Justin B. Smith
Co-founder & CEO, Semafor
This episode premieres Thursday, October 15, 2026 at 7:00pm ET.
“There’s one big thing you can do to get stuff done, and that’s assemble the best teams and create the best cultures for them to thrive in.”
Summary
Great achievements all must start as ideas, but the quality of the idea on its own rarely what determines whether it will succeed. The harder work is turning possibility into reality: finding the right people, building the right institutions, and creating the conditions for good ideas to stick. In Justin Smith’s opinion, that’s where leadership really matters.
Justin is the co-founder and CEO of Semafor, a global news and intelligence platform for high-quality reporting and convening on significant global issues, and the former CEO of Bloomberg Media Group. On this episode of Leadership Matters, he and I sat down to discuss a remarkable career that spun more than three decades and some of the world’s leading news organizations.
Justin has an instinct for meeting the moment, demonstrated by his work building the China Summit, and prioritizing Semafor’s expansion into Africa. Together, we explored his approach to convening leaders around substantive ideas while ensuring that commerce serves, rather than defines, the conversation. In a moment when uncertainty can make it easier to retreat than to build, Justin believes the pendulum is swinging back toward values, service, and the collective work of building a better society. His experience is a reminder that optimism is not simply a belief in what might be possible, but a commitment to working to make it so.
Mentions & Resources in this Episode
Guest Bio
Justin B. Smith has spent his career building and reinventing news organizations. He is the co-founder and CEO of Semafor, which he launched in 2022 after leading Bloomberg Media and serving as president of Atlantic Media, where he returned The Atlantic to profitability and founded Quartz. His path into journalism began at the U.S. Department of State, followed by roles at The Economist Group, The Week, and the International Herald Tribune. A graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Justin is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute and a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.