Robert F. Smith called Bell Labs every Monday for five months to get an internship. He later founded Vista Equity Partners.
A chemical engineer from Denver who earned patents at Kraft, then moved into Goldman Sachs technology banking in Silicon Valley, Robert F. Smith founded Vista Equity Partners.
Robert Frederick Smith was born in Denver in 1962. His parents both held doctorates in education, and he grew up in a middle-class African-American neighbourhood in East Denver. As an infant, his mother carried him to the March on Washington.
Persistence, in practice
In high school he applied for an internship at Bell Labs and was told the programme was for college students. He kept calling, every Monday for five months. When a student from MIT did not show up, he got the place, and that summer developed a reliability test for semiconductors.
Engineer, banker, investor
He earned a chemical engineering degree from Cornell in 1985, then worked at Goodyear, Air Products and Chemicals, and Kraft General Foods, where he registered two US and two European patents as principal inventor. In 1994 he completed an MBA at Columbia.
He joined Goldman Sachs in technology investment banking, first in New York and from 1997 in Silicon Valley, where he started the firm’s technology-focused mergers and acquisitions work. After Goldman he founded Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm of which he is chairman and chief executive.
The story is a lesson in two things: persistence on a phone line, and the value of technical knowledge when you invest.
