So, what were you up to in May, 2016? Enjoying the NBA Playoffs? Gearing up for that highly anticipated election?

Well, whatever it was, I’d be willing to bet that it wasn’t quite as profitable as what the black billionaire engineer and private equity titan Robert Smith was doing.

See, in May of 2016, his firm, Vista Equity Partners, purchased Marketo Inc., a leading provider of marketing automation software and solutions, for a whopping $1.79 billion. The purchase price amounted to a 64 percent premium over the price that Marketo, a publicly traded company prior to the sale, was trading at.

At the time, some industry insiders were surprised by the high price tag of the deal and thought that perhaps Vista paid too high a price.

Boy, were they wrong.

Last week, Vista Equity Partners announced that it had agreed to sell Marketo to Adobe, of Photoshop and PDF fame, for, get this, $4.75 billion!

If you’re keeping score at home, that means Robert Smith and friends essentially flipped Marketo for 2.6x the price that they bought it for only two years ago, and pocketed a sweet, sweet nearly $3 billion in the process.

Lest you think this was some kind of lucky break, you need to know that Smith launched Vista in 2000 and has (quietly?) grown it into America’s fastest growing private-equity firm, with more than $31 billion in assets under management and a stellar 22 percent in annual returns.

After studying chemical engineering at Cornell, Smith initially cut his teeth at industrial giants Goodyear, Air Products and Kraft before heading over to Wall Street as a banker in the mergers and acquisitions department at Goldman Sachs.

Once the deal-making bug hit him, he never let it go, and soon one of his clients made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: backing of $1 billion if he would leave Goldman Sachs and start a private equity fund.

Check please!

He seized the once in 4 lifetimes opportunity and the rest is history.

Smith took that $1 billion investment and has parlayed it into a Forbes ranking as the 480th richest person on the planet, the 155th richest person in the U.S. and the number one wealthiest black person in the country.

Not bad for a smart kid from Colorado.

And interestingly enough, he didn’t have to do anything on a stage, on a screen or with a bat or ball to get there.

Rob Wilson

Writing since April 2018 · 1 story contributed