Scott Belsky, Co-Founder/Head of Behance; VP Products, Mobile & Community at Adobe; Author & Investor
The fourth episode of the Collective Wisdom podcast is focused on the care and tending of creative communities. You’ll learn why apathy, not anger, will kill your team; why product teams should strive to kill, rather than add features; and why it’s important to celebrate the “middle” of a startup’s journey.
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Don’t have time for a podcast? You’re in luck! We have also prepared a transcript with links, highlights, and other audiovisual elements for easy skimming & sharing.
Micah Rosenbloom: Scott, you’re a well-known entrepreneur, executive, super successful angel investor. I really appreciate you as a philosopher. I follow you on Twitter and it seems like everyday you have a nugget of wisdom that forces me to think. You’re bit of a modern-day Confucius. My question is: where do you come up with this stuff? Is Twitter a place for you to brainstorm and get your ideas out? Did someone write this stuff for you? How do you come up with such good stuff?
Scott Belsky: First of all, I think I aspire to be all the things you just rattled out there. I think I’m a student. I think that when I’m in meetings throughout the day, when I am just trying to solve a problem, some little insight will pop into my head. These days, Twitter is my way of not only capturing it so I can remember it but also sharing it and seeing how other people build upon it. Oftentimes, I’ll also see some interesting points or disagreements that I’ll retweet to share that on top of it.
I’ve always enjoyed the academic side of what we do: building things, investing in people and ideas, learning from mistakes, and understanding why something is not working. There’s one part of me wants to be reactive and fix it. That’s the kind of doer side of me. Then there’s also the thinker side of me that likes to say, “Gosh, like, why did this happen?” It’s fun. It’s fun to share. I also think I benefit from a lot of other people who do the same thing, share some of their thoughts on the open web.
MR: Do you get some give and take from the community that makes you think?
SB: Totally. The theme for me is what I’d like to call the journey in between. I feel like we love celebrating the starts. The starts of things are these glamorous moments where people just start something in the garage. A classic story, right? We also love to celebrate the finishes, the acquisitions. Whether it’s a bad finish or a good finish, the media loves it. Then momentary finishes like raising money is sometimes seen as a new start or a new finish, depending on how you look at it. Everything in between gets no coverage. It’s not sexy. It’s not clear. It’s actually very messy. That’s the stuff that I love.
MR: I think, to that point, I started my first business in ‘98, second business in 2002. There really was no Twitter and startups can be very lonely especially in between. In the very beginning, there’s a lot of excitement. If you exit, there’s a lot. In the middle, it’s lonely and I think Twitter, in some ways, is a place for other folks to, it’s sort of the town square. It’s an opportunity to vent and see that other people are going through similar stuff, get suggestions and ideas.
SB: I mean that’s social media at its best and, obviously, there’s many things as it is at its worst. At its best, I think it makes us feel less alone. I think it makes us feel some partnership through various parts of our lives. You saw Sheryl Sandberg’s loss of her husband and the way that she used social media to connect with others and share her thoughts real time and grieve with others. When you’re an entrepreneur starting something or when you’re an author starting something, social media now is our source of accountability, partnership, inspiration, grounding. It’s certainly humbling to be able to see what other people are accomplishing and being like, “Wow, I aspire to be as productive as that person.” Social media serves all these purposes, I think. I think that being in this community, it’s something you should contribute back to it if you benefit from it.
MR: In that spirit, I twitted out to my followers. I don’t have nearly as many followers as you. By the way, Scott is @scottbelsky on Twitter. I said that I was interviewing you on the podcast today. Micah Baldwin, who gets credit for having the same first name as I do, emailed a question or tweeted a question, rather, that says, “If you could be any Photoshop brush, Scott, which one would it be and why? You’re welcome to swap out brush for gradient.”
SB: Thank you for that allowance, Micah. What I would say is that I would definitely be a natural brush. There are these new essentially homemade brushes that people are making now with this new app called Adobe Brush we came out with, where you basically capture anything around you and immediately turn it into a Photoshop Brush. I would definitely be an environmental type of brush. Actually, my first major at Cornell was in environmental sciences in science and rote systems. I always feel like a lot of things come back to nature. I love going around and capturing little things that I can see as brushes and if I were a brush myself hopefully I’d be the organic kind.
MR: By the way, how do you toggle between Adobe and the products you’re building there, your angel portfolio, the stuff you do at 99U? How do you even separate that in your brain? Given just how many different things you’ve got going on and different product and skills that you have to tap into?
SB: It’s an interesting thing I always am thinking about. I feel like part of my training for this was starting Behance well at Goldman Sachs was building Behance well at business school. I was always managing in some ways, two lives at once I felt, and trying to find the overlaps in between where those would be like sweet spots of productivity for me. For example, today, working with the team like Periscope that is building a modern technology, a social experience using Adobe tools, and then also working at Adobe running mobile products. Obviously, I just close to both sides what I’m doing. I try to avoid anything competitive but it’s really helpful. It helps on both sides.
Of course, then, Adobe was one of the first adopters of Periscope to spread a lot of how their tools work and became an example for Periscope of how companies can use it. I like to find those sweet spots and invest my time and energy in those. I think that it just forces me to be more productive and economize and also really to say “no” to the things I don’t think I’ll add value in.
MR: Someone was describing to me earlier today that you use, I think it’s call the Kanban System, which is a series of less, basically, of projects and you start to move them along. I think it’s from the Toyota Production System that we learn about in business school. I’m curious if you use tools or lists or software to just track everything going on. I use Evernote and I have certain notebooks for different projects but they’re not all that. It’s probably not the best system in the world. I’m curious if you have any tips or tricks on tools to keep everything organized and moving along.
SB: At the top level, I have an extreme bias towards action. Everything that I think of I write down as something that starts with a verb. Whether it’s to expand on it later or to follow up with someone or whatever, I use tools like Wunderlist. I really like Wunderlist for task management. I use Evernote for longform writing and tracking things and stuff like that. Then I also use Slack for all the various teams that I work with so I can just hop in for even a few minutes, just be completely immersed by how a team is working and who’s talking about what and what’s going on. I find that these tools enable a new level of productivity and cross-pollination that was never possible before.
MR: Are you at inbox zero guy? Do you clear out your inbox every night?
SB: I don’t clear it out everyday but I do make sure that I reduce it down. I’m not one of those inbox infinity guys.
MR: I can attest that you’re pretty responsive most of the time.
SB: I try to be. It’s always going to get there. I’m always going to get there.
MR: I want to talk about some of this wisdom that you share on Twitter. We put together a few of the tweets that resonated with a few of us here at Founder Collective. I’ll read to you a couple of them and then maybe we can dissect the meaning.
SB: Uh oh, I wasn’t prepared for this.
MR: One of them said diplomacy is fine so long as it doesn’t compromise authenticity. Being truthful requires some necessary ruckus every now and again.
Thinking: Diplomacy is fine, so long as it doesn’t compromise authenticity. Being truthful requires some necessary ruckus every now + then.
— Scott Belsky (@scottbelsky) October 25, 2014
SB: That sounds like it was inspired being a big company, doesn’t it? MR: Perhaps. Reminds me of some of my time at 3M. You have another one that goes on the process of getting agreement is developed/improved by managing disagreement. Find the value in discord.
Thinking: The process of getting to agreement is developed/improved by managing disagreement. Find the value in discord. — Scott Belsky (@scottbelsky) December 8, 2014
You got another one where you talk about engaging with tension.
Seek disagreement, tolerate tension. Friction polishes stones…
— Scott Belsky (@scottbelsky) February 8, 2014
It feels like you got a little feistiness in your management style. It’s a little different than the way you carry yourself. You seem like a reasonably, easy guy to get along with. Are you a little more aggressive when it comes to your style for getting things done in the company?
SB: I’ve always said from the very beginning of Behance that I love hiring people who feel comfortable with fighting. I also have always said that one of the greatest leadership skills I look for in managers, and also I try to do myself, is to fight apathy ruthlessly. If there are people on the teams that aren’t willing to fight it out. Fight that because, ultimately, when you are fighting something through, you are covering all of the design space of opinion. It’s almost like this multidimensional tug of war going all which ways. As soon as someone lets go and says, “You know what? I don’t care whatever you guys think,” that is when you screw over the customer because at that point, and going forward, no one is exploring that person’s design space of opinion.
I find conflict to be a very good thing. I also have a hard time with the patience and the process required for diplomacy. I actually recognize that politics are a reality in any team probably larger than 2 but at the same time, when you feel like progress is not being made because of an individual’s process to get there, it’s very frustrating to me. One of my challenges, especially working with larger teams, is to try to learn how to be diplomatic to the point of acceptable but also to ask the difficult questions, to call out the elephants from the room when they’re there, and be the person who just fast-tracks a lot of that ambiguity and lack of productivity.
MR: Were there any sources of conflict in the early days, sort of pre-Adobe, with Behance where either you saw a particular vision that wasn’t consistent with someone else on team?
SB: All of the time. It’s funny actually because I think about this. We were 5 or 6 years bootstrapped before raising money, and then really 7 years before the acquisition. I think the first 3 to 4 years of that, there was tons of tension because of the environment we were working within. We had very little money. Everyone was stretching themselves-hours, time, financially, in every which way. We had a lot of anonymity. No one really cared what we were doing. We were at those beginning stages where every decision had implications for the next few years of our lives. There were vehement disagreements and tempers and whatever.
The thing that we always did, though, is two things: One is we all weighed shared conviction at the end of every conflict. There was never a time where we would end a conflict or disagreement and anyone of us would resent each other or be like, “We should’ve be doing this.” It was always shared conviction, which is really important especially as a team grew.
The second thing is we had this belief that sometimes the company would answer our question, like sometimes we’re really debating things out and we just weren’t sure where to land. We almost felt like Behance as a brand or entity made it clear for us within 24 hours. I think that was because we had a very clear mission to connect and empower the creative world. We also had a very clear brand. We knew what we were about and what we weren’t about. I think having some of those things helps conflict resolve itself a little bit as well.
MR: It’s interesting as you’re talking I’m thinking about what’s going on at Reddit at the moment. Building a company is one thing where you build a product and you’ve got potentially some conflict between managers or functions, but then you throw in a community that’s got its own point of view and thinks of your product beyond probably even what the founders think of their product. I’m curious if the community of Behance users also played a role in this mix of what to do. I’m sure in a positive way because they told you the features they wanted but also it was yet another voice at the table that you had to be mindful of.
SB: When you’re in the business of communities, I always like to remind entrepreneurs as well as my own team that we are not owners of community, we are stewards of community. Because at the end of the day everyone can be deactivate their account and remove their content and we’ve got nothing. You are in the stewardship business. What does that mean? That means that you have to really listen. That means you have to proactively communicate. That means you have to manage expectations.
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