Building Alpine: Graham Weaver on CEO Training, 5x Returns, and 25 Years of Intellectual Property

“CEO walks in day zero. They make their big announcement. The people are upset because Joe's plumbing, Joe's retiring. They've been working with Joe for 15 years. Here's this 28-year-old that doesn't know the industry. They're not thrilled. The first move for the first 60 days is listen. They sit down with the key employees and say, hey, tell me about your role. What do you do here? What's going well? What else, what else, what else? What's not going well? What else, what else?”— Graham Weaver

The Playbook for CEOs · p. 16

Leadership & Management · Operations & Execution · Psychology & Behavior

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First 60 days: listen only, trust follows

“The way I like to think about it is I like to think about the world in endogenous winnable games and then ones that might be a little more exogenous and or unwinnable or hard to win. I don't want to just go full-on brute force in a non-winnable game. So for example, in private equity 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.”— Graham Weaver

Investing with Insight vs. Brute Force · p. 7

Strategy & Decision Making · Economics & Markets · Business & Entrepreneurship

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25% find winnable game, 75% execute hard

“The first thing I'd say is that if you watch most people, they're kind of asleep or unconscious. 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, then you eat. Then you return 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.”— Graham Weaver

The Power of Choice · p. 4

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management

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Create space, ask powerful questions, act

“The winnable game that we're engaged in, and we learned this over the first 10 years of Alpine, is we're going and finding a $20 million revenue plumbing company in Ball, Louisiana, where the owner's retiring and they need a new management team. There's just not a lot of people that want to sign up for that game. It's a lot of work. We're putting in a new CEO in a small company. We're putting in new IT systems. We have a whole new playbook.”— Graham Weaver

Investing with Insight vs. Brute Force · p. 8

Strategy & Decision Making · Business & Entrepreneurship · Operations & Execution

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High operational complexity = low competition

“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. 21 years in, my salary was a hundred thousand dollars. That's a fact. And we hadn't yet had a carry check because of our European waterfall. And so waiting for the last company, which was our best one, it just took a long time. I think Alpine is a success story.”— Graham Weaver

Becoming an Overnight Sensation 21 Years in · p. 35

Business & Entrepreneurship · Psychology & Behavior · Philosophy & Reasoning

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21 years, $100K salary, then success

“The best deals that we did were always ones where we put in either us or someone just we to go run this business who knew nothing about the industry, but had these raw talent and also coachability to say, hey, I don't know everything. So who do I learn from? Not this grizzled veteran that already knows everything about the industry, but I'm going to look at things differently and fresh. And by the way, I'm going to just run through walls. Those were our very, very best deals.”— Graham Weaver

A Masterclass on Platforms · p. 13

Strategy & Decision Making · Leadership & Management · Business & Entrepreneurship

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Burned boats, rebuilt sourcing for young CEOs

“On one of the audio tapes, I heard this guy say, 'Okay, imagine there's this genie that comes out of this magic lamp. And he says to you, Patrick, I've only been in here 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, 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.”— Graham Weaver

The Power of Choice · p. 4

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior · Strategy & Decision Making

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Genie removes failure, reveals soul's desire

“The very, very first major thing that I ever tried to do was right after the summer when I started listening to these tapes. 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 6ft tall, and I dropped 30 pounds and I wrestled 125. I was eating 900 calories a day. I was going on runs in the morning when it was nine degrees outside. And I just powered through that.”— Graham Weaver

Building the CEO Factory · p. 3

Psychology & Behavior · Philosophy & Reasoning

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Dropping 30 lbs proved the power of decision

“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. I mowed lawns about six hours a weekend to make money. 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 by Napoleon Hill and Lead the Field by Earl Nightingale.”— Graham Weaver

Introduction / Building the CEO Factory · p. 2

Psychology & Behavior · Philosophy & Reasoning · Leadership & Management

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Accidental cognitive programming at age 12

“My dad started a veterinary practice about the time I was born. They had a falling out of some kind. My dad 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 2 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.”— Graham Weaver

Building the CEO Factory · p. 6

Business & Entrepreneurship · Psychology & Behavior · Operations & Execution

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Emergency calls for 25 years built empire

“Our objective function is MOIC. We have a specific number we put on that: we're trying to do 5x on a fund. 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. And I think it can muddy up.”— Graham Weaver

Alpine's Core Tenets · p. 11

Strategy & Decision Making · Business & Entrepreneurship · Leadership & Management

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MOIC objective, A talent in B industries

“I made so many mistakes, Patrick. Everything you could imagine. But I also got in the game when I was 25. So instead of just sitting around thinking about it, overthinking it, I got in the arena. That would be my third piece of advice: go get in the arena. I started off trying to sell my track record, which was a catastrophe, because these people are seeing phenomenal track records. On the plane from Denver to San Francisco, I read this little book of selling.”— Graham Weaver

Alpine's Core Tenets · p. 11

Business & Entrepreneurship · Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management

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Sold self, not track record, landed capital

“I show up the next morning. I worked all the way back, I talked myself into getting there at 5:30 in the morning. You know the punchline: I get there, there's nobody there. There was no one there at 5:30, 6, 7. No one ever showed up, 'cause Land Warrior was a euphemism for 'You just got cut.' I stayed and rowed, and I met this guy who was training for the national team, Mike Teti. He ignored me. He's a legend. He eventually kind of took me under his wing a little bit.”— Graham Weaver

Building the CEO Factory · p. 5

Psychology & Behavior · Operations & Execution

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Three weeks at 5:30 AM earned mentor

“Alpine has three North Stars. 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.”— Graham Weaver

Building the CEO Factory · p. 1

Strategy & Decision Making · Leadership & Management · Business & Entrepreneurship

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Three North Stars, everything fits under them

“I'm a huge fan in thinking, 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 do 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.”— Graham Weaver

Alpine's Core Tenets · p. 12

Strategy & Decision Making · Leadership & Management · Creativity & Innovation

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Oak tree seeds today, shade in five years

“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 work on our business and really do some deep thinking. I hired some executive coaches. Part of that was 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 keep us just jumping out of bed in the morning.”— Graham Weaver

Building the CEO Factory · p. 1

Strategy & Decision Making · Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management

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Forced pause created strategic clarity

“I think one of my probably favorite things is when I went back when I was telling you earlier about Irv Groesbeck 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. It would matter that he said that. I think a big part of it, Patrick, is we get to be that force.”— Graham Weaver

Lessons from Teaching at Stanford · p. 34

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior

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Belief creates self-fulfilling prophecy

“I come out of college and I'm just ready to run through walls. I show up, I get this job on Wall Street. 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 at undergrad level ever did. And then we did it, by the way, 80 to 100 hours a week. The culture wasn't great. And I just remember thinking, is this what work is? I've been in school 16 years and this is my big moment. And it was incredibly disappointing.”— Graham Weaver

Investing with Insight vs. Brute Force · p. 7

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior · Business & Entrepreneurship

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Wall Street wasted 97% of capacity

“I never knew what private equity was until I graduated from college. But when I got recruited out of college to go into private equity, I just thought it was 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 I 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.”— Graham Weaver

Building the CEO Factory · p. 2

Psychology & Behavior · Strategy & Decision Making · Philosophy & Reasoning

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Big plans stir blood, small plans don't