Robert Frederick Smith, born and raised in Denver, Colorado, is a chemical engineer by training and an investor and philanthropist by conviction and passion. His ancestors were Cherokees forced to walk the Trail of Tears, and escaped and newly freed slaves who met and formed a community in Southern Colorado.
Robert is the son of two educators who instilled in him an appreciation for the power of learning and the moral obligation to apply our unique skills to change society for the better. He is the first and only African-American to sign onto the Giving Pledge and was named by Forbes as one of the 100 Greatest Living Business Minds. Smith is the Founder, Chairman & CEO of Vista Equity Partners, Chairman of Carnegie Hall, and Chairman of the Board of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights.
Robert has been a mentor, a friend, a brother to me. He possesses a boundless heart and is the most generous person I know, in all the ways generosity truly matters. He is a problem solver and a visionary, and he is constantly determining how to help people in need. For Robert, it’s not just about giving, it’s also about doing. It’s personal for him. I was inspired to learn that every Christmas, he brings scores of kids aging out of foster care to spend the holidays with his family at his ranch in Colorado.
Kerry Kennedy: Robert, you’ve said that Robert Kennedy has been a great influence in your life and work. What is it about my father that inspired you?
Robert Frederick Smith: Robert F. Kennedy is a reflection of all that is hopeful about America and all that continues to drive our optimism for the future. I wasn’t there when your father gave the speech in Indianapolis after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, but I’ve studied that speech, and it was remarkable. It took great courage to speak the way your father did to an angry crowd. He appealed to people to stay calm and he spoke about compassion, responsibility, and community. He expressed his hope that people wouldn’t act based on racial animosity. He reminded people to consider what obligations we all have to our brothers and sisters and to our divided country, and he did this in the face of intense grief and anger.
During that dark time for America, I was part of school desegregation in Denver, Colorado. I was six years old, and I recall how intense a time it was for me and for the community I lived in. I was one of about twenty-five African American first graders who were bused to the elementary school across town. The previous years, I had been in an all-black kindergarten; now I was in first grade at an integrated school with a whole bunch of people who didn’t look like me. I remember it was spring, which is always a time of hope and optimism after a cold Colorado winter, and we were finishing our first year at the new school trying to make sense of it all. Why would they kill Dr. King?
We lived in a middle-class black community. My father was principal of the elementary school around the corner, the one I wasn’t going to. My mother was a fourth-grade teacher. The parents in our neighborhood were professionals—doctors, dentists, teachers. I shoveled the driveway of a guy who was one of the founders of the Pullman Porters Union, and our next-door neighbor was George Brown, who held the highest office of any black person in any state government at that time—he was lieutenant governor of Colorado. In our neighborhood, we shared our celebrations and setbacks, we relied on each other, and our “extended family” was there to look out for us. The pioneering spirit in Colorado translated into a resourcefulness and resilience that made us stronger together.
My father was chairman of the board of the local YMCA. That’s where we all played and learned to swim and learned to do all the things children did. It was the center of our community. We did fund-raising for it, sold candy or hosted events, whatever it was, as we had to provide significant community-based funding in order to make it accessible to all members of our community. We invested in our community: as educators, my mother and father were very active in bringing the Head Start program into Colorado. My parents lived what they preached. It was so clear to them that education was the way we were going to lift up our community. My parents instilled in us the value of striving to get the best education possible. That’s why they fought for desegregated schools. And while my aunt was very active in the Black Panther party back on the East Coast, this passion for the African American community, the belief in integration, and the belief in education, was central to my upbringing.
KK: Apparently your upbringing prepared you for a good career. You’re one of the most successful people in the private equity field. The way we usually hear that presented is that you’re the wealthiest African American man.
RFS: I’m fortunate to have achieved success, but it’s been a long journey. And I feel like I’m just getting started.
I’ll tell you a story that’s almost funny, but is not. We’ve been the top-performing private equity firm in the world since 2000, and we’ve never lost a dollar of institutional capital for going on eighteen years. Until recently, despite this track record, I couldn’t raise money from some institutional investors managing state pension funds. The only reason for this is because of their unspoken biases. And yes, that’s unfortunate for me and for Vista, but it’s also sad to think that the people who are invested in state pension funds—the teachers, firefighters, nurses, and so many others—aren’t getting the most of their money because the people responsible for managing those funds in certain states won’t work with the best-performing funds. I’m glad to say that slowly, some of these states are changing their ways.
I remember one time not long ago, I invited the CEO of a very large financial institution out for dinner. When the check came I reached for it, and the guy says, “No, thank you. I can’t have a black man buy me dinner.” He thought he was being nice! And this isn’t ancient history, it’s today, and there are still a lot of people with issues about a person’s race, in spite of all the work that’s been done, the words that have been shared, the terrible experiences of your father’s times and also of the last few years. This is something we have to continue to work on.
This is why I go back to that speech: April 4, 1968. Your father said we have a choice: we have to ask what kind of nation we are and what direction we want to move in. If we’re black, we can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and with a desire for revenge. As a nation we can move in the direction of polarization, black against white, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, and as your father called on all of us to, to replace the violence and bloodshed with compassion and love. I certainly believe, as he did, that the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people want to live together, want to improve the quality of all our lives, and want justice for all human beings who are part of our American community.
America’s not always going to be perfect. There’s going to be violence and lawlessness, there are going to be gang issues, but we have to harness the moral courage within our own communities, which is what it comes down to. We have to say we’re not going to condone this; instead we’re going to embrace respect, and we’re going to create a more peaceful existence.
KK: Many of the divisions Daddy talked about still exist, and while some things have improved, there are also new divisions. What do we do to heal the divisions that exist today?
RFS: The disunity and pessimism that pervades our country today is real; but it is not unique. Today does bear striking similarities to 1968. Then, as now, millions of Americans felt as though they were throttling headfirst toward a future that was alien and beyond their control. Now, as then, the solution is to reach across divides and remind ourselves that we are all in this together. And that hope always conquers fear.
One factor that makes our divisions today different from those in 1968 is the role of technology. Technology has enormous power to unite, but it can also alienate. It can amplify, but it can also disenfranchise. It can tear down barriers, but it can build up walls. What just a few years ago took a factory and 40 workers can now be done by one engineer with the right equipment. This is progress. But there’s a downside if technology lifts up the few and leaves behind the many. The future doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, but we need to re-skill and skill-up. We can begin to heal many of the economic and cultural divides in our country if we get to work training and retraining people to operate the technology platforms that will be the job engines of the future. I’m focused on creating on-ramps for inclusion of all people—no matter what their race, gender, or religion – in the workforce of today and the future.
We can either choose to harness technology as the greatest equalizer and wealth creator in human history, or we can choose to let it victimize, minimize, and fracture our communities. The important thing to remember is that we do have a choice in the matter. We must choose to invest in the thinkers, the doers, and the leaders who won’t follow the arc of history, but bend it.
KK: You’ve done something in that spirit at your Vista investment fund. You’ve made a concerted effort, without looking at race, to find a fresh way of discovering merit and potential. You’ve hired people who were gas station attendants, who’d done all sorts of things, if you thought they showed an aptitude for your business.
RFS: That’s the way America should be: Opportunities should be available to the people who have an aptitude and want to work hard. My job is to provide that platform. I provide a place where you can become your best self, and I cast a wide enough net to catch all those people who want that opportunity. I look to every community–every race and gender—for people I’d love to “catch.” I’m a fly fisherman, you know; I love to fish, and that’s how I think about this.
Recently I was giving a speech. I was with some top developers and programmers, and I told them how we have to catch promising people we can train to make a contribution to our business. We find the most creative and capable people, and we get them to work in our organization for as long as possible. We have to do everything we can in the organization to support that; it’s our job to develop people; it’s our job to develop a pipeline.
We have a session once every month on a Saturday, and we bring in the inner-city kids and teach them how to program. Not all of them are going to be programmers, but we’re going to expose them to it, and this year we’ll have had fifteen thousand come through the process, and next year we can do it twice a month so it’ll be at thirty thousand, and then keep going. We just have to cast our lines and hook on as many prospects as we can. It’s a systemic process based on things I learned as a kid, that you have to develop the preschoolers and the kindergarteners so they can do well in school. That’s why Head Start is so important, and the after-school programs and the development programs and the extra sessions for kids who didn’t have that culture of learning as part of their family fabric. Many of them didn’t because they’re the first generation that even has a chance of going to college and becoming professionals. It takes time to weave that fabric into the community so those children can see there are real possibilities for them. That’s taking responsibility for your community. That’s taking action to lift people up.
It all comes back to this: What your father stood for was taking responsibility for your community—I have a responsibility to do the best I can for my community—that’s for the people I grew up with, the people in the city, the state, and the country I live in. That’s my community. So I will do as much as I can for those people, for as long as I can.
KK: You mentioned city, state, and country, but your community orientation doesn’t end at the borders of the United States. When the girls kidnapped in Nigeria by Boko Haram escaped and went home, you offered those girls the chance to go to college.
RFS: It’s all part of the fabric of being a human. It’s in your father’s phrase: “To tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world.” To work for that is the job of every human being. When I saw those little girls kidnapped for going to school, I saw the savageness of man. Those little girls were kidnapped, forced into sexual slavery, some killed, just because their parents wanted them to get an education. They were taken simply because they went to school that day. It’s my human responsibility to make life gentler for those girls. Perhaps sometime later they’ll say, “Yes, these savage things happened, but there was some good in this world that found me.” Maybe inspiration will spark those girls to improve the part of the world they live in. We have some of the girls in America now, and they say, “I want to become a doctor, I want to become a human rights worker,” and it’s spectacular to see how far they’ve come. There’s a light in them, and the light is hope for the future.
I’m a chemical engineer by education and training, but I love to read, and I read a lot. I read Walt Whitman, and I read James Baldwin, and I read Maya Angelou. I’ve been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates. I want to expand myself and expand my reach. The point of my reading is that I never wanted to be a prisoner of my own life. That’s one of my central principles. I’ve never wanted to be categorized as X and then have to be a prisoner of X so I measure up to some expectation of someone else. I try to let my spirit tell me if this problem in front of me is a problem I can solve, and I take that problem on.
It would be a disservice if I didn’t do that because that’s part of my calling. We’re all here for just a short period of time, so you might as well do all you can. What are you going to get done in this short time? How are you going to make this a better place? I’m not interested in people knowing my name two hundred years from now because I won’t know about it anyway. What I’m interested in is pushing more good into the hearts of more people more often. If I can do that, I’ll feel pretty good about the contribution I’ve made.
I teach my five children Zoë, Eliana, Max, Hendrix, and Legend that there are three important things to remember in life.
The first thing to remember is: You are enough—to do the things you want to do and become the person you want to become. That’s an affirmation that’s true no matter what difficult circumstances you might be in. The second thing is to discover the joy in figuring things out because there’s not much in life that’s better than identifying something that’s wrong and figuring out how to fix it so it works. The third thing is that love is all that really matters. Those are the three things I want to leave my children.
Robert Kennedy calls us to these things. His vision is more important now than ever before. We have new tools now that we can use to help us deliver his inspiration to our communities. I’m optimistic that we can make the progress we have to make. We all need to hear Robert Kennedy’s clear voice now even more than we did in 1968.