Ben Weprin
Founder & CEO, AJ Capital Partners. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestorajcpt.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Ben Weprin is the founder and CEO of AJ Capital Partners, best known for creating Graduate Hotels in 2014. Through AJ Capital, he has developed and restored prominent hospitality properties, including the Chicago Athletic Association and Soho House Chicago.
Everything Ben Weprin said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Weprin: Success comes down to who can 'eat the most shit'
“All the most successful people that I've, you know, read about or met, it's like, who can, you know, eat the most shit and just keep going forward?”
Weprin: Recessions create major opportunities for luxury hotel brands
“I also think there's a huge opportunity for this brand in a recession to actually, you know, acquire assets, or to, you know, build the portfolio of operational, because they're, you know, these smaller hotels, if they're in trouble, they could use distributio…”
Weprin: No hotel brand existed around university nostalgia before Graduate Hotels
“It's the idea that people take very passionate ownership of where they went to school or where they're from, and the hotel product was terrible, and no one had done it. I was like, why anybody done it? Why hadn't somebody built a brand? There's all these brand…”
Weprin: Ideas that are easy to say but hard to execute win
“Easy to say, hard to do, but that's actually a great recipe for a new business too.”
Weprin: Graduate Hotels were busier in the summer than the winter
“There was so much going on in these culturally rich, inspirational markets in the summer that we were way busier in the summer than we were in the winter.”
Weprin: Scaling hospitality requires thinking smaller to evoke local nostalgia
“The challenge as you grew bigger was to think smaller and find more stories and more history and more nostalgia and create, you know, we get this term nostalgia. You create a new memory in an old place that you'd already been that felt familiar.”
Weprin: Graduate Hotels laid off 2,000 of 2,200 employees during COVID
“Yeah, corporate, we had a lot of layoffs. The property levels, we had a massive amount of layoffs. I think we laid off 2000 people out of the, I think, 2200 at the time.”
Weprin: Graduate Hotels was sold due to expensive COVID survival debt
“And this was actually, you know, why we ended up selling graduate was we took a, you know, a very large, expensive loan out during COVID to, you know, continue to execute, to deliver the projects, continue to pay our mortgages, and, you know, we made it throug…”
Weprin: Graduate Hotels would have been a $2B portfolio without COVID
“I mean, there, you know, if there wasn't COVID, if there were, we wouldn't be having, we'd be talking about us selling the entire portfolio, you know, over a two billion dollar portfolio of real estate. That'd be the conversation, you know, and the brand, or m…”
Weprin: Larry Levy's 25% Auberge Resorts stake was $8.5M in 2008
“It was, at that time, I think, nine, it was like eight million dollars, eight and a half million dollars.”
Weprin: 15 investors backed 2008 Auberge buyout after Larry Levy rolled equity
“There was 15 people. I was short a couple million dollars at the end, and Larry, you know, decided to roll his equity into that.”
Weprin: AJ Capital acquired the Raleigh Hotel via a napkin deal
“Long story short, we end up buying that hotel. I make a deal with Frank, literally, like, on a napkin that we wrote at Macaluso's in, in, in Miami Beach for him to be the operator.”
Weprin: Graduate Hotels reached 4,600 rooms and $72M revenue in 2020
“In 2020, we had 4600 rooms, and the portfolio did seventy two million dollars. Your start, we opened, you know, 15 hotels. We had another 15, 17 under development.”
Weprin: Graduate Hotels vertically integrated ownership, operations, and branding
“We were going to become vertically integrated. We're going to own the hotel. We were going to operate the hotel. And we were going to brand the hotel. So We controlled the full customer journey and experience everything that a customer would touch, see, feel w…”
The other half of the tape: Ben Weprin's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Guy Raz 2
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
How I Built This 2
2025 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ben's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Founder & CEO, AJ Capital Partners | 1 | 15 | — | full record on How I Built This → |