Griff Whalen

Who is Griff Whalen

Griff Whalen is a former professional football player turned real estate developer, and the throughline is that nobody handed him either one. He walked on at Stanford, earned his spot, and did it again in the NFL after going undrafted. That is the same starting position most people in this room know well.

He was born in Detroit in 1990 and grew up in Sylvania, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo. At five foot eleven and a hundred and ninety pounds he was never the physical answer to anything, which is most of the point of his story.

On the field

He walked on at Stanford in 2008 and was one of only eight true freshmen to see the field that year. He roomed with quarterback Andrew Luck for three seasons. He also finished a B.S. in engineering, in a program he describes as product design, while doing it.

The production came late and then came all at once. Seven catches as a sophomore, seventeen as a junior, then fifty-six for 749 yards and four touchdowns as a senior, which made him a finalist for the Burlsworth Trophy, the award given to the best player in the country who started his career as a walk-on.

Indianapolis signed him undrafted in 2012. He spent four seasons with the Colts, with a 2013 season of 24 catches for 259 yards and two touchdowns, then passed through Miami, San Diego, New England for all of six days, Baltimore, Oakland and a final camp with Calgary in the CFL. The career line reads 51 receptions for 532 yards and three touchdowns across 43 games, plus two playoff appearances. He is also, through no fault of his own, a permanent part of NFL blooper reels: he was the man pressed into an unrehearsed long-snapper role on the Colts' famously botched trick play against New England in 2015.

It's just my personality. I'm really competitive and never really feel satisfied.

What he builds now

Today Whalen is co-founder and Chief Development Officer of Narrow Road Group, an Austin multifamily investment, development and operating firm. He runs land use, entitlement, predevelopment and ground-up development, which means he is the one taking raw dirt through zoning and into buildings people actually live in.

The firm's own numbers put the scale plainly. More than $250 million of multifamily assembled, entitled, capitalized and under construction. More than 750 units going up right now. A pipeline past $2.5 billion and 6,000 units. More than thirty zoning cases navigated, which in Central Texas is the hard part and the reason his specific job exists. The work spans market-rate, affordable and public-private partnership projects. The client card here describes his personal portfolio as more than 1,200 doors.

The diet nobody expected

Whalen went vegan around 2013, in the middle of an NFL career, in a sport built on the assumption that meat is what makes you big enough to survive it. He became one of the more visible plant-based players in the league and talked about it openly rather than quietly, which took a certain amount of nerve in that locker room.

I get plenty of protein just from the plants that I'm eating, and I think there is a huge misconception about how much protein we actually need.

Off the field

The engineering degree is not a footnote. Whalen approaches development the way an engineer approaches a system, and the walk-on story is not a slogan for him so much as a working method: earn the spot, then keep it by out-preparing the room. Thirty zoning cases is that method applied to city hall.

He said it himself back in his playing days, about the major he almost went straight into instead of football.

My major was called product design, and I really loved that and definitely felt like I could have hopped right into that right away if I wasn't playing football.

He ended up designing a different kind of product. It is why founders trade notes with him on how a real estate portfolio actually gets built.