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This is Masters in Business with Barry Rittholz on Bloomberg Radio.

This week on the podcast, I have yet another extra special guest.

Melissa Smith is co-head of commercial banking for J.P. Morgan.

Previously, she was co-head of the bank's Innovation Economy Group. Really fascinating because she sees the world from a very unique perch, has incredible access to every aspect of both commercial and investing banking that a small startup or medium-sized company, and by medium, I mean up to $2 billion

in revenue might need. And that gives her this really incredible set of insights into how these

companies are growing, what they need, what direction various industries are moving in. It's really

kind of fascinating because if you remember back 20, 25 years ago, Wall Street and the large investment banks and brokers were kind of

accused of moving up market and abandoning that whole middle section and allowing private

equity to get a toll hold there. To their credit, J.P. Morgan has aggressively moved back into

what some people used to call, you know, middle

merchant banking or middle market banking. And I thought this conversation is just a whole world

that you don't know exists and is in fact robust and growing rapidly. I thought this was a

fascinating conversation. And I think you will also,

with no further ado, my conversation with J.P. Morgan's Melissa Smith. Thank you so much for having me.

It's a pleasure to be here. Well, thank you for being here. Let's talk a little bit about your

background before we work up to J.P. Morgan, bachelor's in political science from American

University, and then you get a master's in public policy from University of Chicago, not the

traditional path for people in finance. What was the original plan? So I definitely thought

that I was going to work in the public sector. When I'm recruiting at J.P. Morgan, I always get the question sort of how did you get into

investment banking? And I would love to tell people I had a grand plan. I didn't really

have a grand plan. But my policy degree was at University of Chicago. So it was very heavy

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