Robert F. Smith (investor)

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 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.

Early life
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. 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.

Education and early career
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.

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 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.

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.

Vista Equity Partners
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. 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. 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.

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

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. 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.

Philanthropy
Smith joined The Austin Trail of Lights as a partner in 2012, and since then, Smith and Vista Equity Partners have sponsored programs and displays of the event. The event is the longest-running display of holiday lights in Austin, TX.

In 2013, Smith joined the Carnegie Hall Board of Trustees and donated money to expand Link Up, which creates a free music education curriculum for elementary students.

In 2014, Smith and Vista Equity Partners sponsored the Menuhin Competition's first visit to the U.S. in Austin, TX. The competition is the world’s leading international competition for young violinists.

In 2015, Smith sponsored the college education of all returned Boko Haram girls. Also in 2015, Smith and his wife provided support to the non-profit organization Foster Love through Fund II Foundation by creating the Family Fellowship Program. This program provides financial and emotional support to students within the program. Smith has hosted fellows at his home in Colorado during the winter season.

In 2016, Smith and his brother worked with the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) to establish the UNCF Sylvia M. Young Smith Scholarship Program. The program awards six merit-based scholarships valued at $100,000 to students attending HBCUs in the U.S. Following this, he donated $50 million to Cornell University, of which $20 million went to Cornell University’s College of Engineering and $10 million in Tech Scholars scholarships for Black Americans and women. This donation resulted in the university renaming its engineering school the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. That same year, he donated $1 million to Carnegie Hall.

Also in 2016, Smith donated $20 million to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. His donation helped establish the Robert F. Smith Explore Your Family History Center and the Robert Frederick Smith Internship and Fellowship Program. He also contributed $250,000 to the Sphinx Organization. The donation helped create the Robert Frederick Smith Prize, which awards some of the winners of the Sphinx Competition with $50,000 to provide access to professional development and other resources that can help create bridges to careers in classical music.

Through Fund II Foundation, Smith helped to establish the African American Health Equity Initiative (AAHEI), now known as Stand for H.E.R.– Healthy Equity Revolution, at the Komen Foundation with a $27 million donation in 2016.

In May 2017, The Giving Pledge announced that Smith had joined as its first Black American signatory. That year, he also made a $15 million donation to Columbia Business School to help it expand to its new Manhattanville campus. Also in 2017, Smith contributed an additional $1 million to the Sphinx Organization.

In 2018, Smith was the largest individual donor at the City of Hope Gala, which funds prostate cancer treatment and breast cancer research for black men and women. That same year, Smith donated $2.5 million to the Prostate Cancer Foundation to advance prostate cancer research among Black American men and created the Robert Frederick Smith Precision Oncology Center of Excellence in Chicago, located at the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center. Also in 2018, Smith donated $1 million to the Cultural Performance Center at the Denny Farrell Riverbank State Park in Harlem, which was later renamed the Robert Frederick Smith Center for Performing Arts. Also in 2018, Fund II Foundation gave a $3 million grant to the Louis Armstrong House Museum, with the grant helping digitize Armstrong's collection to make it available to the public and hire fellows and interns.

On May 19, 2019, during his 2019 commencement speech at Morehouse College, a historically Black college in Atlanta, Georgia, Smith said he would pay off the entire student loan debt of the 2019 Morehouse College graduating class of 396 students, a reported $34M in student loan debt, including the debt incurred by parents and guardians. He had previously donated $1.5 million to the school in January 2019, to be used for the Robert Frederick Smith Scholars Program and a campus park with an outdoor study area.

Smith established internXL through Fund II Foundation in 2019 to help match diverse internship candidates with paid internships at leading companies. Smith stated that he was inspired by his own internship experience with Bell Labs, which is what led him to create the platform.

Under Smith’s leadership, Fund II Foundation made a preservation gift in 2019 to buy and preserve the homes of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. through the National Park Service. Fund II Foundation also made a contribution of $3 million to the Sphinx Organization in 2019 under Smith’s leadership.

In a June 2020 report, Time reported the launch of Student Freedom Initiative (SFI) with a contribution of $50 million from Fund II Foundation and an additional $50 million from Smith, to benefit HBCU students.

In 2021, Smith partnered with Goalsetter on an initiative to help one million Black and LatinX youth become shareholders, and Smith gifted five shares of stock — equivalent to approximately 15,000 shares — to 2,900 students, educators, and staff members.

In January 2022, he donated $10 million to Columbia Business School, to fund the Robert F. Smith ‘94 Scholarship Fund for students graduating from historically black colleges and universities, from diverse backgrounds who have overcome significant hardships or challenges in their academic pursuits, or who have demonstrated a strong commitment to engaging principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In February 2022, SFI, partnered with Prudential Financial to provide up to  $1.8 million in microgrants to students of HBCUs.

In April 2022, Smith launched the Mount Sinai Robert F. Smith Mobile Prostate Cancer Screening Bus in Harlem, New York, in partnership with Mount Sinai Hospital.

In May 2022, Cornell University announced a $15 million donation from Smith that will provide financial aid to engineering students from historically underrepresented communities. The gift will support an undergraduate scholarship fund to provide at least 7 students a year from urban high schools with up to $45,000 in grants, in addition to setting up a graduate fellowship fund to support 12 master’s students and five doctoral students who attended historically black colleges and universities. Smith had previously made a donation that provided similar funding for underrepresented students at Cornell’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

In June 2023, Smith helped launch a new branch location of Grameen America in Atlanta, Georgia through his leadership of Southern Communities Initiative. The goal of this branch is to help support a greater number of entrepreneurial women of color. Also in 2023, it was announced that Mansa, a free ad-supported streaming service, would be launching, for which Smith provided initial funding.

Smith co-founded Anglers of Honor., a charitable organization that strives to make therapeutic fly-fishing opportunities available to individuals with physical disabilities and their families and is a River Deep alliance program.

Smith has also donated $300,000 to Jane Goodall’s youth environmental program Roots and Shoots.

Politics
In December 2022, taking a stand together against increasing instances of racism and antisemitism in the US, Smith joined New York City Mayor Eric Adams, Reverends Al Sharpton and Conrad Tillard, World Values Network founder and CEO Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, and Elisha Wiesel to host 15 Days of Light, celebrating Hanukkah and Kwanzaa in a unifying holiday ceremony at Carnegie Hall. Smith said: "When we unify the souls of our two communities, we can usher in light to banish the darkness of racism, bigotry, and antisemitism."

Tax fine
In the 1990s, businessman Robert T. Brockman approached Smith about creating a private equity fund, and offered to back the initial fund. As part of the deal, Brockman required an offshore trust be set up to conceal earnings from tax authorities and avoid litigation in US courts. Brockman also required that the first fund be located in the Cayman Islands, and set aside some of the interest earned to protect him against losses. Brockman's proposal was a "take-it-or-leave-it offer". According to Smith's later non-prosecution agreement, Brockman dictated "the unique terms and unorthodox structure to the arrangement" and he accepted the offer as a "unique business opportunity he eagerly wanted to pursue". Brockman's lawyer helped Smith set up the offshore entity.

In October 2020, Smith entered into a non-prosecution agreement with the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), agreeing to assist the DOJ in a separate case against Brockman who was charged that month with what the DOJ called the "largest ever" tax fraud scheme by a U.S. citizen, and to pay a fine of $139 million. According to the DOJ, Brockman led Smith to use the offshore trust that concealed income. Brockman died in August 2022, while his trial was pending.

Other achievements
Smith has served as the chairman of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, on the board of overseers of Columbia Business School, as a member of the Cornell Engineering College Council, on the Cornell University Tech Board, and since 2008 as a Trustee of the Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco.

In 2014, Smith became the founding director and president of the Fund II Foundation.

Smith became the board chairman of Carnegie Hall in 2016, the first African-American to hold that position; he had been a member of the board since 2013. Since 2018, Smith has served as a board member of the Louis Armstrong House Museum.

In April 2020, Governor Greg Abbott named Smith to the Strike Force to Open Texas – a group "tasked with finding safe and effective ways to slowly reopen the state" amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

In October 2022, media outlets including TMZ, Revolt TV, Variety, and Vibe Magazine published an article highlighting Smith being nominated by Floyd Mayweather, Jr. to serve as executive producer of a series of film and television projects titled "The GOAT" aimed to tell Mayweather's life story. Mayweather said: “As someone who owns his own brand, I can’t think of better partners than Deon (Deon Taylor), Roxanne (Roxanne Avent Taylor), Robert F. Smith — the wealthiest African American in the world — and Hidden Empire Films, a prolific Black-owned production company.”

In 2024, Smith was interviewed by Tony Robbins for his New York Times #1 Bestseller, The Holy Grail of Investing.

Honors and awards
In 2010, Smith received the Ripple of Hope Award from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.

In 2014, he received an honorary doctorate from Huston-Tillotson University.

In 2016, Cornell University named the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering after him, following a donation. Smith received the 2016 Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's Chairman's Award.

In 2017, Smith was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Denver. That year, Smith was also named by Forbes as one of the 100 greatest living business minds. That year Smith also received Ebony’s John H. Johnson Award. Also in 2017, Smith was named in The Chronicle of Philanthropy 's "Philanthropy 50".

In 2018, he received the International Medical Corps Humanitarian of the Year Award, and the Candle in Business and Philanthropy Award from Morehouse College,

He received an honorary doctorate at Morehouse College in 2019. He was inducted into the Texas Business Hall of Fame as a Class of 2019 Legend. In October 2019, Smith received the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy, which is given to individuals who have donated private wealth to the public. He also received the 2019 United Negro College Fund President’s Award.

Smith was included in the Time 100 in 2020, Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2020, he was also recognized by Cornell University with its Distinguished Alumni Award.

He received the Award of Excellence from the National Association of Investment Companies. He was awarded an honorary doctorate of International Affairs from American University's School of International Service. He has been a trustee at Columbia Business School.

Personal life
In 1988, Smith married his first wife, fellow Cornell alum Suzanne McFayden. They divorced in 2014. Smith married Hope Dworaczyk, the founder and CEO of skincare company MUTHA, a former Playboy playmate, healthy living advocate, and fashion editor, on July 25, 2015, after she gave birth to their first child in December 2014. Smith has three children with his first wife. He also has two sons and two daughters with his wife Hope. Smith owns homes in Austin, Texas, Malibu, California, New York City, Denver, and Florida.

Smith partnered with Matthew Burkett to purchase the historic Lincoln Hills, Colorado property in Gilpin County in 2007 and convert it into an exclusive invitation-only fly fishing club. Lincoln Hills was founded in 1922 as a destination summer resort for Black families. He now uses it to host musicians and underprivileged schoolchildren.

In a 2018 cover story, Forbes said that Smith the wealthiest African-American, passing Oprah Winfrey. As of 2021, Smith was one of 15 Black billionaires in the world. In November 2023, Forbes said his net worth was $9.2 billion, and that he was the 78th-richest person in the United States, and the 235th-richest person in the world.