Robert F. Smith

Robert Frederick Smith (born December 1, 1962) is an American billionaire businessman and philanthropist.

He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of private equity firm Vista Equity Partners.

He graduated from Cornell University with a chemical engineering degree and from Columbia Business School with an MBA, before working as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs.

In 1982 he was initiated as a member of Alpha Phi Alpha (AΦA) Fraternity, Incorporated, the first African-American intercollegiate Greek-lettered fraternity.

After graduating from Cornell, Smith worked at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company and Air Products & Chemicals.

Later, he worked at Kraft General Foods as a chemical engineer, and registered two United States and two European patents as the principal inventor.

Smith earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University in 1985.

While there, he won the Procter and Gamble Technical Excellence Award for chemical engineering.

In 1994, he received his Master of Business Administration from Columbia University, with concentrations in finance and marketing.

From 1994 to 2000, after receiving his MBA he worked for investment bank Goldman Sachs in technology investment banking.

He first worked for it in New York City, and then moved to Silicon Valley in 1997 where he started Goldman's technology-focused merger and acquisitions efforts there.

He advised on $50 billion in merger and acquisition activity with companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, eBay, and Yahoo.

In 2000, Smith founded Vista Equity Partners, an Austin, Texas-based private equity and venture capital firm of which he is the principal founder, chairman, and chief executive.

Vista purchased enterprise software businesses and brought performance improvements to the businesses.

In 2014, Smith became the founding director and president of the Fund II Foundation, which has invested in organizations such as Cornell, the National Park Foundation, and Susan G. Komen, while also donating money to causes preserving African-American history and culture, music education, and the environment.

In 2015, Smith sponsored the college education of all returned Boko Haram girls.

In 2016, Smith was named Private Equity International's Game Changer of the Year for his work with Vista.

In 2016, he donated $50 million to Cornell University, and $1 million to Carnegie Hall.

In May 2017, The Giving Pledge announced that Smith had joined as its first African-American signatory.

In 2018, Smith was included in Vanity Fair's New Establishment List, which is an annual ranking of individuals who have made impactful business innovations.

In 2019, while delivering the commencement speech at Morehouse College, Smith pledged to pay off the entire $34 million of student loan debt of all of the members of the 2019 graduating class.

Smith was born in Denver, Colorado, the fourth generation in his family to be born in Colorado.

His parents were Dr. William Robert Smith, an elementary school principal, and Dr. Sylvia Myrna Smith, the principal of George Washington High School, who both had PhDs in education.

His father had attended the University of Denver on a band scholarship, playing percussion and piano.

As of 2019, Vista Equity Partners was the fourth-largest enterprise software company, after Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP, including all their holdings.

Vista has invested in companies such as STATS, Ping Identity, and Jio.

As of 2019, Vista Equity Partners had closed more than $46 billion of funding.

The 2019 PitchBook Private Equity Awards named Vista Equity Partners "Dealmaker of the Year".

In January 2022, the company had $86 billion in assets under management.

Asked about his mother in 2020, he said: "She usually calls me to tell me what I can do a little better."

His paternal grandmother was an educator, and his paternal grandfather was a Pullman Porter.

His maternal grandfather was a postmaster for three post offices in the Washington, D.C. area, and before that while in high school worked in the U.S. Russell Senate Office Building, serving coffee and taking hats and coats in the lounge.

He grew up in a predominantly African-American, middle-class neighborhood in East Denver.

When he was an infant, his mother carried him when he was six months old at the March on Washington, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

He attended Carson Elementary School and Gove Junior High School in Denver.

Smith then attended East High School ('81) in Denver.

While in high school, he applied for an internship at Bell Labs, but was told the program was intended for college students.

Smith persisted, calling each Monday for five months.

When a student from M.I.T. did not show up, he got the position, and that summer he developed a reliability test for semiconductors.

According to Black Enterprise magazine, Smith was credited with consistently generating a 30% rate of return for his investors from the company's inception through 2020.