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.

Pretty much, pretty much. A small hiatus in the middle where I spent some time as an investor but I really had an affinity towards the customers and towards Behance and towards the other products and I felt proud there and it was, you know, so I came back as chief product officer three, four years after the acquisition when I left and then came back pretty quickly.

Yep.

I think there's a few different things there. First of all, the model game right now is like this game of slap a hand where there's one hand at the top that's the best but then the next version of another one comes out and outperforms the version of number one and they keep outperforming each other. And so it's this period of time where every time we discount a particular LLM or model in six months we're wrong, right? There was a time where people had completely written off Google and now Gemini is an incredible model. There's a period of time where people said Anthropic's not going to work and OpenAI is going to win. Now we're at a moment where people like Anthropic is going to work and OpenAI might not win. And I've now learned enough to know that whatever the leading model is today is unlikely to be the leading model tomorrow. And there's still a lot of great breakthroughs and jiu-jitsu moves that these models are playing. So I think for development teams we have to first of all create products that are somewhat model agnostic where we can actually change up or leverage different models for different purposes. I think there's a lot of instances of teams, especially creative teams that are playing with these models, realizing that some are really good at one thing and others are really good at something else. And so I think you want to have that optionality. I think there's other considerations. For example, do you want to use a commercially safe model? Meaning one that was not trained on IP that can't be used for some license purpose or doesn't give you some form of indemnification to use it for commercial purposes. I think there's other questions around creative control. I think one of the things that we're also realizing now is that there are two types of creators in the world. There are content creators and there are artists. And content creators, they just want to get something done quickly and they want to throw it against the algorithm and see if it works and gets engagement or not. They don't have the luxury of spending tons of precision craft calories on making it perfect because they have to do 10 a day and they're not even sure which one will work with the algorithm. And so it's like a throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks approach. And for those folks, they love this new generative technology because it allows them to just whip through tons of possibilities super quickly. Then you have another type of creator that I consider to be more of an artist. And these are folks unlike the first folks who would trade control for speed all day. The second group of people are not willing to trade control for speed. In fact, they just want more and more control over achieving whatever's in their mind's eye. That's what an artist wants to do. An artist wants to imagine something and then express it. And if I can't express it with any degree of craft and precision, I'm going to be extremely disappointed as an artist, right? And I think that there are new models and more so workflows I would say than models that are evolving that help artists just like past workflows of many intricate tools and chisels that are used, digital chisels that are used to make something exactly as an artist intends to make something. That to me is another variant of the future of technology that is equally as important but we don't talk about as much.

I've always had a passion for human storytelling. I feel like my friends who are either synthetic biologists or writers have gotten into a field in which they've become passionate and successful and a lot of them were inspired by a film or some form of series that they watched growing up and that they still like, Jurassic Park or whatever the case might be. I just think that storytelling and filmmaking in some ways is a way of us understanding the world around us as it happens. It's almost like a form of prototype for the future. It allows us to determine ahead, do we want to live in that world or not? And I also think that as our feeds get filled with slop and the era of abundance kicks in as it relates to content, we're all going to look for better, higher quality, more risk-taking storytellers. And I was excited to kind of get involved in that world.

I think it's still TBD.

People who have ideas endure a ton of friction to explore them. It's hard when historically you need to have a lot of money and a lot of resources to really explore the full surface area of your own imagination. No one has all the skills for every tool, for every medium to really explore what's in your mind's eye. It's exciting today that people now can explore ideas more quickly. Like the ability to quickly concept something, to try 50 variations of something. There's a great, a lot of great designers have been asked over the years, 'What is creativity?' The designer Isaac Mizrahi was once asked that question and he said creativity is a mistake of the eye. And I think about that a lot because a mistake of the eye requires you to see a lot of things and to notice something that others don't notice based on your own taste, right? And then express the agency to do something with it and to run with it and to see how that would look in this context or in that context. I think that the creative process is now in the process of being completely reimagined with a lot of this new technology. And what that will result in is more surface area of possibility being explored by more people who never had the resources to explore it. Right? And if you fast forward that, we should have so many incredible artists and filmmakers and storytellers and others emerging, new voices that bring new IP to the world. And by the way, that's another thing I'm super passionate about is new IP. We need new stuff. We humans, we develop our taste through our inputs, right? What are inputs? Inputs are new places we travel, new foods that we try, new friends that we make, new books that we read. It's new inputs that get conjured up in our brain and help develop our taste. And yet films, like so many, I think 13 of the last 15 highest grossing films last year were all sequels. And when something gets very expensive to do, no one takes risk, right? Because they want to make sure that they make their money back, which is totally reasonable. So, what can we do to help new voices with new ideas experiment and explore the possibilities? I'm just very passionate about that idea.

I think that the other problem is that AI is a term that's thrown around way too loosely. I've been launching AI-driven features in products like After Effects and Premiere Pro for like 10 years. Every photo we take on our phone is computational photography at this point that is AI-edited by default. AI has permeated our life in various ways, shapes and forms and makes life a lot better. No doubt, right? Protein folding, driving breakthroughs in vaccines and disease prevention and cancer research. It's like we can't blanket statement something like AI. It's like blanket stating meaning like technology or the internet. Like technology and the internet have been used for bad things and for good things and AI will be no different. But it is important that we ask ourselves about the ethical questions of technology as a whole, like when should it be used and when shouldn't it be used. I think it's important to ask ourselves about audience preferences. Like what do people want? Right? When fast food was invented, we still had this desire for great cuisine. If it was just about efficient caloric intake per dollar, like we'd all be going to fast food every day, but we've realized that doesn't nourish us in full ways. And we also realize that we want the experience and even the friction of a fine dining experience, right? And so I think that similarly we have to think about audience preferences for what they actually want AI to do for them and what they don't want AI to do for them. So I think these are the types of modern questions we're all still figuring out. The last thing I'll just say is I think people in Silicon Valley and in the world of technology are often guilty of only thinking about what can go right with the technology as opposed to also being creative about what can go wrong. And I think we've seen this time and time again with social media and algorithms like everyone's always in the world of technology at least they have a tendency to be creative about what can go right and so I do think we have to also be creative about what can go wrong so we can do the work to keep us on the rails.

I think we have a lot of people that, maybe two answers. One is certainly greed. There's some companies that don't want to address certain things because it's not in their own financial interest. But I also think that there's a lot of, there are a lot of optimists. In order to be an inventor and to take a risk with your career and to try to build something that doesn't exist, you inherently have to be an optimist. You have to believe that something is possible that others are telling you isn't. Right? And that optimism is a great thing for the messy middle and for getting started and for hiring people and inspiring a team. That optimism can also be a liability when it comes to taking safeguards and making sure you're careful.

Probably more, definitely more than 100.

I do but I also am always reminding myself that great investing is a business of exceptions, right? And that's the trickiest part is that you'll see something that you've seen before that worked out and you have to ask yourself how could this be an exception and vice versa. Sometimes, you know, when I met the Ramp founders, the classic logic would have been yet another fintech company in a fintech boom that was doing yet another corporate card venture. There were already other players and then there's also MX and others and but it was not intuitive that this was a market worth getting excited about but it's always an exception that breaks out and transforms a market. And in their instance it was their execution and also they had a, there was one thing that really appealed to me which was that every corporate card company made money was all about in their marketing around people spending more and they were like we want to build the corporate card that helps you spend less. And I was like oh my gosh like that as a core principle for product is so fascinating. If you could build a corporate card that is all about spending less that influences every interface, every report, every marketing copy like everything will be different from the rest of the market and that I found to be really appealing. I also always look for founders that are insatiably curious and want to learn. I think that a bold journey as you know Emanuel is like very, it's always a learning experience. So you keep compounding on the lessons learned sometimes the hard way sometimes the easy way. So you want to be a team and a founder that really has that deep curiosity and ability to learn. I also always ask myself would I want to work for this person? That's a great litmus test. As an investor, it's very easy to get too cerebral and to start to imagine like the market and this person seems motivated. But if you really ask yourself, would I want to work for this person? If you're like, I'm not sure, then you definitely should not invest in them because you won't be able to recommend other people work for them and you can't believe that smart people will want to work for them either, right? So, I think it's an important question. And then for me and personally I have two other things like design and product matters to me. The sensibility around product and the insights around how to craft a product for the end user. I like to test for those sorts of things.

I think that in an ideal world I'd have time for multiple conversations. In reality, I think I can see it from a combination of spending time with their materials, their deck, and their product if it's available yet. And also just spending some time with them, but it doesn't have to be too much. And I just, because I just don't have the luxury of too much time, but I do try to jump in and have a conversation very quickly.

It's an interesting question. How has it changed? I think I'm a lot more paranoid now about any moat or any form of competitive advantage. I think that we're all a little too, I think we've learned now over the last couple of years especially that we're all underestimating the rate of change and the rate of progress of AI. So whenever teams tell me why their business is resilient from a major model just disrupting them, I push that further obviously now. But I also think that it's becoming more clear which areas are very resilient. Systems of record, right? Some of the things that humans are going to crave more of in this world as a result of what's happening are going to be good businesses. I also think that the fact that there's so much more need for software because there's so many more capabilities and that we have to make software and so it's like this market expansion moment and I'm sure you're experiencing this as well. If you know you can have an app for that then you're going to make an app for that. Whereas before the cost of doing so was too high. Now it's wait a second I can just do that. And some would say oh no that's a bad sign. It's commoditizing software. That means software won't be a good business. Guess what a great business is, the best businesses in the world are actually commodities because they're massive. Food is probably one of the biggest businesses in the world. Energy, these are all commodities. They're just extremely precious. And there's the Jevons paradox of the more it's available, the more people use it, the more valuable it becomes. So those are the types of debates and conversations I find myself having more lately.

Well, I think one lesson I certainly learned was where and when to not be creative. I think your tendency when you're building something is to do it all in a new way sometimes. And I think what I've learned over the years is that there's a reason why certain things are done certain ways. And I've become a bit less of a contrarian on everything as an entrepreneur building Behance in my 20s. I was a contrarian on everything. I just thought, yeah, I could really, 101s dumb, like reviews dumb, organizational models wrong. Like they're just by default. You're like, I'm going to do it better. And then you start to realize actually there's a reason why you have regular one-on-ones. Even though they're super annoying, people require mentorship to feel like they have room for growth. And there's other, I think that you learn that there's like reasons why certain things are done and you become a little bit more selective about the areas where you become a complete contrarian and do things differently. And I think that was something I could only learn the hard way in some ways.

Me too. Thank you. And it's great to see you and thanks for hosting this.