Koch Industries

“Our CIO today, his name's Jared Benson he started, his first interaction with Coke was based striping lines in our parking lot. So no college degree whatsoever, but he found his way into Coke because he demonstrated that, hey, he knows a little bit about data …”

“If Coke were publicly traded, the revenue would put it easily in the top 25 of the Fortune 500.”

“And then we had, ah, 30,003, 300 employees. Now we have more than a 130,000. And ah, in, in 60 countries. And ah, we have ah, increased in value 9000 times over that period.”

“We need to be capability-bounded, not industry-bounded.”

“Reinvesting 90% of profits in new businesses and growth”

“So if we would have just judged it based on, okay, guys, you got three or four years to figure this out, we would have shut down KDT.”

“Probably the most profitable private family-owned business in the world.”

“No, but the main threat we've had is we had stars that wanted to go pop, take us public, and I said it'd be over my dead body”

“And I think our view, we never could have accomplished what we've had. First of all, we never would have built a principle-based framework, and then we never would have been able to pull off this capability bounded versus industry bounded.”

“I mean, that's why we back Cosmos, who is doing, backing people who do AI based on these principles of market-based management, based on these principles of human progress.”

“My father said, you can run this business any way you want. The only thing you need me, my approval on is to sell. That's the way he talked me into coming back after I said I didn't want to, ah, or I wasn't going to.”

“And so we closed that acquisition and within days we found out that we had hundreds of millions of out of the money hog contracts. We didn't even look at the contracts.”

“We are, we put leaders in who were destructively motivated, and in refining, we got a leader, and they were destroying those businesses. And so it didn't almost bankrupt, but it almost wiped out all of Coke's earnings in the late 19 nineties.”

“Instead of operating them all as independent businesses and almost like in silos think about it as a republic of science. We're not a conglomerate. We're an integrated set of capabilities.”

“Yeah, that wouldn't work for us, the stuff we buy.”