Transformational Leadership

Krach is recognized as an early pioneer in the robotics industry. As a General Motors VP in the early 80s, he initiated and led the robotics joint venture between GM and Fanuc which gave rise to as the largest industrial robotics company in the world. It quickly rose to be the dominant player by leveraging GM’s sophisticated robot technology and huge captive market combined with Fanuc’s leadership position in NC controllers and its low cost, automated factories.

In the early 90s, Krach and his founding team at Rasna created the category of Mechanical Design Synthesis by developing an easy to use methodology for analyzing mechanical designs. It enabled design engineers to automatically optimize products instead of having to rely on PhD specialists. Rasna was ranked #3 on the Inc. 5000 fastest growing companies, and was later acquired by Parametric Technologies and remains today strategic for engineers globally.

In 1996, Krach co-founded Ariba serving as Chairman/CEO. Krach took it public in 2000, ultimately achieving a market capitalization of $40 billion and building one of the fastest-growing software companies in history. In honor of his accomplishment of creating the category of B2B eCommerce, EY named Krach the 2000 National Entrepreneur of the Year. Today, $1.7 trillion/year of commerce is transacted on the Ariba network, which is more than Amazon and Alibaba combined.

As Sigma Chi’s Grand Consul (President,) responsible for over 244 university chapters and 350,000 lifetime members, Krach drove the transformation of the institution to be exclusively focused on next generation leadership development to serve the world. He drove the creation of the Horizons Leadership Institute in Snowbird, Utah a new long-term strategic plan and at the 150th Anniversary, launched the fraternity’s bold vision to be the preeminent collegiate leadership development organization with the mission to develop values-based leaders committed to the betterment of character, campus and community.

Krach is credited with initiating and guiding a key paradigm shift in higher education. As Chairman of Purdue and in partnership with past President Cordova (Director of NSF) and President Daniels, generated a new model in STEM education, with unprecedented progress in student affordability, online learning, and retraining the workforce. By leveraging Purdue’s prestige in engineering, large international student body and acquisition of Kaplan University, Purdue University Global was launched as the “World’s First Public University” which has been a catalyst for transforming higher education.

As DocuSign’s current chairman and CEO until 2017, Krach created the category of Digital Transaction management and built the DocuSign Global Trust Network, with more than 1 million companies and 1 billion users in 199 countries, which “Empowers anyone to transact anything, anytime, anywhere, on any device– securely.” DocuSign became the verb across real estate, financial services, insurance and other industries and established the benchmark for trust in the industry by creating the Global xDTM Standard. In 2016 the company was named #3 on Forbes Best Cloud Companies and Krach was honored as E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year.

Krach’s drive to challenge the status quo extends to philanthropy. He established the $30m DocuSign IMPACT Foundation with the mission, not just to give to charities, but to transform them—by using DocuSign technology to streamline operations and maximize resources to support the cause. The Krach Family Foundation serves numerous innovative causes. Krach and wife Metta were honored by City Year with the “2018 Citizen Leadership Award” for their dedication, innovation and impact to communities around the world.

What Krach pioneered in business and higher education, he is now applying to developing the next generation of transformational leaders by building the Virtual Mentor Network. Seeing a shortage of role models, Krach is using technology to tap the insights of great leaders and mentor at scale. The principles of creating networks and categories from his previous endeavors are the formula for building the ultimate pay-it-forward category. This could be Krach’s most transformative and profound venture yet.

As Under Secretary of State, Krach saw US leaders "hitting the panic button" over China’s growing dominance in 5G telecommunications. He revolutionized traditional diplomacy by creating the ‘Trust Principle’ doctrine of collaboration engineered to advance freedom through trust-based alliances. The Clean Network alliance of democracies, established a set of shared trust standards for 5G, and rallied countries and companies to embrace only technologies that met these standards. Sixty nations, representing more than two thirds of the world's GDP joined. The ‘Trust Principle’ has been called "the new basis for 21st century international relations." For his work, Krach was sanctioned by China and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The success of the Clean Network convinced Krach that US policy makers and diplomatic personnel need to understand how to apply the trust principles and tech-statecraft strategies of the Clean Network to other tech sectors, to ensure that they advance freedom, not undermine it. This gave rise to his founding of the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy, along with Co-Founder, Mung Chiang. The mission of the Institute is to advance freedom through tech-statecraft--coupling high-tech sector strategies with foreign policy tools to build a Technology Trust Network that rallies allies, leverages private sector innovation, and promotes democratic trust principles.