Weprin: Career success is 99% luck and timing
Ben Weprin · Graduate Hotels: Ben Weprin · Sep 23, 2024 · at 1:03:59
Ben Weprin, founder of AJ Capital Partners and Graduate Hotels, reflects on whether his entrepreneurial career was driven by relentless grind or good fortune.
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“99% luck.”
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“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?”
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“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.”