Graham Weaver
speaker
351 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Graham Weaver’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And now we have it a little bit more dialed in and we're still learning.
I mean, I'm not declaring victory at all. What are some of the, especially extra points for surprising attributes that have made these young people successful?
I like the surprising one. Obviously hard work and smart. Okay, so I'll say some and then I'm not sure how many of these are surprising. So the number one attribute is will to win. I'm going to take this project or business or whatever, and I'm going to put it on my shoulders and run it through this burning building. And you just see that show up in their life. Historically, they've done that.
There's this ownership and drive. And that's number one. Number two, which is probably 1A, is grit. So they've been knocked down, they got up. They've been knocked down, they got up. Because that's gonna happen as a CEO. And I think the great thing about getting knocked down and getting up is at some point,
You just have the belief that you're going to get up and you have the expectation you're going to get knocked down every now and then. And that one is actually more rare than you would think. At some of the schools that we're recruiting from, that grit isn't as common. And we've made that mistake many times. Third is I'm going to mash a whole bunch of stuff together, but it's like...
emotional intelligence, self-awareness, ability to get along with people. We've also got that when we've had big failures, we've missed that one. So those are probably the three big ones. Surprising one would be probably just a bias for action. So getting in the arena, trying stuff, it fails, try again, versus this analysis paralysis.
If you think about marketing to these people, like how you get, obviously you would want to monopolize people that have that trait to come on one of your companies. That would be a great virtuous cycle. How do you do that? Is it just word of mouth? Are you more deliberate about it?
The answer is it's word of mouth. One of the students goes and has a great experience running a business. Their friend hears about Alpine, calls them and says, hey, is this real? And the friend says, I am having the absolute time of my life. Like I didn't even know this exists. I can't believe this even exists. And it is as or better than advertised. And that word of mouth.
So the best thing we can do is just deliver on the experience, starting with giving them a winnable game and a lot of support. I think last year, this would be surprising probably to you, but Alpine was the number one most applied to job ever. At Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, Kellogg Business School, the Alpine CEO and training program. Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you've literally like short circuited the front part of that search fund process. Yeah, exactly. Which is a pain in the butt. It is a pain. Yeah. Yeah. It's also so interesting that in that process, like you said, you said it as they have to build a private equity firm and then abandon it.
Exactly, yeah. They don't get to reuse the skill that they built. Build it to do one deal. And the other thing is they can just do something on a way bigger scale. They're going to run something much bigger in this, and they're going to hopefully get there a lot faster.
Yeah. Can we spend a while talking about your class at Stanford? So I think you took Irv Grossbeck's class over, who was the father of search funds. Maybe first talk about him, anything you learned from him, the nature of this class, and then I have lots of questions about how you run it.
I would say Irv is one of the most influential people in my life. And I would also say there's probably literally without hyperbole, probably a thousand people that would say that same thing. I don't know anyone else that that's true of. And you sit down with Irv and you are the most important person in the world for that period of time. He remembers everything from your last conversation.
He later told me he takes notes afterwards and then reviews them before he meets you again. He just cares, right? So he remembers everything from your last conversation. He's always the voice of, you've got this. Yeah, you've got this. I've seen all these students. I've done all this. Let me just tell you, it's going to be okay.
It's like your older version of yourself could come back and give you advice. He's that person. And I can't tell you how many times in my career where I've been down and out and gone and met with him and just, he just gives me a shot in the arm that I needed at the right time. And from someone that you believe it when he says it. So He's just incredible.
So my experience was I was a case guest in his class, and the case was about buying companies in my dorm room and all the stuff that went wrong. And I don't think Irv would say this, but I think I was like the token failure case in the corner. Where it was like, you know, all these people with this parade of champions.
And I'm this like 28 year old that just gets my teeth kicked in again and again. So he probably wouldn't say that. But now that I teach there, I think that's the role I played in the curriculum. One funny story too. When I first started teaching his case, I was young, I was 29. I knew a lot of people in the class because I'm basically the same age.
One of the students told me like in the wrap up of my case, one of the takeaways was, as you can see from Graham, you don't really need to have charisma or be articulate to be a CEO. That was one of the takeaways. I was so nervous and stumbling over my words and stuff. But anyway, so yeah, I mean, the class was amazing. And then I was a case guest in his class for 12 years.
And then he was going to go start a new class. And he called me one day and was like, hey, Graham, do you want to teach my class? I was almost immediately going to say no, because I'm like, yeah, I already have a full time job. But I thankfully said, I'll think about it.
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