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 then there's a whole lot of things you back up from sleeping well. So I don't drink alcohol. I don't drink caffeine. I don't take sleeping pills. 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.
If I go back to our Teal versus Schwarzenegger analogy, my experience with the Schwarzeneggers of the world is that the structure of their days matters a tremendous amount, typically a lot more than the Teals. Maybe could you give us like a day in the life? Let's say a normal day of work or something, a Tuesday. In some detail, what does a day in the life look like?
A 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... Shocked. Yeah.
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. Cause it just, I don't know, it has some kind of impact on me that I enjoy. And then if I'm successful, I have my day start a little later, like nine or 10 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, weekends, probably not weekends. Yeah.
Weekdays.
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.
And in that day, if I think about the archetypes, a second like pairing of archetypes for people running investment firms, you have a category of investor focused people and more like what I would call CEO running a business that happens to do investing as its thing versus people that are like doing the deals. So like very famously, like Schwarzman or the KKR founders.
They were kind of CEOs from day one. They didn't really like deal people. They were, of course, involved. It was more about building the machine than executing the individual deals. And I know you've done both. But if you think about the day in the life today, like if I looked at your meetings. Yeah, my calendar.
How does it break down between, wow, we're making this huge equity investment, like talking about the company versus talking about Alpine?
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 like, my deal's better and I'm going to grab your analyst because, you know, whatever. 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'd 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, 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.
Where do you think private equity is going? It's a very interesting time in the news because Yale and others have just sold these big secondary interests and a whole bunch of their private equity exposure, venture exposure. It is an industry. I mean, it is professionalized, mature, huge. There's huge public companies that do this.
When you started Alpine, it was very much still in its, you know, whatever, earlier innings, let's say. Yeah. How would you describe it today? What does it kind of feel like to you having been in it a while? Where do you think it might go?
Well, if you go back to when I started, say 1990, I started in 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 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 eight or 9%. 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.
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