Executive Vice President & Chief Risk Officer, Ttec Holdings
Search every verified Robert Smith interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Robert F. Smith, founder and CEO of Vista Equity Partners, has discussed the state of the technology industry and proposed a private-sector initiative to address structural racism. At the 2023 World Economic Forum, Smith said that tech companies are "ratcheting down" their expense bases after a period of unsustainable pandemic-era growth, and predicted a "new equilibrium" in the second or third quarter of 2023. He described enterprise software spending as having fluctuated in 2022, with a strong first quarter followed by declines in the second and third quarters and a rebound in the fourth quarter. Smith stated that productivity software would be a principal area of growth in 2023. In a 2020 interview with Forbes, Smith outlined a "2% solution" in which large corporations would allocate 2% of their annual net income over ten years to Community Development Financial Institutions and minority-owned banks. He argued that this would address what he called "structural racism" in corporate America, particularly in the deprivation of capital to African-American and Latinx communities. Smith said that activating the wealth and income of the African-American community to the average level of white Americans could increase U.S. GDP by $1.5 trillion per year. He also stated that default rates in underserved communities are lower than the FDIC average, calling investment in these markets "good business."
“Tech companies, of course you know, we came out of a period in the pandemic where we had a massive migration to work from home, work remotely, all those sort of things. So people were buying and expanding their organizations in advance of that sort of growth. Of course, that wasn't sustainable.”
“We're at a point now where there's a ratcheting down as people have: a. come back to work some slow down in certain parts of the economy consumer principally, not necessarily enterprise. And so, you're going to see these companies start to ratchet down what was their forward planning.”
“It's probably second quarter/third quarter we'll see that come to a new equilibrium of their expense base.”
“Here's what we've seen in our Enterprise market, we've seen Q1 actually have a, you know, highest spending ever in the history of enterprise software. Q1 last year. Q2 we saw a drop-down, Q3 a drop-down. Guess what? Q4, it bought it bumped up again.”
“The productivity software which has enabled businesses to do more with less, with fewer and actually expand their markets, maintain their margins. It's going to be one of the principal areas of growth probably for 2023.”
“Hopefully, as China comes back online. Hopefully, as we end the war in Ukraine we'll see a revised pattern of consumption that can hopefully drive us off to a better economic outcome.”
“Hands down it's one word: storytelling. If you can tell stories in your business and get your clients excited and fired up and ready to move, that's all it takes.”
“Features and benefits might have sold in the 50s and 60s — they don't sell anymore; people need to get excited and you gotta have case studies, you gotta have stories.”
“I was on a financial conference ticket with Tucker Carlson but I was too busy doing my thing — people started whipping their phones out, texting friends, and by the end we went from a few hundred to closer to a thousand because of the storytelling.”
“The day I switched to storytelling I started making every month what I used to make in a year.”
“I tell a true story about a client who won like $140 million in the Pennsylvania lottery — he procrastinated shopping the insurance, had a non-fatal heart attack, became uninsurable, and it cost his family roughly $50 million in estate taxes.”
“Structural racism is most apparent in corporate America, especially in the deprivation of capital in African-American and Latinx communities, which limits economic enablement and opportunity.”
“Only 21 of the approximately 4,700 banks in America are Black-owned, holding less than five billion dollars in assets, while total US commercial bank assets are 20 trillion dollars, highlighting a stark disparity in access to capital.”
“Seventy percent of African-American communities don't even have a branch bank, which severely limits lending to small businesses that employ over 60 percent of African-Americans.”
“If the top ten banks allocated just 2% of their annual net income—about 970 billion dollars over ten years—into Community Development Financial Institutions and minority depository institutions, it could drive significant capital infusion into underserved communities.”
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