Five years ago, Decoder podcast host Nilay Patel started an annual tradition: interview a grill CEO every Fourth of July. The first guest was Roger Dahle, CEO of Blackstone — a griddle company that went viral on TikTok during the pandemic. Now Dahle is back, and the full-circle moment is hard to ignore: he’s the CEO of Weber Blackstone. He bought Weber.
Blackstone was founded in 2008 and exploded during COVID when smashburger videos took over social media. The growth was so fast that Dahle needed a manufacturing partner by 2015 — a father-son team from Taiwan with facilities in mainland China, who became equity partners in the business.
The Weber connection came through Byron Trott of BDT Capital Partners, who’s owned a stake in Weber since 2010. Trott loved Blackstone’s story. After an attempted acquisition fell through and a SPAC deal cratered with the markets, Dahle and Trott agreed to merge in late 2024. FTC antitrust review held it up until May 2025. The two companies have been merged for just over a year.
The cultural divide is real. Weber is a 70-year-old legacy company — structured, siloed, process-heavy. Blackstone is entrepreneurial, fast-moving, obsessive about speed to market. “At Blackstone, we’ve always done speed to market with new products,” Dahle says. “I can’t take three years to get a new product in a box; it has to take three months.”
Dahle describes walking into Weber and finding employees who wouldn’t pick up a piece of garbage in the parking lot — not because they’re lazy, but because they feared taking the janitor’s job. At Blackstone, everyone picks up trash. That’s the culture gap he’s trying to close.
The merger is still a work in progress. Dahle spent the first four months just learning the business, then started making changes to the C-suite. He brought in a consulting firm to help with integration. Full integration will take another year, he says.
What’s at stake: combining Weber’s iconic brand and retail presence with Blackstone’s speed and product innovation. Whether Dahle can break down 70 years of corporate silos while navigating tariffs and a tough retail environment is the open question of the grilling industry.
