From Venture Capital To Wonderfruit, The Elusive Katrina Razon Is A Changemaker

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It’s 9 in the morning at Solaire, and already guests are positioned at the card tables and the slots, looking like they just rolled out of bed, or never went home to it. Solaire’s decadent, winner-takes-all interiors transport you to another place, like Macau. But before we can consider throwing down some chips for breakfast, the Esquire team is whisked away to the top of the VVIP tower, where we are led inside a massive private villa overlooking the bay.

The 938-square-meter Chairman’s Suite has its own pool, entertainment room, and gym, and just as I was getting lost trying to find a bathroom, the chairman’s 28-year-old daughter breezes in, fresh from Wonderfruit. Dressed in a pink Tropa jumpsuit, carrying a Halo Halo banig bag, and singlehandedly bringing the bucket hat back, I have to say that Katrina Razon is one of the best-dressed personalities on Instagram. Her eclectic style of mixing luxury labels with home-grown brands is always on point, whether attending board meetings or womanning the decks at a nightclub.

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Katrina has been based in Manila for a few months now, but if you’ve been following her on social media you’d be forgiven for thinking that the only place she consistently hangs her hat is inside an airplane. Previously, the Solaire scion was in the country for an extended period when she took a semester off from Northeastern University during her senior year to help out with the opening of the casino in 2013. As a comms major, she interned under Joy Wassmer, Solaire’s PR head, and handled everything from entertaining high-profile guests to assisting in photo shoots. On the weekends, she would hit the club scene as DJ Katsu.

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The last four years were spent primarily in Los Angeles, where Katrina worked not in a traditional PR firm, but in the more rarified world of venture capital. “I started KSR Ventures by pure accident,” she says. “I had met with the founder of a music tech company that I’d been a fan of for many years, and luckily I was able to exit out of the deal within the first year since the company was acquired by a bigger music tech company,” which in investor-speak means that she cashed out good. “After that first exit, I decided maybe it was something I could explore.” Katrina didn’t study business or finance in school, but she’s not a Razon for nothing, and discovered that the best way to learn how to invest is to just invest.

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Dress by Johanna Bespoke

She kept abreast of startups in the entertainment industry and continued sourcing deals and meeting with founders of different companies in their early stages. “I was more interested in the fact that they were driven by empathy to find solutions to problems. When I rewired my brain that way in terms of thinking of different solutions based on a startup team and founder’s vision, it really got me inspired to design KSR Ventures as a net positive-driven investment firm.” In Katrina’s years DJing and producing and attending music events, she noticed how a lot of waste was being generated at these large-scale festivals. “I decided to have a heavy values-driven investment philosophy that would back companies that put more back into the environment and community than they take away from.” She began investing in companies whose vision and beliefs aligned with hers, whether in fashion, tech, music, agriculture, or education.

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With Dear Frances, a shoe label from the U.K., she started as a customer. The company reached out to Katrina as it was raising a round of funding, and for her, it wasn’t a tough decision. The brand is a proponent of slow fashion, using ethically sourced material and employing traditional Italian shoemakers. Additionally, it partners with a non-profit organization to provide shoes for impoverished children around the world.

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Her involvement with the Thailand-based music and arts festival Wonderfruit has more serendipitous origins. She met one of its founders, Pete Phornprapha, as the sun was rising in the middle of the Mojave Desert. “We connected over music, environmental issues, and our arachnophobia,” she wrote in an IG post. Shortly after, when Wonderfruit was embarking on its second year, Katrina came in as a business partner and co-producer. Pete is a Thai analog of Katrina—his father, CEO of Siam Motors Group, is one of the country’s richest men—and he splits his time between helping run his family empire, starting new ventures, and organizing the festival, which has become the largest of its kind in Southeast Asia.

“We saw that the music festival market was very crowded with event producers who were big-name driven, lineup-driven,” Katrina says. “We learned that the only way to survive in this competitive industry was to be experience-driven and values-driven.” Wonderfruit, aesthetically, is the lovechild of Burning Man and Coachella, with batik and bamboo playing a more prominent role than dusty chrome and flower crowns. Philosophically, it advocates for sustainable and mindful living, offering yoga and gong sound baths, celebrity chefs and healthy food trucks, seminars by tech innovators and environmental activists, and workshops on kombucha and adaptogenic mushrooms. A writer from Vice Asia calls it “New Age luxury for jet-setting crazy rich Asians.”

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Sleeveless blazer by Dona Lim at Tryst Studio, Power Plant Mall; silk suit by Eairth at Tropa Store

Over the last few years, the festival was certified carbon neutral and has banned single-use plastic. Water is drawn and filtered from the nearby lake and given to patrons for free, while food is both grown and composted onsite. The performance stages and architectural structures are built with materials like bamboo, hemp branches, and rescued fabric. Wonderfruit does not market itself as an eco-conscious festival, but rather attracts guests with its diverse entertainment programming. The edge it has in the music scene is the inclusiveness of its lineup, with local and regional artists sharing the billing with more established international acts. Once inside the grounds, however, the guests are shown fun, interactive, and surprising ways how they can treat the planet better. Katrina describes how they hid a karaoke bar inside a tree decorated with the coconut husks used in the previous year’s event. Basketball hoops were also placed around the venue so people could dunk their coconuts, whose shells will be used in 2020.

“A lot of people who come to Wonderfruit aren’t really aware of what consumer behavior does to the planet. Afterward, they start implementing changes into their daily lives, then it snowballs into their network of friends and family, and that just echoes through the community,” Katrina says. When all the dance floors were emptied, not a single piece of garbage was left at any of the 30 stages.

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Leather bustier and skirt both by Triple A

Katrina will be carrying over these zero-waste principles to UNKNWN Fiesta, a one-day Filipino-themed festival that had been scheduled to take place in the Puerto Real gardens of Intramuros this February, but has now been postponed till next year due to the coronavirus. Katrina plans for the festival to take on an active role in supporting grassroots environmental groups like Save Philippine Seas. “There’s a huge disconnect between conservation and entertainment. As festival producers, we want to be the leaders and inspire others to be more environmentally friendly,” she says.

CC:Concepts is the four-year-old events company behind the planned event, where Katrina acts as creative director, with partners Mikhail Schemm, Emel Rowe, Celine Ferros, and Samantha Nicole, colleagues she all met on the dance floor. UNKNWN is the underground dance music vehicle that has brought in acts like Jamie xx, Breakbot, and Four Tet, but the group has also ventured into cinematic territory, producing the film concerts Call Me By Your Name and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, both backed by a live orchestra.

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“UNKNWN Fiesta is going to celebrate Filipino culture and the eccentricities and kookiness of it. One stage will have budots music…” Wait, what? For those who have been spared of this earworm, Budots is a form of original Filipino dance music that emerged from Davao and has been appropriated by Bong Revilla, with its associated dance moves, for his senatorial campaign. (Check out BuwanBuwan Collective’s Soundcloud mix: Rodrigo Duterte’s Summer Budots Party if you want to laugh, cry, and jump around at the same time.)

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I also listened to a few of Katrina’s “cosmic techno” sets, on Soundcloud of course (the last time I stepped inside an actual club, we had a female President). Her selections range from the dark to the dancey, the fun to the flirty, classic house to deep techno, with a liberal sprinkling of rare disco finds. Katrina was a DJ first, and everything stemmed from there. At 15, she already thrived in the performance aspect of DJing. She got into theater studies in college, which further informed her act, helping her read the crowd and reciprocate energy from them. Theater also led Katrina to get over any fear of speaking in public or to a room full of strangers. Her hospitality training came into play as she moved beyond playing gigs and into artist relations. If you ask how so many opportunities come her way, it’s because she puts herself out there. And she is unfailingly nice to everyone.

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Her father, Enrique Razon, definitely helps her along her investment journey. The ports magnate looks through her deals, gives expert advice, but also lets his only daughter make her own choices, even if they lead to failure. Katrina told Karen Davila on Headstart that she once lost money in the cryptocurrency space, and the lesson she learned was that crypto is very volatile and that for her at least, it was better to focus on her tangible businesses.

In the Philippines, Katrina has also invested in Edukasyon.ph, the award-winning, 11-million user-strong online platform that connects students to educational opportunities; Future Fresh, a hydroponic container van farm that grows “post-organic” produce sold at affordable prices without competing with local farmers; and NXTLVL Water, by the same founders of Future Fresh, which provides clean water solutions to coastal communities using a micro desalination system, housed also in a container van.

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Top by Araw at Tropa Store; skirt by Aeron at Tryst Studio, Power Plant Mall

“These amazing tech entrepreneurs are thinking of creative ways to give back to the country. I love being back here to enable these entrepreneurs to achieve their goals,” Katrina says, delivering the crux of why she moved back home. In California, she could continue chasing the same unicorn every other VC is chasing. Here, her work has more impact, and it’s fair to say that she’s blazing a trail as a young venture capitalist in the developing world. “The social impact space is not so competitive at the moment because people don’t realize it can deliver top returns. The old-school mentality is, if it’s socially good it’s not going to make money. People don’t realize you can be net positive and have a great bottom line.”

Her partner Mikhail in CC:Concepts, who has known her since her Boston years, says he wouldn’t be surprised if she becomes a leading global figure in the next few years. “Katrina is one of the most driven people I know, with a craving to make a difference in fields and for causes that she is passionate about. From music and culture to sustainability and education, each of the fields she is active in has a deeper ethical motivation that drives her passion, which reflects her insatiable desire to keep on learning in depth in order to know how to give back properly.”

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Silk slip dress by Vivien Ramsay at Tropa Store

Driven is exactly what Katrina is—just two nights after Dave Chappelle’s successful shows at Solaire, which she helped produce—she played a surprise pre-Fiesta gig at Futurist. Then she revealed that, in a week, she will be going on a six-day climb up Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak, for the benefit of The Nature Conservancy. It’s the first time Katrina will attempt a climb this challenging peak, and she says she’s never been close to camping at this altitude nor did she even know what a crampon was prior to this opportunity. She’s been prepping hard, working on mental and physical endurance, and training daily with a Pilates instructor. Organized by conservation awareness group Project C:Change, the climb is advertised as a “celebrity charity climb” for changemakers. If tech CEOs can tune in and drop out in the middle of a desert, then social-impact entrepreneurs can certainly touch the void at the top of a mountain.

Katrina’s proven that being born into privilege gives one a greater platform—and responsibility—to do good for others. We’re living in a time when billionaires are seen as the villains of late capitalism, and having lived in California, which is home to the highest number of billionaires in the U.S., Katrina is well aware of how they create only more disparity. “There’s too much capital in the world,” she says. “People now want to use their money for positive change.”

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In this story: Produced by Clifford Olanday • Photographs by Artu Nepomuceno • Styling by Meg Manzano • Interview by Audrey N. Carpio • Makeup by Joan Teotico • Hair by MJ Agaton • Production assistants Paolo Chua and Roland Mae Tanglao • Styling assistants Tere Gabat and Sophia Concordia • Shot on location at the Baccarat Room And Bar, Solaire Resort & Casino

From Venture Capital to Wonderfruit, the Elusive Katrina Razon is a Changemaker