My First Million - #32 - Product Genius: Scott Belsky

Episode Date: December 25, 2019

We've got a different flavor today for you. We sat down with Scott Belsky (@scottbelsky) join us today and instead of hearing his backstory, we bounced around a bunch of topics. Scott has done it all. He's been a founder (Behance), angel investor (Uber, Pinterest), VC (Benchmark), Tech Executive (CPO of Adobe currently), and Author (The Messy Middle). So sit back, grab a salad (cause we're healthy in 2020) and enjoy this conversation.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

But here's the amazing thing is that when you ship a number of features and then you start killing a few of them, what you find is that the core stuff gets used more. A lot of social consumer products, you know, ultimately engage someone based on something they're insecure about. Hey guys, Sean here. I got a different kind of episode for you that I think you'll like. And just to set the scene for you. So I'm recording this right now. It's Christmas Eve. got about an hour to go till Santa hits the chimneys. And this episode is going to be with Scott Belski, probably one of the coolest people I met this year doing the podcast. And as I'm recording this, you know,

I'm just supposed to do the intro and tell you what this is about. But I'm feeling a little reflective because it is the end of the year. I started this podcast about six months ago on a whim. I was bored. We were selling our company and we were in the due diligence period. And I was just getting itchy waiting for lawyers to finish doing. and what lawyers do. And I was like, I want to start something new.

And so I knew I couldn't start a company, so I started a podcast. And I didn't know if anyone would listen. And amazingly, you know, I really thought nobody would listen to this thing. And now here we are, six months later. I'm looking at the dashboard right now, and there's 526,000 listeners. So over half a million listeners already in just the last few months. And so I never thought that that would happen. If you're listening to this right now, thank you.

This has been a kind of an amazing new addition to my life. I started the podcast because I thought it would be a great excuse to hang out with interesting people. I don't drink coffee, no caffeine from me, never had the taste for it. So I didn't like inviting people out to coffee or trying to make up excuses to meet. And I thought the best excuse would be, hey, come on my show, come on my podcast. And for whatever reason, that kind of flattery works. So I wanted to invite people like Scott onto the podcast. And somebody like Scott's interesting because I start the show with this, which is he's done basically every job I've ever thought about doing.

So he bootstrapped his own startup. He raised venture capital and ready to go that way. He sold his company and then he became a tech executive. He's currently the chief product officer at Adobe, which is, you know, obviously Adobe is a massive company. So he's been a founder, he's been a tech executive. He's been an author. He wrote a book called The Messy Middle, which is an awesome book about the process. of creating stuff.

So, you know, creative guy who wrote a book. He's been an angel investor in companies like Uber or Pinterest, aka two of the best angel investments of the decade. Then he was a VC with benchmark, one of the top funds that exists. So the guy basically has done everything

and what I was blown away with and what you'll get out of this conversation is he's just a good dude. He's a very down-to-earth, smart person who I think he says this somewhere in it, which is his goal wasn't to become any of those things. He didn't say, I want to be a tech executive. I want to be a founder. I want to be a investor. He was just curious and followed his curiosity and it kind of led him down those paths.

And I found that kind of inspiring. So, you know, as the New Year hits, I'm thinking about all these different episodes we've done. I don't know, about 25 episodes, meeting all these great people and then even getting a chance to meet some of, you know, if we got half a million listeners, that's a cool number. But I've gotten to meet, you know, hundreds of you in person at one of the live shows or people who email me. And we're going to try to squeeze in a Q&A episode this week. So if you are listening to this and you have a question that you wanted to ask, you know, it could be about business, could be a investing, it could be about a podcast, whatever, I'll answer. Just shoot me an email. My email is just Puri P-U-R-I-S-H-A-N. So

Puri.shan at g-mail.com. So just shoot me an email. I'm going to do a Q-N-A episode. I already have like 20 questions or so, but send them in and I'll try to get through as many as I can. I hope you enjoy this episode. We're not going to do a super fancy intro. We're just going to go right in. and it's a little bit different. We recorded this thing at night. I just don't have the energy to do the whole, okay, let's start with your story from beginning to end. I just hopped around on whatever was interesting to me.

And it made for a fun convoy. Me and Scott, I consider us friends now after this because the conversation was that fun to be a part of. So it kind of hops around. It's a little bit of a different flavor. I hope you guys like it. And again,

thanks so much for supporting the show. The podcast is already bigger than I ever dreamed to it be. And all that made me want to do was grow it even 10 times bigger. So that's what we'll be doing next year. All right, guys, enjoy the show. Scott, welcome. Thank you. So Scott Belksky.

So I don't like doing intros because usually I butcher it when I do it. But what I thought was interesting about having you was like, you've done the career path that's like everything I've thought of doing, you've actually already done. So it's like, you know, you've written a book, you bootstrapped a company, you've raised venture capital, you sold the company, you've sold the company, you've invested. You've been a tech executive at Adobe. So I'm like all the potential career paths you've actually explored. It sounds like, okay. Sort of a career identity crisis at all times. Yeah, either you know exactly what you're doing or you have no clue what you're doing.

Right. Fine line between the two, maybe. Right. And currently, which one of those paths are you in at the moment? Yeah, I mean, listen, sometimes I think what is my happiest state professionally? Actually, just generally. Okay. And I think it's the feeling of feeling fully utilized.

And I think that personally, you know, I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm a friend. You know, you feel utilized in all those ways. And then professionally, I feel fully utilized. utilize in a day like today, actually, where I had meetings with product teams. I had meetings kind of leading change in a big organization in those types of meetings. I also had pitches, a couple pitches from companies that I might invest in. I also helped make a couple introductions to companies that I'm already investor in. And I also even had a quick talk related to the book. And so I feel like every muscle was stretched in some way. That's a day. Yeah. It's a day.

And so I think that I've always just tried to, you know, pull, pull threads on curiosities. and I do, you know, for better or for worse, I kind of am enjoying, you know, both ends of the spectrum these days. Yeah. To give people a sense. It's like 9 p.m. on a, what is it? Tuesday, Monday night.

I don't know. Tuesday night, someday. We squeeze it. And I was telling you, I was like, I give you credit because I know it's easy when you're like two weeks out and you're like, sure. Yeah, we'll make it work. And then the day of you're like, and you're like, and you're like, who is this podcast? What am I going to go do? Yeah.

I'm feeling good. But I, yeah, yeah, give you props. In fact, on the last episode, I sort of put out one of my life theories, which is 80% is just showing up. And most of the things that you don't want to show up for it, if you just build that discipline to just show up, good things happen. I agree with that. You just have to do it. Okay. So you've done a bunch of things.

If I'm listening to this, I'm like, okay, why am I interested? So you created Behance, which if you're a creative person, you know exactly what Behanza is. But if you're not somebody who's maybe a designer or somebody in the creative world, what was Behanz? Yeah. So Behance was inspired by a bit of a sense of frustration with the creative world and just how good. disorganized it was. A lot of my friends in the creative community, architects, designers, people are new from college. Their careers were at the mercy of circumstance. And I felt like, they never got attribution for their work. And I felt like they were not doing the greatest

they could be doing in their career as a result of that. And so Behance was an effort to organize the creative world. And people would always say, yeah, good luck with that. But the idea back in the day was, why are people having their portfolio sites sitting on some websites out in the ether, only visited by people who know them? Their work should also be broken out and searchable and sortable based on the client, the search term or whatever. And then through someone's work, you discover who that person is. Then you see their portfolio. And then you see who they are. And so it was inverting the model to some extent. And it was a long slog. I mean, Behance was five years of bootstrapping. Two years of venture back business. Acquired by Adobe. Three years of integration.

It was an incredible. Archeridge and a pear tree. Right. Right. Right. We kind of sell it all. But it's great. I mean, I love building products for creative people. I find that ultimately across all industries, creative people are the ones that really move things forward. And they compel us to take action. They, you know, prompt emotion through media, movies, whatever it is. So it's just kind of an honor to, you know, build things for creative people. It's always been something that gets me going. Yeah. Somebody asked me, they're like, why do you like to do that? Why, why that? In traditional terms, I don't seem that creative. I'm not a designer. I'm not an artist of some kind, not making music. You know, anytime you're trying to make something new happen, you're being creative.

You know, fundamentally, you're problem solving something new. And I'm like, you know, it's really simple. Like, I like the new shit in the world. I get excited about new shit. And if you want new shit, you need people to be creative and need creative people to have all the tools at their disposal to do what they do best. Well, I think it's, you know, creativity is genuine interest combined with initiative. You have like deep interest into something. It doesn't matter what it is to your point.

But you also have the initiative to do something with it. And those are the folks that get fascinated by those edges that will someday become the centers. And, you know, that's what makes things work. And so normally on the pot, I'm like, okay, be Hans. Great. That's the mission. How did you think of the idea?

How did you get your first hundred customers? those are the normal ones. And so if you're here to listen to that, sorry, I'm not going to do it this time. There's people who have asked you those questions. I've seen those interviews. So actually, I don't know if it's because it's 9 p.m. I'm in the mood to just talk about other things. One of the things I want to talk about is you wrote this book, Messy Middle, which is cool. I'll tell you the premises I understand it. Premises I understand it is, 95% of the conversation is around the beginning and end of companies. I'm guilty of it myself. But, you know, press and the media is much more, you know, that's their bread and butter is like somebody's starting something,

somebody's ending something, either failure or success. And so 95% percent of the talk, or 99% of the talk, is about 1% of the time that actually goes into any adventure. And everybody just sort of fast-forwards the middle, the actual, like, sort of doing and navigating of the unknown. And so that's what the messy middle is about. It's about that middle section. I think Eric Rees says is good phrase where he's like, Act 1, we go into depth about the hero and how they came up with their idea. Act 3, you know, the resolution. And Act 2 is the montage. Right. All the hard work, and it's just like all the training. You just, you just quickly fast forward through all of it. So you can get to the good thing. It's not sexy,

but it's kind of all the matters. And so why write the book? Well, I was fascinated by that big period of volatility. That just seemed like an endless succession of lows and highs. I was interested in the idea that we're not our best selves at the lows or the highs. We're not our best selves at the lows because we make decisions out of fear. You know, at Bihance, we saw new companies, new competitors emerge, and we made a lot of mistakes at times where we would suddenly try to emulate and then realize, wait, we just lost touch with what we really are and what we're good at.

And then you're also not your best self at the highs because you falsely attribute the things that you did to the things that were. And so there's something to be learned at those moments. There's a practice to be developed and how you endure the lows and how you optimize like hell, anything that works. And I just, that was what was interesting to me. And I wanted to interview and chronicle a lot of stories and insights from people that I've worked with, words that I was on, entrepreneurs that I partnered with and also things that I learned, you know, my own experience. And originally I kind of started this as a project for myself. And then I realized I had this Evernote notebook of like 680 or so insights.

And I said, okay, like, I'm going to pair this down and ship it. So that was the origin of the book. Because I was thinking, I was like, why not a blog post, right? Like, I read a bunch of your blog post. Part of the reason why I wanted to have you on is your blog is actually really good. And you can shut, what's the domain? It's just like, belski.com, right? Thanks.

Yeah, I guess, yeah, it's like on medium, but I don't know. You can get there through many different ways. Okay. So I read a bunch of your things and you have these like, almost like watercolor art, like diagrams of stuff. Yeah. So I've been reading these for a long time. And I have a couple friends. So Sam from The Hustle, who you invested in.

And Greg, Greg Eisenberg, he says amazing things about you. That's why I wanted to have you on, like, your philosophies that I have read and then friends who vouched for you. And why not just like do a blog post? Why did it have to be a book? Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. Because a book is kind of stagnant. You can't really update it as easily. Right. I think though that a book is a forcing function to give it some gravity. Gotcha. And I felt, like, what's an example of one of those? Like an example is the science of businesses scaling. The art of business is the things that don't scale. And then it's like, okay, what does that mean?

Right. Unpack that. Yeah, unpack that. And so that will be like a two or three page section about how we sort of perseverate over all the science nuances. And actually, our instinct is to not want to do anything in our businesses that doesn't scale because we feel like that's a waste of time. When, in fact, a lot of the greatest examples of distinguishing a brand or a service are

the things that don't scale. like Airbnb sending out photographers for every apartment or I mean every company has their example of the things that they did that don't scale that ended up being the art and how do you also preserve that as you grow and how you decide what your art is and so that's like an example of one of maybe 200 or so insights in the book gotcha you write this book and I like it because there's some books where you can kind of tell the person who's writing this like they're either you know nowadays not trying to make money off this but they're trying to parlay this into speaking gigs or things like that but like you already had your sort of success and win so this it feels like it comes from different places. It comes from a place of like, I want to share wisdom. Or like first tap into the wisdom, the scattered wisdom you had in your Evernote files. Yeah. Like put it together for yourself and then like generously give. Is that like a... Yeah, it was weird.

It was actually, I remember the moment when I was kind of entering another one of those things I had observed over, you know, a board meeting or something. And then I realized, gosh, like there are so many in here. And I think it was on a plane. And I remember being like, gosh, this plane goes down. Like, no one's ever going to see any of this stuff. It's only going to be for me. Right. And so that was one of those moments.

I also, you know, I think there's a part of me that despires to do me. more coaching and helping people build products. One of the things that I love doing and done it with Sam and also with Bragg and others is help them develop their products and then build their product teams and hire the right designers and build a design culture. And I wanted to, I did see this as a book as an opportunity to kind of help share some of the things I've learned, some of the things I'm thinking about and do more of that stuff. So it's in some ways like a cornerstone of that, of that intention I have for the next part of my life. What's something that you commonly, so when you advise people to say on building products, making better products, obviously as an entrepreneur, you'd own. always be better. You will never turn down the opportunity to make your product better. Sure. It is your rock. Let's some like common things you find yourself constantly advising people to do or, you know,

questions you keep asking or advice you keep giving. Is there anything that's sort of a pattern you're noticing as you do this for different companies? I mean, there are a lot of them. I would say like two that come to mind. You know, one is obsessing over the first mile of the user's experience of the product, which ironically, typically is the last mile that the team spends actually thinking about. And yet it's the only part of the product experience that every customer will in fact experience. Right. After that is just drop off. And first mile just so people.

Yeah. Sorry. It's like literally the onboarding, the splash page onboarding, step by step, the questions you're asked before you get into the product. How quickly you actually realize any form of value in the product? Right. The defaults of the product. You know, does it show you everything at once or only a few things? The progressive disclosure of functionality.

Like all of these factors are things you must consider as you're nailing that first mile experience. Right. is in fact probably what determines the fate of most products, frankly. Yes, because, you know, you get 60 seconds or 90 seconds with the bulk of your potential customers. And I like to remind folks that every customer, as great as they may be and as wonderful as your product may be, every customer is lazy, vain, and selfish in their first 15 to 30 seconds of using your product. How are you going to cater to them in that world before? And I think the mistake we make is we expect our customers have too much faith in us, you know, as product builders.

They don't care. In fact, they shouldn't because their life is. too busy. And they shouldn't spend any amount of time, energy, or effort, you know, until they actually know that they're going to get value out of it. Right. And so that's the conundrum. So that's like one example of something that, you know, I love working on with product teams. Another example is kind of unpacking the psychology of their customer. A lot of social consumer products, you know, ultimately engage someone based on something they're insecure about, right? Something they want to have validated, something they want to learn or they're worried about. I mean, there's a lot of like

underlying nuances of our product that are really driven on psychology. You know, I was talking to to the teen at Visco the other day. And, you know, they decided not to aggregate the number of followers that you have visible to you, nor do they let you see how many likes something has. That's very counterintuitive to what we know about ego analytics and the things that drive social consumer product usage. But they had an insight, right, which was the type of customer and how they wanted to use the product. That sort of thing is very important thing to kind of distill and then make as a core principle. And so when you're investing in companies, I'm guessing you're looking for in that first conversation with the entrepreneur, you're trying to figure out

what insights do they have about the psychology of their customer? And also when you demo the product, has this first mile experience. Those are probably two of the, you know, first tests of your investment. Yeah, they are. And of course, you know, for consumer products and for enterprise products, there are different types of tests or different types of lenses you look at them through. But I think that those actually apply to both. You know, in enterprise, you realize that everyone wants to look better in front of their boss. Everyone is, you know, sometimes even more lazy in terms of what they're willing to do. And so you have to build products and first mile experiences that take those things into account. So these are important things to think about as you're considering as an investor.

If you're a product-oriented investor like me. And what are some of the investments you made that you're proud of? Yeah, I mean, I think that my first ever investment was Pinterest. So I met Ben Silverman back in 2010. And I had no business being an angel investor. I was just leading my own company. But I had met them how. You just.

I met him through, of all people, I think it was our intern. And he, you know, but Ben was coming through. New York to raise money because he had hard time filling his round out here. And we both were building products that we were orienting towards designers to some degree. And a lot of the pins on Pinterest were driving to Behance pages. And I was seeing the although slow but rapidly growing, you know, source of traffic. Back then it was a force Google, but then stumble upon and Tumblr and made a couple others. And then I just started working with him first as a product advisor. And then when he was raising the seat round, he was like, do you want to participate? And I was like, okay. So that was, you know, that was the first foray. It was amazing because, It was just cool to see a product at that stage and to share some of what I learned, but also just engaged in a lot of healthy debate. And so I think there, you know, there been a bunch of, every product experience that I've had with the team has been remarkably different. I sat on the board of Sweet Green for a few years, you know, a totally different world, right?

But then again, Sweet Green is thinking about efficiency behind the counter and how to, you know, reduce operations time or preparing salad is the form factor of the actual bowls and how that increases efficiency and is better for the environment, the design of the space. and then the mobile experience. They had this ambition of having over 50% of all orders, you know, started on mobile, you know. And so I just, I love getting a bit geeky with product problems and, you know, and helping solve them. Right. That's amazing. Okay. So, so you, when you made that first angel investment in Pinterest, you don't have a budget for this. You're not like, okay, I'm, I've made it, because you're still doing Behance at the time. You had not exit, correct? Correct. And so

you said, I'm in no position to do angel investing, but you did it anyways. What risk did you take there? So, like, when you put in, whatever you put in, like, what percent of your, like, net worth were you putting on the line at that time? Yeah, it was, uh, it was probably a good chunk of my salary. And, you know, but the one of the other thing I did, though, to rationalize it for myself, I remember is Ben had worked at Google. He had a network on the West Coast. I was this like, you know, new entrepreneur in New York that didn't have any of that network. I actually felt like I would learn a lot from this. And so in some ways, I was like, you know, I'm sort of paying for an education. Yeah. if nothing more.

And it was, again, like, I just knew so little about everything I do now back in 2000 and, what is it? 2010. So it was nine years ago. It was, if you have a real deep curiosity about something and then you find someone you really respect and give a lot to learn from them, find a way to get closer to them. Find a way to work with them. Just always leads to something and you may not expect what it is.

Yeah, this is timely. So I just yesterday invested in a self-driving car company. And my last sort of, like, as I was going through the last checklist of like, okay, should I do this? You know, this is meaningful money to me. I'm not at the point where, you know, when I invest dollars in, I actually really want those dollars to come back. I'm not, this is not like the philanthropy angel investing that some people do. And so my last thing was like, look, I'm going to learn so much about robotics, machine learning, and self-driving cars.

And that's the future. Whether it's this company or the next one, these guys are the future. And this might just be my education. And worst case scenario, this is my education. And I started helping these guys, you know, last couple days, try to get their business off the ground. And already, I feel like I get to live in the future a couple hours a week just by working with that. It's like a, you know, it's a long-term view on the value of learning and relationships, but also for those that aren't ready to write a check to people, I mean, there's so many ways of

getting closer to people that you admire and want to learn from and, and keeping those relationships. I mean, I think platforms also like Twitter are amazing in that regard. There's some people that I somehow got connected to on Twitter that I never even met in my real life, who just reached out to me and just started to share, like, enough information and witty observations and feedback on something that I wrote that I just start to follow them. And then I follow them for a year and two years. And then, you know, these are folks that feel like you know them. Yeah. And anything that they were probably doing next, I would probably be first in line to help support or at least learn more about. And so it's just enlightening that anyone can kind of through their own insights and just hard work

and knowledge sharing, like, you know, sort of generosity in that sense, build relationships these days. I learned this the hard way in the sense. I host these like mastermind groups. Do you do anything like this, like a dinner series or anything like that with sort of the same set of people where you get together every two months or so where it's like your peers. Do you do? Yeah, only like informally. There's probably a groups that I do that with. But tell me about a So the regret was I moved to San Francisco and I got invited to one of these and I was like, this is great. This is an awesome way to learn and meet people because the good thing is you're at a table with founders and they're not selling because it's like you're not their employee. You're not their

investor. You're not their customer. So they're actually telling you what's up with their company and you're sharing likewise. And so the first couple groups, I was in, if I had just written checks to all of them, blindly, I said, you know, like, with no judgment, I'm just writing the same $10,000 check in all of you guys. You know, Calm was in that, in that crew. Yeah, exactly. They would have paid it off, clear bit was in that crew. Product Hunt, Zola Electric, which is the biggest solar company in Africa. So that portfolio would have done amazing. And so I looked back and I was like, man, I did the first part, right, which is what you're saying. You know, I just spent time with interesting people and added value to them through sharing

ideas and sites, whatever, helping being helpful. Yep. But then the lesson I learned was, why wasn't I investing? And to me, I kind of asked myself this and I thought, because I wasn't thinking of myself like an investor. Yeah. And so then it happened again and I saw this company called Lambda School that I thought was really big. It was really early on. And I started, you know, talking to Austin. And I was like, this time I'm not going to fuck this up. And so I convinced my friend. I was like, I found a company that's amazing. If you invest, this is, I'm your scout here. If I invest, if you invest, you know, give me 15% of your, your action. And, um, and let's let's do it. And so then that was like my first.

like deal deal where you know I was able to put it in and since then now you know once we sold I got a little more money so I could do it myself but the lesson I learned and what I would tell anybody's listening to this is don't count yourself out as as a player in the game either as a founder or investor there is a way if you're willing to be creative and helpful enough I think yeah I think that's my I agree I think that's one of the greatest cultural attributes of the system of kind of early stage founders is that we all know how much those circumstantial relationships matter and how much we learn from one another and how we actually can't do it alone. And, you know, that, that manifests itself in ways like what you're describing. Yeah. Did you invest in Uber? Is that right?

Yeah, I did. So that was also kind of early on. Right. And the funny story there. So we were bootstrapping our business, Be Hans, early days with paper products of all things. We were making paper products for creatives to be organized. They were serious products. Actual paper. And they're called Action Books. They're actually still out there. Okay. Yeah. And so, and one of our core partners for B. Hans from a traffic perspective and partnership was, was StumbleUpon. Garrett had recently purchased Stumblepon back from eBay. He had sold it and then he bought it back. And so he was in my apartment, which was also my office back in the day in New York. And we were kind of jamming on some product stuff. And he whipped out one of our action books that I'd given him previously and was like, hey, you know,

check this out. I'm like working on this side project. And then he shows me, literally invested in the sketch of Uber. Literally shows me these sketches of this product where it's summoning a black car as opposed to having a dial for it. And, and I'm like, dude, you should be focused on your business. You just bought it back. Right. Now, I'm a founder CEO struggling. You're a founder of struggling. Like, you're thinking of making it. It's a distraction. Yeah. It's basically like that's a textbook distraction, right? And so fortunately, he didn't take my advice. 60 billion dollar distraction. And he said, you know, do you want to, do want to be involved? And I think I kind of was like, oh, I don't know. But then I also became a product advisor for

for him. And this was actually even before Travis was in the picture, Ryan was involved. And then, of course, you know, that team got up and running. And so I had, he asked me if I wanted to invest. And I again, like, sure, but I very small check, which is all I could do at the time. Right. And that was a journey as well. And so you're, you do this sort of start as product advisor. And because of that, you're at the table. And so when, when the time came, you were, you were, you were in position. I try to fall in love with a product in the sense where it's still on my mind, you know, and I'm like thinking through the problems. And, you know, And maybe, you know, what's wrong with the interface or how could they onboarding me better? So what's something at Uber that the product, a product change early on, like probably before any of us touched it that you remember. Was there anything like that where? I remember a debate with Garrett around the brand and this notion of should it be a, it was Uber Cab at the time. Right. It was Uber Cab at the time. Should it be an expensive feeling brand where it looks like it's aspirational but something you couldn't afford?

Or should it be a accessible brand where it feels like this is something that everyone should be doing. Right. And it was actually a really healthy argument because you intuitively think it should be accessible to everyone. I mean, if you want to make a big company. But Garrett's view is that it should be something that feels like a superpower. Like everyone's private driver. It should feel expensive even though it was intended to be accessible. And so that was part of the thought behind the black kind of logo and the branded entity that sort of suggested that feeling.

The luxury, elite feel. Exactly. So I remember that debate. And I think that was also the right choice. That's amazing. Okay. And what are you excited about nowadays? Like, go on either a space, a company, a problem that you think needs solving, what's got

Scott interested? Well, I think there's a lot of different things that are interesting me at any point in time. I mean, in my day job, it's building products for creative people and kind of thinking about the future of not only the creative tools we know, but also things like augmented reality and how we're going to actually infiltrate and build content in that new medium that would otherwise die if it wasn't enriched with like interactive, animated, hyper-intelligent content. So it's thinking about that. working with a lot of our partners like Apple and others to help think through like how does that even

happen has been like a really fun thing for me by day and you know and by night I mean there's been a lot of really interesting enterprise companies that are thinking about the future of work if you're in a big company you know how hard it is for them to even think about a remote workforce and how to make a transition right even though a lot of us all know it's coming what are the steps to get there what kind of technologies need to come about I also think that you know social has been out of favor which makes it interesting which means it's the yeah you know when everyone says Because something is dead, it means that something's being born. Right.

And now's the time. So I'm thinking a lot about consumer products that help people connect with one another in new and, you know, privacy-driven premium ways. Gotcha. What's a day in the life? Is there a wake-up time, a morning routine that you like that kind of works for you? I mean, every day is different, right? But I'm trying to think of anything that would be useful and helpful. But I ultimately-

Normal is also useful because people are like, oh, there's no secret. He just wakes up and, you know, eats his breakfast, ties his shoes, a little bit groggy and gets out the door. Like, that's okay too. Yeah, no. I mean, I think that, I do try to switch it up. You know, I'm actually not one of those people that has to like everything has to be the same and whatever else. But I do, I mean, there are a couple things I do.

Like, I do try to audit my calendar in retrospect a little bit. A lot of people only look forward. Not many people live back. So you do a time on it? You look back at the last week or what do you do? I do. I typically look back at the last week. And I typically ask myself, you know, how do I spend my time?

It's actually a really interesting thing because you're typically at least ashamed of one day, if not more than one day. For sure. Yeah. And how you did it and you look at these blocks. What did I do during that period? Or why did I meet with that person for that long or whatever it is? Is this advancing what's most interesting and most important to me?

And that could be personal things and work things, right? But it's just this audit. And it's prompted some difficult realizations. It's like, wow, like that was more important than, you know, seeing my family. Family time, yeah. Right. It's important. I saw a version of this that I really like.

So there's a guy, you probably know his name is Matt something. He's like the like coach, CEO coached to a bunch of CEOs in Silicon Valley. He just wrote a book called The Great CEO Within, I think it's called. He just came out. And so Emmett, who's the CEO at Twitch, I think he works with him. I might be getting all these details wrong. Name wrong. Book title wrong.

Directionally. Yeah, something like this. Let's just wave our hands a little bit. So this guy works with a bunch of CEOs. And so he wrote this book and I saw his like, like you had your 680 Evernote notes. So he had a bunch of Google docs that were just like quick, you know, like principle after he worked with somebody's CEOs. He was noticing some things.

He would just start writing them down. And he called this one, the energy audit. And so it's the same thing you're talking about where he would go back in your calendar, But he said, get two markers, right? Red and green or whatever. Red means this activity takes energy away from you. You feel less energetic after you do it. Green means that activity gives you more energy, right?

Like the gym is this weird thing where you would think you go to the gym, you put all this energy in and you exercise and that should deplete you. But actually, you walk out and you feel more energy for the rest of the day, right? So like there's these activities. So we said just start highlighting and just look at the couple. Step back and just look at the colors and then be like, okay, that's where you're at today. Let's try to move towards more green. And different things give you energy, like the sort of doing things.

things that are in your zone of genius, right? Things that you're good at, things you know that are important, and you can just get in flow and do them. And I really like that because it was, it's one of those things you know when the first time you do it, you're going to, like, it's going to look bloody. It's going to be like, oh, this is not a good use of time. I think that would be interesting. I wonder, I feel for me, as I have like a natural introvert tendency and they say that

introverts get their energy from being alone. I wonder if I'd be skewed a little bit towards like, all the non-meeting times are green. Like, oh, that was the best time. but I like that idea because, I mean, listen, there are meetings where you're like, and there are meetings where you leave with a lot that you're thinking about. Maybe that's another measure also is after you spend time with something or someone, are you leaving thinking about things?

I mean, that is one of the things I have used over the years to determine founders I want to work with as an investor is if I feel like every conversation with him or her was a step function more interesting than the one before it. Or was it a repeat? Right. A lot of conversations we have with people are repeats. Yes. It's like, oh, you know, you kind of talked about the same thing last time.

Right. Every now and then you meet someone where you just pick up where you left off and it just gets like actually even, you know, better and better and richer and more dynamic and whatever else. I mean, that was like the story with Periscope when I met Kavon and Joe and they were doing this thing called Bounty App at the time. But every conversation with them about what they were trying to build and whatever was like infinitely more interesting.

Right. And it was like, okay, we got to work together. And what you're saying is it's not just that their results were getting better every time because nobody does that, right? It was the ideas, right? It was the ideas and the, you know, maybe also chemistry, like building upon an idea to make another idea, right? It's like, oh, my gosh, sort of like seeing the world through someone else's eyes. Oh, it's like teleportation.

Yeah. It's like, oh, teleportation. Like, what would I want to do? You know, maybe I'm at night going to bed and I just want to like drop into Tokyo and like walk around. It's like, oh, yeah, like maybe you could do this. Oh, you could go and see a tennis match that's at Wimbledon when you're in New York. And then you suddenly like, oh, wow, like, what are the media rights implications of that? And maybe there's a business model there.

And just like, thing, the thing, the thing, the thing, the thing, the thing. and it's like, okay, this feels good. Right, yeah, I like that. I have a similar thing where I call people Pokemon because it's like, you know, Pokemon just sort of evolve. It's like the next time you see them, oh, my God, this whole person has evolved into a better person. Yeah.

And those are the most, like, fulfilling people to, like, spend time with. I agree. I like that. Yeah, here we go. A new book. One thing I wanted to ask you, because the way I look at it is, this is a guy who's achieved a lot of things that I'd like to achieve in my life, right? So, just sold our company, but, you know, I'd love to write a book. I'd love to, you know, achieve success in the next thing or invest in great companies.

So you're still setting. goals for yourself. What's a goal you have set for yourself now? Like, what can you share? That's something you're like, all right, here's a goal I have for myself nowadays. Yeah, well, I think that there's some ideas that I'm like brewing that I want to give some time to, right? So I am trying to kind to radically schedule time to just think through these things. I actually love flights for that reason because I can give myself a chunk of hours that you ordinarily never get on the ground, right? Or just take a shower. Yeah, right. You know, just uninterrupted time. I mean, I do believe in this constantly connected world, the disconnection is a competitive.

advantage. Yes. Because you can actually think deeply about something as opposed to just constantly react and pick away at the collective inboxes around you. Right. I think that I also certainly have some goals for like the changes I'm trying to bring upon the teams, you know, that I'm leading now, you know, as this chief product officer role at Adobe. I mean, this is just a company that bought my company, a lot of my DNAs in this business.

I care about where these products land and what, you know, and so I've set some like KPI driven even, you know, goals around. And it's just, it forces you to start making big swings. and think about how you're going to lead those changes and get people to go along with it. And then it's about narrative and merchandising and all these other things. It's fun. You kind of have to build a internal marketing campaign at times just to get people to change their minds. So those are just a few examples.

Okay. And if you were 21 again today, so I'll let you keep all the knowledge you have. But you give me back sort of all your assets, your reputation, nobody knows you, you're 21 years old again. What do you think you do? How do you think you would go about spending, you know, the next? a few years of your life. Well, I would definitely start something again if I had really a deep interest. I think I would probably aspire for more empathy for the customer suffering the problem

as opposed to my passion for the solution. I think a lot of the mistakes that I made early on were that I was always like super passionate about what I know needed to happen. And then we would realize eight months later we were like 30 degrees off. Right. You cherry pick evidence that might fit the need for that solution. Exactly. Because you're, you know, you get excited. by a prototype and a vision and you want alignment so you force alignment and then you realize, wait, had I just spent more hours next to a customer, seeing what their actual life was like and what they actually thought of my product, I would have known better. So I think those were some of those.

There were, I think, a few lost years, as I like to call them in Behance in that five-year bootstrapping period, where we had to rebuild a lot of stuff. And I can't say I would do that all over again, you know, if I had the choice. Although I would say that it definitely built us as a team, like the culture. We went through a lot again. Adversity will do that to you. It did. Like what doesn't kill you makes you stronger?

Like definitely true. Right. And it seems struggling. I think I would also try to do fewer things. I, you know, and I go back and forth on this. I've heard two contradictory feces about,

like, what makes a great entrepreneur. Either you are really, really great and willing to take risk or you're really good at hedging risk. It's like, wait, those are like the opposite. Yeah.

I was always a hedger. You know, I always was thinking about the contingency plan. And that caused me to do number of weird things. Number one, it caused me to go to business school simultaneously as I was starting a business and not drop out. A little did I know that dropping out would be way better PR value than finishing. No one gives a shit about an MBA. Right. The second. And so the other way you had taken, let's say, taking the risks. Yeah. That would be what? Okay, so dropping out is one.

What were some other ways that you were doing contingency plans? Does that mean like... Oh yeah. Sorry. I was going to say like also like another example was the number of products we were building. Because I was like if this one doesn't work, then this one will work. Right. And even like features. It's like the insecurity of shipping many features in a product is basically, I don't know what's going to work. Right. But here's the amazing thing is that when you ship a number of features and then you start killing a few of them, what you find is that the core stuff gets used more. And it gives more attention from the team too. And it was one of those really strange realizations, I would say, three or four years into behance, which is again, probably two years too late or too much later than it should have been, where we killed a few major features.

We had this tip exchange thing where creatives could leave like tips for another and build it upon each other and vote them up and down. It was like a mini dig at the time. within the hands. There was a group's functionality where people could share and then we killed both like one after the other and then suddenly people created more projects. Right. Usage goes up. And they use and they use the core fee functionality more. And I just again wish I could have gone back and just really drove it down to like what do we actually have to ship and how do we make sure it's amazing. And what space would be interesting to you? Or 21 would you be like building tools for creatives or would you go into biohacking or you know

like whatever? Like at that point you have a long time where you can ramp up or go into any space. You're not sort of committed. Sure. And I guess the question is if I was 21, today, or if I was 21 back then, because back then I think... 21 today, I would definitely be doing something different. First of all, I mean, we're still living in an app-driven world, which is crazy. I mean, apps were born in the world where there was no GPS, there were no notifications, there was no AI. And so you had to download apps and then use them for things.

Now, with a modern OS that should know where you are and what you're most likely to want to do based on where you are and when you're there and with whom you are with, the whole operating system, the whole notion should be. completely different. There shouldn't even be apps, frankly. There should be superpowers that are suddenly there and then they're suddenly gone. And if you think about, and I think that we're going towards that end, I think that we will see operating systems evolve. I think that the notification systems we know them today will be totally antiquated to this more, you know, actionable interface that just is always like the sixth sense, the appendage that we never know we needed. And I think about,

like, what are the applications that are going to thrive in such a world? I also think about marketplaces that are more sustainable. You know, the, the modern notion that every freelancer marketplace essentially taxes the transaction is silly, right? And that's actually the on-demand model for on-demand marketplaces, and it's all the same formula. There's a totally different model that should exist. Maybe it's blockchain driven. Maybe there's some other mechanic at play for value distribution. So there's a lot of these things that I think a bit about. Some of them overlap into my day job. Some of them I'm looking for companies and entrepreneurs that are tackling and want to help them. What I like about you, approach is that you didn't start with some idea, like, oh, I want to build this or a generic space,

but it was more like, why are things the way they are? Wait, shouldn't they be different? Like, you basically were like, why are apps and notifications the way we use this phone now that we have XYZ? Or why do all marketplaces do this, you know, rent seeker model where they just, you know, sit in the middle and grab from every transaction? So it's funny. Like, one of the things I learned most working with the benchmark team for a little while was I really went in there thinking the greatest investors are really good at the future. And what I left there believing is that the greatest investors have a really deep and concrete understanding of present and how the present is like about to change. And you can kind of, but not, you know, distant, distant long shots are fun bets, but they're bets, right? But if you really have a tune into the current dynamics and just how they're slightly shifting and start getting ahead at really interesting things. I see. And so you, where do you like to learn from? So like, what do you listen to? What podcast do you listen to? What book do you read? Who do you think is really smart? Where if there's talking, you're listening. What do you like to feed your brain? Yeah. No, it's something that, so I'll tell you, like, my first answer is I have, I am a huge fan of Twitter. I think that it is an incredible, it sounds

like such a cliche answer, but I have carefully curated a group of people. They are, they are astrophysicists, they are biologists, they are economists, they are political scientists, there are other entrepreneurs, and designers and illustrators. These are the people who curate for me every day. What's interesting to them? I just think that's freaking amazing. Right. You get to surf on top of that. It is. It is. And so some people would say, oh my gosh, you spend so much time on social media. Actually, it's just literally going through and reading. Yes. If you think about it, but curated by the And that's how I learn about the books that I want to read. Right. And that's, so, I mean, I love reading books related to psychology. And I love reading,

I'm starting to listen to a lot of history podcasts. So, like, some of those like Kings of Kings type podcasts, I think are super interesting because you're just learning about, um, this notion of history rhyming. Like, it's so true. I mean, you're learning about what happened in like Rome, you know, and you're like, oh my gosh, it's happening all over again now in America. Right. There's just a lot of that. So I, but I, I try not to, uh, you know, I actually don't have like one field. I'm, just like I love reading just this genre or whatever. And I don't read too many business books. Why is that?

Well, I find that most of them are a big book about a little idea, you know? That's how I feel about most books. It is. But, you know, I think that, and I have an argument with my publisher about the messy middle because I came in with this, like, this big book of like, you know, between 100, 200 insights that were completely disconnected from one another, although there was some sort of read. But, you know, and they were like, this is not what you're supposed to do. You just write a chapter book.

And I was like, I want to read a book. Right. At least my audience. They're too busy. They're starting companies or changing companies. They just want actual insights. They'll make them think about something differently. Right.

And like where to go to learn more. Right. Turn the page and then like, you know, turn on your brain, basically. That's the least what I want. Yeah. Great. All right. I know you got to help on a flight side.

I check the clock. Look at this. Oh, wow. Look at that. Oh, wow. That's great. 10 p.m. flat. Yeah, this is fun.

I hope you guys like this conversation. If you want to follow Scott. Where should they follow you, reach out to you. Hey, just Scott Belski. At Scott Belski. Wherever. Whenever. go for you do connect.

Great. Awesome.