Inside CVC: Trust as Currency. Congruency as Strategy. A Conversation with SGNL’s Jen Randle

In this episode of Inside CVC, Steve and Philipp sit down with Jen Randle, co-founder of SGNL, a strategic advisory and content firm known for helping leaders communicate with clarity, coherence, and purpose. Jen has spent her career advising executives, founders, and institutions on how to build trust by aligning what they say with what they do. Her work at SGNL focuses on narrative clarity, strategic storytelling, and the deeper system dynamics that shape leadership and culture.

Jen introduces a simple but powerful idea. Congruency is the new credibility. When the inside matches the outside, trust grows. When it doesn’t, trust erodes. And that erosion shows up everywhere including valuation, culture, M&A integration, AI adoption, ESG strategy, customer loyalty, and even a company’s license to operate.

Listeners will hear:
 • Why trust should be treated like an asset on the balance sheet
 • How congruency breaks and what it costs
 • Why greenwashing is a failure of alignment rather than messaging
 • How ESG becomes stewardship when leaders think long term
 • Why M&A deals collapse when trust mapping is ignored
 • How innovators earn public trust in AI, robotics, and new industrial technologies
 • What leaders can ask themselves right now to find where trust is fracturing

This is a conversation for anyone building innovation portfolios, running CVC programs, merging cultures, navigating public scrutiny, or operating in markets where the permission to move fast must be earned daily.

Transcript

Steve: 0:06

Welcome to Inside CVC, the podcast that brings together leaders in innovation and capital investment to explore the trend shaping the business of corporate venture capital. I'm your host, Steve Schmidt, and together with Philip Willardman, we're speaking to corporate investors, entrepreneurs, and ecosystem builders driving the future of innovation. InsideCVC is brought to you by UPath Advisors, helping corporations and startups unlock sustainable growth through strategic partnerships. To learn more, visit upath.com. That's the letter u hyphenpath.com. And to catch up on all of our episodes, search InsideCVC on your favorite podcast platform or visit uPath.com forward slash podcast. Today we're joined by Jen Randall, co-founder of Signal, a firm that helps leaders build clarity, coherence, and trustworthy communication inside their organizations. Jen's work centers on the idea that congruency is the new credibility. When leaders say one thing and do another, trust fractures. When words and actions align, trust becomes a powerful form of capital that shapes culture, performance, and even valuation. In our conversation, Jen connects trust to ESG, sustainability, AI, MA integration, and how companies earn their license to operate. She explains why stewardship is a more productive frame than sustainability, and how greenwashing happens when alignment breaks, and what leaders must confront before misalignment shows up on the front pages of the newspaper. It's insightful, it's direct, and it gives leaders a practical lens for understanding trust as a strategic advantage rather than a soft concept. Here's our conversation with Jen Randall. Jen, thanks so much for joining us today on Inside CVC. How are you? I'm doing well. It's wonderful to be here with you guys. Well, thank you for joining us. Really great conversation we've got on tap. So why don't we why don't we hop in? In your philosophy, you talk a lot about congruency being the new credibility. Why don't we start today's conversation? Can you describe what that means for our audience?

Jen: 2:26

Sure. So really it's congruency is part of a broader sort of system that we think about at Signal. So it's congruency is the condition we want. It's we want to show up in this life, in our business, congruent with who we say we are. We the inside matches the outside, let's say. So when we have congruency, then it creates the sort of soil or the environment for trust to grow. And so when we think about how we build congruency, it's really about thinking about the third piece, which is alignment. So it's ensuring that the work we do, whether it's individual work as ourselves, work in our communities, in our teams, work in institutions, that there's coherence in all the different pieces. They all work together coherently. And that really then fosters the congruence that we want. But really ultimately, what we believe we trade in all the time, whether consciously or not, is trust. And so that's what we really want to focus on as the barometer for if there's congruency, if there's alignment, is how much trust is being built, or is trust being eroded.

Steve: 3:32

Let's apply that notion of trust to sustainability, to ESG. Certainly a lot of conversation in that space, a lot of money flowing into that space. But there is an entire group of society who doesn't have a lot of trust in these sustainable technology. Call it greenwashing and so forth. So when you think about this notion of trust of driving innovation, particularly in sustainability and in ESG, how do we get past that?

Jen: 4:03

First of all, I think ESG, sustainability, they've been highly politicized. Like they're just they're charged in this moment in a lot of ways that a lot of our vernacular and terminology has been politicized. So I think we like to think of this as stewardship versus whether it's sustainability, ESNG, really about holding and maintaining stewardship. And what's our responsibility in a stewardship sort of framework? It's not about extraction, it's about future impact. It's understanding that you are taking the long game versus looking for short-term, short-term returns or short-term gains or short-term value. And so, therefore, if you're taking stewardship, it actually gets directly to congruence or incongruence, right? Because are you actually doing something that is going to protect and ensure and enshrine? Um, are you taking longer-term bets and investments, or are you doing something in the short term that means that you got the high ROI, you're playing on shareholder value, you're trying to do these things that actually just create sort of the optics versus the impact that you want to say or that you've committed to doing. So that's where that greenwashing comes in.

Philipp: 5:11

Jen, thank you so much for being on the show. It's uh it's a great pleasure. What is at stake when corporations treat diversity, inclusion, ESG as a pure performance theater rather than really congruent work?

Jen: 5:25

I mean, it fundamentally is trust. So I think one of the things that I hope comes through this conversation is an underlying hypothesis, thesis. I don't know where we're at yet in the journey with this topic, but that trust is currency. So it isn't something that's a nice to have, it isn't something that's a feel-good, it is actually something that can be a part of the balance sheet in the same way that we think of other things. Um, and so when trust is fractured, you lose value. You lose credibility with your customers, you lose credibility with your shareholders, your board, you lose credibility with your employees, all that translates to value. So when we think of you know, DEI, ESG, all of the acronyms, um, all the letters as performance theater versus actually driving and creating value, we relegate it to the sort of side and don't give it the prominence that it needs. And then therefore, we don't see these fractures that slowly come and slowly start to build erosion and decrease the value and undermine sort of the overall performance.

Philipp: 6:27

What would it look like if you if you would measure trust capital? And how will that change when you think about innovation, ventures, acquisitions, and so on and so forth?

Jen: 6:39

Thinking about trust being on the balance sheet, I mean, I think it's similarly like it could be considered an asset class. So if you are a board, you should measure it, you should monitor it, you should report it, you should have that expectation of your C-suite of your business. You can actually look at the trust delta, you can look across your partners, external partners, you can look across your employees, you can look across your customers and understand where lags are happening in trust and start to actually hold and incentivize, hold accountable and incentivize your leaders to actually be reporting on this. Because if we're making decisions, if we enter this market and we will we build trust or will trust erode.

Steve: 7:14

I'm curious what happens when congruency fails? What's the impact on the balance sheet?

Jen: 7:20

What happened with open AI to me is such a great example of what can happen, right, when congruency fails or could fail. So when they kicked Sam Altman out, he returned not because it felt good, he returned because 95% of the employees at OpenAI wrote an open letter that said, if you don't reinstate him, we walk. And the reason we walk is because he represents, whether we agree with this or not, the embodiment of our purpose. He represents what we've signed up to do in this lifetime and in this world, the thing that we think we're here to make a difference in. And if he goes, that means this company no longer represents that. So right off the bat, that's congruency. And if they left, I mean, how much talent are we talking about in terms of value? So now the flip side, you can see and you can actually categorize or or put a number to their value because you have Zuckerberg at Meta going in and offering hundreds of millions of dollars and signing bonuses to open AI employees. And now they in turn said, no. Why? Not because the money wasn't right, but because we don't believe Meta represents what we are signing up to do. Their values, who they are, are incongruent with ours and what we're trying to do here at OpenAI. So now again, this is all a game of congruency. But at the end of the day, you can absolutely assess the value of that talent and the go-to-market implications if that talent were to leave and no longer be at OpenAI but switch to Meta or just leave and walk from the company, period.

Philipp: 9:02

I mean, the the examples you bring resonate. I've been sitting at a lot of meetings where we look at talent data, but I never really had people, especially from HR, saying, Oh, we have a trust issue, or in executive meetings where somebody would really sometimes push the issues. Everybody tends to be a bit careful. How do you create that antenna system? How who is that person who would pull all these different threads together and say, hey, you know what? We are quite happy with maybe how this and this indicators improve on the talent side, but this is going down, and this may actually be correlating with something on the supplier side and something on the regulatory side. Who is that person? Who is kind of pulling this insights together?

Jen: 9:44

Let's go back to DEI as an example for a second to answer your question. Uh before we ended up in this situation we're in now with a highly politicized sort of environment around DEI that we find ourselves in. A few friends of myself had conversations quite a few years ago about the fact that DEI was going to fail. It was no surprise. And for me personally, what I witnessed happening in the work I was doing, and you know, a lot of people were wanting to pull me into like that space. And I was like, I am not a DEI uh executive or leader. I appreciate those that do the work. But what I saw happening was when it became about representation and mix, which again, those are important. But when it became about that, and then it became dashboards and numbers and percentages of women, men, people of color, not, et cetera, it became relegated to HR. So now it's siloed off. And the problem that I had was that DEI was never centered in the conversation the way that I thought it should have been, which was diversity is a driver of value. And so things that drive value are going to be paid attention to, and things that cost will be considered cost centered. We never talked about it from a value creation perspective. It was a feel-good thing. We should feel good. And I shouldn't actually have to make a case for why value is created through diversity. I think that was an error because when we didn't talk about it from a value creation perspective, it took all of the C-suite off the hook. No one had to actually define for their business how diversity was going to play a role in creating value for their business. So if I'm in product or if I'm in engineering or if I'm in supply chain, I never had to develop objectives, KPIs that said, here's how I'm actually going to create value through diversity. So back to your question, there is no one person that needs to be responsible for trust. Trust needs to be the responsibility across the C-suite.

Steve: 11:50

In the world of MA and Venture and bringing two companies together, how is difficult it is to build that trust in congruency when you're actually bringing two cultures of organizations together?

Jen: 12:01

Whether you're getting a merger, an acquisition, but let's say just a darling is being sort of viewed and seen by another entity and saying, like, wow, they're a darling. If we could get them to join us or if we could acquire them, it would be great. A lot of times, what makes a darling a darling is the fact that they haven't actually considered this thoughtfully or intentionally, but they have a lot of trust. They have done something really special in their corner of the world that has set them apart from everybody else. And it's in market, it's with their employees, it is all the way around, and now they are a darling. But they probably haven't thought about it in this way. So now when you infuse capital into this darling's little world, that you put pressure, you create pressure. And what happens under pressure, you have to move fast, you have to hire a bunch of people, you got to start ramping up production, you got to do all of these things, you haven't codified what makes you a trustworthy entity. And so your trust will be fractured immediately. So the same thing with MA, you have two darlings that are coming together and we believe will be the most magnificent darling ever. You probably haven't thought about what makes you uniquely you and really special and what needs to be protected and what can actually be combined. Because if we lose this, if we fracture in any way, we undermine the value we've sold to one another around why we should do this deal. And so time needs to be spent to map the trust on all the entities and understand where we can actually come together and create force major, big force, or where we actually, if we try to come together, it will undermine our efforts. My favorite example in nature is a murmuration. The things that these murmurations are able to do, it's just phenomenal. And you're like, how can thousands of little birds be in such flow with one another? And the reality is that they only focus on their immediate seven. Every immediate seven focuses on their immediate seven, and then the circles overlap and overlap and overlap, and you become. And if one of the seven becomes weak, it breaks off and the murmuration continues. And then this is like a sad little flock over here. And sometimes they come back in, but sometimes they don't, and the murmuration goes. And so the opportunity, as we think about like all different companies coming together, is like there's going to be the overlap. So we find where we naturally can connect, but we still have to honor the rest of our circle that doesn't overlap and protect and invest and make sure that we're maintaining trust with those other six, let's say. And then we can overlap and join and flow in flock in memories together. The problem is sometimes with MA or with these acquisitions, you want to like just smash them together and combine them and sort of say, now we're one entity, we are together, versus honoring that there's there's uniqueness and separateness that needs to be nurtured, protected, and grown in order to still make the thing work collectively.

Philipp: 15:11

Jen, closing us out slowly, I think there's one one question I'd love to hear your thoughts on. We talk about you talked about trust a lot today. We talked about AI, then there's topics like robotics, humid robots, which a lot of people talk about in the Bay Area and in the industrial sector, even in healthcare, some of these technologies and innovations which are truly changing the way we do things, can do things, how societies may work together? How can the leaders behind some of these innovations, some of them are startups, others are like already billion-dollar ventures, some are coming from big corporations, how can they really help the societies to understand how this will work, how how it will work in a trusted environment? And really, how can they earn the license to operate?

Jen: 16:08

I love that you ended on the license. I mean, a license to operate isn't permanent, it's earned daily. I don't think that we talk about tech. I mean, here I live in the Bay Area, we talk about tech constantly. Tech doesn't have a problem with trust. I think institutions have a problem. Um, and so the institutions haven't handled uh their permission to operate with care. And they haven't actually ensured that they have nurtured and cultivated the trust necessary to continue to operate. And so they haven't shown congruency. When things are happening, the more that you can be transparent, the more that you can ensure that you're operating from an aligned place, that what you're saying actually matches with what you're doing, and you talk about that, the more permission you will have to operate as a company. And when fractures happen, when missteps happen, you have to confront them head on. You can't sweep them under the rug, you can't bypass them or act as though they're not a big deal because you're on the edge of whatever it is you're doing. You're leading the society into new spaces and new places. So every step that people take is tenuous. I talk about with my clients like our job is to get people to not only join us on the path, but stay on the path because the journey is going to be arduous. So we need people to continue to go down that journey with us. And the only way they're going to do that is if they trust us and they know that like it might be hard. We may have setbacks, we're in this together, we're communicating those things. All of that is necessary in this. You can't go so quickly that you just hope that the technology will speak for itself, the innovation will speak for itself, the good you're trying to do will just be evident or clear and speak for itself. It's not the way it works, it's not how trust is built.

Philipp: 17:56

If you're sitting in front of CXOs, what would be one provocation you would make to them to kind of like get them off their shoes and act more?

Jen: 18:04

Well, I think if it were around sustainability, it's actually are you operating as a steward? A steward of future impact, or are you actually just extracting for short-term gain? What which one is it that you're doing? And actually being forced to answer on that binary. But I actually think for all leaders, it's really like asking yourself where trust is fracturing right now. Do you have the courage to name it? And do you have the courage to name it before it shows up on the front page of a newspaper? Because I've seen that time and time again.

Steve: 18:38

Jen, thank you very much for joining us on the show. Covered a lot of grammar. Very, very good conversation around trust and concurrency. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Inside CVC. If you enjoyed today's conversation, you can find all of our episodes on your favorite podcast platform or online at upath.com forward slash podcast. Inside CVC is brought to you by UPath Advisors. To learn more, visit UPath.com. That's the letter UH.com. As always, thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time.