Episode 53 - Defining Disruptive Technology with Jason Illian
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We can confidently say that today’s guest is the first person we’ve had on the show who was also a part of The Bachelorette. That’s right. Before Jason Illian was pioneering disruptive technologies, he spent time sharing a house with 24 other guys trying to woo one girl’s heart.
He didn’t make it very far in the show (something he and his current wife are both grateful for!), but he did take that platform and use it for something else—namely, sharing his faith. He has written a book, started a Christian version of YouTube, but is here today to talk to us about Koch Disruptive Technologies, where he is looking for emerging high-growth technologies across a range of industries that are poised to be a benefit to society.
Episode Transcript
Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.
Jason Illian: Listen, I grew up in Nebraska, and it used to be it just jumped on your tractor and now the tractor drives itself right now. The soil is monitoring itself. And now we're using next generation technology to fertilize it and keep track of it and measure it. And so technology and breakthroughs are happening everywhere. And we believe as part of it is we want to be part of that. Doesn't matter if you're in Silicon Valley, if you're in Israel or if you're in Cincinnati. You know, we want to back those best entrepreneurs and learn from them, be a true partner.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast, this is the podcast for you as you endeavor to understand what's a community of believers talking about, thinking about what's going on as people come to understand how they might stored the wealth that God has entrusted them with. And every week we talk to somebody else that has a new perspective, a different story about how God is using them. And the hope, of course, is that you'll come away from this time understanding and knowing God a little bit more fully by talking to somebody else that shares your faith and is intentional understanding how to bring faith into the investment world as you are and that you'll just be encouraged by the broader community of people that are looking at this space. And we've got a great guest today. We've got Jason Elián, who's got such a really, really cool background that I hope that he'll share with us, but then also great perspectives and experience and what he does right now as he allocates capital and is driven by his faith as he does so. So, Jason, welcome to the program.
Jason Illian: Hey, thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this.
Henry Kaestner: So with every guest, we like to understand a bit of their background, who they are. A quick autobiographical sketch. I know enough about your background to think that this rather than just kind of just doing a quick flyover of 90 seconds, that this is worth spending a little bit more time on. So do that. Who are you where do you come from now that I've intrigued our audience like that?
Jason Illian: Yeah. Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. You know, it's interesting during the day, right? It's Jason Allen, one of the managing directors at Koch. But most of the day I'm being known as either Alicia's husband. Right. Or dad to my three kids, rogue, rain and sage. And so my three kiddos, they're almost 13, 11 and 10. Their names are all biblical names like Rain Comes from Isaiah. Forty five. We're talking about how the Lord reigns and how he's going to tear down mountains and do things in his name. So that's where his name comes from. And Sage is for the Lord's wisdom comes from Zephaniah. And then my youngest is named Roeg. And Roeg is as is set apart for the Lord. Before I knew you in the womb, I set you apart. And his name's Roeg and so is really important from us, my wife and I, from just the word go to say, hey, they're dedicated to the Lord. This is what our family is going to be about. And and most of the time, like I said, I'm known as Alicia's husband. And if you've met my wife, you realize you have the wrong one on the podcast. Right now, I've clearly outputted my wife. We could switch you. She really should. Lifeline a lifeline. Yes. This is where you phone a friend and get her on the line and you get much more interesting biblical insights than you get from her husband. But I met my wife speaking actually at a church about fifteen years ago, and she just finished writing a book called Chasing Perfect, which is helping Christian women get through the noise to really have a personal relationship with Jesus. And so we met fifteen years ago, kind of taking a step back to hear just a little bit more from me as I ended up going to school at TCU and Fort Worth, Texas, came to know the Lord when I was 17 years old at an NCAA football camp. I thought I was going to the camp so that I could show my great athletic prowess. And they were giving an award for somebody that exemplified the most Christlike behavior. And I was thinking, well, that must be me. And if you're thinking it's you, it's definitely not you. Right? And so they had this kid come out and pray for us. And as he was praying, I realized he had something I didn't. He had this relationship with the creator, God Almighty, and it was real and it was authentic. And he had this piece about him. And I based a lot of my identity on what I could do right. And playing football and doing well in school. And that just shifted it completely and came to know the Lord there. And then I went off TCU played college football, Texas Christian University go Frogs'. I know we have some other Bama and Baylor guys around. That's OK.
William Norvell: I'll speak slowly for you guys in North Carolina this year. Let's not leave him. Yeah that's true. They showed up this year.
Henry Kaestner: Thank you, William. The essay did Mack Brown.
Jason Illian: They brought their game so I wouldn't play ball out there. And my goal had always been to go play NFL football, but had some injuries there. But really what I found is when I got there, I became part of the FCA. I'd never really led any Christian ministry before, but the FCA grew from about 40 or 50 kids to at the time when I left about five hundred and fifty. And that guy just blessed it. Right. And God gave me this amazing opportunity at TCU to grow athletically. Intellectually, my background is international finance as well as spiritually. Just put amazing godly men around me to help form the type of man I am today. I owe a lot of that to my time at TCU. My degree was finance. So I went to the London School of Economics, got recruited at Strong Capital Management. They did investment management had about forty five billion in assets under management.
And when I was there, this was late 90s, early 2000s. We were tracking all these companies in this tech space and some of my friends were like the first non founding member of Napster. We're building a company called Friendster. One of my friends had their distribution rights to this small company called the Amazon, and I was watching these things in my real interest was the Internet back in the day, used to just be flat. You just went there for information. And what was happening is it started to become transactional and even more importantly, started becoming relational. And when I saw that you could start to build relationships potentially over, this became really intriguing to me. And so I ended up being in finance for four or five years, moved back to Dallas and ran a company called Gadhia, which was the first Christian video site. And one month we had twenty thousand users. In the next month we had two million and it really grew that fast.
Henry Kaestner: One that feels like kind of like how our podcast is exploded with with our listener base.
William Norvell: I mean, you know, it's it's a little bit I mean, I think we've eclipsed most of that at this point, but yeah.
Jason Illian: That those are small for you guys.
Henry Kaestner: Twenty thousand to two million. That's unbelievable.
Jason Illian: Yeah. I want to say in the early 2000s, for a couple of months, we on the fastest growing websites on the planet, we just grew tremendously and would love to take credit for that. But the reality was, is it was content that people were really hungry for. Right. They really wanted to have the Google centered content that was safe for their kids. And, you know, we had a few videos that just went viral. And as they went viral, it just grew and grew the site. And we later ended up selling the site to Salem Communications, started another company called Bookshop, which was an e-book company. And then I ran that until twenty seventeen and sold that to a private equity group and then decided that I was going to take some time off. So my wife in her wisdom said, hey, you've been running hard. And as you guys know from the type of people you interview and work with this building companies and building startups is hard, right? It wears you out physically, emotionally, spiritually. And my wife said you should just pray about this and take a year off. And so I was at my home in Dallas just playing with my kids, you know, swimming, mowing the lawn, doing Bible studies and driving back and forth between Wichita to see my wife's family from time to time. And through those connections and some other God ordained introductions 10 years earlier, I got to know the team at Coach and Chase Koch, who is the president of our division and the son of Charles, our founder. So he was getting ready to start a growth and venture arm for Koch Industries and asked if I want to be part of it. And so my wife and I prayed about it and we thought about it and decided this is where God would have us be. So we sold our home that we'd lived in for less than a year and moved to Wichita, Kansas, which is where I am today.
Henry Kaestner: So this is the faith of investors, most definitely not the faith driven reality show participant, but some of our listeners are going to know a little bit about that story. And presumably, as you're coming out of FCA, motivated by your faith, you see that there's an opportunity to live that out in a way that actually made quite an impression on a lot of people because it was a great witness and testimony. You were on The Bachelorette in your faith, came to play to spend just a second on that. What that looked like. As you know, you're in an environment now where you're doing something that's unexpected is countercultural. And I think that maybe there are aspects that shouldn't be presumptuous or prescriptive, but there's things that you might have an opportunity as an investor to be countercultural. But this won't be the first time that you've been countercultural. You've done that before. Just speak briefly to that.
Jason Illian: Yeah. You know, one of the things that's really interesting about life and how God has it is our paths aren't linear. Right. And his ways are greater than our ways. His thoughts are greater than our thoughts. And he's just asking us to be faithful in whatever moment that we're in, in whatever situation that we're in and how do we live that out. And so that's certainly played out in my life many ways. And one of those was through being on this reality television show, The Bachelorette, which was it was like the second season I was on. So it was still relatively new to this. And how it came about was even throughout this story that I just told you, this narrative of my life, I've continued to be involved in ministry. And I came home one night from speaking at church and I flipped on the TV and The Bachelor was on. And while I was making dinner, Jesse Palmer, who is now on ESPN, he was on the show and one of the girls asked him, why are you here? And he said, well, you know, I get tired of waking up every morning with a different girl, not knowing her name where I am.
And I just stopped and said, where do they find these idiots? Like he's doing more damage in ten seconds on television than all of the things that we're trying to talk about our faith and how do we should live out purity and how do we push towards traditional family and marriage? And I was telling one of my friends about it and he said, well, if you think you can do better, why don't you send your application in and almost out of a dare? I just did. So I sent it and I didn't think much of it. About three or four weeks later, I get this call and it was so and so from ABC's The Bachelorette. And I thought it was my friend. That is give me a tough time, so I just gave them a tough time, I gave this person a tough time for like 10 minutes on the phone. And I'm like, yeah, sure you are. And I'm the pope. How can I help you? And I just kept going on and on until I finally realized that it was them. And I said, I'm really not a fit for your show. I'm like, I've seen the type of people on your show. That's not the life that I live. It's not a lot of the things that I believe in from a faith perspective. And they said, listen, just come on the show and just interview. There's like five rounds of interviews and you may not make it through anyways, but we'd love to talk to you. So I did. And, you know, you do on camera interview and do in person interview. And there's one where you fill out, I don't know, an inch thick of background paperwork. And in there they asked, you know, all the people you've slept with. Well, it was a virgin at the time, right? I was saving myself for marriage, so I just left it blank and I turned it in and they brought it back and said, you missed the section. And I said, no, I just hadn't slept with anyone. And when I said that, you could have heard a pin drop in the room, right. It was like they just cast a serial killer on the show or something. Right. They just couldn't fathom why anybody would do this. And so it just started this ongoing conversation of my time throughout this television show, just saying, listen, what I believe and what God has for us and at the highest level of intimacy is matched at the highest level of commitment marriage. I said that's how God has designed our family structure. And so I got a chance in front of ten million of my closest friends to have this conversation on national TV with Gen Sheft, who was The Bachelorette at the time. And it was because of that conversation that I got voted off. Right, because she didn't believe that was very lovable. But what most people don't know is I got thousands, hundreds of thousands of emails and calls from people that just said thank you. I said we need more examples of this and said I didn't go on the show necessarily to make a point. Right. I didn't go there saying, hey, I'm going to pound my hand on the table and here's what I'm standing for. I'm just honestly just living my life as I feel like God's called me to that. And, you know, God's provides those opportunities. Right? He did that with The Bachelorette.
You know, I wrote a book early on called MySpace My Kids, when MySpace was just roughly a million users that was helping Christian families just understand this thing called social networking. It seems so basic today, but back in the day, we didn't know what we were about to embark upon. And so when God opens those doors, I just try to be faithful. It's not that I had this master plan. I'm sure God does, but I don't see it clearly. And just take those moments to be faithful and try to have an impact.
Henry Kaestner: So that's and an obvious question. And maybe we'll go there, which is that was, as I said before, it's countercultural for you to talk about celibacy on a show like The Bachelorette. Do you see opportunities to be countercultural and what's going on right now in the world through what you do right now? So you're managing director of Koch Industries for Disruptive Technologies. Yeah, and I'm going to ask a two part question. One is, some people are going to say, what in the world is disruptive technologies? But then also, why don't you riff a little bit about how your faith in your worldview impacts the way that you see your job?
Jason Illian: Yeah. Yeah, it's a good question. So maybe to back up just a little bit, Koch Industries, if most people don't know. Right, we're roughly one hundred and twenty dollars billion privately held company and it's really a number of companies that are put together. So if you have a cell phone, this components in that cell phone from one of our companies called Molex. If you are living in any type of house or building structure, it's probably has Georgia-Pacific Materials, which is a Kochcompany.
Henry Kaestner: So it doesn't apply to people living in teepees.
Jason Illian: But if you live in a house where the tea is made of toilet paper, then yes, because that's also Georgia-Pacific, right? So, yeah. Yeah. So basically, think of it this way. Right. We're in sixty five countries. We have roughly forty thousand trucks on the road at any time that have Kochmaterial in them. And you know, if you popped open the hood of Koch industries, what you'd really realize is it was built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. Right. So one things that Charles has really done is saying I'm going to align incentives, push decision rates down to the bottom and let people create products and services that will make people's lives better. And we want to do it at an affordable and efficient way. And so as the company continues to grow, they said, hey, we need to build a growth in venture arm so that we don't get disconnected from those people that make transformative change. And that's really what birth certificate. And so day one, there was two of us here chased Koch and myself as one of the founding members. And we built a team of about twenty five investment professionals, including three in Israel. And we're a stage in industry agnostic arm, so we can write a check as small as a couple million and as large as a few. Million dollars per check and it's a greenfield fund, right? So it's all of our own cash on balance sheet, we can do 15 investments this year. We can do one investment. You know, we're only really bound by what we deem to be something that will truly be disruptive. And so what does that mean? I mean, what is disruptive actually mean? Well, I look at it. Is is it a platform? Is it something that is going to make people's lives better, more efficient, cheaper change the way that they live their life? So I remember the first time I heard a pitch for something like Uber, right? It was people like, hey, one day random strangers are going to pick you up in their car and take you to where you want to go. And people were like, are you crazy? I'm never getting in some stranger's car. And now that's just what we do, right? You guys know with grab I mean, you guys are that's you understand. But this is a lot of the things that sounded crazy back in the day or just the way we do things today. Airbnb is another example, right? You're going to stay in somebody else's house on their couch, like who's going to do that? And so these are transformative companies that change our behavior in the way that we live our lives. And a lot of those came in consumer areas to start with. But they're also now coming across be to be industrial manufacturing, a number of other areas as well. And so, you know, we invested in a company called Desktop Metal, which prints three D metal parts, which are being used by Jewelleries, like Tiffany's, are being used by BMW for parts. And so we look at all those types of various technologies and really invest in the people, because at the end of the day, you're investing in the people who are building those types of technologies. And yeah, we put about a billion dollars to work over the last three years and I think we're just getting started.
William Norvell: Wow, that's fantastic. So when I think about the rise of entrepreneurship has just been incredible, I think over the last 10 years, you know, we talk about that our entrepreneurs are cultural change agents. You know what Elon Musk is to our generation? Mickey Mantle was to my dad's right. And it's just amazing how that's continued and continues to spread across the country. You know, Henry and I are here in Silicon Valley or maybe that was a thing 20 years ago and we're obviously biased. But I grew up in Alabama where when I go back home in my small town of 60000 people, I see, you know, coworking spaces and tech hubs and, you know, of course, in the bigger cities, Birmingham and Huntsville, it's just it's all anyone can talk about. And from Wichita, Kansas, I would imagine, you know, that name doesn't scream innovation and entrepreneurship to most of our listeners, maybe screams fantastic college basketball first. But could you let us in to what you see? So you're around the world now, but specifically maybe from the Midwest perspective of what do you see happening in entrepreneurship and in sort of how that is part of society and how God could be using that to bring his visions into the workplace?
Jason Illian: It's a good question. And I think what people in you and Henry can probably speak to this better than I can. But what happened in Silicon Valley didn't happen overnight. Right? It was decades and decades of building on top of one another with defense and semiconductors, Internet and mobile. It grew into what it has become, right. It became that melting pot of great ideas and ways for people to interact and take new risks in terms of building next generation platforms. And I think what you see happening is that's starting to happen all over the country and all over the world. Right. So look at what Brad Feld has built in Boulder, Colorado. Right. It used to be you walk down downtown Boulder. Yeah, I maybe grab a bite to eat, but that was about it. Now you walk down there and there's tech companies and people all over the place building next generation technology. Same things with the Walton family's done in northwestern Arkansas. That has become a vibrant tech hub where people are wanting to move. They want to raise their families there. They can look at anything from mobility services to next generation data companies. And then I think what you're seeing in Austin, too, right? I think you and Henry had the way to make a sound in the media. You may be the only thing left in California because our base moved Austin. Right. And so what's happening is you're starting to see great entrepreneurship. And it's one of the reasons we're friends with Eric Schmidt. And what Steve Case is doing with Rise of the rest is there's all these ecosystems that are starting to grow up and there can be great entrepreneurs anywhere. Right. Great entrepreneurs don't want to guarantee. They just want an opportunity. Right. So how do we find those and give them an opportunity? And so, you know, Steve Case made this bet before covid hit. And I think Ovid's only accelerated that to say, yeah, you can talk about the Austins and you can talk about the boulders. But what you're starting to see is what's happening in Cincinnati and Miami and Minneapolis and hopefully Wichita as well, that we can start to think of ourselves as a place where we're giving people new opportunities and those new opportunities. Without a cap on them in terms of what they want to grow and what they want to build, but with that comes the need for capital, right? Need for community. You have to have the people and the right skill sets around you and also just the knowledge sets that you're going to need to bring in there because problems become more complex as we break into new areas. But listen, I grew up in Nebraska and it used to be it just jumped on your tractor and now the tractor drives itself. Right now, the soil is monitoring itself. And now we're using next generation technology to fertilize it and keep track of it and measure it. And so technology and breakthroughs are happening everywhere. And we believe as part of it is we want to be part of that. Doesn't matter if you're in Silicon Valley, if you're in Israel or if you're in Cincinnati. You know, we want to back those best entrepreneurs and learn from them, be a true partner.
William Norvell: Now, that's great. And did you give us a sense and I don't know, you know, do you have a sense for our investments in those areas? I'm trying to play the cynic here. Right. You know, I read a report this morning that, yes. You know, tech hubs are growing, of course. But if you look at the data from last year, you know, the venture capital dollars in San Francisco still outstrip L.A., New York, Seattle, Portland, Austin combined. Right. That's just a data point, is it today? Right. That's a balance sheet metric. But I'm interested in what you're seeing out there in the field as you invest and sort of come alongside rise of the rest. I mean, is it working? You know, are we in inning three and we're, you know, five innings away or they're still unknowns out there about whether it's going to work? Or is it just exactly what you said about San Francisco right now? We just got to keep building layer after layer and it's clearly working.
Jason Illian: Yeah, I mean, listen, there's not one answer. That's a broad brush that works in every community. It's working in some places better than others, and some are more mature than others. And so at the end of the day, if you go to Austin now versus Austin 10 years ago, it's working significantly better. Right. Wichita still has some work to do, right? We're not as far along. But what I would say is what covid really did is kind of lead just five years into the future, 10 years into the future, and you're starting to see even just the prices and cost of living like living where you live versus living where I live, you know, where your kids can go to school. The other amenities and things that you want to have covered has taught us we can work remote. And so what's happening is it's causing people to spread out. And you're going to have these events where there's a black swan event or just technology accelerating that creates these communities around. And, you know, people sometimes forget that MailChimp, which is one of the largest privately held tech companies, is in Atlanta. It's not in the Bay Area. Right. A few of our big investments have happened in Denver because people have said, hey, we're going to leave the Bay Area, but we want to be in Denver. And I just think there's great people everywhere. Now, it may not have the concentration of Silicon Valley yet, but that's not to be expected overnight. We got to continue to build on it. And Chicago's a good example. You get something like Groupon that's successful and those founders spread out and create more companies and they invest in other great entrepreneurs and that ecosystem continues to build.
Henry Kaestner: Tell us about Israel. So you've got a guy on the ground in Israel. I've been to Haifa before. I seen some of the dynamism there listening to this podcast. Are you going to be interested in just what happens in a kind of a special geography that's politically charged? It's got a spiritual foundation, but there is something special about what's going on in Israel. Maybe you can comment on that a little bit.
Jason Illian: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. Israel is a leader in technology, in building platforms. And part of this comes because everybody's trained in the military over there. Everybody has to be trained and a lot of them have technology backgrounds that they've actually been trained in. And I also think you're willing to take risk goes up when you live, you know, fifty miles from somebody willing to shoot a rocket at you at any time. Right. So you live in an environment that you realize that taking risk building a tech company is not as risky as getting shot by a rocket or by somebody that doesn't have the same belief system as you do. And so what Israel is built is this really robust ecosystem of great technical entrepreneurs. And they're coming up with all sorts of great technologies. And you can talk about companies like Mobileye which have help helping autonomous driving. But even our first investment as a company called Tech and we invested over one hundred million dollars in this company, does noninvasive focus ultrasound on people that have essential tremors or Parkinson's? So the first time I saw this, a gentleman was shaking so bad that he couldn't write his own name or hold a cup of coffee. So he lays in an ultrasound machine, special helmet, and it uses ultrasound waves to ablate the part of the brain that deals with the shakes. He stands up two and a half hours later in the shakes are gone and it looks like magic, noninvasive, like no cutting the skull open, no peeling your head back. This is hey, what if we use the ultra? Sound waves, and we pinpointed them at a place that we could kill whatever is causing that to happen. We'll take the next step. What if we can use that for cancer? What if we could use that for blood clots? What if we could use it for all sorts of other things? This is an Israeli company, right? So our thought is like, listen, once again, there's great entrepreneurs all over the place. How do we help connect to them, help you, that connective tissue? Because we're in different countries and a big part of our investing mandate is not that we can just deploy capital. I think there's a lot of really smart investors that do that. But how can we come alongside them as a partner? How can we help them accelerate the growth of their platform and those entrepreneurs that want to do well by doing good. And they need a real partner to do that. That has capital. You know, we may be a good place for them.
Henry Kaestner: So as you talk through this and you talk about technologies that can and maybe I shouldn't get overly biblical about this, you know, it's in the Holy Land, Jesus was healing people that had leprosy and others. And there's kind of a two thousand years on, you know, walking with tremors and you walk out without it. It's almost miraculous and almost feels that is you're in this space. And we all have found ourselves kind of in this world of these disruptive technologies and investing in them, that if you have a propensity towards a God complex, you get involved in inventing technologies like that or and financing technologies. You know, there's a temptation to kind of feel like, you know, Alec Baldwin in the movie Malice, which talks about, you know, you want to know if I've got a God complex. Well, who is the person saving your life at 12, 30 am an emergency or operating room for when you talk about the technology you just talked about? I think about Kalikow, which is this initiative to end aging. Right. That's the final frontier for us to become godlike, immortal. And yet you're talking to people, entrepreneurs and technologists every day that see that aging might end. Right. How does your faith come to bear in all of that?
Jason Illian: Yeah, I think you're asking a really important question that we haven't asked ourselves enough in the technology space is we often ask what we can do and we don't ask why or what are our boundaries are on this like. So why do we want to stop aging, right? Or why do we want to change the financial system and what are the repercussions? So we're seeing the repercussions of social media right now. We wanted a better way to communicate. Now, what we've got is we have partizan division. We have people being blocked because of this. We have some large tech conglomerates that are starting to tell you what you can and can't say. Right. So, you know, I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any stretch, but somewhere between nineteen eighty four and brave new world things are happening. Right. And we see this in China with the social credit system. What happens when all of a sudden technology can become used to monitor everything you do? So it's very important that we're investing in those entrepreneurs that one have a sense of humility, that they're not leaning towards this God complex of taking over the world, but they want to do well and they know their limitations. Right. I think it's very important that we are investing in entrepreneurs that know their limitations and are also putting other great entrepreneurs and investors beside them. Right. Scripture says plans fail for lack of a council, but with many advisors they succeed. So how do we put people around ourselves, just like we should do in our own personal lives, to have people point out our blind spots left to my own? I'm going to step into the ditch where the ditch is on the right or left hand side of the road. I'm going to hit one of the ditches unless I have brothers, advisors, counselors, mentors helping remind me of my limitations in the team that we put in place. And so we want to invest in those entrepreneurs. Right? We certainly want to invest in those entrepreneurs that know their own limitations, build great teams around them, but also have what I call cognitive flexibility, ability to take different mental models and know when and where to apply them, because there are new challenges that are coming up in our world and we need to know how to approach them as believers and have a stance on those. Right. A lot of people say we got to defend the faith. The word defend doesn't resonate well with me because you don't need to defend a lion. You just need to unchain it and let it defend itself. So we just need to be bold in our stances and we need to be honest. We need to be intellectually faithful to know what we believe and how to apply that. And we need to give other believers by standing up the courage to stand up and say what they believe as well. And I think that as people that invest in technology in the future, in these next new platforms, if you are to invest the next Facebook or Twitter or go beyond communication platforms to whatever. Her new medical technology. We have a responsibility beyond just the shareholder responsibility to make money, to know why we're doing this and how this benefits society in a positive way that ultimately points to our creator and savior.
Henry Kaestner: You're out there, you're talking to some of the most exciting entrepreneurs in the world. Do you ever get a chance to share your story? You know, everybody, whether they're in Israel or Silicon Valley or Wichita, has a world view that kind of directs them towards what they're doing. And I'm wondering if any of those folks that are developing some of this disruptive technology. I know some to be clear. I did. I'm an investor, so I know some, but maybe not at the scale that you're looking at. Do you see any that are motivated by their Christian faith? You see that any that are open to that, any that are as they go about inventing, they're trying to figure out why they're doing it and what's the bigger metanarrative here? I don't want to overly spiritualized what you do every day, but I am curious about these personal relationships that you end up developing with some really, really interesting people about what are they thinking and does that ever give you an opportunity to kind of be in a relationship with people and maybe not the same way that so deliberately countercultural as it was for you on The Bachelorette, but what does that look like?
Jason Illian: Yeah, I think sometimes we over Spiritualized sharing our faith. I mean, really what that means is building relationships and valuing the people that are in your life. Right. And as you value people, as you listen to their story, they want to know your story as well. And so I take every opportunity or I attempt to take every opportunity with any great entrepreneur to ask what they're building, why they built it, like, what are your challenges and tell me about your family. And what happens is we build this personal relationship and then it becomes a conversation right here. I want to know what you believe. Tell me what you believe. Give me your world view. How are you seeing this world? And then can I share my world view, too? Because I would love for you to understand how I look at the world. In my world, view is a biblical world view. Now, I'm very fortunate because here at Koch, Koch are not necessarily a Christian entity, but they have what we call market based management mbm in the market based management. A lot of the philosophies around that align very well with biblical framework. Right. And so it gives me that opportunity to engage people where they are. And when you engage people and you share your story with them and they show you, you start to understand the type of people you want to do business with and live your life with. And as you know, many of these companies take years and years and years to build. And we're going to be sitting on the boards and we're going to be sending Christmas cards to each other and we're going to have dinners together. You want to work with people you like, trust and respect. And that doesn't mean they're going to share the same Christian faith with me every time. And that's OK, right? It's an opportunity to build a relationship with them. But I will say there are a lot more believers in the trenches that are trying to make a difference for the kingdom than you know, and it's an opportunity to encourage them when you run into them. And so it's either an opportunity to share, encourage, but no matter what, it's an opportunity to build a relationship and then see what God has with it. Things don't always change overnight. It may be 10, 15 years down the road when somebody comes back and says, I remember this conversation I had with you, and those are wonderful conversations to have. Or when an entrepreneur calls you and said, I'm having a tough time with my wife, I'd love for you to get some feedback. Great. I'd love to share. Matthew, 18 conflict resolution with you. Let me tell you what works in my family and let me tell you all the ways it's gone wrong. When I approached my wife like this and just to be honest, right. Believers make all the same mistakes that nonbelievers do. We just believing there's grace for that and that, you know, God's given us a path to that redemption and how we should interact with others.
Henry Kaestner: Now, it's beautiful. And, you know, for our listeners, there are a great number of men and women really driven by their faith that are leaning into technology in this time. And of course, we both know the Anthony Tan story. Grab and Mark, seriously, CloudFactory. And there are many, many, many more that's really encouraging.
William Norvell: Absolutely. And yeah, love sort of some of the concepts you talked about. I think from a code perspective, which we talked about a little bit, I read good profit years ago. I think a lot of kind of what you're talking about is sort of espoused in there and just some incredible wisdom on how to treat people well and build transactions and deals that honor both parties and of course, a lot of their management, the MBM process you took as well. So it's a good read for sure. If anybody finds himself needing to read about one of the largest private organizations in the world and how they become who they are.
Jason Illian: Yeah, and I think one really interesting thing is, you know, we're told that a tree is recognized by its fruit. So I can tell you what kind of tree it is by the fruit that it's going to show. And Charles Koch is eighty five years old. And he still is as active as he was when he was 40. Right. He is still using his opportunity and his platform to make people's lives better. And he still comes to the office. He still gives back tremendously to things like criminal justice reform and, you know, next generation education. And I can go down the list of like 15 things that he is spearheading because he's not sitting on a beach somewhere. Right. He did not make a ton of money and say, I'm checking out. He's like, I have this opportunity to give back. And those are the type of men I want to work for. I want to work for those that are going to the grave, trying to help make other people's lives better. And I feel very blessed and fortunate to do that.
William Norvell: Women and men. And as we come to closure, this section of the podcast, we always love to invite our guests to share with our listeners where God has them in scripture these days. And that could be something you read this morning. It could be something you've been meditating on for a season, but just maybe a story or a verse or whatever God has brought to the forefront of your life through his word.
Jason Illian: You know, I think all of us, anybody listening to the podcast and ourselves included, 12 months ago or so, we did not know we were going to be hit by something like covid, which I think's changed all of our lives in various ways. On top of that, we went through one of the toughest election cycles that I can ever remember. I feel like we have a country that feels very divided. We have racial tensions. We have all sorts of challenges that as believers and as the church, we need to step up and lead through. Right. And so a lot of where God has been moving on my heart are just things like Joshua five, right. When Joshua is sitting there in the Angel of the Lord appears to him and he says, hey, which side are you here for? Right. Thinking like if you're with me, we're said, if you're for our enemies, we're in trouble. And the angel replies, Neither. I'm here for the Army of the Lord, saying, I'm here on behalf of God. I'm not taking sides. I'm coming to take over. Right. I'm coming to take over. So that's when he bowed down and realizes my first thing is to worship God. Right. My first things to be at his feet. And that's reflected again in the second chronicles where, you know, Solomon could have asked for anything and he could have asked for anything to you could ask for wisdom. He could have asked for riches. He could ask for anything. And what he really asked for is, God, give me wisdom to lead your people. How great is your people? And I need the wisdom discernment to lead them well. And because of that, everything else was a symptom of that primary ask because he desired in his heart to lead God's people well. And that's the same desire I want to have. I just want to have this desire to lead God's people well, not that I'm leaving a legacy of money or how many deals that I've done or how successful. Hopefully those will be great symptoms because I lived my life appropriately. And it comes back to just the Sermon on the Mount of where you said, you know, blessed are the meek. Right? So I'm doing a Bible study with my kids every night. So we do a devotional every night together. And so we have to read over something again that you read over a thousand times. It makes you stop and reflect upon it. And we're so blessed are the meek for they inherit the earth. I ask my kids, what is meek mean? And then I thought to myself, I don't know if I know it. Right. And as we started talking about this and looking it up and what really it is, it's power under control. It's power under control. Right. And what we need is we need men and women that are willing to worship and recognize God is who he is. And Joshua to ask for wisdom, to lead God's people well and then be meek. We don't need to be shouting from the rooftops. We don't need to be screaming on social media. We just need to know what we believe into Henry's point early to build relationships with those people. Right. The outcome is going to be based on how the Lord wants that. I'm not in charge of the outcome any more than I was in charge of winning every TCU football game. I had a role to play. And if I caught passes and made blocks and hopefully at the end of the game, the score was in my favor. But when it wasn't in my favor, then I got to walk away with something to learn. And in my house, my kids learned through the sports that they're in. We either win or we learn those are our options. And so every day, just meditating on those scriptures, bringing them to the office, knowing that I'm going to have a dozen amazing potential entrepreneurs and people I get to interact with, how can I help make their lives better and value them so that they will go out there and do that to others and that virtuous cycle will continue to replicate itself. And if it does, I happen to believe lives will be changed. We'll make money doing it right. New technologies will make this world a better place and overly hopefully it will bring us all together and make us realize that these differences that we're fighting about, some of them are completely perceived and the other ones aren't as wide. We think they are we just need to be able to sit at the table and have a civil discourse on most of them, Amen, Amen, that's one of my favorite words.
I love it. I love Mique. So glad you brought that in. And also, I totally empathize with reading the exact same stories over and over. My three year old is currently obsessed with Nayman. It's his favorite character. So we read about Sickness Amen and Healed Neyman. That's a great story over and over and over again. And it is. It made me read it again like multiple times and it's amazing.
So my son just asked on this exact story because I think name is a perfect example that he wanted to do something miraculous. He wanted to do something big in his simple thing was like, hey, just washing the Jordan is like, wait, I don't want to do that. I wanna do something big in your name. He's like, just be faithful where you are. And that's that's what I tell my kids is like, just be faithful where you are. And when I tell them that I'm always looking in the mirror being like, am I being faithful or I am, I'm just telling my kids this, but I got to live it out. And so what you guys are doing and how you're continuing to have this impact through podcasts and your network and stuff is tremendous. And so thank you for what you do. And I'll certainly be praying for all that you do. Thanks for. Thank you, brother.
It's great being with you. Yeah, likewise, guys.