Speaker

Chase Koch

Chase Koch

Lead guitarist of the band 2ŁØT, a leader within Koch Disruptive Technologies and the foundation Stand Together, and co-author with his father, Charles Koch, of Becoming a Principle-Driven Leader: 41 Principles to Build an Enduring Business.

Koch grew up inside Koch Industries’ distinctive management philosophy, raised on Sunday philosophy lessons built around recorded lectures by Hayek, Milton Friedman, and other economists and philosophers. He spent a decade running Koch’s international fertiliser business before founding Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT) in 2017 to build the company’s technology and venture-investing capability, having judged that operating an existing large business was not his comparative advantage relative to sourcing and betting on new technology. He also founded Stand Together Music, a platform connecting musicians and creators to Stand Together’s work on criminal justice reform, addiction recovery, and education — grown out of a pandemic-era Zoom series, ‘Stand Together Jam Together’. He is son of Charles Koch and nephew of the late David Koch (Koch Industries co-owner, d. 2019) [?].

Core positions

  • Treats comparative advantage as a tool for individual self-knowledge as much as economics: identifying one’s own gift relative to a team, and not pretending to a strength one lacks. He locates his own comparative advantage in working with people, distinct from his father’s in abstract concepts.
  • Frames entropy — the physical principle behind his band’s name, 2ŁØT (the second law of thermodynamics) — as an organising metaphor for both personal loss and organisational decline, treating Schumpeterian creative destruction as the discipline that keeps a business from becoming, in his words, ‘a dinosaur’.
  • Favours a bottom-up talent model over credential-based hiring: recruiting people who are ‘contribution motivated’ rather than ‘deficiency motivated’, illustrated by Koch’s CIO, who joined with no college degree.
  • Sees culture — particularly music — as an underused lever for social change, built on a three-part test for durable partnerships: aligned vision, aligned values, and complementary capabilities.
  • An active personal user of AI, having built a five-part ‘operating system’ with Claude to manage his roles across Koch and Stand Together, taught to him initially by his 14-year-old son.

In the wiki