Robert F. Smith (investor)

Robert Frederick Smith (born December 1, 1962) is an American businessman. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of private equity firm Vista Equity Partners. Globally, Smith is among theThe World's Billionaires with a net worth exceeding US$10.6 billion as of 2025.

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. Both parents had PhDs in education.

Smith grew up in a predominantly African-American middle class neighborhood in East Denver. When he was an infant, his mother carried him to the March on Washington, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Education and early career

Smith 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 became a brother of Alpha Phi Alpha (ΑΦΑ) 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.

Non-prosecution agreement and 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.

Following the introduction of the Swiss Bank Program by the DOJ, Smith filed Foreign Bank Account Reports (FBARs) and amended tax returns with assistance from experts, including former IRS Commissioner Fred Goldberg. The IRS rejected Smith's disclosures, and in 2015, an audit completed by the IRS found "no badges of fraud" related to Smith's 2013 amended tax returns.

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. This was a part of Smith's settlement on his own charges. Smith's non-prosecution agreement settlement required him to pay a penalty of $139 million. Brockman died in August 2022, while his trial was pending.

Philanthropy

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.

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.

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.

On May 19, 2019, during his commencement speech at Morehouse College, Smith said he would pay off the entire student loan debt of the 2019 Morehouse graduating class. The graduating class consisted of 396 students, and those students owed a reported $34M in student loan debt (including the debt incurred by parents and guardians). Smith had previously donated $1.5 million to Morehouse College 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.

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.