Scott Belsky is the VP Products & Community at Adobe and cofounder of Behance. Scott is also a successful investor in major tech companies such as Periscope and Uber. Scott and I talk about the fundamental nature of creativity, why he created Behance, staying focused, the value of formal education, and what he wishes more people would ask him. Finally, at the end of the second part of the interview, Scott shares specific advice for developers who are wanting to work better with visionaries. Enjoy the interview!
Scott Belsky is the VP Products & Community at Adobe and cofounder of Behance. Scott is also a successful investor in major tech companies such as Periscope and Uber.
Scott and I talk about the fundamental nature of creativity, why he created Behance, staying focused, the value of formal education, and what he wishes more people would ask him. Finally, at the end of the second part of the interview, Scott shares specific advice for developers who are wanting to work better with visionaries. Enjoy the interview!
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Hey everyone and welcome to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cottrell and today I am interviewing Scott Belsky. Scott co-founded Behance back in 2006 and he served as the CEO until Adobe bought Behance in 2012. Now he is the Vice President of Products and Community at Adobe. He's also the author of Making Ideas Happen. Scott also has invested in companies like Uber, Pinterest, and Periscope. And he's just had a lot of experience in the tech world and in the overlap of tech and creativity. So I wanted to talk to Scott because I'm really interested in how we can perceive creativity as developers and how we can work with visionaries better as developers. So let's get to the interview with Scott Belsky. Scott, thanks so much for being on the show today. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. So... People who are listening to this show most likely know about your work from Behance or starting at Behance. And then they probably at some point have heard that Adobe bought Behance. Can you tell me why did you decide to create Behance in the beginning? Well, Behance was born out of a sense of frustration, to be honest. A lot of my friends were in the creative world as designers or architects or writers. Or entrepreneurs. And I felt like they always had these great ideas. And then you check in six months later and they would still have either the same ideas or new ideas. And I felt like ideas were always replacing ideas and replacing ideas. And nothing was ever getting done. So the idea behind Behance was to help organize and empower the creative world to get stuff done. To make ideas happen was our tagline from the very beginning. And... And... And... And... And... And... And... And... ... through any medium we could, whether it was a conference or a book or an online network of millions of creatives connecting with each other. And so that's where Behance was born. So in other words, Behance is not just Behance.com. It's things like what eventually became Action Method and all of those other pieces to the puzzle. Yeah, the 99U, which is our big annual conference and think tank, the Action Method paper products. We really, if you think about it, we touch the realm of paper products, conferences, online content with the 99U website, obviously core technology like Behance, the platform, and books like my book and the 99U book series, which have sold hundreds of thousands of copies now for creatives managing a successful career. So it's been interesting to be kind of medium agnostic. Yeah, absolutely. So as a developer, actually, one of the most influential books that I've ever read on my, like the most influence on my career was actually Managing Your Day-to-Day. Absolutely fantastic. Oh, so you've got your team across the books. Great. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Managing Your Day-to-Day, which I'm actually going to do a giveaway for Managing Your Day-to-Day. If you're listening to this episode, and you share this with your friends, you're going to get a free copy of the book. And you can get a free copy of the book. And you can get a free copy of the book. And you can get a free copy of the book. And you can get a free copy of the book. And you can get a free copy of the book. And you can get a free copy of the book. And you can get a free copy of the book. And you can get a free copy of the book. One of you who shared this will get a copy of Managing Your Day-to-Day, which I will announce later, but we'll talk about that later on. But in Managing Your Day-to-Day, there's quite a lot of talk about focus and about front-loading your day with the work that you need to focus on. And I want to talk to you about that as well, because in making ideas happen, you talk about focus, about self-promotion. Can you talk to me a little bit about how reactionary workflow has a negative effect on our day-to-day work? Yeah. If you think about it, at this very moment, we're all being inundated with stuff. We're getting text messages, voicemail messages, email messages, Facebook messages, LinkedIn messages. All these different sources of things are coming into us. And we are essentially with a connected lifestyle that we live where we're always online. Our devices, you can literally spend all day every day pecking away at the collective inboxes around you, trying to stay afloat, essentially reacting to whatever comes into you rather than being proactive in what matters most to you. And as a result, you're kind of living other people's to-do lists. You're not allocating your energy towards the things that are most important. You're just kind of responding to whatever is either urgent or whatever flows to the top of your inbox or is the last thing you were pinged with. And so. I like to say that we've entered into this era of reactionary workflow where you can simply spend all day every day reacting and never be proactive with anything. And so I actually encourage people, including myself, to spend a chunk of every day focused not on all of the inboxes of my life, but rather on a list of two to three things that are most important to me over the long term. And also be willing to sit back and think and read. And write about these things that are long term in order to make progress on the things that aren't urgent, but are extremely important. Sure. So let me ask you this on a very practical and literal level. When is that time for you on a day to day basis? Is it morning, afternoon? What do you normally do? Usually for me, it's actually the evening. Because realistically, I have kids now. I have dinner events. We're just eating events almost every night. And so really the pause and the silence in my day is after 930 at night when I can sit down for a few hours and think. Yeah, that's great. I think we have a tendency in our culture to feel like to get anything done, we have to constantly be on and constantly be moving. And so. And like you're saying, you know, responding to that inundation, trying to stay afloat. But what you what you're saying sounds a lot like kind of meditative in a way, not necessarily like true meditation, but having some time to contemplate and really look at the things that you're trying to do more from a backed up perspective, like a zoomed out perspective. Yeah, I mean, we'll say it again. I mean. I was just saying that it's so what you're saying sounds like it sounds a lot like a meditative approach to to work. So sure, we have a lot of, you know, minute things that we have to respond to. Like you can't just turn off your email inbox and expect your co-workers to appreciate it. But but there's also a time for us to kind of zoom back or zoom out rather and look at our work from, you know. The long perspective. Got it. Yeah, I know. Certainly, you know, and a lot of this is discipline. You know, I think that a lot of the maybe one of the skills of the 21st century will be the ability to disconnect and to have some discipline over, you know, the way that tech drives our lives. Sure. Yeah, I actually have another episode of this show where I talk about addiction. And then I I specifically talk. About how there was a study done and that basically just counted how many times people unlock their phones. And it's kind of it's kind of scary in some ways. When I say scary, I mean, it's it's telling that we are addicted to to the notifications and to all the things that are being pushed into our lives. Listen, I mean, net net tech has a tremendous amount of value in our lives. And if it can help us achieve more with less time and less energy, you know, it's it's it's it's a gift. But, you know, like, you know, like all all opportunities are also responsibilities. And I think sometimes, you know, we've all done this, you know, where I get into some just mindless mode of going going from app to app on my on my on my phone. And it's almost like I'm searching for more stimulation, which is silly. You know, it's one thing to have a diligent desire to achieve something and go into a. Application to achieve it, like I need to buy something or respond to something or contact someone. But to just mindlessly swipe and find something, that's where the addiction certainly kicks in. Sure. And it's kind of the antithesis of your, you know, getting things done, like making ideas happen. You don't make ideas happen by just kind of swiping through applications and clearing notifications. So. So. Let me let me switch gears here a little bit. You also talk about destigmatizing self-promotion. And I've I've talked to the people who are listening to this show about the same concept as well. I'm interested on your take on this because it's it's kind of difficult for me to kind of give myself a brand as a developer. It feels kind of inauthentic. Can you speak a little bit to the the authenticity of creating a brand for yourself? Yeah. Well, I mean, a couple of things I would say, first of all, and developers know this more than anyone else, that sharing is the new networking. So a developer who builds his or her reputation is not so doing so necessarily by going to cocktail parties and trying to network and meet people. It's typically committing to GitHub or sharing, developing for open source projects and building a reputation that is where people respect you for your capabilities. Right. Yeah. Using your skills and opportunities just kind of fall in your lap. So I think that in many ways, the technology community is the head of the head of the ball on this. But I also think that self-promotion is also about curation. Back in the day before. Before blogs, even before Twitter, there were some people who had sent around these photocopied compilings of articles. And studies that were interesting to them. They would send this to like, you know, 30 or 50 other people, snail mail every couple of months. And people would get it and they'd read it and they'd find it so interesting. And they'd send it to a friend who would then say, oh, I want to get on this mailing list. And and that was kind of essentially building your following, curating stuff that's interesting to you that other people will then also find interesting and follow you. And as a result, when you share something you're working on or some resources that you need, everyone's already listening. So I think we all have to consider ourselves to be curators of what's interesting to us. And that's a very effective means of self-promotion. Yeah. Well, that that reminds me a lot. And this is actually a good segue into another topic. But that reminds me a lot of my experience in in academia. So when when a teacher in my master's program created a rubric for that class or I guess a syllabus rather for that class, they would have a lot of different reasons. They would have a lot of different reasons. They would have a lot of different reasons. They would have a lot of different reasons. They had curated over the years that kind of backed up whatever the thing is that they were teaching for that week. And so there's there's kind of this background of like there there is a curriculum that they were pushing. But we we want to push the same kind of idea of a curriculum for other people as well. Maybe not with a specific goal in mind, like a specific topic, but rather what we are trying to share about what we do. Or about what we want the world to be. Absolutely. And I think that that's in sharing that and building conversation around that and curating around that. I mean, that's it's it's how people get to know you and respect you. And that's that's how what's the purpose of promotion is essentially attracting opportunity. Right. Mm hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So speaking of education, you hold two. Degrees, one from Cornell and one from Harvard. And I talk a lot about education on the show because a lot of people are wondering whether education is worth it for them. There's you know, obviously, there's a lot of people who are saying that it's not worthwhile or it's not worth the money. And instead to just go your own way and and teach yourself through experience or teach yourself online, maybe get an online degree. I'd like to know from you, somebody who has gone through kind of the opposite end of things. That spectrum. What is the value, would you say, of education today in a formalized setting? Well, I think that the honest answer is I certainly met, you know, build friendships throughout my educational experiences, just as I probably would have through whatever work experiences I had. Although typically in an educational, you know, when you're getting a graduate degree or something, you have more time to be with people and meet more people and stuff like that. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. you know job opportunities and you'll be exposed to new new industries and it's kind of a bridge to a question mark um and i think that that's and and so if you're really sure about what you want to make in the world don't go to school um but if you you know but if you're really not sure and you're kind of uh you're trying to figure it out then um you know then i think that it's just it's just a good hedge yeah i think that's that it's really important for people to know how different this conversation would have been um before we had the opportunities that we have now because you're you're saying as somebody who holds two degrees you're saying if you know what you want to make in the world uh don't go to school which is which is totally different than this conversation would have sounded maybe 50 years ago because statistically at least then um education was almost a no-brainer you you kind of have to go to school to be able to be employable but that's just no longer the case yeah 10% agree thank you so much for listening to the first part of my interview with scott belsky make sure you check out the next episode of developer t for the second part of my interview with scott belsky and also follow scott on twitter scott belsky is his twitter handle you can find it in the show a tweet on twitter and thank him for being on developer t that's at developer t on twitter and you can email me or get in touch with me on twitter if you have any feedback the email is developer t at gmail.com thank you so much for listening to developer t if you like the show make sure you leave a review in itunes letting other developers find the show a little bit better only you can do that because other developers are going to trust your word thank you so much for listening to the show and until next time enjoy your tea you