Graham Weaver
Founder and CEO of Alpine Investors (23 years; one of the top-performing PE funds globally). Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business — teaches Managing Growing Enterprises; winner of the 2024 MBA Distinguished Teaching Award. The class’s official topic is CEO tactics (hiring, fundraising, hard conversations, board management), but in practice centres on helping students identify what they actually want to do with their lives and dismantle the limiting beliefs keeping them from it.
Alpine’s differentiating philosophy: management team is where all PE alpha comes from. The fund instals its own CEOs in portfolio companies and runs a programme to develop people in their late 20s and early 30s into operators.
Known for the genie framework, the nine lives exercise, and the conviction that most people are operating on autopilot through a script written by other people.