much enjoyed spending time.
On the tennis court, Chase didn’t have to talk or explain himself. He only had to face his opponent. On a trading desk, something similar happened. Here, the market rendered a clear-cut verdict on whether Chase had made a good or a bad decision. The market didn’t care about Chase Koch’s last name. It only cared about what he did. Chase didn’t have to worry if anyone was pulling strings for him. The market numbers were clear and inarguable.
“That was the first time . . . my blood started to move in my body,” Chase recalled with a laugh. “You know what I mean? I got really excited about something. Because I liked that feedback of trading—the market feedback—and just the energy on the trading floor.”
Chase got a view of the trading operations that even most traders never got to see. He spent weeks shadowing Brad Hall, the CFO of Koch Supply & Trading, who gave Chase Koch a detailed overview of Koch’s entire trading group. Hall taught Chase about the intricate accounting and tax systems that supported Koch’s trading operations and gave Chase a view into forging large energy deals with Arab princes in the Persian Gulf, executives of Asian oil refineries, and CEOs of American companies like United Airlines.
It was clear to Hall and other leaders that Chase Koch was being groomed for a senior leadership position in the company. Chase worked like he wanted to earn it. “He was just full of questions and wanting to understand. He was the opposite of just going through the motions,” Hall recalled.
Chase only sat on the trading desk in Houston for about a year before he was rotated back to Wichita to work on the Koch Equity Development team. Around this time, in 2006, Chase started feeling restless. His rotation through different jobs at Koch gave him a perspective on the company that very few people could attain. But he felt that his education was wide and shallow. He hadn’t mastered anything.
The chance to settle down and master one part of Koch’s business came when a job opened up in Koch Fertilizer. Steve Packebush was still president of Koch Fertilizer, and he offered Chase a job that put Chase in the middle rungs of the division’s hierarchy. Chase became a regional salesman, traveling around the northern central United States and selling fertilizer to farmer co-ops.
Early in his tenure, Chase Koch tagged along with a more senior salesman on a call to a customer in Iowa. The customer was irate about an earlier deal and complained for a long time before he even noticed that Chase was in the room.
“Finally he looks at me, and he’s like, ‘And who are you?’ I was like, ‘Well, my name is Chase,’ ” Chase recalled.
“And he goes, ‘You don’t know shit about fertilizer!’ ” Chase said.
Chase replied“You’re right, sir. But I’m hoping you can help me with that.”
* * *
Chase grinded it out as a salesman and learned about the nitrogen fertilizer business in an up-close and granular way. Then he shifted to the part of the business that he loved the most: he joined the small group that traded fertilizer for Koch and was given a small portfolio to trade a nitrogen-based product called UAN fertilizer.II His trading record was successful enough that he was given a larger and larger portfolio. He estimated that he was eventually trading roughly half of the entire trading book.
This was a time when Chase’s career accelerated, based solely on the money he was earning in the markets. No one could accuse him of getting ahead on his name alone, and coworkers said that Chase seemed happy.
Wes Osbourn, who traded oil in Koch’s Wichita office, arrived at work early. But he never seemed to arrive early enough to beat Chase Koch in the door. No matter how early Osbourn arrived, Chase Koch’s car was always already parked in the lot.
One evening, when a group of traders went out to dinner, they invited Chase Koch to come alone. Osbourn thought this was a mistake. He didn’t want to hang out with the CEO’s son.
“I was like, ‘Ugh. I don’t want to go to dinner with this guy because he’s going to be so arrogant. I’m not going to be able to take it,’ ” Osbourn said. As it happened, Chase Koch arrived at Osbourn’s house early, and the two of them sat around talking before dinner. Osbourn was shocked. Chase Koch was actually a nice guy, and he seemed