"number one attribute is white hot will to win. I'm gonna take this project or business or whatever and I'm going to put it on my shoulders and run it through this burning building. How did you work it..."

"I think the place to begin would be to just understand what you are trying to build and why. We have three northstars at Alpine. Uh one is to be the number one performing private equity fund in the wo..."

"three. When you think about 5x, why do you care about that? Why that number? Where did that come from? We went through a really tough period in the recession and uh we didn't have a fund for a number ..."

"interesting to you? I never knew what private equity was until I graduated from college. So, I didn't have this uh background or think that that this was never a goal of mine when I started. But, when..."

"Ohio, like in the rust belt, uh, outside of Toledo, and I mowed lawns. And I mowed lawns about six hours a weekend to make money. that was the best paying job. I had a Sony Walkman and I started to li..."

"three concepts. I'm summarizing thousands of hours of lawnmowing. But that that that was when I just was So then what happened to answer your question why I felt the first time I started feeling like ..."

"cool. I just got done reading uh the story. Is it Dan Gable? Is that the guy's name? The great wrestler. He's incredible. What What is it about wrestling? like it seems um we'll talk about rowing too ..."

"and so and and so I think I think it's something about just the kind of primal nature of that. Can you say maybe one degree more about this idea that you can just choose like you sort of just choose. ..."

"that's one great question. Um, another one would be like if you didn't have to worry about the how. So, relax the how you're going to do it. You know, the the coaching quote is the how is the killer o..."

"this space. And so, I literally was like, "Oh, wow. Now I can really like let go with these goals." So, I I set three goals going into Princeton. I was going to be the valictorian. I was going to be t..."

"Boat House. And he ignored me. He's a legend. He coached the US Olympic team. He went on to coach the US Olympic team to a gold. And I didn't know any of this at the time. I just saw this tall, skinny..."

"things about about my dad real quick. Um so my dad started a um veterary practice about the time I was born and he he and his father went his my grandfather was a vetinarian too. They started this pra..."

"graduation and you know kind of starting to tell the story that leads to Alpine like why did you get interested in in this field? What was it about investing or business that called called you? I um g..."

"out of college and I'm just ready to run through walls, Patrick. you know, I've just had this incredible experience in college and I show up, I get this job on Wall Street. You know, I've seen the mov..."

"know why why am I only doing like using like 3% of my capacity? It seems like there's my friend Jeremy Gifon has this really funny idea for two models of success that he dubs like the Peter Teal model..."

"don't want to just go full-on brute force in a non-winable game. Um so so for example, um in private equity today, you know, it wasn't like this in 1984, but today if you have a big business, you're g..."

"private equity funds, you know, at any any given great high quality business like you're describing. Um, particularly like take take just extreme high quality business ERP subscription software busine..."

"the the earliest days kind of right before and right after the start of Alpine. Like what was going on? What what what was your goal in your in your in your journal like give us give us the sort of wi..."

"what? Keep keep the story going. So you come out of that. Did you buy anyone? Yeah, I bought I bought um a total of three companies. I was 25. So I had no idea what I was doing. And that's not falsely..."

"from those three and and then the one that worked right after? They were in the label printing business, which was a good business because no supp label might cost a penny on a $5 bottle of shampoo, b..."

"under your belt um coming out of business school. Um sounds like obviously at this point you would have said this is the thing I want to do. Is that right? Or was there still like searching to be done..."

"do if not now? And so I walked in, you know, a couple days later and and and quit. I didn't have anything to land on. I didn't have a fund. I didn't have investors. I didn't have anything, but I was l..."

"is like, you know, go get in the go get in the arena. What did you learn about raising money for deals when you really didn't have a track record and you were 25? I started off trying to sell my track..."

"a on a fund. Have you done that historically? We've done 5x uh in our last four funds or we we have we have it marked at 5x in our last three and the fourth one is well on its way. Yeah. Um and and so..."

"results. So we we'll we'll look at B+ industries that other people really don't look at as much, but we've compared that with an A+ team. We found that to be just a great combination. Um we won't over..."

"kind of imagination and innovation. When when I do my like asking around, I'm always curious like if you condense everything down to asking someone what is Alpine known for? Like what is like the thin..."

"who do I learn from?" Um, you know, I'm not this grizz grizzled veteran that's already, you know, knows everything about the industry, but I'm going to look at things differently and fresh and and by ..."

"change uh around 2010. So is it true now today that you will not do a deal where you're not installing your own team in a platform company we install our own team pretty much 100% of the time. I mean ..."

"are the steps what are the so for us it means roll up and I'll use our best example so we started off in uh in plumbing and HVAC and we had this a guy named it's always HVAC seems to be a good place t..."

"the world. And then so you're starting to architect what does that look like before you even have bought a company. So you're we're hiring the CEO and we're getting the industry right. We're getting t..."

"quickly. Um so you know this particular deal um one of the early things we figured out is that the real um that you know you've heard you said there's a lot of HVAC companies and but we figured out th..."

"know that's an example of starting literally with a blank piece of paper which is how we do each thing we we form a pod of people to go assess a bunch of different industries. we design the playbook u..."

"actually do that. Without giving away all the secret sauce, can you give us like a flavor of that IP and like some of the things that they that you've learned or I I'll give you a couple things. So um..."

"problems? they're going and doing that and they're meeting with, you know, depending on how big big the business is, they might be meeting with 20 30 people in the business without a doubt without fai..."

"about, you know, I think about, okay, you're a single mom and you're you're working at a call center in one of our companies or something and before we come in, you know, maybe you're clocking in, you..."

"through a bunch of you know getting on base and then good things happening. Um but if we if we underwrote an individual deal to 5x we would never close a deal. So that's kind of how we think about it...."

"breathing room. And if we're doing that again and again and again, you know, we're now starting to have a lot more consistent businesses that are are are these these outliers. So, it's not it's not in..."

"you know, in your 26 rather than in year zero. So where do you find these people? Like where do they come from? How did that start? I'm I'm sure it's much easier now. You've got a reputation like this..."

"so it it took a long time and it also took us a while to really figure out what kind of business they would be successful in and where their whole you know where their blind spots were and what they c..."

"than you would think at at some of the schools that we're recruiting from. That grit isn't as common as and we've made that mistake many times. Um third is I'm going to mash a whole bunch of stuff tog..."

"support and um you know I think last year uh this might this would be surprising probably to you but Alpine was the number one most applied to job at Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School,..."

"spend a while talking about your class at Stanford? So I think you took Irv GBC's class over who was the father of search funds and maybe first talk about him um any anything you learned from him the ..."

"How did you build it? Like same same set of questions kind of as for Alpine as for as for the class like what what do you hope the class does for the students and how do you architect it to achieve th..."

"most. Yeah. Yeah. You you've told me before some of these incredible framing questions to like really like like expand the mind beyond like incremental thinking into more like blank sheet thinking. Ye..."

"the same time. And then other questions are like um we we do visualizations which is like you go out 20 years and we and we spend some real time on this and you're you're meeting your future self 20 y..."

"that. Some of the key questions are you know what would you do if you knew you wouldn't fail. Um relaxing the how not worrying about how to get there. The nine lives you know there's a whole bunch of ..."

"well. How has being a teacher changed you personally? Like what what are the takeaways that you have or the behav like how are you different as a thinker as a person because of this experience that yo..."

"learn it better. And and and then the other thing is I have to practice it. I can't stand up in front of class and say um you know what's keep you if you're running this business you can't have B+ peo..."

"helpful is that I could say, "Wow, there's all these MBAs who want to be CEOs. They have this skill set, but not this skill set." And it just happened to marry up really great with our strategy which ..."

"for the potential value of something like coaching or the first coach I had in 2009 I sat across the table from him his name is JP Flom and he pitched me on being an executive coach and I remember thi..."

"coach. Um then I have another coach I use and and we will set aside four hours and this will be like really blue sky, messy thinking. Sometimes nothing comes out of it. Uh we ask big questions like wh..."

"go like a little bit deep here, but um you know I I think that ultimately each of us has uh most of the answers in our in our inside of us in our intuition. Like I think we have this we have this comp..."

"toward that thing and then there's there's your your work going to be in there versus running away from it. A good question, you know, just kind of uh using using kind of your future self. Uh okay, I ..."

"But did you earn a return on the equity on the 170? The initial equity was about a 3x and then some of the late equity was like a 1x. But yeah, we didn't everyone everybody the banks got paid back. Ev..."

"most afraid of. What do you What have you done about that? I try to whatever I'm I'm I'm in at the at the moment just be 100% fully on and fully present and just just be all in with, you know, a thous..."

"that I think if I go back to our uh our Teal versus Schwarzenegger analogy, my experience with the Schwarzenegger of the world is that the structure of their days matters a tremendous amount, typicall..."

"Where do you think private equity is going? Like it it is it's a very interesting time in the news because Yale and others have just sold these, you know, big secondary interests and whole bunch of th..."

"had that trend going on over that same period of time and therefore, you know, returns were good generally speaking. Um today, you fast forward, there's 5,500 private equity funds. It's very efficient..."

"Well, I think one of my probably favorite things is when I went back when I was tell telling about you earlier about Irv Geck and how at certain times in my life, I would walk in and ask for his advic..."

"can be. If you think about the industry as a big participant in it, are there any parts of it that really bother you? Like are there features of the private equity investing style, landscape industry,..."

"$100,000 that's a fact and we hadn't yet had a carry check uh because our we had a a European waterfall and so you know we're waiting for the last company which was our best one and it just took a lon..."

"want to learn because what's happening along the way is you're growing and you're learning who you are and you're building your own confidence and your own resolve. And I think the dirty secret is tha..."