Virginia
How Marshall University President Brad Smith Became West Virginia’s Richest Person
After 36 years away, former Intuit CEO Brad Smith returns home with a fortune—and grand plans to level the playing field in Appalachia.
Brad Smith was six years old when a plane carrying the 1970 Marshall University football team crashed a mile from his home near campus in southern West Virginia, killing all 75 people on board. His cousins rushed to aid their dying neighbors as volunteer firefighters. “I watched the flames burn outside my window,” Smith remembers. “And then I watched this community rise from the ashes.”
Half a century later, the recently retired Intuit CEO’s community is waging new battles, with an opioid epidemic raging and the coal economy that once made Governor Jim Justice a billionaire on the verge of extinction. So, after 36 years away, Smith decided to take the country roads back home to West Virginia, the place he belongs—and into the President’s House at Marshall, his alma mater, which he took over in January 2022. He brought back with him a sizable fortune, accumulated over nearly four decades in business. According to Forbes’ ranking of the richest person in each state, released Thursday for the first time since 2019, he’s West Virginia’s wealthiest resident, worth $700 million.
Forbes estimates that roughly half of his fortune is comprised of 943,000 Intuit shares and options he still holds. That’s after selling 2.4 million shares during his tenure as CEO from 2008 to 2018 (and as chairman until January 2022), netting him about $300 million (after taxes and the cost of option exercises). He takes the mantle as the state’s richest from Jim Justice, whose wealth has been weighed down by debt. Smith is worth some $250 million more than the governor, who dropped from the ranks of the world’s billionaires in 2021, when it was revealed that he’d personally guaranteed $850 million of loans to his coal businesses by Credit Suisse via a now insolvent intermediary, Greensill Capital. (Justice also owns the iconic Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and other real estate assets in Appalachia; he disputes Forbes’ estimate of his fortune.) Smith declined to comment on Forbes’ estimate of his net worth.
Smith grew up “about as far from Silicon Valley as you can get,” he tells Forbes, on the border of Kentucky and Ohio in Kenova, West Virginia (“Population: 3,100…if you round up”). His father served as mayor after working in sales at Nestlé and his mother was a homemaker. It was in Kenova that the future software CEO “who’s never written a line of code in his life” learned to listen more than he spoke: as a 14-year-old white belt martial artist whose mother constantly reminded him to “use his two ears and one mouth proportionally.”
After high school, Smith spent a semester at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, before transferring home to Marshall to study business administration–just in time to see the Thundering Herd’s first winning football season since the 1970 plane crash as a junior in 1984. The first members of their family to graduate from college, Smith and his two brothers each received Marshall class rings for Christmas in 1996–gifts from their proud father, who died of a heart attack two days later.
Smith, whose ring never leaves his finger to this day, followed in his dad’s footsteps, landing a sales job at PepsiCo after receiving a master’s degree in management from Aquinas College of Michigan in 1991. Despite an early boss’ insistence that he attend corporate communications courses to rid himself of his West Virginia twang, Smith quickly climbed the corporate ladder at 7-Up and direct-mail marketer ADVO with the “inherent flaw” of his accent proudly intact. After rising to the role of senior vice president of marketing & business development over seven years at ADP, Smith joined Intuit in 2003 as vice president and general manager of its “accountant central and developer network.” Five years later, he was running the entire company.
Smith inherited a 25-year-old business with tremendous brand equity whose TurboTax and QuickBooks software products were beloved by individuals and small businesses alike. But few could have foreseen its radical transformation over the next decade, with its market capitalization soaring almost sevenfold to $51 billion and annual revenue nearly doubling to $6 billion by 2018.
“We believe there are as many geniuses here as there are on the coasts, so our mission is to level the playing field of opportunity in Appalachia for anyone who has the aspiration and grit to try.”
“If you think about 10 or 15 years ago, a lot of legacy companies looked at the cloud and said, ‘not that important’,” says Stifel analyst Brad Reback. “Brad understood the power of the cloud early on–and not just on the application side for their tax and QuickBooks businesses. He also shut down all their own data centers and moved [their data] to Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, which really positioned them well to take advantage of AI now.”
According to Intuit’s billionaire founder Scott Cook, Smith’s impact on the company goes beyond business results. “He is the ultimate servant leader, focusing on those he serves and solving their most important problems, which inspires teams to be the best they can be,” Cook says. “His spirit of integrity and teamwork changed our customers’ lives and our employees’ lives forever.”
When Smith left Intuit in January 2022, at the height of his career, to become Marshall’s president at the age of 57, the company etched his signature phrase (“Work Hard. Be Kind. Take Pride.”) in stone on the face of its headquarters, which was recently renamed for Smith. His sudden move from Mountain View to the Mountain State shocked many in the industry, but it made sense to those who’d heard him reminisce about West Virginia over the years.
“It’s always surprising when someone who has had that level of success, who is so engaged in the day-to-day of a business, decides to step aside as a relatively young man,” says Stifel’s Reback, whose spouse is a West Virginia native. “But when you peel back the onion and get to know him as a person, it’s really not that surprising because he and his wife have a higher calling.” As Smith puts it, “we traded an amazing profession for an inspiring purpose.”
Smith and his wife Alys, a lawyer from Ohio with a shared love for Appalachia, founded their education, entrepreneurship and environment-focused Wing 2 Wing Foundation in 2019, but their philanthropy in the region goes back even further. Since 2015, they’ve donated $35 million to Marshall to establish a scholarship that gives preference to first-generation students from West Virginia and Ohio and to transform its recently renamed Brad D. Smith Schools of Business. The couple also has an “Outdoor Economic Development Collaborative” named after them at rival West Virginia University, thanks to a $25 million gift in 2020 that is being used to recruit and retain talented out-of-state workers and to develop outdoor recreation resources in the area.
But the Smiths’ impact cannot be fully measured in dollars, says Luke Yingling, whose legal tech firm Rhetoric is one of at least nine local startups that counts Wing 2 Wing’s venture arm as an angel investor. “Alys was a practicing attorney for quite a long time, and we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the lessons Brad learned from everyone he knows in The Valley,” Yingling says.
Smith, who is the first Marshall alum to serve as the school’s president, isn’t the only A-lister sharing his wisdom with West Virginians these days. PayPal CEO Dan Schulman, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner all accepted Smith’s invitations to attend recent fireside chats at Marshall, while Nike CEO John Donahue delivered the school’s commencement address this spring. Meta Platforms’ former COO Sheryl Sandberg also flew in over last Thanksgiving week to visit opioid ravaged communities with Smith and his wife. In October, Alys Smith will host actor Nicole Kidman and TV journalist Soledad O’Brien for a Women Warriors Summit that will focus on speaking up about difficult issues at home and in the workplace. “By learning these skills, women will come away with more tools in their toolkits to get better jobs and to have better relationships with their spouses,” she says. “And that is going to have a flywheel effect, because when you teach a woman a skill, she takes it home to her family and teaches it to her community.”
The Smiths’ return has been “an absolute gamechanger,” says Brandon Dennison of Coalfield Development, a Wing 2 Wing-backed nonprofit that provides modern workforce skills training to unemployed Appalchians. “Marshall is the gateway to opportunity for so many kids in West Virginia and throughout the region, so to have this amazing leader with a vast network and an incredible skillset come in is a hugely valuable asset. I think Marshall is going to help lead the way in reinventing higher education.”
Smith is embracing that challenge with a plan to transform Marshall that would rival his achievements at Intuit. If all goes according to plan, 100% of the school’s graduates–about half of them first-generation students like their president–will leave campus debt-free a decade from now and land in the careers of their choice. It won’t be easy, but Smith isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, apologizing for the state of his work clothes from behind his desk on campus last month.
It was Marshall’s week of giving back, and he’d been landscaping, power washing and moving rocks all morning with 650 community volunteers. “It’s deeply personal to me,” he explained, reflecting on the plane crash that inspired Matthew McConaughey’s performance in the 2006 film “We Are Marshall” and raising the class ring his father gave him toward the heavens. “We believe there are as many geniuses here as there are on the coasts, so our mission is to level the playing field of opportunity in Appalachia for anyone who has the aspiration and grit to try.”
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