YouSaid · the spoken record

Graham Weaver

lines on the record

142

first

2025-05-27

most recent

2025-05-27

sittings or episodes

1

sources

podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

1. “Patrick, I love your podcast. I've listened to so many episodes. I learned so much, so I'm really honored to be here. Thanks so much”

   2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “First thing that comes to mind was last year my wife's out of town and I have my middle son Blake and Lily were at home. So it's just the three of us. We had these crazy power storms going on. I get up in the morning early. I drive down to Stanford and Blake calls me and I'm like, oh no, what's happening? And he says, hey, school's canceled. There's no power. And I said, okay, no problem. Just, you know, make sure you drop your sister off somewhere she couldn't drive before you go wherever you're going to do. Just make sure she's okay. And he's like, no, dad. Lily and I want to come down and watch your class. I just remember thinking, wow, you know, these two teenagers who could have done whatever they wanted on their day off, they're going to drive an hour and a half and come hang out with me at Stanford. And I don't know. It just really, really moved me and it meant the world to me.”

   2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “That story he talks about dancing is so awesome. And he says, you're not rewarding the fastest dancer, right? He says that in that quote.”

   2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Absolutely. I mean, again, not to get too philosophical, but the real journey, the real part of your life is the journey, the building, not knowing how it's going to turn out and the challenges you face. When you look back, that's all the fun stuff. And so you wouldn't even want it to grow great in the first year because I think you'd be depressed. I think you wanted to take a while and you want to learn because what's happening along the way is you're growing and you're learning who you are and you're building your own confidence and your own resolve. And I think The dirty secret is that's actually what it's really about. That's really why we're here.”

   2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “21 years in. I mean, 21 years in, my salary was $100,000. That's a fact. And we hadn't yet had a carry check because our European waterfall, and so we're waiting for the last company, which was our best one, it just took a long time. I think Alpine is a success story. A lot of it is because we just stayed with it for a long period of time and we're constantly growing and learning through that entire time. I think that's something that at least my students and I think a lot of people miss is they probably hear people on your show who sound really successful because they are, but they may not really understand that it doesn't just happen. Like it takes a long time. And I think giving people the perspective going into starting a company that it's going to take a long time and be ready for that ride. So pick something you're excited about that you want to stay with for a long time because if you're in it to make money and exit, you're probably going to be disappointed.”

   2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “I mean, I think probably the biggest thing is it just took a long time through the first 14 years at Alpine, I had seven years of private equity before that. So I'm 21 years into the industry. I think we managed $400 million or something like that. And we had a huge team and weren't really paying ourselves.”

   2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Yeah, there's a lot. I think that, gosh, there's so much money in the business that it's just very, very hard to not get distracted by that. So if you really think about, I was talking about before about the objective statement and how much that matters. I think if you watch what firms do, maybe not what they say, but what they actually do, their objective statement is go raise the next fund, go raise a bigger fund. I think that that makes sense. That's how they stay in business, but I think it can lead to the wrong behaviors. Specifically, you cut your flowers and water your weeds. You show these great realized returns and you're compounding your stuff that's not great. It leads to a lot of people that come in the industry and maybe are in it to make money as opposed to build things or don't always show up the best way sometimes.”

   2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “I think one of my probably favorite things is when I went back, when I was telling you earlier about Irv Grossbeck and how at certain times in my life, I would walk in and ask for his advice and he would tell me, hey, I've seen a lot of students, I've seen a lot of people, you got this coming from him, like I would believe it. It would matter that he said that. I think a big part of it, Patrick, is we get to be that force now for these MBAs who are coming in and saying, hey, look, here's been your track record. We've done this a lot. You're going to be awesome at this. You're ready. We're going to help you go do that. And then it becomes somewhat self-fulfilling. The students believe it and they start behaving as though it's true. And it kind of becomes true. So I think seeing the best in people is it's really one of my favorite things about Alpine, our passion statement Alpine is unleashing heroes. And so we think that the people we're bringing on at Alpine in our”

   2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “So you had that trend going on over that same period of time, and therefore returns were good, generally speaking. Today, you fast forward, there's 5,500 private equity funds. It's very efficient. Interest rates are going the other way. That's dynamic one. And then dynamic two is there's eight dynamics very early and it's tiny dollars, but individuals are starting to be able to go into private equity through their wealth management, which didn't used to be a thing. I think the impact of all that is that the people who were putting up median returns and felt like they had this God-given right to raise their next fund and it was going to be bigger. I think that's not going to work out very well in the next decade or so. I think you're going to have to be pretty differentiated or the really, really massive firms that are able to collect the money from the individuals, which is the new tailwind coming in. I think they're going to be able to mass assets. But I think it's hard. It's gotten harder every single year I've been in it for 31 years. I think it's going to get even harder just given some of the potential headwinds of interest rates.”

   2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Over a very steady period of time throughout that. And that had two massive impacts. One is the pension funds pretty much all underwrote their pensions at 8 or 9 percent. I don't know why they picked that number, but they all did. And all of a sudden, your risk-free rates at zero, you have to find alternatives. And so over that same period of time, that last 30 years, you had allocations just steadily increasing. It was a biggest tailwind. I mean, over that time, Calper's probably went from a 0% allocation to, I don't know, 20% allocation. That's a lot of money. Multiply that by foundations, endowments, and everybody. And so you had this just massive tailwind. And then the second one, the obvious one is debt was really cheap. And so that's a big part of the private equity model and borrowing was cheap. And so you had multiple expansion over that entire period of time. I don't care what anyone says. There was multiple expansion. I mean, we were buying the same companies in 1994 at five times that were paying 13 times for now and excited about to do so.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Well, if you go back to when I started, say, 1990, I started 94, but let's say 1990, I think the 10-year treasury was around 8%. Then you watched over the subsequent 30 years from 90 to 2020 interest rates steadily went down. I mean, they had a little few spikes, but they went basically from eight to zero.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “I mean, the first 10 years at Alpine, I just did deals. And then I've gone through periods where I wasn't working on deals and wasn't on boards. I think for me, the right balance is to probably spend around 25% of my time in the action because I think it's good for me to keep one hand in the action so I can know what it's like building one of these companies and what problems they're facing. I don't want to be totally out of that. And then I'm spending probably 75% of my time working on Alpine itself.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “And they spent virtually no time, if any time, saying, how do I make this the place where the best people want to stay? And I remember the last place I worked, if they had spent 25% of their time doing that, they'd probably have the best returns. And so I remember thinking that tucking that away in my head and thinking, gosh, so to answer your question, I think that's the most important part of my job is, is Alpine the place where the best people want to come and work and spend their lives and their careers, that's the most important part of my job. And then similarly with our portfolio companies, which are really an extension of us because we're putting our own teams in there, are those a place where we can attract the very, very best people. I spend a lot of my time on that. How are we structuring the deal teams? What does career advancement look like? How are we recruiting, meeting with world-class people on our team and trying to say, hey, how are things going? What's working well? What's not? And then that's a big part of my day. But to answer your question specifically, I have gone through periods where I'm doing.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “That's an awesome question. I'm just going to go back for a second on that question, which is I worked at four private equity firms before I started Alpine. The leader of every single one of those firms looked at their job as being a deal person, trying to close deals. And in many ways, they almost were competitive with me and my deal's better and I'm going to have, I'm going to grab your analyst because, you know, whatever.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Probably not weekends, yeah. I have it all on one note. And then I try to just compare my schedule to that. I look at the things I have on my calendar. Hopefully I'm prepared for those things. And then I try to just be present throughout the day”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “And then if I'm successful, I have my day start a little later, like nine or ten, so that I have a little time in the morning to just kind of gather myself and get organized. And then like I have this habit I've done since I was 12. I write out what are the three most important things you're doing this year and what are the three things you're doing today to move toward those things. I write that list every day.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “I try to ease into my workout enough and warm up that at some point in that workout, no matter what it is, I'm going hard for at least something. Because it just, I don't know, it has some kind of impact on me that I enjoy.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Normal day, I'm waking up with no alarm, hopefully sleep in eight hours. So maybe I go to bed at 10 or 9.30 getting up at 5.30 or 6. I'm having a somewhat relaxed morning that's going to include at least 15 minutes of meditating and then a workout. And I try to work out really hard. I try to.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “I have a nighttime routine. I try not to schedule stuff early in the morning that's going to stress me out. I think that is so underrated. How you feel physically matters a ton.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Think one of the pillars is that you have spent the time being intentional and spent the time getting in touch with your intuition so that you just know the things you're working on are the things and you don't have to be hedged at all. You're not spending your time, am I in the right job, mind the right relationship, am I living in the right place? You've already answered those questions, so you can just kind of relax into those things. So a lot of the work that I do on that has allowed me to relax in those things. I think the physical part is massive. I think the most highly correlated thing to having a good day is if I feel good physically. That starts with sleeping well. And then there's a whole lot of things you back up from sleeping well. So I don't drink alcohol. I don't drink”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “I'm in the process of it, honestly. Like, I think one of the things I've done about it is I try to, whatever I'm in at the moment, just be 100% fully on and fully present and just be all in with a thousand percent of my energy each thing. And actually, ironically not overthink it. And I think that's been the thing that I guess has allowed me to feel the best about the mortality.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “I told you this when we talked the other day, but my two boys went off to college and it was like the end of a chapter that was really one of the first times I felt like I needed to start facing my mortality. And I think that's the thing on the most afraid of is how long do I have? And like, am I going to be able to do all the things that I want to do in this lifetime? And this is the only one that I know that we have. And am I doing that right now or am I going to look back and have any kind of regrets? That's probably the thing I'm the most afraid of.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Yeah, for us, you know, I want to think that we're having a, I mean, it sounds cheesy, but we're having a positive impact. The world's a little better because we're building this company. And if I'm being honest, I don't think that was true in that business.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Initial equity was about a 3x, and then some of the late equity was like a 1x. Everybody, the banks got paid back. Every one of our investors made their money. Plus, we had some preferred equity. They got all paid. So it was like, we did escape, but yeah, I would never want to bet our business on one.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “We saved the deal because we read that Illinois was going to open up and put slot machines in bars. And Illinois is like the fifth or sixth most populous state in the U.S. We were like, oh my God, this is going to happen. It was going to happen in like a year, then it was two years and three years. But in the meantime, we went around Illinois and made deals with all the bars. They had no money coming and these bars weren't making any money. So we'd pay them X dollars to have the rights to put slots in their bars. And we were like three years ahead of time. people so then when the thankfully the law finally passed and the games came out we were the largest or second largest supplier in that market and then we were able to sell the business on the back of that”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “And then I remember this one time I walked, we had these like local casinos. I remember one time walking in and there was this five-year-old girl sitting outside with a coloring book. And her mom was in there blowing her paycheck. I just was like, I don't want to be in this business. It consumed a lot of our time. That was probably the worst deal we ever did. It set us back quite a bit.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “So we had to make it work. I became CEO of a business. One of my partners was basically the CFO. We had technology, we had customer concentration, we had CapEx, we had product obsolescence. It was a very hard business to run. And then there was just, again, this element of like you're competing with some people that don't follow the rules or the law. It was just this undercurrent. It just didn't feel right a lot of the time. And I still remember this one time, someone would ask me about it and I'd say, oh, you know, it's just entertainment and the median income of people who play slots is actually higher. And they could afford it. And I'd have those things I'd say.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “So it had a recurring revenue element to it. It was on paper a good business. We sold the Native American tribes, which was exploding at the time. This was probably the early 2000s. Native American tribes were just growing their gaming presence. So all those fundamentals are the reason we did it. But there was just something, and I'm sorry, I'm going to probably offend a lot of people here, but there's just something about that industry where there is still an undercurrent of some people that weren't playing by the rules. A few things were tough about that. Number one is we just had way too much money in it. We had co-invest in the deal. We were in a 68 million dollar fund at the time, and we had $170 million in the business, including Co-invest. So it was just like too big to fail.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “They made basically software that went into slot machines and then they assembled the slot machines somewhere else and put them in casinos. They put them in in a rev share. So we give away the machine for quote free and then we get 20% of the win”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “We had a lot of deals that just didn't go well, but probably the worst deal we did was this slot machine business that we owned. It was the worst deal. It wasn't economically the worst deal, but it just was so consuming. So we put money in the slot machine business.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Work going to be in there versus running away from it? A good question just using kind of your future self, okay, I have this decision to make going left or right. And right now I'm in the fog of war and it's scary. And gosh, it's going to be really hard to go either direction, but stepping out and saying, okay, if you're 10 years older version of yourself were to give you advice right now, what would they want you to do? And so you're getting out of like the immediate fog of war. And a lot of times the answer is super clear. So those are all just a few questions or tools that might help.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “How to get to good questions Your head is a really powerful tool, it'll talk you out of a lot of things. Three really simple ones. So first off, to get into your intuition, a lot of times it's meditating, breath work, really being still and quiet and getting out of your mind and a lot of things that people have talked about for thousands and thousands of years. So that's a part of it is to try to get yourself in that state where you're silencing your mind or separating yourself from your mind as much as you can, which is kind of the core principle of meditating. But if you had to jump to just questions, which is a form as well, it's some of the ones we talked about. Like, what would I do if I wasn't afraid? What am I afraid of? How is fear playing into my life right now? There's a great Kal Jung quote where your fear is there is your task. Usually look at where something is holding you back that you're afraid of and go into that and toward that thing.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “I mean, I'll tell you like a really early one. This is the first one that came to mind when you just asked a question, but as an early one. So I'm in Toledo, Ohio. And to be the popular and be the cool kids, they didn't care at all about school. A lot of more drinking, doing drugs. Some of them just really weren't nice kids. They were bullies. In many cases, they were like the athlete group. I just remember that took a lot of courage for me to separate myself because I could have been in that popular group. I chose a different path. And at 12 or 13, For me, that took a tremendous amount of courage and isolated me. And then I think in a very short period of time realized that that was the right call and that that gave me just so much confidence in listening to that gut from then on. I still try to tap into that, but I think at a pretty early age, I just got a sense of like how powerful it was to just listen to that voice.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Of those things are designing, being really intentional about your life, figuring out what does a successful life look like for you in all your different areas, and really spending time on that and designing it and then having a practice where you're working toward that almost on a daily basis.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “You can do that over and over, you'll self actualize and become the best version of yourself for lack of a better word. And then there's a whole bunch of things underneath that to try to make that happen.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “I'll go a little bit deep here, but I think that ultimately each of us has most of the answers inside of us in our intuition. Like I think we have this compass and you could call it your intuition, your soul, whatever that is, that's incredibly powerful. It's like our own LLM. It's taken every experience and every input we've ever had and it's storing all this and it has all the answers. And so I think a lot of personal growth is understanding what that intuition is telling you and spending the space and time to really understand what it's saying and getting out of your head, which is a lot of times confusing things and then having the courage to go do what it says. That's probably my highest level of personal growth because I think”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “So it's like a way to put space on my calendar. You activate different parts of your brain when you talk than when you think or read. So just the act of having another coach, you're actually lighting up more of your brain. So then I have another coach, Rachel Lockett, who helps with the org chart of Alpine. I haven't at every step of the way, I'm running a business that's bigger than I've ever run before. She's run. She's been the chief people officer at really large companies so she can help guide me through like, hey, this org chart makes no sense. Here's some ways you could be thinking about it.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Don't need a personal trainer to go to the gym, but I actually do need a personal trainer. Like, grab me and say, What are your goals? Are you sticking to them? Are you on track? I think that's really valuable. I'm not able to get there by myself without a coach. Then I have another coach I use, we will set aside four hours and this will be like really blue sky messy thinking. Sometimes nothing comes out of it. We ask big questions like what do we want LPEN to be 10 years from now? What do you want your life to look like 10 years from now? Where are you getting on track, off track? If you were going to achieve your 10-year goals in six months, what would be true? Just these really big questions, sometimes amazing things come out of that. Sometimes amazing things come out of that three days later in the shower. But I like making space to have that. And I just enjoy that too.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “So for me, a number of different coaches I use for different things, but I'll give you a couple of real examples. So I have a coach, Dave Mandy Shoemaker, and just to have a call with her, I have to fill out a form that says, what are your one-year goals? What did you say you were going to do last week? What did you do? And what are you going to do this week? And what's the outcome of the call? And just filling that out every week, if I never even talk to her, would be a great accountability. And then obviously she's an amazing coach. She came up through the Tony Robbins system. So for her, it's like a personal trainer for your goals and your life. What better investment is there than that?”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Bought the salesman. Yeah, good one. Yeah, I bought the salesperson. I think most of the people that probably have negative things to say have actually never done it. I don't think I've ever met anyone who actually hired a very high quality coach and had anything negative to say about the process. And they probably just don't really know what they can get out of an experience like that.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “The first coach I had in 2009, I sat across the table from him. His name is JP Flom, and he pitched me on being an executive coach. And I remember thinking, what the hell's an executive coach? What are you going to do? And to this day, I don't even know why I signed up. I think he was just a really compelling person.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Because I understood that really well. So that's how it was helpful that I could say, wow, there's all these MBAs who want to be CEOs, they have this skill set, but not this skill set. And it just happened to marry up really great with our strategy, which has like all these 12 to $20 million revenue business. I mean, you couldn't ask for a better training ground. That's how it was helpful mechanically. It works out really well because we do all of our recruiting at Alpine in the fall. So by the time my class comes around in the winter, students either have a job or they don't at Alpine. So they're not, my class is not a job interview, which is really important to me. I draw a line. I never interview students. I don't even ever give feedback on students. When I'm teaching, I'm really just there to be their professor. The calendar works out that I can do it that way.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “The way it became a fuel for talent isn't because I was going out and recruiting my students, it was because I was meeting with enough students to learn what they really care about, what they're passionate about. And then that helped me design a role at Alpine that was directly catering to the things that students wanted at the level that the students were.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Yeah, I do. I do fall. I have this thing where I really can't stand up in front of class and say something either I'm not doing or don't believe. And then sometimes it's a good mirror to look at my own life and make sure I'm living that way”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Every quarter I learn the most. I try to make each class in each quarter be a reflection of the best I've got. This is my 12th year teaching this year. I spent more time preparing than I did in year one. I'm trying to use it as a Personal growth to spirituality. I'm trying to bring everything I can. So it's a forcing function that almost makes me download an entire year of reflection into 19 classes and bring the best that I can. So just the process of that reflection and having to codify it has made me learn it better. And the other thing is I have to practice it. I can't stand up in front of class and say if you're running this business, you can't have B plus people in your key roles and your executive team. And then I look in the mirror and I'm thinking, okay, I got two B plus, you know,”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Is the kind of safe thing. And then we just spend the rest of the time trying to unpack how they can do A in a lower risk way and that sort of thing. And that's the framework I use in the class as well.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “A good enough executive coach for each other. We have a whole class on that. So then throughout the quarter, when they have to coach each other, they have some core skills. So I can do that for an entire group. And then I do tons of one-on-one meetings. My one-on-one meetings are typically, they're almost always the same. The student comes in and says, they ask the same question, which is like, what should I do with my life? Number one question I could ask, great question. And then they say, okay, I have plath A and I have path B and I'm torn. I spend a few minutes with them asking some questions. In 10 minutes, it's clear that their heart wants to do B, but their head's talking them out of it.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “It's both, so there's a lot we can do in the class, and then they can break out into groups and do some one-on-one stuff. Earlier in the quarter, I have a class just on coaching where they learn how to be like.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Can dig into those nine lives, and then it's just a lower stakes way to kind of get them to their something they're passionate about. And the secret is you can have all nine at some point in your life, just not all at the same time. And then other questions, we do visualizations, which you go out 20 years and we spend some real time on this. You're meeting your future self 20 years from now and your future self has just been incredibly successful and everything's worked out and you really spend some time on like what does that look like and then you come back and say, well, what advice did that future self have for you now? The advice is always go do this thing or hey, relax, it's going to work out or don't stress about these things. So we do exercises like that. Some of the key questions are what would you do if you knew you wouldn't fail relaxing the how, not worrying about how to get there, the nine lives, you know, there's a whole bunch of those.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “One of their lives is the thing they did before school. They were going to be a convertible bond salesperson. Life number three was run a business. And as they started learning, how are they going to grow and learn? The convertible bond one wasn't as interesting, even though they were going to make more money doing that initially.”

    2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source