Marcus Ingram/Getty Images
- Robert F. Smith is a billionaire tech investor and philanthropist who founded and serves as CEO of Vista Equity Partners.
- Smith just announced he will pay off the student debt of the entire graduating class of 2019 of Morehouse College in Georgia.
- His grant to the class is reportedly estimated at $40 million.
- Smith is worth an estimated $5 billion, according to Forbes.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Robert F. Smith, CEO and founder of private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, just announced he will pay off the student debt of the entire graduating class of 2019 of Morehouse College in Georgia, a gift reportedly estimated at $40 million.
Smith made the announcement during his Sunday commencement address at Morehouse College in Georgia, where he also pledged an additional $1.5 million gift to the school and received an honorary degree.
"My family is going to create a grant to eliminate your student loans," Smith said to the graduating seniors of Morehouse, which is an all-male, historically black college. "You great Morehouse men are bound only by the limits of your own conviction and creativity."
Smith is worth an estimated $5 billion, according to Forbes. He founded Vista Equity Partners, which invests in software companies, in 2000.
As a high schooler, Smith convinced Bell Labs to give him an internship even though they were reserved for college students. He went on to study at Cornell and Columbia universities, and he worked at Goldman Sachs before starting his own investment firm.
Here’s a look at Smith’s life and career.
Jonathan Marino contributed to an earlier version of this story.
Robert F. Smith, the billionaire CEO of Vista Equity Partners, was interested in working in Silicon Valley from the time he was in high school.
Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Smith gave a commencement speech at American University’s 2015 graduation, where he spoke about his earliest attempts to get work in Silicon Valley while he was still in high school.
"I dug up the phone number for Bell Labs to ask about summer internships," Smith said. "They said I could apply if I were a junior or senior in college. I said that was fantastic, because, while I was only a junior in high school, I was getting A’s in computer science and my advanced math courses, so it was like I was in college. Much to my dismay, they disagreed."
But Smith said he kept calling back "every day for two weeks straight," and after an intern from MIT didn’t show up, he was accepted as an intern.
Smith spent years working as an intern at Bell Labs and went on to study chemical engineering at Cornell University.
http://www.cornell.edu/visit/
Smith attended Cornell for undergrad but never lost touch with Bell Labs. He continued to work there as an intern during his summer and winter breaks before graduating Cornell with a chemical engineering degree.
In 2016, Smith donated $50 million to his alma mater.
After Cornell, Smith got his MBA from Columbia University in New York City and then went on to work on Wall Street, taking a job at Goldman Sachs.
meunierd/Shutterstock
"When I finished business school and decided to join the tumultuous world of investment banking, my family and friends spoke up with concerns about my sanity," Smith said in his American University commencement speech.
Smith would rise to cohead of enterprise systems and storage-investment banking at Goldman Sachs, advising on $50 billion of deals from 1994 to 2000.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
See Also:
- The biggest names in the hedge fund industry gave tens of millions to both parties in the 2018 midterms — here are the top donors
- Meet the world’s top 15 unicorn hunters: These funds are backing dozens of booming startups
- 3 top Evercore execs share the exact career tips that made them dealmaking legends on Wall Street
Source: Business Insider – kwarren@businessinsider.com (Katie Warren)