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

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“Would be, I'm a huge fan in thinking slash using your imagination. We schedule time outside of the office in the Great Recession. We were spending a full day outside the office just really thinking, mapping out what did we want to build, what are the capabilities we want to have, using time to work on the business, the expression I use is we're planting seeds of oak trees that will yield us shade five years from now. And if you can do that consistently, you can always create moats effectively, but it takes a lot of discipline in the middle of all the crazy stuff you're working on to actually take time out to work on something that's important but not urgent. And that's the imagination and innovation.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've done 5x in our last four funds. We have it marked at 5x in our last three. And the fourth one is well on its way. Yeah. And so we have an objective function that is specifically net MOIC. And I think cascading from that is how long you want to hold businesses, how you're going to invest in them, how you're going to build them, what's your objective function, I think matters a lot, what's your goalpost. And I think a lot of people use IRR maybe, or they're trying to raise their next fund or something like that. And I think it can muddy up you're selling your best companies quickly so you can raise the next fund and have higher RRs. Or what are you doing? And I think the objective function matters. Another belief that we have is the way that we're really going to create alpha is through talent. That's probably the foundation of Alpine is just we think that incredible leaders, CEOs, management teams are going to create amazing results. We'll look at B plus industries that other people really don't look at as much, but we've paired that with an A plus team. We found that to be just a great combination. We won't overpay for the A plus industry. We'll go down a little bit. And I could talk more about that. That's number two. And then number three.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a number of them. The first one I would say is what's your objective function? Our objective function is MOIC. We have a specific number we put on that. We're trying to do 5x on a fund.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I started off trying to sell my track record, which was a catastrophe because what I didn't realize is these people are seeing phenomenal track records. And then they're comparing me to that. I was on the plane in the Denver airport going to San Francisco to visit what would turn out to be my largest investor. And I read this little book. And I don't remember anything else, this book said. It was a little book of selling. It was called, but they had this line that said people buy the salesperson, not the product. And on the plane ride from Denver to San Francisco, I completely changed my presentation and was like, okay, I'm going to sell myself as someone that will figure this out and is going to be trustworthy, reliable, kill myself to make this work. And that pitch landed a lot better than, hey, here's my three label deals. Yeah, yeah.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What really mattered. So I'd say try to stay in the same industry if you can. Pick a good industry. Secondly, I'd say pay yourself. Sounds really obvious, but I didn't do that. So that was part of the pressure that I had about why I didn't go do that full time. So carve out enough that you can live reasonably comfortably, even if that cuts into your total upside or something. Duration is more important over the long period of time. I made so many mistakes, Patrick. Everything you can imagine. But I also got in the game when I was 25. So I just sit around thinking about it, overthinking it. I got to get in the arena. That would be my third piece of advice is go get in the arena.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say a few things. First is I'd say pick one industry. Don't go do three deals in three different industries because you're not really going to know that much. In my case, I had that fourth deal with successful because I had done three and learned what really.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I did that for a little bit of time. And then actually had a close friend of mine around that time, around my age, had passed away. I just took a little time off and I just realized, hey, when am I going to do the thing I really want to do? If not now. And so I walked in a couple days later and quit. I didn't have anything to land on. I didn't have a fund. I didn't have investors. I didn't have anything. But I was like. I got to give this a shot.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, it was 100% what I wanted to do. And I still chickened out. So if you'd asked me anytime in the tears, I was like, I know exactly what I want to do with my life as graduation starts approaching and all my classmates are getting jobs in private equity. I'm getting a little foam more. And I'm also scared. I take an interview, which turns into a job at an institutional private equity fund. And I knew in my soul, it was not what I wanted to do. And I showed up in a little bit of me died the day I started”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paid in five days. They allowed their vendors to have great margins. So it was just a home run deal. I owned it for 22 years and it paid. Yeah. I just sold it a couple years ago, actually. It paid dividends along the way. Thank God”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Revenue went down significantly. That was the first thing I missed. The second thing was I didn't understand how important management was. And this would become a huge part of our philosophy later on. The founder would retire and then the number two person was there. I just backed them. And they were absolutely not backable. I wildly underappreciated how much the management team mattered. And I made that mistake three times before relaxing. I had made it. So in the next one, next label business, the underlying customer, the biggest customer we had was Trader Joe's, which was just like the best customer ever in the early 2000s. They just grew 15%. Yeah, 15% of year every year.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were in the label printing business, which was a good business because label might cost a penny on a $5 bottle of shampoo, but it contains all the product information. So no one's going to purchasing manager is going to be a hero by saving a fraction of a penny on the label. Had very good, predictable revenue. I miss two things. One is you were really underwriting the underlying customers. You had to go a level deeper and look at power recession. So the companies in the Midwest, whenever recession hit in 01, their clients got destroyed.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, they didn't. Those three collectively. Right after business school in the same industry that worked out really well, and thankfully helped fund a bunch of the early part of Alpine. But the first three Where I did literally everything wrong.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To those deals And then later on, thank God that you get another one that said roll your balance and pay no interest for another 12 months. So that was playing a very high wire act, which I do not recommend.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So these were like half a million of EBITDA businesses that I've offered, two million the seller would finance one million. They'd had some equipment. So I get to equity, literally get the equity down to like 100 grand, which I also didn't have. So part of it was I had some people on Wall Street who put in 10,000 here, 5,000 there. And then at this time, Capital One was just starting, get an envelope in your mailbox and say, write yourself a check for $25,000 and pay no interest for two years. And I did that. I was like, okay, great. That was where I contributed my equity.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyway, so we didn't have class on Wednesdays at Stanford. So I'd take a red eye flight Tuesday night and then go visit these little manufacturing businesses in the Midwest and then go bank meetings and try to get them financed and then fly back and then try to take my exams and stuff. So that was kind of how I spent the two years at Stanford.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was at Wall Street, and then I got into Stanford Business School. I deferred for a year. I eventually went. I show up. And once again, I had that feeling of being unshackled again where someone wasn't telling me where to be when I was at business school. So I decided I was going to start buying companies out of my dorm room. That was really the beginning. And my dad, he always wanted to name his company something that started with an A because of the yellow pages and start with an A and come before the word American. And so Alpine was a great, I thought a great name. And I lived on Alpine Road. Funny story about that one time I sent a letter to a banker and I had my address. And he said, oh, wow, they named the street after you. Meanwhile, it's like one guy, you know, with no money.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of people that want to sign up for that game. It's a lot of work. I mean, we're putting in a new CEO in a small company. We're putting in new IT systems. We have a whole new playbook. We're putting in. Godspeed if you want to play that game, particularly at scale. That's an endogenous winnable game where it's just a ton of work, but then the investment decision ends up being pretty easy. When someone brings a deal to you and they say, okay, here's a business you're paying eight times EBITDA with the playbook that you have, you can blend that down to five times EBITDA. You can borrow at five and a half and your platform is going to trade it 18. The investment committee decision there is not the hard part. Hard part is getting the CEO in place and the IT systems and all that.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think there's 5,500 private equity funds at any given great high quality business like you're describing, particularly like take just extreme high quality business ERP subscription software business. I mean, it doesn't get any higher quality than that. There's just a lot of people that can buy that. There's a lot of people that can see what that's worth and do some calculation and come up with a value for that. And by the way, it doesn't necessarily go to the smartest person. It goes to the highest bidder. So it's a little bit different where that doesn't mean that they were the smartest person necessarily. It's just a really, really tough game. And conversely, the winnable game that we're engaged in, and we learned this over the first 10 years of Alpine when we were really hands-on with these businesses, is we're going and finding a $20 million revenue plumbing company in Ball, Louisiana, where the owners retiring and they need a new management team.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it isn't a good exercise. If I have 100 units of energy, I want to use 25 of those units to go try to find a winnable game to play. And then the other 75 would be like the brute force endogenous path.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think you can have investors in private equity that have the Peter Thiel model. They make few large investments and they sit around and think and it looks like that. That's not really us. That's not how we're wired. The way I like to think about it is I like to think about the world in like endogenous winnable games and then ones that might be a little more exogenous and or unwinnable or hard to win. And so I don't want to just go full-on brute force in a non-winnable game. So for example, in private equity today, it wasn't like this in 1984, but today if you have a big business, you're going to hire an investment bank. You get the game. You're going to show it to 55 private equity funds. For me to just go brute force in that red ocean as there's a great book called Blue Ocean Strategy. So they would call that a red ocean for me to go brute force in that.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I just remember thinking is this what work is like? Is this what you do when you graduate? I've been in school 16 years and this is my big moment. And it was incredibly disappointing. And that would end up being a really, really foundational part of Alpine was just that kind of feeling of, wow, I have so much more to give to this place. Why am I only using like 3% of my capacity?”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Graduate from college. I never once thought about my job. I never had an internship because I was always Recruited in 1994 directly into private equity. The guy who recruited me was this guy, David Ramsey, and he kind of explained to me what private equity was. And the way he described it, he couldn't see any reason to do anything else ever. He thought it was the greatest business. And he had a pretty compelling case. So I was really just fascinated by how you could buy these companies and build them and be a part of so many businesses. I just thought it was the coolest job I'd ever heard. I couldn't believe that you got a blank piece of paper from investors to go buy things. So I was fascinated. However, I come out of college and I'm just ready to run through walls, Patrick. Just had this incredible experience in college. And I show up, I get this job on Wall Street. You know, I've seen the movies and everything. And I think it's going to be this incredible experience. I learned how to build a financial model in the first three weeks. And then I do that for two years. That was all I did. That's all anyone undergrad ever did. And then we did it, by the way, 80 to 100 hours a week. The culture wasn't great.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really stuck with me. I don't think I realized that at the time, but that was a lot of what Alpine looks like. He would say it took way longer than he thought, and he built something much bigger than he thought. And I would say almost the exact same thing about my business. I never really put that together until many, many years later that I was watching that as a kid.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll just say a couple things about my dad real quick. So my dad started a veterinary practice about the time I was born. He and his father went in, my grandfather was a veterinarian too. They started this practice called Weaver Animal Hospital in our hometown. And they had a falling out of some kind, I don't know what happened. I never heard the whole story, but my dad like stormed out. Well, he has a mortgage and three kids. And we have no money. The only money we had coming in was he would take emergency calls at like two in the morning. So his little beeper would go off and he would get up, drive to the office, fix a dog's leg, and go back. And he did that for 25 years. And I think the bad news was he was really never around. We didn't have a great close relationship when I was growing up. But I think that ended up having a big impression on me because if you were to ask him about his practice, he ended up building this really, really successful veterinary practice, but he just did it one emergency call at a time over a long period of time. And I think that.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really means he really is going to do this. And he taught me a little bit. So, anyway, progress forward. I get better a little bit better my freshman year, better my sophomore year. By my junior year, I had one of the top times, maybe the top time on the 2K rowing machine on the team. And then by senior year, I was captain. We won nationals. And so it was just everything came together. But it was just a really linear expression of if I put in a certain number of hours, this is what Mike Tati said. He said, here's the formula. It's really simple. Sit on this machine and row as long as you can, slightly below your aerobic threshold. Basically, you'll hit your goals. I was like, that's it. He's like, yeah, that's it. He was a very simple. And I just did that. And it worked. It just required a lot of hours.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know the punchline. I get there, there's nobody there. There was no one there at 536, 7. No one ever showed up because Land Warrior was that euphemism for you just got fuck. You got cut. I stayed and rode and I met this guy who was training for the national team, Mike Tati, and he and I were the only two guys in the morning at the Princeton Boath House, and he ignored me. He's a legend. He coached the U.S. Olympic team. He went on to coach the U.S. Olympic team to a gold. And I didn't know any of this at the time. I just saw this tall, skinny guy just hammering this erg. And eventually he kind of took me under his wing a little bit. After I showed up at 5.30 in the morning for like three weeks in a row, he's like, okay, this kid.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they knew how it worked. So I got cut my freshman year, but they didn't cut anyone. Instead, they said, okay, if you don't make a boat, you're going to be a land warrior and you can use the rowing machines. I still remember when they posted the boats and my name wasn't on there, I did the math and I said, okay, women's heavyweight. I was a lightweight, lightweight, and I did the math on how many people got cut and how many rowing machines there were. And so I was like, okay, I got to get here really early because all these people are going to be using rowing machines. I show up the next morning. I worked all the way back. I talked myself into getting there at like 5.30 in the morning.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Third House is going to start a business to pay for school to skip the end of the story. I didn't actually achieve any of those goals, but I came really close on all three. And so rowing is probably the simplest one to explain. So I show up, I'm a novice. I'm 130 pounds from the wrestling, you know. And I got my ass kicked because there's kids who'd rode for six years.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. I go to college because I thankfully turned onto these tapes early. I did really well in high school and I got to go to Princeton. So I was, I think the first kid in my school to ever even apply there, let alone go. So I go to Princeton and then all of a sudden I literally felt like Force Gump in that scene where his braces come off and he's running because I didn't have to be like at my mom's house from this time and my dad's here in high school at this time and all this. I had like all this. Space. And so I literally was like, oh, wow, now I can really let go of these goals. I set three goals going into Prince that I was going to be the Valedictorian. I was going to be the number one rower in the United States, even though I've never rode before. I didn't even know that the boats went backwards.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, really tough to go do it. It takes a lot of courage, and sometimes the path isn't clear. But I think that's where the real fun of life is, is really trying to get in touch with what your answer is to some of those questions.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should build it up a little bit better on one of the audio tapes I heard. This guy said, okay, imagine there's this genie that comes out of this magic lamp. And he says to you, hey, Patrick, I've only been in here like a thousand years, so I can't give you the traditional three wishes. But what I can give you is that whatever you throw yourself into with your career, your life vocation, like it's going to work out amazingly well. And you'll have ups and downs. It'll take a long time. But I'll be here to bless you with that. What would you wish for? And then the punchline is go do that thing. That's your life path. That's what your soul really wants to do. And that's what you would do if you get out of your head and get out of your fear of failure. So that's one great question. Another one would be like, if you didn't have to worry about the how, so relax the how you're going to do it. The coaching quote is the how is the killer of all great dreams. Make space. Ask these really provocative questions. And it's not like you're going to answer them right away, but you might two days later in the shower, you might answer that question and then you'll really know you're going to feel it when you really know it. And then it's.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first thing I'd say is that if you watch most people, they're kind of asleep or unconscious. I am too sometimes. Imagine you get up, whatever your routine is, you brush your teeth, you get ready for work, you commute to work, you have a tough commute, you get to work, you have a couple meetings, some Zoom calls and you eat, then you've returned some emails. You have a few more meetings, you get home, return some emails, watch some Netflix go to bed. There's all this busyness. You're just kind of doing today what you did yesterday. You're doing tomorrow what you did today. And you're stringing together that and calling it a life. So there's this real level of unconsciousness about it. So the first part is step back and just make space. And I do this with an executive coach. You can do this with a journal. You can do it with a friend. But just step back and just make space and then ask really powerful questions in that time. My favorite question of all time is, what would you do if you knew you wouldn't fail?”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In our high school wrestling was a big sport in the Midwest and Ohio, they would turn a mat light on. People are yelling and screaming. There's a matlight on. The lights are off in the whole arena. And it's just you and one other person. And you're trying to defeat the other person. I mean, it's crazy. It's a pretty intense sport. And then the weight loss and the training and everything. Hardest thing I ever did. I think it's something about just the primal nature of that.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“900 calories a day. I was going on runs in the morning. It's like nine degrees outside. And I just powered through that. And all of a sudden, I was like, wow, if I could do that, at least the other goals I said I was able to eat. And so I just got to feel this incredible power of being able to really change the trajectory of your life by just deciding you wanted to. It was really cool.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The very, very first major thing that I ever tried to do was right after the summer when I started listening to these tapes. And it was to this day the hardest thing I ever did. So I wrestled. I was on the varsity team, my sophomore year. And I wrestled at 155, I had a starting position. The captain dropped down to my weight class. I looked up and down the lineup, and the only guy I could beat was at 125. So I'm six feet tall and I dropped 30 pounds and I wrestled 125. I was eating.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started applying this to really small things like getting an A on a test or running a faster mile or something like this. And it just worked exactly like all the authors said. I just kept pushing the boundaries of what I thought I could do. And I never really ran into, and I still probably have yet to run into boundaries that you couldn't blow through.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pick the one or two that you're really excited about, and then you have to kind of draw a bright line and give yourself permission to not do goals three through 30. Those are really the three concepts I'm summarizing thousands of hours of lawn mowing. So then what happened to answer your question why I felt the first time I started feeling like this.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These authors, thank God, just had incredible content that I really needed at that as this young, impressionable kid that was having a lot of trouble in my life. And I had these frameworks to just hang my life on for lack of a better word. And there were really kind of three big ones that came from that. One was, hey, you don't get to be a victim. Yes, you have things that have happened to you and they're not necessarily your fault, but you walking around blaming people and thinking, whoa is me. That's not going to serve anyone. You got to take control of your life. Now, that sounds probably really obvious to you and me right now, but back then, like that was a new concept for me. Grabbing control of your life. And then they were huge about deciding what you want and writing down your goals. And I got really into that. I would write my goals down three or four times a day, literally all through high school. And then the third one was you got to make some choices. So you can have kind of any goal you want, but you can't have 20.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was 12 years old. My parents went through a really bitter, ugly divorce. We changed schools to a new school, so I didn't really have friends. So the ground beneath me was pretty unsettled. I grew up in a small town in Ohio, like in the Rust Belt outside of Toledo. And I mowed lawns. I mowed lawns about six hours a weekend to make money. That was the best paying job. I had a Sony Walkman and I started listening to books on tape. For whatever reason, our library had this self-help section. So I had these books like Think and Grow Rich, Find Napoleon Hill, and Lead the Field by Earl Nightingale, Universal Laws of Success and Achievement by Brian Tracy. So there were only like three of them, three or four. So for the next X years, I just would six hours a weekend walk back and forth. Literally brainwash myself walking back and forth in the hot Ohio sun.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never knew what private equity was until I graduated from college. So I didn't have this background. This was never a goal of mine when I started. But when I got recruited out of college to go into private equity, I just thought it was, I had a real burning interest in business. And I thought once I learned what private equity was, I was thinking, wow, this is the best expression of building businesses. We get to do it over and over and over across a bunch of businesses. In terms of why try to be the best, I guess ever since I was pretty young, I just never thought about doing anything other than trying to be the best in the world at it. It's like. There's a great quote by Daniel Burnham who says, make no little plans for they have no power to stir one's blood.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We went through a really tough period in the recession. We didn't have a fund for a number of years. So we had three years to kind of work on our business and really do some deep thinking. I hired some executive coaches. We can talk more about that. But part of that was kind of the questions you're asking. Why are you doing this? What's your goal? What are you waking up every day to do? And I think we wanted to create something that was going to get us just jumping out of bed in the morning. And so we said, hey, we want to be the number one performing fund of all time. So we looked at all the data that was public on some of the pension funds websites and information and we said, hey, if we could deliver 3x net consistently on every fund, that would put us in the conversation. We've been out performing that. So we increased our goal a little bit.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question. We have three North Stars at Alpine. One is to be the number one performing private equity fund in the world as measured by MOIC. Our specific goal is 5x on every fund. Number two is we want to be the best place to work for the top talent. So we want it to be a place where the very best people can come and have just an amazing career. And three is we want to use this platform as a force for good. And really everything that we do fits under one of those three and usually all three.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source