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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And so we have a 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 know, are you 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 can talk more about that. That's number two. And then number three 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 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.
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.
When I do my like asking around, I'm always curious if you condense everything down to asking someone, what is Alpine known for? Like, what is the thing? You only get one thing. What you hear a lot is young talent development and relying on 20-something CEOs to run sometimes very large companies and the search and development process of that young talent, those young CEOs.
So maybe you can explain, when did you plant that acorn seed? Why? How has it grown? We can spend as much time as we want on this thing because it does seem to be an elemental part.
Yeah, that's right, Patrick. That is core. So the way it came about was in the early days, we were doing all kinds of things, a number of businesses going well. So one of us would go out and run the company. So Dan Saner, one of my partners today, we moved to Detroit. For like a year, Will Adams moved to Maine for two years to run this horrible business. And a guy named Mike Duran was in Chicago.
I ran one of our companies, a slot machine business for a while. We got in when we were in the recession and we had all this time to kind of look back at our track record.
the best deals that we did were always ones where we put in either us or someone just like us to go run this business who knew nothing about the industry, but had these raw talent and also coachability to like say, hey, I don't know everything. So who do I learn from?
Not this grizzled veteran that's 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 and Those were our very, very best deals. Mike Duran ran one, a guy named Josh Greenberg ran one, and then Mark Straub ran one. At one point, I can still remember where I was when we had this conversation.
Those were also, by the way, the most fun, most fun board meetings. So you're sitting literally with your friend talking about how you're just going to just crush this prank. And you know when you walk out of that meeting, they're going to do it. It's not like the founder who says, oh yeah, oh, great idea, Patrick, and they're writing it down. You just know it's never going to happen.
It's the opposite of that. And it was so much fun. And so at one point we just said, let's just do that every time. From this point forward, let's just, let's put our own team in a hundred percent of the time. And we burned the boats, brutal to burn those boats because bankers don't sell companies that don't have management teams. So we had to rebuild an entire sourcing engine to do that.
We had to change our brand in the market we're the brand now if you don't want to continue you call alpine as opposed to the other private equity firms that will back the founder so it was really really brutal to make that change but yeah we made that change around 2010. so is it true now today that you will not do a deal where you're not installing your own team
In a platform company, we install our own team pretty much 100% of the time. Every rule can have an exception.
Sure, someone could be amazing.
Yeah, exactly. So if they're coachable and they want to run through walls and meet our criteria that we would have otherwise, certainly that would even be easier. But historically, we've last, I don't know, four funds, we've replaced the management 100% of the time. And we're super upfront going in. We're saying, hey, you want to cash out and go hang out on your boat and whatever? Great. Yeah.
And then probably 80% of the time in the add-on investments, we're changing management.
Can you give us like a platform architecture or a platform building class, like 101 or 201? Does platform mean roll up? That's a word you hear a lot in private equity. Like what is a platform? How do you build one? What are the steps? So for us, it means roll up and I'll use our best example.
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