JEFF SMITH

Smith launched the Starboard Value strategy inside asset manager Ramius in 2002, then spun it out into an independent firm in 2011 and became its CEO. Starboard grew into a roughly $9 billion fund built on deep operational analysis rather than flashy financial tricks.

His defining moment came in 2014 at Darden Restaurants, the parent of Olive Garden. Starboard released a now-legendary 294-slide presentation that picked apart everything from the company's real estate to the fact that Olive Garden was not salting its pasta water.

He won the proxy fight and replaced the entire board, all 12 seats. Darden shares then rose nearly 60% from October 2014 to April 2016.

Over the years he has taken on Yahoo, Papa John's, Mellanox, and dozens of others.

Starboard Value, Ramius

Smith is what people call an operational activist. He does not just demand a stock buyback and leave.

He buys a stake in a company that is running badly, then digs into how the business actually works, line by line, and pushes management to run it better. His research is famously granular, right down to how a restaurant chain boils its pasta.

When a management team welcomes him in, things usually go smoothly. When they put up walls, he is happy to go to war in a proxy fight and let shareholders decide.

He targets companies that have missed their numbers year after year, because those are the ones where change is easiest to justify.

Darden, without question. In 2014 Starboard owned under 10% of the company yet convinced shareholders to throw out the entire 12-person board and install Starboard's slate.

It is one of the rare full-board sweeps in activist history. The 294-slide takedown, complete with the pasta-water detail, became a case study in how to build an unanswerable argument.

Darden stock then climbed nearly 60% over the next 18 months as the new board cut costs and spun off real estate. It cemented Smith as the activist CEOs feared most.

Not every campaign is a Darden. Starboard's push at Papa John's was messier and slower than the clean Darden sweep, as the pizza chain worked through a bruising public fight involving its founder before the turnaround took hold.

Activists also live and die by timing, and Smith has taken stakes that sat dead money for long stretches while the thesis played out or fizzled. The lesson his record teaches is that even a great operational plan cannot rush a company culture that is not ready to change.

Smith believes most underperformance is fixable and that a fresh set of eyes plus real accountability can unlock value hiding in plain sight. He describes his biggest impact as lighting a fire under management teams to do more, faster, than they otherwise would.

He thinks activists make markets more efficient by forcing lazy boards to act. He is a self-described efficiency obsessive who says he has to find the most efficient plan forward no matter what he is looking at.

Smith keeps his family life out of the press, in keeping with his generally low personal profile. His public identity is built almost entirely around Starboard and its campaigns.

Smith earned a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994, one of the top finance programs in the country.

That analytical grounding shows up in Starboard's obsessively detailed research decks.