Chase Koch: disagreement

Transcript context

…Some basic questions about Koch Industries and also Koch Disruptive Technologies. At this point, roughly what percentage of the business is still energy-related? I’m glad you asked that question because it’s a misperception. I think part of that is because Koch is private. We’ve always been private, and we plan to stay private. Koch is not an old industrial company anymore. We’re a tech company. We’ve invested, over the last, I would say, close to 10 years, $50 billion in tech. That’s through companies like Infor, which is ERP software that we acquired over time that brought on more than 30,000 software engineers to help the rest of Koch really think about technology through a different lens. Molex was also a game-changer for us. Molex makes connectors, whether it’s your iPhone, medical devices, what lights up this room, data centers. I think that was 2013 that we acquired Molex. That was basically getting us into this IoT world where everything was starting to be connected. You could create so much more value if you could get data off machines, and products, and plants, and processes. When we acquired that, it transformed our knowledge around what you could do with data, but you need the hardware to make that work too. The first thing I would say is that Koch’s a tech company now. For those, even old industrial companies that aren’t transforming themselves with technology, they’re going to be dinosaurs really quick. That’s the principle of creative destruction from Joseph Schumpeter. We believe it. We live it. It’s not perfect, but we try to inspire that principle in all 130,000 employees in 60 countries. Creatively destroy what has made us successful in the past and make it better every day, whether it’s your individual job and what you focus on or experimenting with new technologies. Back to your question on energy, 4 percent of the overall capital consumed at Koch is in refining, which is basically where my grandfather started the company. I think that surprises a lot of people because I think a lot of people are still stuck in this, “Well, you’re this energy company. ” No, we’re not. We touch the majority of the economy now, and we’re in everything from forest products, consumer products, software, as I described, glass manufacturing, to energy and fertilizers as well. What have you learned from Marc Andreessen, speaking of partnerships?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.