Scott Belsky | Adobe's CPO of Adobe Creative Cloud, co-founder of Behance On Scaling a Business

I'm doing well, thank you for having me.

Childhood? Well, let's see, depends how far back we want to go and how many issues boxes we want to get through. Eighth-grade dances, you can start there. Eighth-grade dances, right? No, I mean, listen, I've always had a non-traditional kind of student side to me. I was always interested in the things more outside the class than in the class. I always had kind of a creative bent, and I also always had kind of an enterprising business bent, and I was always looking for the overlaps of these things. So, you know, growing up, making stores as a kid, doing a lot of art, having like a creativity zone in my basement where I had all sorts of concoctions. And then, of course, in college, thinking about how do I combine interest in design with interest in technology with interest in business. And, you know, Behance, which was a company I started back in 2005, my first real company, the purpose was to literally organize the creative world using technology. And that was one of those examples in my life where I felt like the overlap of interest was perfect.

Well, I was probably one of the worst students there because I was simultaneously starting my company that I started about the same month that I started business school. And the whole time I was there, I was thinking, 'Gosh, you know, should I drop out or should I stick with it?' In retrospect, I think the story of dropping out of Harvard is way better and more interesting than the story of finishing. But listen, I had a good experience there. I made some great friends that have been great advisers and collaborators to me ever since, so I can't regret it. But I do think that when you're building things, when you're building new things, an MBA is less useful than if you're kind of going into a big company and trying to have more management experience behind you. It's a bridge to a question mark, and at the time when I was at business school, I kind of knew what I wanted to do.

Well, I started right before business school. The idea was really inspired by frustration. I couldn't believe how disorganized the creative world was at that point. People would put their portfolio sites online on their own websites, on their own domain name, and no one would ever find them unless they knew them already. And I figured there should really be a LinkedIn for the creative world. There should be an interconnected portfolio platform where the stuff that's in people's portfolios also thrives and is discovered outside of their portfolios, sort of circulates online because it's great creative work, and also helps people find it without going through the person's name. You know, if you talk to any creative professional in the world, they'll say that they're more defined by their work than their brand or even what company they happen to have worked for. And that was the insight for Behance.

Sure. Well, it was a bootstrapping story, so it was rough at times. I had saved some money up from my previous job working at an investment bank, so I had some money to commit. And then, but also I hired two other people to join me, and we were all kind of willing to work for nothing for a period of time to figure this out. And then quite quickly, we actually had our first product was a totally analog product. It was a paper product. It was a notebook for creative people to be more organized, and we sold these paper products literally at trade shows and other places to pay the bills in the beginning, and also to build our brand as a company that organized creative people. So it was one of those first insights, which was, let's be a mission-centric, medium-agnostic business. You know, let's make sure we organize creative people in whatever possible way we can.

Well, I would say maybe two or so years into the company is when we started to actually see people post portfolios that we didn't know ourselves. And one of the things we did to bootstrap the network was we actually would go and interview great creatives we admired. We picked a hundred great creatives and designers that we admired, and we went to them and said, 'Hey, would you put a portfolio on our platform?' And they said, 'No, what the hell, who are you?' And then we would say, 'Oh, well, can we interview you for our blog? Can we write about how great your work is?' They're like, 'Oh, well, okay, sure.' And then we say, 'Oh, and by the way, when we post this blog post about you, we want a link to your portfolio that we're willing to put together for you. Can we just take your imagery online and make a portfolio for you?' And they would say, 'Oh, okay.' And so we actually got a hundred great portfolios that we made for the members ourselves, and then when people would find those, they'd be like, 'Oh, you know, so-and-so is there, I should be there.' And that's how we got the flywheel going, as they call it.

Sure. Well, in the beginning, of course, we were bootstrapping every which way we could, and so I had a book, we had a conference, we sold notebooks, whatever else. But the real driver of revenue for Behance ultimately became two things. One, which was a premium level offering for people to have the contents of their Behance portfolio on their own personal website, always in sync, because everyone needs their own website also. And so we figured, hey, if you can have the two combined in one solution and manage in one place, people would pay a monthly fee for that, and they did in droves. And then the second was a job posting service, and ultimately a talent service product for companies to get access to all of the data in the platform to find the exact right designer or creative professional for the job that they were hiring for.

Let's see, around that time we were a little over a million members, and you know, fast forward today, we have over 16 million members, so it's grown quite a bit since the acquisition. But we were in a very high growth rate at the moment where that happened.

Well, the Creative Cloud was really the Creative Suite of products, but then delivered in a new way and with new services integrated throughout. And so I would say that the Creative Cloud journey is still well underway. And the idea also was, hey, instead of paying $1,000 for all of these creative tools, you can pick like a plan as low as nine bucks a month and get access to the ones that you want. And it was a very empowering thing for creatives out there, many of whom previously didn't really properly pay for their products. You know, now they could say, 'Hey, I can get them legally. I can also have all these services like font management and Behance and all these other things integrated throughout my tools.' And then I can have, you know, increasingly have better ways to collaborate with others, because that's the one thing that the creative world is actually still awakening to, how to work together.

So I actually just turned 39 last week.

Yeah, so I'm looking for all of the creative products. So all of the products in Creative Cloud, of course, the video products, the imaging, photography, experience design, animation, all these products, how they interoperate, so how they work together, and how they have road maps ahead that, you know, bring them to another level. Always thinking also about new mediums like voice interfaces and AR and VR. And so the challenge is always making sure that we're pushing every segment forward, allowing photographers and video editors and others to do the greatest work of their lives, while also making sure that they adopt new technologies and create for new problems. You know, it's always, you got to always stay on the edge.

Mandatory. Stay tuned.

Yeah, no, we were acquired by Adobe, and I started investing right before that happened.

Well, I look for, you know, different things in the person and also the product and the problem. So on the people's side, I love people that want to shake something up, that listen and learn as much as they speak. I love to work with teams that value design and product experience above everything else, not just exploiting some opportunity. I really enjoy products that take in like human psychology into account and, you know, what do we really care about when we start using a product initially? Not much, it turns out. We're all very lazy, vain, and selfish in the beginning, and it better really appeal to near-term needs before it kind of delivers that long-term value. So I think about things like that. I also look for teams that really have empathy with the people suffering the problem they're trying to solve, as opposed to just being passionate about a solution, but people really get the problem they're solving and have empathy.

I got involved with Uber when it was still an idea, so before they had actually launched their first product.

Well, Making Ideas Happen, although in some countries it might be called Making Things Happen. Fair enough. Making Ideas Happen came out in 2010, and this is a book about why most creative individuals and teams get nothing done. They're always going from idea to idea to idea, but some creative people and teams defy the odds and are so productive and just churn it out and make ideas happen again and again and again. And so Making Ideas Happen is a book all about what it is that those people and teams do that we can learn from.

Maybe two cents, but thanks.

The Messy Middle was inspired also by frustration, in this case by everyone's obsession with the starts and finishes of everything, and why we don't talk about the middle volatility, the stuff that actually matters. Yeah, it's wild to me. And so The Messy Middle is all about navigating volatility. How do you endure those lows? How do you optimize the heck out of everything that works and how you work, how your team works, or what your product's doing and how your product's working? And finally, how do you not screw it up in the final mile?

Sure. Well, where do I begin? I mean, Behance was a five-year bootstrapping journey, and we had a lot of very, you know, great volatile times. I would say just a general challenge I had was we had a small office in Union Square, or off of Union Square, and whenever I would walk out of the building, I would see the fruit guy at the corner, the guy selling fruit in his cart, and I would realize that at the end of the day, he had a far better business than we did. And it just was very humbling to realize, gosh, like we think we're smart, we're working so hard, we're spending years just working ourselves to the bone and losing money, and yet like we still don't have a great business, or any business for that matter. We're working complete anonymity, ambiguity, uncertainty, and anxiety. And it was during those periods of time where, without any rewards to keep the team motivated, we had to be very creative in coming up with our own reward systems, like just literally things to work towards in the near term that would keep us engaged. I mean, one of those things, by the way, was we would type Behance into Google, and it would always say, 'Do you mean enhance? Do you mean enhance?' Like, come on, like can we just not be a mistake anymore? So that was like one of those goals. So we were like, in six months, we are no longer going to be a mistake. And that was one of those little hacks we used to keep ourselves engaged, even though we had no real short-term rewards to measure ourselves with. And right, lo and behold, six months later, after all these portfolios we put up for the creatives that I talked about at the beginning, Behance came up as a legitimate search result. Early or late middle 2007. Boom.

No, yeah.

Well, you know, you just make another goal and you just keep working towards it. And I think that's, you know, that's what we've always done. It's just, you know, make up another goal, another milestone, and you just keep churning. I feel like one of the most, you know, greatest competitive advantages of startups is just sticking together long enough to figure it out.

Well, I think you always have to keep people aligned. And there's two ways of forcing alignment. One is you just, you know, you convince people of where we're going and why. You use design to show a prototype as opposed to discuss it. You know, there's a lot of ways of getting alignment. The other way of getting alignment is to impose process on people. And I find that process is the easy solution, but it's also the one that screws you over the long term, because the more and more process you add, the more burdensome and bureaucratic the system becomes, and the less engaged people are. So some process is really important, and you have to have process, but at the same time, you know, the work that you do to keep people aligned, to show rather than tell, is really important.

You just said a knowledge bomb. I just wanted to marinate on... you said you want to show a design rather, like show a mockup rather than to discuss it. Why is that?