Charles & Chase Koch on How They Quietly Built a $150B Empire
5/12/20261 hr 35 min
(0:00) David Friedberg welcomes Charles & Chase Koch
(1:04) Koch Inc. Overview: Scale, Business Lines & History
(2:21) Building the Business: Early Days & Charles Koch Joins (1961)
(11:31) Failures, Creative Destruction & Learning from Mistakes
(19:22) Culture & Principle-Based Management
(33:53) Georgia-Pacific Acquisition & Culture Transformation
(56:17) Stand Together: Education Reform & Social Change
(1:12:37) AI, Economic Challenges & the Future of Capitalism
Thanks to our partner Axon.ai for making this possible.
Axon.ai — AppLovin's AI advertising platform reaches over a billion daily active users across mobile games. Full-screen video ads with a 35-second median watch time. Advertisers are profitably spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day and advertiser access is still in closed beta. The window is open at https://axon.ai/allin
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Showing 10 of 12Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDavid Friedberg· Host0:00
What an honor to be here. Thank you for hosting us, Forbes, and welcome. This will be put out as the All In interview, so I'm really excited to share this conversation with everyone on the world, on the internet, and to get some time with Charles Koch, Chase Koch. Chase and I have known each other since 2013- Yep ... when we overlapped in the agriculture industry, got to know each other. We've been business partners, and Charles and I have gotten to know each other a few times over the years, but I'm really excited for this conversation tonight. So Charles, thank you for being here.
Charles Koch· Guest0:31
Thanks for having us.
David Friedberg· Host0:32
It's an honor. I'm going all in. Every few years, a new ad channel opens before the market catches on. That's axon.ai right now. The AI ad platform behind one of the biggest runs in tech with access to over a billion daily active users. Full-screen video ads in mobile games watched for a median of 35 seconds. Businesses are profitably spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day on it, and most advertisers don't even know it exists yet. The window is open at axon.ai/allin. I'm going all in. In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs and even mature company CEOs always like to learn about the story of other businesses and the success of those businesses, and I've always felt like Koch Industries was that untold story. Uh, probably the most profitable private family-owned business in the world, maybe I'm off on a, a couple points, but certainly up there. And one of the most impressive business stories because of the evolution of the business, which I'm hopeful we can hear a little bit