'Talent can be found anywhere on the planet. The point is to find it, cultivate it, develop it and give it opportunity to bloom.'
Text size Robert Smith, head of the private-equity firm Vista Equity Partners, is known for his wildly successful technology investments, and he says that both the tech industry and private equity have a woman problem.
He estimated that his engineering classes at Cornell University were “about 80% pale males. Probably more than that.” Smith, who is African-American, opted for a study group that included a man from Cuba and a woman from Michigan. His classmates, meanwhile, formed study groups that had little diversity. “They grow up with that,” he said.
Smith made the comments Wednesday after hosting a panel at the “Women’s Business Leadership in Tech: Unlocking the Value of Gender Diversity,” an annual event that is co-sponsored by Vista Equity at Columbia Business School. More than 300 executives and students, mostly women, attended the conference, which is meant to increase gender diversity in the tech workforce.While tech may have a diversity issue, Smith’s firm celebrates its women.
Pecoraro started out in tech support at Zywave in 2002. She was managing a customer-relations team when Vista bought the company in 2008. The firm identified Pecoraro through its high-potential leadership program roughly eight years ago. She was named Advicent’s chief executive in April 2017. Smith has spoken before about the lack of women in private equity. In 2014, he echoed Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg when he said publicly that women in PE needed to “lean in, lean in” and not take time off from the industry if they wanted to succeed. Now, he thinks the lack of women is partly due to a “pipeline” problem. Private-equity firms usually grow talent organically, hiring staff as associates at the beginning of their careers.
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