The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 24 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
High-attribute young talent placed in senior roles quickly eclipses experienced executives
“I think to have a returns that are different, you have to have a belief that's different at the core. And our belief is that we can put a low experience, but high attribute person who's very young into an incredibly high senior leadership role. And in a short …”
Alpine generated 95% of returns by scaling bright spots, not fixing problems
“You actually make all your money by focusing on the bright spots and scaling the things that are going right. We've made 95% of our money by focusing on the things that are going well and scaling those until those crowd out the rest of the activities.”
PE buyers get a discount acquiring companies without incumbent management
“In the public markets, Ted, you pay a premium to put your own management teams in. In the private market, you get a discount.”
Traditional executive search reshuffles rather than expands the diversity candidate pool
“They go look at people that have run healthcare software companies for 20 years, and so the DE&I battle was won or lost 20 years ago. Now, you could tell them, okay, we want that to be a minority or a woman, but they're not increasing the pool, they're just mo…”
Suboptimal CEO talent, not recessions, causes portfolio company underperformance
“And I realized, yeah, we're in a recession, but really the root cause in every single case was a person, the wrong person.”
Alpine Investors set an explicit goal to deliver 5x on every fund
“And we actually set a goal of delivering five X on every fund.”
A candidate's will to win is obvious in three-hour topgrading interviews
“We use the top grading process that GH smart popularized. And so you do this three hour plus interview with someone. And if the will to win doesn't pop out of that interview, they don't have it. And so it's people are like, how do you interview for that? It's …”
Alpine aims to reduce add-on multiples to 5x EBITDA within 12 months
“There's a lot of private equity firms who go around and they basically do this math. They say, okay, a platform company trades at 15 times EBITDA and I can buy the add-ons at nine, so I'm gonna make money. It's fine. Lots of people do that. That exists in our …”
Post-acquisition operational improvement is the source of all alpha in private equity
“That last Piece of actually improving the company you're buying is a tremendous amount of work, but it's also where all the alpha comes from.”
Alpine lost money buying businesses at 2-4x cash flow in Fund I
“This is very hard to do, but we bought companies that two to four times cashflow in our first one and lost money. So because we bought companies that had no barriers to entry, maybe they had customer concentration. They were trading at those multiples for a re…”
Most PE firms market that they partner with existing management teams
“If you go and look at private equity, go on the website, 95% of them have on the very first page. We're great partners for continuing management teams.”
Newly trained young portfolio CEOs remain over their heads for a year
“They still are really in over their heads for the first year or so, and they have to be a little patient. So it's not perfect, but it definitely gets them up to speed pretty quickly.”
Alpine targets boosting add-on EBITDA by 50-100% in the first 18 months
“If we have a clear playbook about what we could do with an add-on, we think we can increase the EBITDA of this add-on by 50 to a hundred percent in the first 12 to 18 months because we've done the heavy lifting on all the elements of that playbook for that ind…”
Alpine retains roughly 80% of its CEO-in-Training hires long term
“So we probably lose about 10% really quickly because they worked in consulting. They thought they wanted to be a CEO. It turns out it's really hard to be a CEO. Maybe not for them. And then probably another 10% who either along the way decide it's not for them…”
Alpine's excess returns fund some university LPs' entire annual financial aid budgets
“So the delta between our performance and median at some of our investors is paying for all the financial aid that they're going to do every year, paying for buildings, paying for scholarships.”
Alpine aims to be its generation's top PE firm by net MOIC
“I mean, we want to be the number one performing private equity firm of our generation as measured by net MOIC, and almost every investment and people decision that we have is geared toward that.”
Doug Martin and Tom Steyer provided the bulk of Alpine's debut fund
“I pitched Doug Martin from the Stevens family that I had served on the board with when I was at the firm prior and done a really nice job for that company. And he observed that from being on the board from a company. So he was interested in backing me. And the…”
Alpine's deal flow hit zero for a year after shifting management strategy
“Our deal flow when we made that change went down to zero because every deal that bankers send you. So we had a year where we had to rebuild our entire deal flow, our brand.”
Alpine Investors places 100 to 150 MBAs into portfolio company leadership annually
“If I add up all those, I mean, we're putting probably somewhere between a hundred and a 150 MBAs into these companies per year.”
Alpine has completed over 500 executive coaching engagements in six years
“So we have, 23 coaches that are in the Alpine ecosystem. And I think we've done over 500 coaching engagements over the last five or six years.”
Alpine Investors is increasingly migrating toward acquiring more services businesses
“So at Alpine, we do software and services, but we probably have been migrating to do way more services.”
Weaver's college newspaper delivery business had negative COGS subsidized by NYT
“I started this little newspaper delivery business, which was actually the most genius business ever because we had the New York Times and the USA Today, and then our daily paper that Princetonian, but the New York Times would actually pay us per subscription. …”
Weaver's first buyout was a $2M label printing business financed with debt
“So the first company I bought was this label printing business for electronic components and things like that. Very prosaic business. I want to say it had maybe 500,000 dollars of profit and I bought it for two million dollars and financed almost the whole thi…”