How Chase Koch is Rewiring Philanthropy and Policy Through Culture

Oh, I'm like, you know, so Dan Gilbert, I listened to him and how proud he is of Detroit and the things he's done for this community. I feel the same about Wichita. Born and raised in the Midwest, absolutely love the people, salt of the earth, grit and entrepreneurial spirit, humility, integrity. That's why I've lived in a lot of different places, but I've always gone back to Wichita because I yearn for that. I like going into big cities and having fun with sports and music, but there's something about your hometown and the community you've built there. I'm very proud to be from there. I love being kind of a Midwestern hayseed, as my mom likes to call it. So, from Wichita. Maybe an interesting way to introduce myself is my first job with Koch. I grew up playing tennis. My parents always wanted us to find our gifts, whether in academics or sports. Elizabeth was a long-distance track runner, very successful AAU runner, and my thing was tennis. I sucked at all the other sports. They put a tennis racket in my hand and I became a decent tennis player, nationally ranked in my teenage years. But by the time I was 15, I got burned out. I had a later curfew, a driver's license, and started partying. I wanted nothing to do with tennis. I remember literally throwing tennis matches in the regionals so I wouldn't make nationals so I could go home and party with my friends. I tanked one match in the quarters, and my mom was in tears because she spent her whole summer taking me to events. She said we'd have to talk to your father about this. I got home and he said, 'You either give 100% on the tennis court or you're going to get a job. You're not going to be a country club rich kid bum doing nothing in the summer.' I said, 'I hate tennis. I'm done. Get me a job.' What I didn't know is the next morning all my stuff would be packed and an old beater pickup truck would be waiting for me in the driveway to ship me off to a cattle feed yard to work. So tennis was sounding pretty good at that point. I joke about that experience. I was 15. I lived with the feed yard manager in a single wide trailer in a trailer park. We went to work at 5:00 a.m. and left at 8:00 p.m., 7 days a week. I was so bitter the first two weeks. But once I thought, 'I might as well have a good attitude, I'm here the whole summer,' I started working with amazing people from all different backgrounds. We shoveled cow manure, dug post holes, found sick cattle and nursed them back. That was the first time I felt what my grandfather told my dad: the glorious feeling of accomplishment. I understood the value of a dollar and learned how to work with people from different backgrounds. I came out of that summer proud of myself for the first time. My tennis accomplishments were meaningless compared to that feeling of creating value and working with a team. I always say my dad, by punishing me when I said I just wanted to party with my friends, gave me the greatest gift by shipping me away. That was not the ideal first job at Koch, shoveling cow manure, but it transformed my life and set up the rest of my life.

Yeah, music is a different story. Shout out to my sister on this. I didn't know I had this insane deep passion for music until I was 11 or 12 years old. She was blaring Pink Floyd's The Wall from her room, and the guitar solo of David Gilmour playing 'Comfortably Numb' hit me in a way that changed my life. I knew music was going to be a big part of my life. After the feed yard experience, one of my friends, Oskia, was an audiophile who knew how to build boom boxes and car stereos. My first job was transforming my parents' garage into a boom box manufacturing joint. Oskia taught me how to do that. All our friends would come in and we customized their cars. This was when hip-hop was taking off. I really got my hands dirty in music, learning about bass, high-end, mid-range, and the power of music. I grew up on Too Short, NWA, Tupac, Snoop. That transformed my life. In college, I got into the jam band world and went from gangster rap to the Grateful Dead. I became a Deadhead and followed all the jam bands around, didn't go to class much. That's when I learned the power of community. The people who follow these bands around and the community built in the lots showed me the power of music to unify people. The main insight that has informed what I do now is the power of music to unify people. Sports unify people, but it's still divisive, one team versus the other. With music, everyone is there for that one DJ or band, and everyone is on the same wavelength. I have a personal belief that music is the real Trojan horse to solving a lot of problems in the world.

Yeah, no, that's great. Before I get into Koch, the pillars of my life now are business, so Koch Inc., which I'll talk about, and I spend about two-thirds of my time on that. Social change, which is Stand Together, where you and I connected. That's all of our philanthropic efforts. And the third pillar is music. So I'm this strange mix of technology and business with social change and music.

Yeah, there you go. So Koch. I described my first job. I started working at Koch when I was 15. I didn't think I wanted to come back to the business after working every summer from age 15 through junior year of college. I moved to Austin, Texas for the music. I went to school at Texas A&M and moved to Austin because that's where the energy was. I had a good job, but I was really there to enjoy music. Then I realized I had an incredible opportunity to work with my dad and really learn the business from the inner workings. But that had to be on my terms. My father never said I needed to come back. It was the pressure I put on myself. I came back after about three or four years after college, on my own terms, in 2003. I've had a lot of jobs at Koch. I spent a decade in our fertilizer business, in agriculture. We make nitrogen, trade phosphate, potash, all the key nutrients for farmers. I learned that business from being a salesperson to a supply chain leader to a trader. Ultimately, they threw me the keys to run the business and said I should be CEO in 2014. What a great opportunity. I'd earned my way, learned the capabilities, and now I got the big job.

Yeah, so fertilizer is one of 11 different operating platforms that Koch has. We stretch across the majority of the economy. Agriculture is one of those areas. I wanted to learn from the ground up and prove myself. I got that job, and long story short, I was in it for 9 months and I walked into my boss's office and fired myself. I said, 'This is not for me.' I learned that I'm a builder, not an operator. I was miserable. This business operates in 50 countries, with 4,000 employees, and was the third largest profit driver of Koch. It's a huge company. I didn't have the leadership skills to understand what leadership and empowerment meant. I wanted to chase the innovation stuff, not make sure the plants were running every day. I was interested in what's next to disrupt this business. This idea of creative destruction, Joseph Schumpeter's model of always disrupting yourself from within, has been pumped through my blood since I was a kid. My dad taught me that. It's core to our vision at Koch to constantly disrupt yourself. I wanted to do disruptive stuff. So I fired myself from the CEO job and said I want to build companies that will disrupt our golden goose, because if we don't, someone else will and our business will be a dinosaur. I went from a business making a huge amount of money to one losing $20 million a year. Everyone asked what the hell I was doing. I was so much happier. I don't want to lose money forever, but this is where the future is. I want to work on the future. We started buying companies and putting them together around disruptive fertilizers. But then it became an operating job again, and I'm not good at that. So I had the insight to say Koch operates across the majority of the economy, from Georgia-Pacific wood products to energy, solar, software like Infor, glass manufacturing, and agriculture. We have a laboratory that can help tech founders building the next disruptive thing. We can help them as a customer, subject matter expert, or supplier. If we create a Koch as a laboratory model for founders, we need to build a venture capital arm that fuses them with capital and helps them in a way no other company can. A software company can sell to 12 companies here in one shot. We'll create the white glove treatment. Over the last seven years, we've established a strong brand in technology, investing in everything from cybersecurity to life sciences, medical devices, semiconductors, and AI. Now, what I'm doing is taking that and building again. I saw an opportunity nine months ago. There's about $8 trillion of capital in private equity looking for liquidity. People want their money back to redeploy. I see that as an opportunity to focus on family-owned businesses. We're a private family-owned company. I know the problems families experience with succession planning, different points of view on the board, or private equity on their cap stack thinking short-term while the family thinks long-term. I'm focused on working with families that have long multigenerational businesses, providing a capital solution, whether we buy 20% of your company or you want to sell. We might be a good home based on culture and long-term private ownership. That's about two-thirds of my time now, based on all those learnings and failures.