Data analytics have been embedded in the Koch DNA for decades, Leonard said. “I’m not at all surprised that they’re making bigger moves into that space. It builds on their expertise.”
Trying to reposition a huge industrial conglomerate around digital technology doesn’t always have a happy ending.
General Electric Co. “made this big effort and got over its ski tips to make itself the platform for industrial digital analytics, and it got way more expensive more quickly” than former CEO Jeff Immelt anticipated, said William Blair’s Heymann.
Byron Trott, the founder of merchant bank BDT Capital Partners, who has worked with Koch for more than 25 years and advised on several acquisitions, doesn’t see it running into the same problems. GE faced short-term pressures that come with being publicly traded, he said, while “Koch is doing this because they are really, really good at thinking long term.”
Chase Koch’s group has made some of the more ambitious bets outside of Koch’s traditional areas of expertise, like investing in InSightec Ltd., a manufacturer of ultrasound-based surgical tools that can eliminate the need for incisions. He’s the only member of the family from the next generation that works at the company. His sister Elizabeth Koch runs a publishing house, Catapult Books, and David’s children are much younger.
Still, Chase took a somewhat unconventional path.
After graduating from Texas A&M, he spent several years in Austin playing in a band covering Led Zeppelin, Phish and the Grateful Dead, and trying to find his way in the city’s tech startup scene. While he previously held summer jobs at Koch, including his first at a cattle ranch at age 15, he spent the years after graduation avoiding his father’s shadow.
“I was too proud to tap into the Koch network,” he told the Wichita Rotarians.
Although he was schooled in his family’s politics from a young age—he recalls Saturdays as a 6-year-old listening to books on tape by Milton Friedman—it’s unclear whether he shares the political philosophy of his father and uncle, who ran for vice president as the Libertarian Party nominee in 1980.
“I start with the idea that to learn and grow, you’ve got to be open to other people’s ideas,” Chase Koch told Politico last year. Politics, while important, is “not at all what I’m passionate about.”