This profile is part of our 2018 Power Issue. For more of 2018’s most powerful Texans, click here. The richest black person in America, Robert Smith is a private-equity titan whose Austin-based buyout firm, Vista Equity Partners, got its start when he left a plum job at Goldman Sachs in San Francisco, where he advised tech giants such as Microsoft and Apple. Smith had noticed the eye-popping financial fundamentals of an obscure Houston company that made software for auto dealerships, and he wished other companies could learn from how they did it. Light bulb: Why not buy other companies and help them do just that?Smith leveraged an investment from that Houston firm, Universal Computer Systems, into Vista—which is now, according to Forbes, the world’s fourth-largest…The post The Power Issue: Robert Smith Is Showing Silicon Valley Another Way to Win in the Software Business appeared first on Texas Monthly.