Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425]
Episode publishedPodcast: Invest Like the Best with Patr...Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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Something I speak about frequently on Invest Like the Best is the idea of life's work. A more fun way to think about it is that I'm looking for maniacs on a mission. This is the basis for our investment firm, Positive Sum, and it's the reason why I'm so enthusiastic about our presenting sponsor, Ramp. Not only are the founders, Kareem and Eric, life's work level founders, certainly maniacs on a mission, they have created a product that is effectively an unlock for founders and finance team to do more of their life's work by streamlining financial operations, saving everyone their most precious
O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and the podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
My guest today is Graham Weaver. Graham is the founder of Alpine Investors, a large private equity firm targeting an interesting market inefficiency. Alpine focuses on the thousands of $20,000,000 or so revenue businesses whose baby boomer owners want to retire, but lack succession plans. Alpine buys companies and installs 28 year old military veterans and top MBA graduates as CEOs, leveraging twenty five years of intellectual property on how young executives can successfully run established businesses. Alpine's CEO and training program is now the most applied to job at Harvard, Stanford, and
Great question. We have three north stars at Alpine. One is to be the number one performing private equity fund in the world as measured by an MOIC. Our specific goal is five x on every fund. Number two is we wanna be the best place to work for the top talent, so we want it to be a place where the very best people can come and have just an amazing career. And three is we wanna use this platform as a force for good. And, really, everything that we do fits under one of those three and usually all three.
When you think about five x MOIC, why do you care about that? Why that number? Where did that come from?
We went through a really tough period in the recession. We didn't have a fund for a number of years, so we had three years to kind of work on our business and really do some deep thinking. I hired some executive coaches. We can talk more about that. But part of that was kind of the questions you're asking. Why are you doing this? What's your goal? What are you waking up every day to do? And I think we wanted to create something that was gonna get us just jumping out of bed in the morning. And so we said, hey. We wanna be the number one performing fund of all time. So we looked at all the data
What's underneath it? You're probably a person that could build a whole variety of different kinds of businesses. Why is high performing private equity one that's interesting to you?
I never knew what private equity was until I graduated from college, so I didn't have this background. This was never a goal of mine when I started, but when I got recruited out of college to go into private equity, I just thought it was I had a real burning interest in business. And I thought once I learned what private equity was, I was thinking, wow. This is the best expression of building businesses. We get to do it over and over and over across a bunch of businesses. In terms of why I try to be the best, I guess, ever since I was pretty young, I just never thought about doing anythin
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