On Thursday, October 31, 2018, Vista Equity Partners announced it would be selling Marketo to Adobe for $4.75 billion, vindicating a strategy that Smith and his Vista billionaire co-founder, Brian Sheth, initiated as the software private equity game they helped create was going mainstream.
Vista will make $3 billion in two years from the Marketo sale, the biggest realized profit from a single company in the private equity firm’s 18-year history.
