Robert F. Smith grew up in Denver's Five Points neighborhood — a historically Black community once known as 'the Harlem of the West' before decades of disinvestment. His parents were both educators who drilled into him that a Black child had to be twice as prepared to get half the opportunity.

Smith took that lesson to its extreme. In high school, he applied for a summer internship at Bell Labs — a position normally reserved for PhD engineers — by cold-calling the company's CEO every single day for two weeks until someone finally took his call. He got the internship. That aggressive, relentless approach never left him.

After Cornell and Columbia Business School, he joined Goldman Sachs and specialized in technology mergers. In 2000, he struck out on his own, raising $1 billion to launch Vista Equity Partners — a firm with a radical thesis: that boring, overlooked enterprise software companies were the most durable wealth-creation vehicles in the economy. He was right.

Vista grew from $1 billion to over $100 billion in assets under management, making Robert F. Smith the wealthiest Black American in history with a net worth exceeding $6 billion. In 2019, at Morehouse College's graduation, he stood up and told the entire graduating class he would personally pay off every dollar of their student loan debt — a gift worth nearly $35 million. From Five Points to Forbes billionaire. That's what twice as good looks like.