Smith is founder and chief executive officer of Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm with about $101 billion in assets under management. The Austin, Texas-based company invests in enterprise software companies and its holdings include workflow manager Autotask and ticket marketplace Vivid Seats.
Smith is calculated to own about 50% of closely held Vista Equity Partners, according to a March 2023 Form ADV filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Vista had $101 billion of assets under management according to the firm's website in April 2024.
Smith's stake in Vista is valued using the $7 billion valuation implied by Dyal Capital Partners' acquisition of a minority stake in Vista in July 2017. The valuation has been uplifted to reflect growth in Vista's assets under management since that deal.
None of the proceeds from this sale are credited to Smith because his personal take, if any, isn't disclosed. A 60% discount is applied to Dyal's valuation of Vista to reflect compensation costs not accounted for in the deal's structure plus 'key-man risk' that is commonly applied to investment businesses that are largely dependent on a dominant individual investor.
He's calculated to own about half of the firm in this analysis, based on an analysis of ADV filings and stake sales to Dyal.
Smith is also credited with about half of the assets held by the firm's employees, according to a Bloomberg analysis of Vista's private fund reporting section in its ADV form.
A person familiar with Vista who asked not to be identified as the information is private has confirmed that Smith owns a majority stake in the firm.
A representative for Smith declined to comment on his net worth.
Robert F. Smith was born in Denver on Dec. 1, 1962. When he was nine months old, his mother carried him on the civil rights march near Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. where Martin Luther King delivered the "I Have a Dream Speech," according to an April 2014 profile in the New York Times.
After graduating in chemical engineering from Cornell University in 1985 he worked at Kraft General Foods before studying for his MBA at Columbia Business School, according to his profile on Vista's website. He joined Goldman Sachs in 1994 and started advising on technology deals. He left in 2000 and founded Vista.
In October 2020, Smith signed a non-prosecution agreement in which he admitted he repeatedly made false filings with the IRS. He agreed to pay more than $139 million in back taxes, interest and penalties after a four-year investigation.
The billionaire, who lives in Austin, Texas, married Hope Dworaczyk in July 2015.