What Behance, Adobe, and A24 Have Taught Scott Belsky About Art & Tech

Everyone talks about passion and having a solution in your mind's eye that you just get a team together and hunker down to build over a few years. But oftentimes when you take that path driven by passion, you end up launching something that is 30° off of product market fit. And then you wonder why people aren't using this great product and it's because you didn't gain and anchor yourself with every decision along the way with empathy, shoulder-to-shoulder with the customer. What they're actually struggling with is oftentimes different than what is the thing you think should be solved.

Awesome. Perfect.

The truth is I never liked finance. I studied both business and design as an undergrad and at that time, 2001, 2002, when you wanted to go into business you cut your teeth in the industry by going to Wall Street. So I didn't really yet understand that there was this world of entrepreneurship and there was a new small crop of technology-driven companies emerging in Silicon Valley. It was just not in my lexicon. So I went and had this opportunity to join Goldman. After about a year or so there, I was like, 'This is not for me.' And I went to my manager and I told her that I was leaving and she said, 'If there's one job that would be interesting to have at the firm, what would it be?' And I said, 'It'd be really cool to see how an organization is run.' I didn't even know what I was asking at the time, but what I think I was expressing interest in was the field of leadership development and organizational improvement. Like how is something scaled and how is it organized? I was always so interested in that and I ended up getting a job in the executive office focused on leadership development and almost like an internal management consultant that would help the teams and the firm evolve. And in the first week I was there, I asked for Adobe Illustrator because I wanted to make diagrams and I wanted to use information design to get people aligned around what we were trying to do. And I remember them thinking like Adobe Illustrator, that's not something we have licenses for at Goldman's, but I ended up getting an exception. And that was the next step of many steps of me always using design to help solve problems and get people aligned around concepts and ideas. And I feel like historically that's always been my theme in my career is using design in that way. But I ended up staying at Goldman Sachs for three more years in this really awkward bizarre function that had nothing to do with finance before going to business school and starting Behance.

So Behance was started in late 2006.

Yeah. So, it was still early days, but it took me maybe five years out of college, I think, and really brewing these ideas and connecting with like-minded people in New York City where I was living at the time. And then Behance, we were really a very tiny team in 2007, but we launched the first version of the network in late 2007. And then five, no, seven years later, we joined Adobe.

Yeah. And I agree with you by the way. I think that empathy outperforms passion when it comes to entrepreneurship and building something. Everyone talks about passion and having a solution in your mind's eye that you just get a team together and hunker down to build over a few years, but oftentimes when you take that path driven by passion, you end up launching something that is 30° off of product market fit. And then you wonder why people aren't using this great product. It's because you didn't gain and anchor yourself with every decision along the way with empathy. Shoulder-to-shoulder with the customer, what they're actually struggling with is oftentimes different than what is the thing you think should be solved. In Behance, that was very true. The observation that founded Behance was this idea that creatives are incredibly disorganized. Their careers were often at the mercy of circumstance. They were oftentimes representing themselves with websites that were completely outdated. Their portfolio was always old. They even struggled to capture what was actionable during brainstorming and the creative process. And so the company was founded to help organize the creative world and that was the opposite of inspiration, right? And everything we did over the years of Behance was around that. Now when we started Behance, we had a focus group. It was the first and only focus group we ever did at Behance where we asked folks if they agreed with us that they needed to have a network to showcase their work and get discovered. And universally they said no, we have our own websites. We have MySpace. We have DeviantArt. We have these so many places we can put our work. The last thing we need is another place. And we said, 'Oh, okay.' Because our passion was to build a network for the creative world. So we said okay what are you suffering from? Empathy. And there was a long list. 'I never get attribution for my work, the agency takes credit but no one ever can figure out what I actually, the person behind the work, no one knows who did what in this world.' 'No one visits my website, my portfolio, only my mom and people that know me. I want to make a way for my website to get discovered by people that don't know me.' Or 'A lot of the stuff in my portfolio was done with other people that I often work with. Is there any way where we could jointly publish a project that we did together to our collective portfolios?' And we wrote all these down and then the outcome of that focus group was actually they do need what we're going to build. They just don't know it. And that's happened many times now in my career where you double down on the empathy and really learn what's required.

It was really just partnering, anchoring with individuals and really understanding what they were struggling with. And also, my co-founder Matias was a designer himself. He was a freelance designer before that. Making sure that we had people on the team who were the customer was really important as well. And we had a conference every year called the 99U conference where we would get our community together and really get to know them and talk to them. And I learned that focus group was not the right setting for this because as I said like everyone tells you no I don't like that idea.

I think there's a great insight for your listeners actually at this start thinking about how to build a product along those lines. What is one of the most common mistakes or the common mistake you've seen early stage founders to make, both from an operator, as an investor because you're extremely active angel, and as a former entrepreneur?

Employees. Yeah. To keep the team together long enough to figure it out requires building not just a product but also a culture where people feel like they're part of something special and don't take the headhunter call and don't always get lured in by the hot headline of someone else who seems to be making more traction than you are. It's just so important to have a team that is willing to stick together. And I think that's really hard to build, especially when you're building a junior team of people who don't know better. The grass is always greener. Whenever your job gets monotonous and hard or you're going sideways, you start to look at your friends and the headlines of other tech companies and you say to yourself, 'Oh, I should probably be somewhere else.' Guess what? It's the same there, right? So, I think that it's that how do you get people to overcome that tendency to always want to hop away and not be heads down? I think a bit of it is about merchandising the progress you're making to your team. It's leadership, right? And I think that's another mistake that founders make is they don't invest in that culture and in that narrative that keeps a team together.

I think that the messy middle I define as the volatility between the beginning and the end of a bold journey or turnaround or startup. And the volatility is a lot to stomach. And the job of the founder, of the leader of the team is to help the team endure the valleys, the troughs, the difficult moments and optimize the hell out of everything that works, whether it's something about the team working or the product working. And so I do think to answer your question, the narrative is intended to help people endure those lows and optimize the highs. The other analogy I like to use is that we are driving our teams across the country with the windows blacked out in the back seat. And so if you're stuck in that back seat, you don't know that you're making progress. You don't feel like you're making progress. You feel like you're perpetually stuck on a bridge or somewhere in traffic. But if the driver is constantly merchandising the progress, saying, 'Okay, we just approached the state line. Oh, we just got out of the traffic.' They keep merchandising and narrating the progress you're making. It actually is tolerable. You can tolerate it. You can tolerate the uncertainty, the ambiguity, and the anxiety of a volatile journey. That's just something I think leaders need to learn to do because otherwise we suffer.

I don't think so because I think that it's easier obviously the truncation of development is fascinating and important. You can learn more quickly. You can address customers more quickly. But everyone is getting that same level of capability. And so the sea is rising for all, right? Not just for you. And therefore the competitiveness and the need to be faster and everything else is just equally distributed. And therefore I think that everyone's journey is equally messy as a result of that. If you had technology like this and no one else had access to it then conceivably your journey would be less messy, right? But that's not the way it is of course.

I think there were a few points in the Behance journey both before and after the acquisition where we reached a point where it was clear to me that some of us had grown into a new role that we needed to play and some of us were still playing the old role and there was now like a new role empty that needed to be filled. And I would be very transparent with my team that my job was to make sure that the new roles that needed to be filled in this company were always filled by great people who were capable of those roles and that some of us would grow into these new roles and some of us would not because we're really good at the role we played but we don't have an interest or the skills to play a different role. And I really, because I just thought that was true and I didn't even know what would be true for me. Right? I thought I would like to be a big company leader, but it also wasn't clear if I could until I tried and determined whether that was a good role for me or not. So, there were moments I think that when we started to have to make real infrastructure and architectural decisions for a platform that could really scale globally, we needed a different level of engineering talent. When it became a bigger team and we needed to have leaders that were engineering leaders and design leaders and product leaders that could manage people really effectively and focus a good amount of their time on hiring great people. That is an entirely different role from the people that helped us get there. And so in some cases one of my best engineers that I founded the company with became an individual contributor when he didn't want to have to manage people all day and then new people came in. So I always, I think the answer to your question though is you always have to take a step back and look at the problems and the opportunities for the company and the people that are most likely to crack them and then you have to ask yourself who is playing that role and where do we have a vacancy.

For me, it was an exciting time when we came into Adobe in 2012, which keep in mind is 14 years ago, right? At the time, the business was like a tenth of the size that it is today in terms of valuation. It was a smaller company, right? And they had just launched the cloud subscription business model, but they hadn't developed any products or offerings that warranted a subscription model. And so the opportunity to come in, it was like I felt like it was a bit of a refounding moment of a product strategy there because there were no cloud documents. There were no mobile apps that connected to the desktop apps. There were no cloud services that enabled you to access your assets across different products. A lot of these things we take for granted today and all the tools we use were very novel and new ideas at the time and were just not in the product roadmap yet. And so it was really fun to be there at a time with the team where even though I was a founder coming in from an acquisition, I was given the opportunity to lead a lot of this stuff. And that was a great experience for me and for my team. The first instance of the downloader and the experience of being logged into Creative Cloud was a project that my team took on shortly after acquisition, even though that's like the heart of the Creative Cloud experience beyond the products themselves, was such a fun thing to do. So I loved being there. It was also Adobe is a company that historically was built through acquisitions. Macromedia was a huge acquisition. Omniture was a huge acquisition. And then other companies like Typekit and Behance and others really defined core parts of the company. And so whereas some companies acquire you and break up your team or tell you to forget everything you did before and do it our way, Adobe was very different. Adobe was like, 'Welcome to Adobe. What role can you play? How can you change us?' And Photoshop was an acquisition if you want to go back far enough. So it's a company that really welcomed foreign DNA.