Friends,

We’re back! 

After spending a couple of weeks out of commission getting married and going on honeymoon, I’m psyched to get back into the swing of things. (Thank you for the many kind wishes, as well!) We have some exciting updates planned for The Generalist in the second half of this year and can’t wait to share them in the coming weeks and months. 

Without further ado, I’m thrilled to jump into today’s piece: an interview with Scott Belsky, Chief Product Officer of Adobe, founder of Behance, prolific angel investor, author, and one of tech’s deep thinkers.

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Modern Meditations: Scott Belsky

Actionable insights

If you only have a few minutes to spare, here’s what investors, operators, and founders should know about Scott Belsky’s meditations.

• Innovating within a big company. When Adobe acquired his startup Behance for $150 million in 2012, Belsky struggled to see his long-term future at a big corporation. Eleven years later and the former entrepreneur is Adobe’s Chief Product Officer. Working at the $227 billion software behemoth, Scott discovered he was a mission-driven entrepreneur rather than a serial one. Rather than restricting his entrepreneurial urges, Adobe has given Scott a platform to tackle them from a new vantage.

• The virtues of slow shipping. The prevailing dogma is that startups should ship and iterate as quickly as possible. Scott believes that’s often counterproductive. You need to “surprise and delight” your customers to create a product that grows organically. You can’t do that by simply meeting a user’s expectations; you must surpass them. Doing so takes time and polishing. 

• Investing in a great mentor. Scott Belsky counts entrepreneur and author Seth Godin as a friend and mentor. Once a year, Scott visits Godin in upstate New York to discuss his plans, relying on his host to pick them apart. This productive inquisition helps Scott allocate his time and effort more thoughtfully. Investing in this relationship has proven fruitful, both personally and professionally. 

• The coming age of hyper-personalization. We live in a “generalized” world, per Scott. When we visit an online store or look at a menu, we see the full range of options. The Adobe executive expects future generations to have more personalized product experiences that filter out unsuitable or unwanted options. They will also have far less choice, as a result.

• The overstated AI threat. Reports of AI’s dangers are exaggerated, according to Scott. Though he expects new models will increase the sophistication of scams and other frauds, he doesn’t foresee humans being made subservient to an almighty algorithm. Instead, we should worry about the fragility of modern society, under threat from war, dictatorships, and corruption.

Not all practitioners can describe their craft. Even the most skilled entrepreneurs, engineers, or product managers can struggle to articulate how, exactly, they operate at such a high level. Why rely on one framework, language, or process over another? Impressive execution rests on implicit knowledge that may be difficult to express.  

Scott Belsky is one of tech’s great exceptions. The founder of Behance and Chief Product Officer of Adobe is not only a successful entrepreneur and executive, he is a gifted product philosopher; a translator of innovation. Scott’s two best-selling books, The Messy Middle and Making Ideas Happen, represent thoughtful studies of the entrepreneurial process in all its complexity. Implications, by Scott Belsky, the Adobe CPO’s newsletter, is a living feed of Scott’s thinking.

I have admired Scott’s work and public thinking for some time, largely because of his twin gifts for execution and articulation. Add in his investing track record – he backed Pinterest, Uber, Ramp, Flexport, and many other unicorns – and Scott has the bonafides of a “super-generalist,” someone with multifarious gifts. More compelling than Scott’s accolades and achievements, though, is the sense of care and craft in his output. In an industry that often tends towards impulse and hyperbole, Scott gives the impression of a considered and generous thinker. Our conversation was one of my favorites of the year for precisely these reasons.

Today’s piece shares that discussion with Scott advancing his views on mentorship, cultivating self-awareness, building products that grow organically, raising emotionally resilient children, and the splendor of space.

What would you be doing if you didn’t work in tech?

Two things come to mind. The first is being a fine artist. I’ve always been interested in pieces that use unorthodox materials. For example, I can imagine making a series that uses pipe cleaners or an especially viscous kind of paint that you could create dimension with.

More than using particular materials, I’d be interested in using art to help contextualize the magnitude of things. I’ve always had this fascination with numbers. Art feels like a particularly good way to understand the meaning of infinity or the juxtaposition between something small and something extraordinarily large. Creating something that captures magnitude would be fascinating to me. 

I could also see myself owning and operating a small boutique. I’ve always wanted to make or carefully curate a series of products. There’s a small shop in Amagansett, New York, called E-E Home that does that really well. So many objects have been carefully selected from Japan or other parts of the world, and you feel a certain aesthetic and quality. I love the idea of curating products from different places that customers might never discover on their own. 

And then, of course, I like thinking about what type of products I’d want to make to sell alongside them. I’ve found stationary fascinating, for example. In the early days of Behance, we launched a line of paper products called “Action Method” as a bootstrapping mechanism. They were dot-grid notebooks designed to help capture actionable items from a brainstorm. Dot grids are widely used today, but I wasn’t aware of others in 2006. We got out of that business when Behance sold to Adobe, but the brand lives on today. Building something so tangible, working with production partners, thinking through the packaging – I just love that stuff. 

Which current or historical figure has most impacted your thinking?

Seth Godin has always been a mentor of mine. I visit him once a year in Hastings-on-Hudson, the town in upstate New York where he lives. Seth picks me up at the station, and we’ll grab a cup of coffee and walk. And then, Seth tears my ideas apart. Everything I think I’m going to do next, he challenges me on. 

Seth has a unique ability to help me rethink things because of our differences. If I were going to be self-critical for a moment, I’d say that I have a hard time saying no to opportunities. I’ve always had so many interests and tended to explore too many at once. I was never a great student in one area because I studied so many different things. When I graduated from college, Cornell didn’t know how to classify me – I’d taken classes from all of these different majors. Ultimately, my degree was in “General Studies,” which means nothing. 

Seth is very different. He’s both extraordinarily creative and very disciplined. He’s great at saying no to things. He knows what he will and won’t do anymore and sticks to that. Seth’s discipline and pragmatism help me think through the opportunities ahead and whether they’d fulfill me. He prompts questions about life choices that I don’t naturally ask. Our relationship has come to mean a lot to me professionally and personally. 

Tim Urban is another person that has made me think a lot. I always admired his writing, illustrations, and frameworks. I’m enjoying his latest book on humanity’s problems quite a bit. 

What is the most significant thing you’ve changed your mind about over the past decade?

That’s easy: the prospects of innovating within a big company. If you’d told me eleven years ago, when Adobe acquired Behance, whether I could be happy at a large organization, I wouldn’t have believed you. I bootstrapped Behance for five years, then ran it as a venture-backed company for two. I was an entrepreneur, and most of my friends were, too. I never thought I’d end up staying at a big organization. 

When I joined Adobe, I learned something about myself. I was a mission-driven entrepreneur, not a serial entrepreneur. There’s a big difference. The mission-driven entrepreneur starts a company because they feel they have to, not just because they want to run a business. I discovered I could continue that mission at Adobe, returning to some of the problems we worked on at Behance and serving the same creative communities. 

What craft are you spending a lifetime honing?

Writing and product. They’re related to me since I write about products. Writing is how I digest, understand, and remember what’s important. That process has yielded two books, Making Ideas Happen and The Messy Middle, and my monthly newsletter, Implications, by Scott Belsky. The newsletter holds me accountable for writing about what interests me and networking around it. Whenever I publish a new issue, people reach out, making connections and sharing their thoughts – it’s so valuable to put ideas into the ether and see what resonates and doesn’t. 

Crafting product experiences is the second thing I’ve devoted my life to improving. Understanding onboarding, user psychology, why a user engages with a product that could be a waste of their time – that’s so fascinating to me. I think product experiences reflect what we want and long for in our lives, more than we might admit. Even though we might talk about digital products as “advanced” or “sophisticated,” a lot of the time, I think we’re yearning for things we once had: a life that was simpler and clearer, the ability to walk into a store and be greeted by someone that knows your name. 

I’m interested in how we can make digital product experiences simpler, more relatable, and more personalized. That’s an endless pursuit.

What is your most contrarian, high-conviction opinion?

The value of building slowly. The popular belief system still centers around the “lean startup,” A/B testing, and shipping quickly. There are two reasons why I don’t think that’s necessarily the ideal approach. 

Firstly, teams tend to underestimate the gravity created by shipping their first product. Once you share something with customers, you naturally start to think in iterations of that product; it becomes infinitely harder to change direction and climb a different mountain entirely. Shipping too quickly can become a prison – a team can get trapped, iterating on something far longer than they should. 

Secondly, moving too quickly can limit the benefits of product-led growth. As advertising has become more expensive, having a product that customers talk about is critical for acquisition. One of the key principles of product-led growth is to “surprise and delight” – to build something that customers will talk about with their friends. It’s easy to forget that people don’t tell their friends about a product that does exactly what they expected; they talk about products that surpassed their expectations. 

If you need people to be talking about your product, you shouldn’t just ship a minimally viable product. On the contrary, you should polish and push beyond the core requirements to create something customers don’t expect and that can grow on its own.

Keep reading

Puzzler

Respond to this email for a hint. 

I am easy to lift, but hard to throw. What am I?

Greg K was the winningest wordsmith. Shashwat N, Meir V, Joshua K, Tidal W, Sajith P, Timothy B, Alex F, Scott M, Hari A, Christopher D, Michael O, Upendra S, Dan E, Alex L, Wes S, Grace E, Adeola O, Saagar B, Morihiko Y also successfully reversed our last puzzler:

Which word is the odd one out: Stun, Ton, Evil, Letter, Mood, Bad, Strap, Snap, and Straw?

The answer? Letter. All other words spell another word when reversed – for example, “mood” and “doom.” 

Until next time,

Mario

PS - I read some very good books while away that I thought folks might enjoy. Very Important People by Ashley Mears is a sociological study of the global nightlife industry, The Sea by John Banville is an elegiac meditation on memory and childhood, and Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M Coetzee is a tortured fable of power and empire. I recommend all of them.