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
I worked all the way back. I talked myself into getting there at like 5.30 in the morning. 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 a euphemism for you just got cut. Yeah, you got cut. I stayed in road and I met this guy who was training for the national team, Mike Tatey.
And he and I were the only two guys in the morning at the Princeton Boathouse. And he ignored me. He's a legend. He coached the US Olympic team. He went on to coach the US 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 the 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 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 Tatey 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 very simple. And I just did that.
And it worked. It just required a lot of hours. Is there anything else between ages 12 and 22 that without which you would be a wildly different person?
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's 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 the 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 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.
What was the story for between graduation and starting to tell the story that leads to Alpine? Why did you get interested in this field? What was it about investing or business that called you?
Graduate from college. I never once thought about my job. I never had an internship because I was always rowing during the summers. I got recruited from Morgan Stanley, which had an in-house investment bank. And to my knowledge, they were the only ones that 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. You know, 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. And I just remember thinking like, 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?
My friend Jeremy Giffon has this really funny idea for two models of success that he dubs the Peter Thiel model and the Arnold Schwarzenegger model. The Peter Thiel model being like a lot of maybe public and market investors that I know who kind of sit around and think and then make infrequent decisions on the back of like a special insight that leads to great returns.
And then the Schwarzenegger model is just brute force, like more reps, more push. I have an early guess as to which camp you might fall into. But maybe react to that. Do you think of private equity as the ultimate open tapestry for performance, almost for its own sake, like the ability to push and drive outcomes versus have insights that lead to good returns, which might be the other paradigm?
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.
Showing 61–80 of 351 · page 4 of 18
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