Leslie Lynn Smith Wants a City With More Front Doors

Leslie Lynn Smith had a tough audience at home. Her daughter, then 12, had heard quite enough about entrepreneurs. When Smith’s husband suggested watching another television interview with Mom, the child declined with the weary authority of someone who had already completed the syllabus.

Then came a Memphis pop-up market. Mother and daughter met makers and artists, asked about their businesses, and bought baked goods, vintage clothes, ceramics and a painting. Smith handed out cards. On the walk back to the car, her daughter delivered a review with a welcome lack of jargon: “I finally understand what you do,” she said. “And I love it.”

Smith told that story in 2019, while running Epicenter, the Memphis entrepreneurship nonprofit. It explains her work rather efficiently. Economic development becomes easier to grasp when you can meet the person selling something, hear what would help them grow, and carry a small piece of the local economy home.

A useful education in things going wrong

Smith began in banking, working as a teller through college before moving into commercial workouts: the business of untangling transactions that had gone badly. She later worked in commercial real estate and became chief financial officer of a firm in Ann Arbor. The route gave her a close view of the distance between a promising arrangement and one that actually functions.

Her account of those years has a practical emphasis. Failed deals taught her to look for what people had missed and to find a way for the parties to gain something from the outcome. That is an unusually serviceable foundation for a career spent persuading institutions to work together.

Detroit supplied the larger frame. Born there in 1967, Smith has connected her commitment to economic opportunity with the city’s racial history. The connection remained visible as her responsibilities expanded. At the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, she directed business acceleration and oversaw a $300 million startup investment portfolio, working across universities, business support organizations and investors.

The parking meter school of economic development

At TechTown Detroit, which she led before moving to Memphis in 2015, the question was how to help more residents turn ability into enterprise. A person could have the makings of a business owner without having started several companies, acquired an investor’s vocabulary, or found an introduction to the right room.

TechTown offered intensive programs for technology ventures and retailers. Its home had a pleasing industrial footnote: the former General Motors building was where the Corvette had been designed. Now a space associated with a famous car was helping people work out how to get their own businesses moving.

Smith’s impatience was quite explicit. “We try to apply a level of urgency to our work,” she said in 2013. The urgency extended beyond the incubator’s walls. TechTown’s SWOT City program, created in 2012, took business assistance into Detroit neighborhoods, beginning in Brightmoor.

There, the team spent two months working with existing organizations and business owners before providing individual assistance. Needs included signs, customers, equipment financing and basic business technology. On Lahser Road, TechTown worked with residents and businesses to persuade the city to remove parking meters that were hurting trade. Economic development had acquired a very specific address.

Other work concerned the next customer. Sweet Potato Sensations, for example, had entered Whole Foods Detroit and was considering wider grocery distribution and mail orders. The ambition was to help a neighborhood business reach beyond the neighborhood, while keeping its footing at home.

Memphis gets a front door

Memphis recruited Smith to lead Epicenter in February 2015. The Greater Memphis Chamber’s Chairman’s Circle had set an ambition of supporting 1,000 entrepreneurs and starting 500 companies. Memphis Bioworks led the initiative, with other local organizations participating. Smith arrived after five years at TechTown, bringing experience in making a central organization useful to a much wider network.

The design was straightforward: give entrepreneurs a place to begin, then connect them with the appropriate help. That required cooperation among organizations with their own programs, expertise and relationships. A founder’s route through the system should make sense to the founder, even if the organizational chart required a considerably larger sheet of paper.

By July, Smith was holding conversations across Memphis about the business community’s strengths and gaps. She wanted rapidly growing startups and businesses building themselves from their own earnings involved in the same effort. Services would need to respond to the circumstances of individual communities.

She also resisted treating her new city as a southern copy of Detroit. The cities shared rivers, music, manufacturing histories and food traditions. Their differences would require her to learn. Carrying experience from one place to another still meant listening when she arrived.

A welcome needs a budget

By September 2018, Epicenter had raised $40 million. A $10 million FedEx grant had helped bring in another $30 million from foundations, financial institutions, individuals and other donors. The organization had helped more than 250 businesses launch since the initiative began in 2015.

One was The Liquor Store on Broad, a restaurant whose inclusion made the breadth of the undertaking visible. A city’s entrepreneurial life includes the places where people eat and work every day. Epicenter’s role was to help owners locate the partners, programs and resources suited to their particular needs.

The fundraising also came with an ambition of $100 million over a ten-year strategic plan. The distinction matters: $40 million was the reported sum raised at that point; $100 million was a goal. Money was meant to support an ongoing regional effort, with businesses at different stages needing different kinds of assistance.

In 2019, a conversation with University of Memphis leaders produced another kind of connection. Smith, university president M. David Rudd and research executive Jasbir Dhaliwal discussed opportunities in the local entrepreneurial economy. The resulting Patents2Products initiative offered two years of resources and assistance to postdoctoral fellows commercializing patented technology.

That sequence shows the work between the familiar nouns of innovation: research, investment, business. A patented idea needs people and time if it is to become something a company can build around. Epicenter and the university each found ways to support the program. Smith welcomed the speed and flexibility that moved the conversation toward a working arrangement.

Taking the city question national

In September 2020, GET Cities announced Smith as its new national director. She joined that October. Gender Equality in Tech Cities aimed to expand the representation and leadership of women, trans and nonbinary people in technology. The move gave her a larger field for questions she had been pursuing locally.

Her proposed method combined agreement on a destination with resources, accountability and transparency. City initiatives could be connected into a national effort, with government policy, funders and corporate partners participating. She also described partnership as a willingness to follow another organization’s lead when the work called for it.

The finance questions remained. In a Cyber Work interview, Smith discussed the space between angel funding and initial seed investment, and how that gap can threaten a young company. She also addressed the slower business of changing policy and the practical work of making technology teams more inclusive. The subjects belonged together in her account: capital, access to work and institutional behavior all affect who can participate.

She subsequently founded Themis Strategic Partners, a consultancy focused on equity and growth. Her public service included the National Women’s Business Council and a national commission examining childcare and women’s entrepreneurship. These roles extended her attention to the conditions surrounding a business owner’s working day.

Another city, another set of doors

On June 2, 2025, Smith became president and CEO of the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation. The appointment brought her back to an institution rooted in a particular region, after work that had spanned multiple cities. Her responsibilities include strategy, operations and relationships with the community.

Her welcome to the role was personal. She spoke of wanting to put down roots, learn and work alongside local partners. A foundation brought a different set of tools to familiar concerns about how a community directs resources and who benefits from them.

By April 2026, housing was prominent in her public discussion of Charlottesville’s future. Ahead of a Tom Tom Festival session with City Manager Sam Sanders and Tom Tom Foundation executive director Paul Beyer, she described rising costs, limited supply and demand exceeding available capacity. She argued for connecting the stages from housing instability to lasting stability and bringing sufficient resources to the whole effort.

“The need is currently outstripping capacity.”

Leslie Lynn Smith · on Charlottesville’s housing challenges, 2026

Her description of courage that spring had less to do with certainty than persistence: listening to people affected, naming problems and remaining involved through slow, uncomfortable work. That adds a useful qualification to the urgency she voiced in Detroit. Acting quickly and staying long enough to learn are both demands of the job.

There is room in this working life for pleasures with no strategic plan attached. Smith’s own biography lists reading, writing, walking, the arts and Detroit Tigers baseball. It also makes a cheerful case for naps. In her Memphis years, her advice included the compact instruction: “Don’t take yourself so seriously.”

The child at the pop-up market had reached her own conclusion about the work by watching it happen. Years later, the same test feels useful. Meet the people involved. Find out what stands in their way. See whether the introduction, the investment or the institution helps them take the next step.