Matt Kunkel of LogicGate: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Became A Founder
An Interview With Doug Noll
As part of our interview series called “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Became A Founder”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Matt Kunkel.
Matt Kunkel is the CEO and Co-Founder of LogicGate, a leading provider of holistic governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) solutions. Before LogicGate, he spent over a decade in the management consulting space building custom technology solutions to run regulatory, risk, and compliance programs for Fortune 100 companies. Matt is recognized as a leader in the GRC/IRM space, and regularly speaks and consults on risk compliance, regulatory and security topics.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
It was a long and winding road. I’ll put it this way — I definitely didn’t go to college telling myself, “I want to be a GRC professional.” In fact, I didn’t even go to college with software or technology in mind — I was a finance and economics major. The truth is that from the time I was five years old, I knew I wanted to do something in business. I remember watching Wall Street (which I was way too young for, by the way) and telling my grandpa that I wanted to buy and sell companies when I grew up.
When I graduated from college, I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do — so I got into consulting. I figured that work would let me test drive a lot of different businesses in a relatively short time, and I was right — but I ultimately fell into the custom application development space more or less accidentally. A lot of what I was doing in my consulting work was developing applications to help businesses meet very specific compliance needs. Eventually, I got tired of the consulting hustle (more to the point, I got tired of spending five days a week on planes) and realized I could turn that experience into a business of my own. I was lucky enough to connect with a few great entrepreneurs, and the rest is history.
