'm searching out, and maybe do some consulting on the side to keep like the IT skills living, or keep like that connection of translating IT to business people living. But mostly it will be the investment side and the, the board side.

There you go. One more question, Kevin, I'll let you go. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you reveal it to us?

That's an interest. One thing you'd never Guess. Let's give— given that if I— that I'm in my office, it's hard to say. You'd never guess that I'm an avid sailor because there's sailboats all around me.

Are you an avid sailor? Yes. Do you have a boat?

None which I personally sail. I had a couple of boats which— actually, that's a funny story. Bought— I bought the right to a boat just before the pandemic for chartering that out. And then the pandemic hit, and I sold the right of that still unbuilt boat—

unbuilt—

for 4 times the money because someone really wanted a boat during the pandemic.

Wow.

And now that guy has the boat and is looking to sell it.

I'll just— you— I'm a racer, sailboat racer, and my wife sailed across the ocean when she was 12 years old, across the Atlantic from Chicago to the Mediterranean. So I live in a sailing family, and right now we've got a— out in our driveway we have a little Prindle 16 catamaran that we're rebuilding. That's a— Prindle was— and Hobie were partners, and they broke apart back in the day, and Prindle wanted to build a racing catamaran. So we— somebody gave us one, so it's old. So we're going through and changing all the rigging out and changing all the lines, and as soon as it cools down here, we're gonna—

I've done—

see if it works.

During college, Miami— no, not Milano— Miami to Sicily. So crossing the Atlantic in that direction.

You cross—

did you cross the Atlantic?

Yeah.

Yeah, what, a 10, 12-day voyage?

Yeah. And that showed me how important a good leader is because we skirted the edge of a big storm, Atlantic storm, and that worked really well because we had a good captain. But then we had a storm in the Mediterranean with a different captain, and the owner who was on board nearly threw the captain over because he was like panicking.

Didn't— oh wow, crazy. Cool, we're sailors. How fun is that? Kevin, it's been great talking to you. Thank you so much for your time this afternoon.

Thank you for having me.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag Listening with Leaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.