Insight
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?”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Insight
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Insight
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.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
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.”
Disclosure
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…”
What-if
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Disclosure
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.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
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.”
Opinion
Weprin: Career success is 99% luck and timing
“99% luck.”
Disclosure
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…”
