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Robert F. Smith Biography
Robert F. Smith is an American prominent businessman, investor, and philanthropist. A former chemical engineer and investment banker, he is the founder, chairman, and CEO of private equity firm Vista Equity Partners. Smith was ranked by Forbes as the 163rd richest person in America in 2018.
He was number 4870 on Forbes 2018 list of the world’s billionaires.
Smith was also included in Vanity Fair’s New Establishment List. In 2017, Smith was named by Forbes as one of the 100 greatest living business minds. In a 2018 cover story, Forbes declared Smith the wealthiest African-American, surpassing Oprah Winfrey.
Robert F. Smith Age
He was born Robert Frederick Smith on December 1, 1962, in Denver, Colorado, U.S and is 61 year old by December 2023.
Robert F. Smith Spouse(s)
Robert has been married twice. He first married Suzanne McFayden Smith and later divorced in 2014. Later, he married Hope Dworaczyk on July 25, 2015. He has three children with his first wife—Zoë Suzanne Smith, Eliana Frederick Smith, and Maximos Robert Smith—and two with Hope—Hendrix Robert Smith and Legend Robert Smith.
Background
Smith was a fourth generation Coloradoan to Dr. William Robert Smith and Dr. Sylvia Myma Smith, who were both school teachers with PhDs. He grew up in a predominantly African American, middle-class neighborhood in Denver. He attended Carson Elementary School and attended East High School in Denver.
When he was a newborn child, his mom conveyed him at the March on Washington, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. conveyed his “I Have a Dream” speech. In secondary school, he connected for an entry-level position at Bell Labs yet was told the program was proposed for undergrads. Smith endured, calling each day.
Robert F. Smith
At the point when an understudy from M.I.T. did not appear, he got the position, and that mid-year he built up an unwavering quality test for semiconductors. At Cornell, he turned into a sibling of Alpha Phi Alpha.
Career
He worked at Air Products & Chemicals, Goodyear Tire, and Rubber Company and later at Kraft General Foods as a chemical engineer, where he earned two United States and two European patents, he attended Columbia Business School. Robert earned an MBA with honors specializing in finance and marketing. He joined Goldman Sachs in technology investment banking from 1994-2000.
He advised on over $50 billion in merger and obtaining movement with organizations, such as Apple, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, eBay, and Yahoo. He was the main individual at Goldman Sachs to concentrate exclusively on innovation mergers and acquisitions in the San Francisco office.
Vista Equity Partners
In 2000, Smith established Vista Equity Partners, private value and investment firm of which he is the key author, director, and CEO. Starting at 2019, Vista has over $46 billion in aggregate capital duties, claims more than 50 programming organizations and has 60,000 representatives around the world, making it the fourth biggest venture programming organization after Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.
Vista has only centered around the venture programming, information and innovation parts. Among Vista’s portfolio organizations are Finastra, TIBCO, Solera, Infloblox, Mediaocean, Vertafore, Ping Identity, Lithium, Cvent and Datto. Vista closed its Fund V at $5.8 billion in October 2014.
Vista Equity Partners was named the best performing private equity firm for the previous 10 years, according to the HEC-Dow Jones annual ranking conducted by professor Oliver Gottschalg in January 2015. Preqin, a counseling firm that tracks the business, reports that Vista’s third reserve returned $2.46 for each dollar contributed, superior to anything each other enormous raised money somewhere in the range of 2006 and 2010, the blast a long time for private value.
In 2017, Vista Equity Partners was accounted for to have $30 billion under administration, and Robert F. Smith was named as Private Equity International’s 2016 Game Changer of the Year.
Philanthropy and public position
Smith is the board chairman of Carnegie Hall; he is the first African American to hold that position. Smith is the establishing chief and leader of the Fund II Foundation. Under his administration, Fund II Foundation has put resources into associations, for example, Cornell, UNCF, National Park Foundation, Susan G. Komen, and Global Wildlife Conservation, among numerous others.
He is the administrator of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, serves on the leading group of managers of Columbia Business School, as an individual from the Cornell Engineering College Council, and a Trustee of the Boys and Girls Clubs of San Francisco.
In 2018, Smith was the biggest individual benefactor at the City of Hope Gala, reserving assets towards prostate malignant growth treatment for dark men and for bosom disease explore for dark ladies. Smith additionally gave $2.5 million to the Prostate Cancer Foundation to propel prostate malignancy examine among African-American men. Additionally, in 2018, Smith gave $1 million to the Cultural Performance Center at the Denny Farrell Riverbank State Park in Harlem, which was in this manner named the Robert Frederick Smith Center for Performing Arts in acknowledgment of his blessing.
Smith was named as one of the “Charity 50” by The Chronicle of Philanthropy in 2017. In May 2017, The Giving Pledge reported that Smith had joined its positions as its first African-American signatory. Smith is an individual from the leading body of the Louis Armstrong House Museum, the main truly safeguarded the home of a jazz artist in the nation, which deals with the Louis Armstrong Research Collections, the biggest single jazz artist chronicle on the planet. With Smith’s administration at the Fund II Foundation, the gallery has digitized the whole gathering Armstrong abandoned and made it accessible to the general population.
On May 19, 2019, he reported his goal to satisfy the whole understudy advance obligation of the 2019 Morehouse College graduating class of 396 understudies, which is assessed to add up to $40 million. He had recently given $1.5 million to the school in January 2019, to be utilized for grants and a recreation center. “This is my class,” he told the graduating seniors, “and I realize my class will pay this forward.”
Speech at the 135th Commencement at Morehouse College
Morehouse College seniors got a surprise Sunday when billionaire investor Robert F. Smith announced during his commencement speech that he would pay off the student loan debt for the historically black college’s graduating class.