Top CEO & Stanford Prof: What Makes A Good Investor? | Graham Weaver

**Adam Taggart** (0:06)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. Today, we're going to do something a little bit different on this channel. We're going to interview a highly successful private equity CEO, and yes, we'll get his economic and market outlook for 2025, but we'll also delve into his insights for achieving success in both life and business. Graham Weaver is the founder and managing partner of Alpine Investors, a people-driven private equity firm that invests in software and services businesses. He serves on the faculty at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, where he teaches a top-rated strategic management course, and he's also a highly popular personal development influencer with millions of followers across social media. Graham also happens to be one of my former business school classmates. I witnessed him begin his private equity firm from his dorm room there. He's a truly remarkable individual, and I predict you're going to highly enjoy today's discussion. Graham, thanks so much for joining us today.

**Graham Weaver** (1:04)
Adam, thanks so much for having me. Looking forward to today's conversation.

**Adam Taggart** (1:07)
Yeah. Well, same here, Graham. And it was so great to see you at our reunion a few months back, and very much appreciate you making time out of your very busy schedule for this. Look, I want to ask you about kind of how you see the world as a private equity investor, as I should add, a very successful private equity investor. But real quick, it might be fun just to give people a little bit of backstory about how you got started.
I think of what Alpine is today, but I remember it's very scrappy. Pardon me, it's very scrappy origins. I remember you there in your dorm room, if I remember correctly, basically starting this thing when we were there at Stanford more years ago than I care to count. I think maybe you were even financing initially some of your first deals on credit cards and whatnot. Can you just give us a little back story about what gave you the drive and really the focus back then at quite a young age to create it?

**Graham Weaver** (2:12)
Thanks, Adam. Yeah, I worked in private equity prior to business school, first at Morgan Stanley and then as a small firm at the time. The firm where I worked, the very first quote fund that they had, they didn't really have a fund. It was like they were what's called a fundless sponsor, which is they'd sign up deals first, and then they would go get the debt financing, and then they would go raise the equities. So they could buy companies with effectively no money, no fund. And so when I showed up at Stanford, I'm 25 years old and business school is expensive, the tuition is expensive, but the opportunity cost of what you're giving up earning is really expensive. And so I sat down the first quarter and I start listening to someone teaching strategy kind of out of a textbook. And I remember thinking, I've got to earn some money to pay for this school that I'm doing.
And then I had this model that these folks on Wall Street had done where they bought companies without having a fund. And so I started trying to replicate that. And as you could imagine, as a 25-year-old, I got like 60% of what they did that I understood. And then a lot that I didn't, and a lot went wrong. But that was definitely the beginnings of Alpine, yeah.

**Adam Taggart** (3:36)
Well, so what was really interesting back then, too, A, watching you go through this, and we were all super impressed because we were all still just drinking from the fire hose and trying to figure out what we might want to be when we grew up. And you were actually rolling up your sleeves and getting it done while we were there during the school. And for folks watching who aren't familiar with business school, it's a short period of time. It's two years, basically two academic years in the summer. And Grant, you not only came up with the vision and the hoots about to go do this, but I believe you bought your first company or bought into your first company during your first year there. And if I remember correctly, it was like a label making company. I mean, it was about as unsexy of a company as you could think of. But I remember you recruited some of our classmates to go like, you know, consult and work, you know, to try to start engineering a turnaround at this label making company in their summer. Is that correct?