In this episode, we sit down with Brian Willis (WG ’23) to unpack his journey from Notre Dame to Deutsche Bank, GTCR, and ultimately the Wharton MBA. Brian shares how he built his foundation in finance and private equity, what led him to step back and pursue business school, and how the experience reshaped his perspective on career, community, and balance. He reflects on his time at Wharton – from organizing Penn Fight Night to navigating personal loss – and offers candid advice on slowing down, staying grounded, and making space for what matters. Today, Brian is part of the Alpine Investors team, where he focuses on building and scaling services businesses alongside founders – combining the discipline of private equity with a people-first approach to investing. This episode is brought to you by Juno, the collective bargaining platform that helps MBA students secure lower rates on student loans. Learn more at juno.us/m7a
I grew up in northern New Jersey in a town called Rutherford, which is about nine miles from where I'm sitting today. If that sounds even moderately familiar, it's because the Giants play in East Rutherford - right in the Meadowlands, just north of Newark airport.
I went to Notre Dame for undergrad. I knew I wanted to do something in business. Both my parents were in finance at different parts of their career, but I didn't know exactly what that looked like. My older brother - he's two years older than me - was a football player at Princeton, and Ivy League athletes seemed to run the sales and trading circle on Wall Street. So I thought that's what I wanted to do initially, and then after a summer internship in sales and trading I realized it was not what I wanted to do. I slowly found my way to investment banking, then private equity, and then business school - what I'd refer to as the dime a dozen path, where you see quite a bit of us at business school.
Basically, when I got to my private equity firm, GTCR - they're based out of Chicago - I did two years in New York and then three years in Chicago. It's an amazing private equity firm. I love the people I work with. On the first day, during orientation, they give a speech that is essentially: we will support you in whatever you want to do - business school, a next job, something entirely different - just let us know. You can go anywhere you want, but you can't stay here. At that point they'd been around for 40-plus years, so there's a long history of people going somewhere. It's not as scary as that might sound.
There were 10 of us in my peer group, and probably seven or eight went to business school. So it was super common to see everybody do that. I hadn't taken my GMAT in undergrad - I wasn't really planning to go - but I started ramping up into that as soon as I left Deutsche Bank, because I knew GTCR would move me along.
Would they welcome you back after the MBA?
That's possible. One person from my class, maybe two, are back out of around ten. It's rare. You're also on different teams, so there are only a couple of jobs. There's a guy a year below me who I'm good friends with - he's now a vice president in the group I was in, after doing business school. As a result, there won't be another new vice president in that group for about three years. So for all I know, they could have someone great on their team and still not have a spot for them. Fairly uncommon.
I wasn't even really sold on the MBA until much later. I was enjoying private equity enough and figured I would move back to the east coast at some point. I started at Wharton in 2021, and at the time the markets were really hot - it was a great time to be in private equity. Things were super busy post-COVID. In the last year of my time at GTCR was the first time that those headhunter emails that were coming in started looking really interesting. I was saying, "Oh, those are actually jobs I might be excited about," versus just another lateral, staying on the rat race.
I had a boss who was a huge proponent of it - no skin in the game, just saying to me, "Hey, I really see the value in it. It's good to slow down for two years. It's a drop in the bucket in the course of a career. Don't be afraid to just slow down for two years, because you're really running really hard in those first five years when you're doing two years of banking, three years of private equity." I loved my boss - he was awesome - and he helped really guide me toward it.
What ultimately pushed me over the edge was that my dad was sick, so it felt like this was an appropriate time to slow down and be available. That is what pushed me over the edge. It wasn't a professional decision at any point - but for what it's worth, it's also a great way to pivot into private equity.
Timing was totally fine because even though I wasn't totally sold on it, I was always going to apply. I knew that I would just have that option in my back pocket in case I had to stay on for a couple extra months while I was looking for the next role - they would have welcomed the help. There were plenty of examples of doing that. So it wasn't like, "Hey, July 1, get out of here." I didn't have that kind of impending concern. I was always going to apply just to have it in my back pocket, whether or not I wanted to go.
I talked a lot about wanting to get to the other side of the table, which at the time I was interested in but didn't think it would really happen - and now it kind of has happened, so I guess I was onto something.
I was afraid to just apply everywhere and say I want to get back into private equity. GTCR is a really large firm - they were close to a $10 billion fund by the time I left, and around $5.5 billion when I first joined. By the time we met with a company, it was really professionalized - probably on its second or third CEO, a multi-billion dollar business. So I rarely got to meet with founders. But on the few occasions that I did, I loved it. They just had a different level of passion for the business. Some of the professional CEOs were among the smartest people I've ever met, and getting introduced to them early on was incredible - but seeing the passion that a founder brought was super interesting to me. I always thought, why wouldn't I do this?
On the margin, I'm not super analytical, and I didn't wake up every morning thinking about how to win an auction process run by William Blair. I had concerns about whether I'd really be successful in that part of private equity if I stayed. So I was thinking a lot about being on the other side of the table and playing into what I thought some of my strengths might be.
I really tried to focus on community and charity and mentorship and just leaving every institution I touched a better place. I don't think it's easy - we all blend together quite a bit. I have always been really community-focused at every point in my life, as much as possible, and that is what I really emphasized.
When I was at Notre Dame, I participated in a boxing tournament - a charity boxing tournament called the Bengal Bouts. That was a charity organization I was really involved with. When I was at GTCR, I started an associate board for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Everybody does something charitable at some point in their first five years out of school, but having founded that associate board, I think that was a little bit different on the margins.
I didn't have the highest GMAT in the world and didn't think I was going to win out one-to-one with all the people who went to Ivy League schools and had 4.0s and all that. So I really tried to focus on community and charity and mentorship and just leaving every institution I touched a better place.
I leaned on it really heavily. I talked about it a lot. It just felt like hopefully somebody would enjoy reading it more than what everybody else did. One of my letters of recommendation was written by a woman named Dana Goodell, who I worked with to start this associate board. It was really heavily featured in my applications.
She was a full-time employee at the Leukemia Lymphoma Society, and I was working with her to help stand up this board from scratch.
Can having a recommender outside your workplace help you stand out?
A lot of people will go with two recommenders that they work with in their job, but if you have a really well-established relationship with someone who can talk about a different side of you, it can really help you stand out.
It wasn't planned. I was doing this because I wanted to do something charitable. It came up organically because one of my bosses was involved in LLS, and he said, "Hey, we don't really do enough with the associate-level pool. Why don't you start something?" And I said, "No." I was like, "Rich, I just got here. I don't know what I'm doing yet. I need to figure out how to do my job." He continued to push me a little bit, and after six months or so, I realized I had a little more breathing room - I'm not an investment banking analyst anymore. I should dive into something that's fun. He helped bring me along to LLS, and I basically had to pitch them on it. I probably spent three or four months coming up with a plan for what I thought we could do and why I thought they were largely missing their population under 35 in Chicago. I spent a lot of time campaigning for it effectively, but it worked. It worked great.
My father always talked about how you have your time, treasure, or talent - those are the three things you can give. None of us are really in a position to give treasure early on in our lives, so you want to focus on time and talent. Throughout my life I had been pushed in that direction.
I've been doing some cancer fundraising since I was probably twelve years old. My aunt died of cancer when I was in the eighth grade and we were very close. I used to shave my head when I was at Notre Dame every year for St. Baldrick's - little things. For me, I just knew I wanted to do something with cancer. There are some amazing educational organizations that GTCR was really involved with, and that all interested me, but I just wanted to do something with cancer and there wasn't anything there yet. I said, okay, if there's nothing there, I should just try to build it.
You should always do something you're really passionate about, because that's how you make the time for it. It didn't feel like a burden. It felt like, oh man, I'm doing something really cool here and hopefully I'll make a difference.
Fighting cancer and raising money for cancer didn't come up a ton in my applications because I just didn't know exactly what it looked like on campus, and I also just knew that I would probably try something a little bit different while I was there. To be specific, on Wharton for example, in my application I talked about Fight Night because I had mentioned how at Notre Dame I did the Bengal Bouts boxing tournament. So I had a couple years of boxing experience specifically in the charity boxing world. I knew how to fundraise, knew how to do all these things. I wrote about, hey, I can tell you day one I don't know exactly what clubs I'm going to join, but I know I'll be doing Fight Night.
I got involved with that as soon as I got on campus - that was what I threw myself into the most. Fight Night is a one-night charity boxing event where it is Penn - it is Wharton students versus the rest of Penn. Historically it has looked a lot like Wharton versus Law; those are the two main ones. But in the years I was there, we had a decent amount of folks from other graduate schools involved as well. I was spending a couple days a week helping coach these people, and then on actual Fight Night that was a working night for me. I came in and cornered all these fighters. So it's this huge party for everybody, and I would have to catch up with my friends at eleven o'clock at the afterparty because I would be in gear, in the corners for everybody. I had so much fun - it was one of my favorite things at Wharton, getting to really dive into that.
Pretty pragmatic. Historically, the people at GTCR had gone to Wharton, GSB, or HBS, and that is where our partners were from for the most part - so that is where you felt like you were going to have the most pull. I also was really set on making sure that I wasn't staying in a city where I had been before, so I crossed off Chicago and New York. If I'm going to do two years, that obviously erases a lot of really good schools. I just applied to those three and figured they would all be able to give me what I was looking for.
The main thing I would have done differently - which is advice I give pretty consistently - is that nobody told me to take the GMAT. When I was a senior going into banking, nobody said, "Hey, you should do this just in case." So I studied for the GMAT in between banking and starting at private equity, during what was supposed to be my time off. And I'm more of a hard worker than a natural test-taker, so I didn't crush it the first time.
I had to take it again while I was at GTCR, and that was hard. I'm starting my job and in between things I'm doing math problems at my desk. I really wish I had gotten the GMAT out of the way, because that was an annoyance.
What was most difficult for me was that in private equity you don't know exactly when you're going to get busy. It ebbs and flows, and there's obviously some consistent level of busyness, but I got really, really busy right before applications were due - I was just working on a tough project. I had the most supportive bosses, amazing people that I worked for, one of whom had gone to business school, so they totally understood. It wasn't like I was working for people who didn't care that I was trying to go to business school.
I took vacation to finish my applications - I just said, I need a week off so that I can wrap some of these up, get my essays done, because it finished right before Labor Day. What I did is I applied to Harvard and Wharton first round because I knew I wanted to be east coast. My boss was a Stanford guy, and some of my mentors had been Stanford people, so I said I'm obviously going to apply. But frankly, I never thought I was going to be able to convince somebody I wanted to be on the West Coast - I had hardly spent any time west of Chicago at that point in my life. I still wanted to apply because it's an amazing place. But I had to take a week off to wrap up my applications.
I should be so lucky - it's almost that I shouldn't treat that as a challenge. But I was doing pretty well on timeline and then I just got blown up for three months. Totally lost the ability to do anything else at all, and that made it hard.
I am enormously lucky in so far as I have a very supportive family, and also my sister-in-law is an incredible writer. She actually does graphic novels and started her career in book cover design, so she was working at Penguin and knows a lot of copywriters. Her best friend's mom helped proofread my essays at one point. I'm the worst writer in my family, so they were always willing to jump in - I have really well-spoken parents and a brother, and they helped me out quite a bit.
I also want to highlight the value of being at a large private equity firm: GTCR did sponsor a consultant for me. They gave us a stipend to use, and I spent most of it on a consultant that I used somewhat sparingly. I didn't do one of those engagements where you spend fifteen or twenty grand and they're with you the whole way, but I worked with a consultant who was really helpful for explaining, "Here's what this application specifically is looking for." Frankly, I don't know how people do it without that. Unless you have somebody you know really well who went to business school before you and can outline what their school is looking for, or you hire somebody, there's just a lot of stuff you wouldn't think of or know how to get that information otherwise - maybe through podcasts like this.
I had a blast. I met some of my best friends there. My two roommates who I lived with both years - we met on an Excel spreadsheet. When you go to Wharton, they'll send out a spreadsheet: there are 900 people in your class, some people are looking for roommates, fill out these couple things, and they send out the spreadsheet once. I met these two guys, and I was just in one of their weddings in March, and the other one I'm officiating in August. They're two of my closest friends, and we got to live together both years. That's always going to stick out as a key positive for me.
I got to see the world - did a lot of travel. I got to just slow down. I don't think you realize how tightly wound you are early in your career until you unwind. Being able to slow down and enjoy things a little bit more was great.
There were some things I got to do that would have never been possible - you can't ascribe any monetary value to them. My nephew was born about a month early, and I was in the middle of finals. I messaged my professor and said, "I have to go home a week early because my nephew's coming a month early, my brother doesn't have a crib built, and I have to go play uncle for a few weeks." I moved to Princeton, New Jersey with my brother and sister-in-law for about a week and a half. Nobody cared. I didn't have any work to do. I did one or two finals remotely and just showed up at the hospital with bagels every morning for the nurses and built cribs and hung out with my family.
My dad was sick, and that was a big reason why I went. I got to be his caretaker for the last month of his life. I just moved home early - shortly after finals - and sat next to my dad on a couch for a month. Delayed my internship for two weeks. There's really no other point in my life where I think I would have been able to as easily do that. And that alone made the business school experience worth it, not to mention all the other amazing things that I still got to do.
Business school is probably the best opportunity for serendipity in your life. You're going to meet incredible people throughout your career, but when people are busy, you're just a little bit less likely to do something - when you have two years to just let things happen to you a little bit, that changes everything.
You learn a ton because you finally get exposed to other people. When you're in banking and private equity, everybody looks the same or at least wants the same things, and suddenly 90% of your classmates have done something else. So you get exposed to a ton of new industries.
I was going through the steps - I was just starting to apply at private equity firms - and I got a cold email from Alpine Investors about a new program they were starting called Investor in Residence, and that's how I ended up there. If I had gone to business school a year earlier, that wouldn't have happened. If I had gone to business school a year later, I don't think it would have happened either. If I went to business school a hundred times, 95 of them I would have just come out working in lower middle market private equity, but I got that email because I happened to be at business school at that time.
There are so many other stories like that - people who came in for something and then ended up doing something different because of somebody they met or an idea they had. It's just so valuable to have two years to think and be open.
I spend my time building services rollups. I spend a lot of time on the road meeting with companies and hoping to partner with them. What I didn't get enough of at GTCR was founder exposure, and that is all I do now - I spend most of my time talking to founders, and it is just fun for me. That's really refreshing, to be in a position where you're enjoying what you do, meeting incredible people, seeing parts of the world that you haven't been to before.
My day job is M&A for a portfolio company at Alpine, but functionally what I'm doing is building these businesses from scratch - starting from zero with Alpine, hiring a team. That business-building aspect has been something that's really fun for me. I would have never assumed I was going to do that going into business school, and it's all just kind of happened afterwards.
Confidence is the main thing. When you spend five years in banking and private equity, it's not the most confidence-building place. I worked for amazing people at really all stages of my career, and still I didn't have the confidence to speak up all the time the way that I wanted to. Then you go to business school, and 90% of people have done something else and they're all really smart, and you realize, oh, I know some things that they don't know - and they know some things that I don't know - but everybody's speaking up and you learn to be confident. That has been enormously helpful.
I really did have a couple classes that were awesome - that again was not the primary purpose for me going to business school. It wasn't what I cared about. I was a finance and econ double major in undergrad, so it wasn't like I was going to Wharton to round out my finance skill set, which is one of the best places to do that. It's something I could have done, but it wasn't what I was there for.
I took a corporate development class that I loved and hadn't really thought about previously, with Emily Feldman. I took a strategy implementation class with a woman named Christine Gartenberg, who's awesome, who I still talk to fairly consistently, and that helped me think about operators and business - there were a lot of operators that would come into the class, and that was exciting. I took a scaling enterprises course with Gat Allon that was a phenomenal course, all about - again, starting from scratch - basically when do you add infrastructure to a business, and what's too early versus too late, and how do you help manage businesses that are scaling really rapidly. Super, super interesting.
The last one I would note is a class called Influence, taught by a guy named Kade Massie. I functionally had probably one or two classes each semester that I really, really liked, and those four are the ones that stand out for me. Influence was a case-study class, basically, but for people. There's different ways to influence people - you can have your soft power, you can have your smart power, you can have your hard power. A case study might be Lyndon Johnson, who is in people's faces, on top of them, staring over them - hard power through and through - and you learn about that. Then you send a survey to people you used to work with: hey, take 15 minutes, answer all these questions about me. It helps discover what your standard style of influence is. And then what Kade did was get up there and say: boom, you guys have your natural tendencies, and here they are, and this is how you have influenced people up until this point in your life. What you have to know is that you can just build a toolkit and you can do other things - you just have to learn how to do them.
The short of it was: you can have a growth mindset about the way that you interact with people. A lot of people think, I could learn valuation, I could learn how to code - those technical skills feel like something you can learn. And he was all about: no, you can also learn how to interact with people and manage. Just realizing that you could step out of your comfort zone with how you interact with people was really formative for me, and something I hadn't really thought about up until that point.
What did you find out your style was, according to your co-workers?
Entirely soft power, which makes sense. I was 28 years old at that point - I haven't been demanding anybody to do something because of my position of power, so that totally made sense. The other piece is: I'm rarely the smartest guy in the room. In private equity, I just don't stand out intellectually. But I love people and I genuinely enjoy getting to know them, and I build relationships - and I say that and it's not intentional. It's not like I'm super calculated and I want to build these relationships. I just love people. I'm probably going to have five or six people that I worked with at Deutsche Bank in my analyst years at my wedding next summer. I just feel so lucky to be in these careers where I get to meet people that I genuinely want to spend time with. So that was what would spike in my surveys - yeah, Brian still keeps in touch with us, people like him, he tries to get people on board, coalition building. It's funny to look at yourself through a survey of here's how other people think that you build things, without really doing it consciously yourself.
I'm taking a five-year bet here, trying to figure out: am I going to really operate and build a business, and then re-evaluate and say, do I want to stay on this side and just be a private equity operator, or do I want to move back to private equity with a taste of helping build from the boardroom? Frankly, I think I've already realized that I tend to enjoy what I'm doing today more than what I did previously. But the only thing I think about is that the stability is quite a bit different than being at a private equity firm. I'm on this five-year perpetual roller coaster of build, exit, build, exit, build, exit. And that's fine right now. I take a lot of flights. I'm not around as often as I'd like, but my fiancée and I are young, we don't have kids, and I can do this for a few more years - but I don't know if I want to do it that way forever. I'm really excited to just spend the next couple years learning and figuring it out, and having the appreciation that you're never too late to switch or do something new, and continuing to keep that mindset.
Really think about why you want to go - and that means put blinders on for a minute. Don't think about why your friend went or why everybody else at your firm is going. Think about what is it that you want to get out of this experience and whether it makes sense for you personally, professionally, and financially. It's almost never going to make sense financially - that should be spelled out pretty clearly for people. It's an expensive few years. But think about whether it makes sense for you, and if it doesn't, don't go. If it does, go. Don't let too many other people influence that.
What I would also say, which is enormously important, is while you are there, find a way to relax and unwind. The most aggressive I am on advice when people call me is if I'm talking to somebody who's a first-year student and they sound stressed about getting their job. If you are at business school and you are stressing yourself out, you are doing it entirely wrong. The recruiting process is stressful, and I was stressed when I was going through it too, but unless you're directly going for something in that moment, slow down and take time for yourself. You don't have to bury your head in your books for the next two years. Take that trip, meet your new friends, cook a recipe that takes eight hours to make, and just slow down - because you're never going to have an opportunity to slow down like this again. If you waste that, you'll notice it.
I came out of business school and still to this day I feel so much more relaxed than I used to be, after taking time to slow down and think about what matters in life. That doesn't mean I'm not working as hard as I ever have, but I don't get stressed in the same way that I used to. I'm two years out from graduating and I am still absolutely feeling the halo effect of it all. It's been a wasted two years if you didn't slow down and enjoy everything.