From The Rolling Stones and NBN Co to start-up queen
After babysitting Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger’s kids, Kate Cornick cast aside London life and her parents’ divorce to become the brains behind NBN and a champion of Aussie tech.
It was known as Rision, a now defunct human resources technology start-up that changed the life of Kate Cornick.
In 2013 she took over as chief executive of the firm – her first role leading a listed company – after a stint working as deputy chief of staff to then federal communications minister Stephen Conroy, where she was one of the brains behind the National Broadband Network (NBN).
Yet she quit Rision just two years into the role after, by her own admission, making “every mistake under the sun”.
“First of all, I didn’t protect my own position enough from the get go. One of the most critical things for tech founders is making sure you are incentivised to be in the business, yet I had a very small portion of the company,” she recalls.
“Had I structured the company better, I probably would have had more control. When the rubber hit the road, we also had the wrong investors: investors who really were there just to make money. They had no interest in what we were trying to achieve.”
She took out a reverse mortgage on her home just to pay her staff and didn’t get paid herself for nine months.
But what was most galling was the sexist treatment she endured from investors and some within the company.
“I did go to a Collins St brokerage firm and was asked by a young stockbroker, ‘How do we guarantee you won’t get pregnant if I’m going to invest in this company?’
“That sh.t me no end, it was utterly appalling and that still happens to women today … There was all of this really appalling, derogatory, anti-women behaviour that I was dealing with and it was a really, really hard time,” she says, before stressing the majority of the board were “unbelievably supportive” in managing these issues.
Her lowest point came in August 2016 when her mother, Celia, knowing how stressed and depressed her daughter was, invited her to dinner.
“I remember crying so hard over a glass of wine and a margarita pizza,” she says.
But through the tears her mother insisted she write a list of everything she wanted in her next job. She was adamant about one thing: despite the horrors of her Rision experience, she still wanted to work in start-ups.
It was literally the next morning that, coincidentally, she got a call from a headhunter asking her to apply for the chief executive role at a new government entity known as LaunchVic, which was to be Victoria’s lead start-up agency.
She started there in October that year, after enduring what she now jokes was a “terrifying” application interview with then LaunchVic board members Ahmed Fahour and Elana Rubin.
Now, nearly seven years into the role, the 44-year-old Cornick wouldn’t trade her Rision experience for the world.
“One of the things I love about LaunchVic is that we’ve been able to put in place the support that I desperately wished I had at Rision. In hindsight, there were people around that could have helped, but I didn’t know how to get to them. I didn’t even know they existed,” she says.
Victorian start-ups are now worth $91bn, 16 times more than in 2016.
LaunchVic has unlocked more than $500m in private sector capital for early stage start-ups through grants, its investment in angel networks and supporting the Alice Anderson Fund – named after the founder of Australia’s first all-women motor garage in the 1920s – that only invests in businesses run by women.
The latter fund is chaired by former Transurban director Susan Oliver, who also chair’s LaunchVic’s investment committee and has been an important mentor for Cornick.
LaunchVic is chaired by former Aconex founder-turned-venture-capitalist Leigh Jasper.
Another key role of LaunchVic is supporting the Victorian government to showcase the state’s start-up ecosystem and connect international delegates with local start-up founders and investors.
Next week, Melbourne hosts the Global Entrepreneurship Congress – an international forum bringing together more than 4000 delegates of entrepreneurs, investors, ecosystem builders and policymakers to discuss new ways of helping founders start and scale ventures around the world.
It is the first time the event, held last year in Saudi Arabia, has been staged in Australia and LaunchVic and Cornick will play a pivotal hosting role.
But she also knows such forums need to deliver outcomes, most importantly getting more private sector funds into early stage funding for start-ups.
“A lot of the capital being raised in Australia now is later-stage capital,” she says
“If we are going to continue to grow our ecosystem, we have to unlock billions of dollars a year of early stage funding. This is not a call to government, it is actually about how we unlock private investors.”
World rocked by circumstance
Olympic Studios in the tiny district of Barnes in South West London is the place where legends of rock such as The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Queen and Led Zeppelin came to make music. It was also the town where Kate Cornick grew up.
“Our neighbour was the manager of the Rolling Stones at the time so I used to babysit Mick Jagger’s kids at his house,” she says, adding that the band would do regular jam sessions there.
“Mum would always insist on coming to pick me up. I always used to be completely affronted that she didn’t think that I could walk next door. Now I know she just wanted to come and see them.”
The Bee Gees was another famous neighbour in the street.
But Cornick’s life changed forever when she was 14 and her parents went through a nasty divorce and a legal battle that went all the way to the English High Court.
The case known as Cornick v Cornick is now part of British legal folklore because it transformed divorce law in the UK.
“It was just awesome when you were little, watching your parents stoush it out,” their daughter now says sarcastically, but she credits them for shielding her and her siblings from the high stakes involved.
“I was aware of the arguments in the house but I never knew it went to the High Court.”
When the case was eventually resolved in 1994, Celia won a 51 per cent share of the family’s net assets, including a landmark proportionate share of her husband’s superannuation.
Cornick’s father, Roger, went on to chair UK funds management giant Aberdeen Asset Management after working with Perpetual PLC for 20 years.
It was her mother, who ran a number of successful small businesses in catering and events before moving to Australia in 1998, who convinced Cornick to move down under.
Cornick dropped out of a veterinary science degree in London but in Melbourne she completely changed her career path by chance after throwing the university careers guide on the floor one day during a heated argument with her mother about her studies.
It landed on the electrical engineering page, so Cornick declared resolutely: “I am doing that course!
“I found the move to Australia daunting. I had my friends in the UK and I was really big into horses. I was also unbelievably shy,” she recalls.
“I think one of the things about coming over here, being the British girl and doing engineering and being one of the only girls in the classes was that I actually became much more outward facing and much more confident and not nearly as shy.”
She loved university so much that she also studied history and science before undertaking a PhD in optical telecommunications at the University of Melbourne. This resulted in her being seconded to New York for stints working with US telco giant AT&T.
It set her up to play a defining role in the development of the NBN.
Strength of convictions
In 2006 Cornick answered a newspaper job advertisement given to her by chance by her brother-in-law for a senior telecommunications advisory role with then shadow federal telecommunications spokesman Senator Stephen Conroy.
But the process did not start well.
“I actually spelled April wrong in giving the date of my birthday on my CV. So the girl who assessed my application rejected me on the grounds that I couldn’t spell,” she says.
Cornick still managed to snare an interview with Conroy, where she made an unforgettable impression.
“The day before the then minister Helen Coonan had announced a policy on 3G. I felt it was just a really poor articulation of technology and I explained to Stephen that the government was making all these public statements that were factually incorrect,” she says.
“I remember Stephen then left the room and when he returned, offered me the job. He told me later that he went and rang an engineer to check if I was telling the truth!”
While she says Conroy was a tough boss, he taught her to “have a backbone”.
“He was a tough boss to have but a very kind boss. He knew what he wanted in terms of the political outcomes he was trying to achieve. I learned how to operate within that political environment. He gave me the strength to back my own convictions.”
When Conroy became the minister for telecommunications in late 2007, Cornick would regularly accompany him over the next two years to brief then prime minister Kevin Rudd on a radical plan to roll out a fibre-to-the-node (FttN) broadband network in Australia.
By contrast the Coalition was pushing for a wireless network, with upgrades of the ageing ADSL and the rollout of backhaul fibre.
In 2009, Labor abandoned its plans for FttN and proposed a new fibre-to-the-premises (FttP) network to be rolled out by a government-owned NBN Co to 93 per cent of the population. Cornick was one of its key architects.
“I was one that, with my fibre background, really pushed for FttP and made it a real imperative that we had big enough pipes to be able to support the future telco needs of the country,” she says.
“Stephen really got behind that and did amazing work with the industry to get that through government.
“NBN Co, you can love it or hate it. But that policy was seminal in increasing the telecommunications capabilities of this country. If we did not have that, can you imagine what Covid would have been like if we’d been on 3G networks and wireless? The only way we were going to connect to the world was by having superior and world class broadband services.
“I knew that technology was the future and I knew that we had to be able to enable telco access for all Australians.”
Cornick worked as general manager of enterprise and strategy at NBN Co for a year, but was frustrated by the lack of freedom there compared with her time working for Conroy.
It is now one of the things she loves most about leading LaunchVic.
While its sole shareholder is the Treasury of Victoria, the group has been set up as a company under the Corporations Act and so enjoys freedom unseen within other government entities.
“We operate much more akin to a corporate and that allows us to be a lot more nimble,” she says.
“You look at what we’ve done for how much funding we’ve had, we have created a really big impact. I would argue we’ve created a much bigger impact than a lot of very large projects that have cost billions of dollars.”
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