Graham Weaver: preference

Transcript context

…I'm excited to see what insights come out of this part of your life. Final question before we get to our very exciting lightning round. We have this segment on the podcast called Failure Corner, where people come on this podcast, they share all these wins: "Oh, I have this amazing PE fund that's killing it. I teach at Stanford. I've launched all these things. All these students, they're so great. Life's amazing. Nothing ever goes wrong," when in reality, it does. And those stories often aren't told. So I'm curious if there's a story you could share of a time you failed in your career and, if you learned something from that experience, what you learned. Yeah, I'll tell a couple stories. So when I was in high school, I wrestled. And I cut a lot of weight to make the varsity team. And I was not in the best mental place because of cutting weight. But anyway, I lost a big match my junior year. And I quit and I never wrestled again. And that haunted me. So first of all, that was a failure, a big failure for me. And it really haunted me. And so I, after that, made a promise to myself that it wasn't going to have that happen again. When I went to college, I tried to row crew. I failed year after year trying to make the team, trying to make the boat. Eventually had some real success my senior year, but prior to that, just failure after failure. And then at Alpine, I mean, we lost money on our first fund. We had real trouble during the recession. I think five of my first eight investments I ever made in my life, I lost money. And in venture world, that's one thing, but in private equity, that's a whole different ratio, which is not a good ratio at all. When I first started teaching, I wasn't good at teaching, had a lot of insecurities. I was really young when I started, and I didn't feel like I had really anything to share with the students. And I think that showed up, and it took me a long time to kind of figure that out. So I guess almost my entire track record is one that starts with things not going well, and then just over a long period of time of chipping away, looks like a success on paper. But anytime early in the process would look like an abject failure. So I'm quite familiar with failure in the form of setbacks. I think the ultimate failure though was the wrestling one, where I just quit. That was really the only one I would characterize as a failure. The other ones, because I kept going and staying with it, turned out to work out well, with a lot of scars and bruises, but the failure would've been quitting. I love that the circles back to your core advice of stick with it. Most things that are important take a long time and there's a lot of suffering [inaudible 01:00:24].…

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