YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Belsky

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130
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2018-09-13
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2018-09-13
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  1. “And I just hope that this helps people know that they're not alone as they're in the enduring phase and managing the volatility. I hope it helps them mine it a little bit more productively. I hope it helps people build better products that all of us can benefit from and optimize anything else that's working within their team. And when it comes down to that final mile, let's not screw it up. Let's ship.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “I'm excited about it. As you said, it really was that process of the 800 and something notes down to the 300, down to the 200, down to the 120, organize in these kind of three themes we talked about tonight, endurance optimization, the final mile. The messy middle really is this passionate side project I've had for the last five or so years. I'm excited to get it out there coming out its shelves October 2nd 2018 And then I'm trying to also though like continue these as conversations you know on Twitter I might just ask Scott Belsky and frankly a lot of the stuff we talk tonight are things that I've also shared over the years and tested and gotten feedback on and incorporated into ultimately you know what this book has become so I think that we're all in our own messy middles and I think”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “It is. And it's also, if you look at it from a business perspective, there's every reason to make a sequel and to squeeze the value out of anything that works. When you look at it from an art perspective, that's the opposite. And I think that that's actually, I think, the greatest founders out there recognize that while the science of business is scaling everything that you can and automating and whatever, the art of business is the things that don't scale. And they see their career in that way as well. It's like, I'm not just going to be the enterprise SaaS guy. I'm not going to be the this. I'm not going to be the that. I'm going to actually kind of find another edge, find something different, keep it fresh. And yeah, that's admirable because it's not the path of least resistance.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “But that realization, you are not your work, being able to disconnect and disassociate when it's appropriate is another challenge in that final mile.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “And then there's the other kind of more existential thing that happens at the end of a project, which is suddenly, especially if it's successful, it becomes part of your identity. You become kind of known for something and you start to have to decide, is that going to be me or am I going to start to reject that and put it behind me? And you'll talk about, you'll hear some creatives and especially artists say that they just like to kill their old work. They like to do something completely different. Otherwise, they feel like they're attached. I know authors who won't speak about their past books because it's just like they got to move past that in a frame of mind.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “So then the question is so how do you make sure you have a successful final mile? And I think part of it is starting to be alert of a lot of these tendencies that creep up right before shipping, right before being done, right before being acquired or whatever it is. And part of it is recognizing that the tactics that you employed all along suddenly may either be wrong or even detrimental. It's really, this is a new game and you have to kind of take a step back. You have to get new different types of mentors and help. I mean, literally, I mean, when I was going through my acquisition, there's a guy named Chris Dixon, who's a great investor who is an angel in my company. And he was the guy that was up with me at, what is it now, one in the morning? I mean, I remember those nights where he was helping me go through the cat table of our team and making sure that I was thinking about it properly. And I realized in that process, I had no idea what I was doing.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Deserve this. He's like, what? Like, what are you talking about? Like, this is okay. You deserve this. This is going to work out. And in that conversation, he kind of started tearing. It was one of those moments where I think he was at first like, what the hell is he talking about? And then kind of there was this connection we had where he sort of looked at his behavior as maybe something else. And I think that happens a lot. I think that there is this, things do break down in the final mile. A lot of stuff changes psychologically. Artists, right? How much churn happens right before they ship? Multiple books, like how many times right before it's done, you're like, wait, wait, wait. Maybe I should have done something else. Maybe I should cut this piece, whatever. And that's like Bizaway, classic behavior in every product release. There's always this period that we call kind of last minute churn where it's like, wait a second, not ready to ship yet. This is classic. And you have to be prepared for it.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “And I remember going home to my wife one evening who's a psychologist and talking to her about it. And she was like, oh, he's, you know, this is self-sabotage. I'm like, what? Like he's been working his whole life for something like this. We're about to have this big payday and this big celebration. Like, why would he? And she kind of helped me understand when you don't feel like you deserve something or when there's other sorts of parts of you that are not comfortable with like what's happening, you can subconsciously sabotage yourself. So I came in to work the next day and her”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Expose so much of who the people are and what you're doing and everything. And as the conversation unraveled, he realized he had no idea what he was doing. And for him, it was like business as usual. And that's one example where that final mile is an entirely different sport. But I think that the other thing that happens that's really interesting is that people psychologically start to wonder whether they deserve what the success they're about to get. I remember a story in my own experience with Behance. There was a senior member of my team who right towards the acquisition was starting to behave somewhat erratically, like was doing things at team meetings that were kind of offensive to people and that were kind of on the line of and just starting to act out a lot. And I remember confronting him a couple times and he would kind of blow it off like, oh, yeah, whatever. But it kept happening. And I was just fascinated by this.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Talk about that first, although I think that some of this is relevant across other sorts of finishes as well. But a few things happen. I mean, first of all, with the confidence that you've built throughout the journey of getting there, you start to make decisions that you actually don't have the expertise nor experience to make. I remember getting a call from a founder maybe like four or five months ago who was telling me that he was really excited that one of these big kind of Google Facebook-like companies was doing their diligence on his company. I was like, oh wow, that's really exciting. Where are you in the process? He was like, well, you know, they've come in and met the team. Like, oh, they've met the team. So you must have an offer on the table. What's the value? How is this going to work? And he said, oh, no, no, we haven't gotten there yet. I was like, wait, so you had them come in and meet your team and you don't even know, is this a talent acquisition? Is this something you would do or not do? How could you suddenly?”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Well, you've endured a very volatile journey. You've optimized everything that works along the way with your product, with your team, with yourself. And then it's like, wow, I see an insight. It could be, listen, things end in great ways or bad ways, whether it's a shutdown of something, whether it's a launch of something, whether it's an acquisition, whether it's going public. And there's also, of course, like many finishes along the way, right, in any major journey. I really, I think that this notion of the final mile of something is very interesting to me because it's an entirely different sport. The stuff that you were so good at to get to this point of hopefully success is a completely different playbook than what you need to do to manage the decisions at the end.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “That's the point. Put that together as a starting place because it helps get alignment very quickly, which is a magical part of product development is when you have alignment versus not two different ballgames.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Narrative and like that brand development piece even before the product, and in some cases the team itself. And again, back to that question you originally asked of which product do I build? Where do I start, which I get from founders all the time? I actually like to say, and I even do this internally in my day job at Adobe now with new products that are being developed around the company, put together the splash page. And it's like, well, I don't even know what it's going to be called yet. I don't know what the brand will be. I don't know what the slogan will be. And it's like, yes, exactly.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “He was thinking global already. It's also, though, I've had conversations with him about brands for other companies that he's been working on. And he'll say he's really all about buying great domain names, as you know, and coming up with a great pithy, hopefully four-letter brands. And I asked him about that in the process of putting the book for the messy middle together. And he was saying that it's also about what kind of email address the team that you put together will actually want to have. I was like, email address. Like, why does that matter? He's like, would you rather have Scott at spot.com or would you rather have Scott at discover spot.com? And so he was also thinking about from the product brand fit perspective, is this something that people can grow into that people would want to work at and say like, you know, this is my email address. So I just, I've always been fascinated by the fact that he develops this.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “What about making sure that you have something that's piercing? I remember when Garrett was thinking about Uber originally when he was still just CEO of his company Stumble Upon. And he was kind of drafting out the concept of Uber. And I remember him obsessing over the icon, like the logo before there was even a team or a CEO on this project. I also remember him agonizing over this notion of, hey, is it an aspirational brand like everyone's private driver? Or is it an accessible brand like Taxis on Demand? Right. And I mean, and if you think about that, it's like, wow, these are questions that he was asking before this was this technology was even coming together or even validated, right?”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Including some big ones like Uber. And one of the things that I've learned from him over the years, and I've seen in some other serial success soul founders, is this notion of building the narrative before the product. So we were just talking about which product do you choose? Sometimes it actually helps to say, hey, what should the splash page be and what should the brand be before we even get the team together? I mean, get alone, start building something or coding something in a digital way.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “So well But at the same time, you also don't need to get everything right to launch or to open your doors. What you do need to get right is the thing you're going to be known for. The last thing I would say on the product side is. Is actually, let's talk about another mutual friend of ours, Garrett camp, who is a co founder of a number of different companies and actually now.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “And whatever iterations you say you're going to be able to do to actually get to that elusive product market fit where suddenly customers are getting the value out of it enough to tell their friends. It actually may be harder to get there when you're not willing to do very bold strokes. And so I think in an ideal world, you do some testing before you start building of just the idea showing the mockups, the stuff we discussed earlier. But then you build something that you truly believe has a shot at adding that or delivering that value to customers and take the extra time to perfect the few differentiating factors that are like most special about it. Yes, you can cut corners around all the other edges, but you don't want to ship the minimum viable version of the thing that you're going to be known for because that's not going to test whether or not the conviction you have is the right one.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Listen, there's a lot of talk about the notion of a lean startup and getting an MVP or a minimum viable product out there and testing. I mean, that's another answer to your question, right? Not only do you make up mock-ups and show people and test how the marketing copy and the value proposition of what you're building, yes, put out a product and see how it performs. But the problem with that teams, I think, run into is that whatever you ship ends up having more sticking power for your own team's approach and becomes a bit of a local maxima of what you're able to do after. So this notion of, hey, we'll ship a minimum viable version and then we'll just iterate to a great place.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Get mockups, sorry. And you test and you build some of the marketing copy, like welcoming, and you just give a design and experience, a fake experience, and you test that and you gauge. What sort of approach to this problem resonates with people? I think that a common mistake at this phase is that teams decide to focus on the thing they're most passionate about solving or the solution that they're most passionate about rather than seeking more and more empathy with the person suffering the problem. And so you'll be like, oh my God, this is the best solution. Like I'm so passionate about let's do it, which is why I always actually say that empathy is more important than passion when it comes to like figuring out what product you should actually do. Also on the question of how you determine which product to build when your team comes together and you're trying to solve a problem.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Well, I think that there's two answers to that. One is you print out comps for both, like designs and you put them in front of customers and you're sort of getting a sense of meaning.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Our friend Dave Morin, who's another great product thinker, always likes to say the devil's in the default, whatever customers see first, they're just going to stick with forever. That kind of decision can't be made like right before launch. In fact, that's the most important decision you're going to make.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Yeah, it's consistently committing period of time to understanding who the newest customers are. I mean, think about it. The newest ones are the first ones you ever have when you launch a product are super forgiving. They're early adopters. The next round, you know, they're actually a little bit more about this better be professional, this better be reliable, but they're willing to go and go along with some bugs and whatever. Eventually you get to those kind of pragmatists, right, later in the curve. And you Now the other problem that a lot of teams have is that when they're launching their product, let's just talk about the newest of the new users when you first launch a product. Oftentimes, ironically, the last mile of their experience building the product is spent on the first mile of the customer's experience of the product. So it's kind of like you're done with building a product after two years or whatever. And it's like, oh shit, we got to make a tour. And oh, what should the default be when customers come in?”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “That is a cohort of new users. Then Word gets out, people start to use Twitter who kind of come for the news as an alternative to CNN and they're hit over the head with this idea of building your timeline following accounts. And they're like, I don't have the tolerance for that. And in this instance, think about it. Like they could have nailed their first mile and had tremendous growth. And then suddenly the newest cohort of new users isn't even willing to go through it. And they have to completely kind of reinvent the first mile experience of their product, which is why teams have to continually kind of reinvent that for a smile. It's not like you get it right and then it's like move on, which actually most teams do.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “What are you doing? All of the above. I think great teams, first of all, don't outsource this completely. They recognize that only being shoulder to shoulder with their newest customers, and I'll get to the newest customer why I keep saying that in a second, is crucial because you're kind of feeling the anxiety and the pain where a report or some graph will never really tell you. And yeah, I mean, I think that there's a lot of mechanisms to measure the effectiveness of first mile. The thing is, though, it's actually not as simple as just solving it. Like once you have a new product in the world and call it Twitter, right? You launch Twitter and you appeal to a group of users that are actually willing to build their timeline, follow all the”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “There's a few, there's first of all the classic metrics of our people getting their way through what's catching them up. I remember in the Behanst days we had a terminology for the creative field that you're in called realms. And we realized people didn't understand what that meant. And so that was an insight in the first mile experience that drastically improved conversion, you know, little things like that. But I think that it really comes down to empathy with the newest user.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Actually, give you a template. They just actually do it for you. They make you seem so much better than you are with stock content or whatever it is. So those are just like a few examples around the edges, but it's to me it's a product principle that makes the case that we have to spend a ton of time on crafting that first mile experience for our customers.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Exactly. The sign up process or walking into the store knowing when you go into any product experience, why are you there? Where do you go next? What's possible? Now, the pushback I get from a lot of great companies and teams and whatever is hey, I have more faith in people. They're going to figure out why this product is great. I can appeal to them with this long-term value of what they have to contribute. I mean, you look at a product like Pinterest again, which was really ultimately a network of discovery, but their appeal in the early stages of their business was just make a quick collection that's visual as opposed to delicious, which was just links. So they appeal to that immediate need of I want a collection for myself before recognizing the value of other people's content. There's so many examples of teams, you know, another product thing I think a lot about is back to that kind of onboarding first time user experience is, you know, should you make a video of how to use your product? Should you walk people through and tell them, make them read something, or should you just do it for them? And a lot of products that really do succeed quickly.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “They're vain in the sense that admitted or, you know, let's all admit we all have ego, we all want to feel good about ourselves and something that makes us look better to ourselves and to others feeds that. And I don't think any of us are immune from feeling that to some degree. And selfish in the sense that, hey, I have so little capacity and I want to achieve a lot very quickly. An example on the selfish side is products like Stripe or Twilio or others that kind of appeal to developers with, hey, two lines of code as a way of them adopting that technology because it was just like, hey, it's selfish, like, just I'm going to get this done quickly. I don't even care if it's as good as the homegrown solution. And vanity comes across in every consumer product you see with those ego analytics, those hearts, those things that tell you that, oh, wow, it's working. I want to do this more.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “You know, I think that product and when I use product, I mean any kind of customer experience you're crafting, whether it's a service, an in-store experience if you're a retail store owner or a digital product, right? And I think that there's some big counterintuitive and strange ironies in how we craft products and experiences for people. First of all, we have way too much faith in people unearthing the value of what we're building. And what I always like to remind myself and teams that I work with is that in the first 30 seconds of any experience of a new product service, experience, whatever, every customer is lazy, vain, and selfish. They're lazy in the sense that they don't want to read anything. They don't want to watch videos. They don't want to try to figure out how something works.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “It may be good. I mean, obviously, from most great product people are perpetually dissatisfied with their product. But it is, I mean, first of all, yeah, it's not good for your own psyche. But for people around you, you know, they can start to see that as also, you know, a form of arrogance or in some ways you're getting a gratification that most people will never be able to get. And then they're seeing you not acknowledge it. It's interesting. Again, like back to that muir exercise, unexpected things you might see.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “But I think that it was somewhat direction? First of all, it made people realize that if I tell someone this because I'm judging them and they don't hear it from others, I'm going to look like an idiot. So it had a preventative measure in that sense. It also helped the recipients discount anything that they heard once. Maybe it's psychologically still hard to do it.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “It's a good question, and I think that it reminds me of one part of it that I omitted, which was that we were also instructed to really only at the end of the day think about the ones we heard more than once.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “Get someone else's take on a situation from a different set of, again, those things that are the context of our decisions, the background, the struggles, the issues with your parents, all the other stuff, like assuming everyone has a different thing. If you ask that question, other people and you see a delta between your reaction or your thought and theirs, then you actually at least know there's something to explore there. It's almost like a canary in the fact that, okay, hey, there's some projection going on here. There's some blind spot that I am not fully aware of that is interesting.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “Yeah, so it was, you paired up with a few different people. I think you had 10 minutes, and you were doing it for each other. And the challenge was to not, it wasn't out of judgment. It was more like you were supposed to see what you were just kind of share what you were seeing without really imposing so much judgment around it, which is hard because something sound judgy. But it was, I think it was a heartfelt exercise. And what it did is it what I do remember taking out of it was, gosh, people see things that I don't, I didn't realize I either showed or knew or didn't even know about myself. And so, you know, from that, I started to, in my professional experiences and in my personal experiences, I would often ask the question of people I'm with, like if, you know, if you or me, what would you do? I would try to kind of.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “And super thin, but yes. But one of the intense, most intense exercises that we did towards the end that I will never forget is this thing called the mirror exercise, where you paired up with somebody and they would tell you what they saw. Of course, from their experience, having lived with you 24-7 in a farm in Vermont. And it wasn't a physical thing. It was like, what I see you afraid or I see you're supposed to use verbs. I see you sometimes wondering if you are in the right place or if you have the right to speak or there were just all these different I remember it hit me like a ton of bricks I actually wish I remembered exactly what the feedback was that I got what I would think it was that I had a lot of insecurity”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “It was more about community than the farm, frankly, learning how to coexist within a small group and govern yourselves and that sort of thing, kind of like Lord of the Flies High School.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “We react, obviously, for all different sorts of reasons to things. We react based on the confidence we have from the financial security we may or may not have. We react based on all sorts of other factors when it comes to just an altercation at work or a decision that we make or whatever else. And knowing that, then of course everyone else interprets us as sometimes irrational to their context of where they're reacting from and what their background is and whatever else. And this is about surfacing what some of those, what are the things that we're doing that we don't even realize that other people see and scratch their heads kind of thinking about. I remember this experience I had in high school where I live on a farm in Vermont for six months. It was one of those programs you apply to and it was 45 kids on a farm self-sustaining and it was”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Yeah, I mean, yes, you have to optimize how your team works and there's, you know, process improvements and blah, blah, blah. There's also, though, the harder challenge in a bold venture journey of optimizing the way you work and think and react and everything else, which we've talked about a little bit, I think. And one of the little insights that I thought quite a bit about was the fact that your true blind spot is how you appear to others. And I think that part of that is understanding that”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “Yes. But sometimes just goes in a completely new direction, and you're like, you know what? Everyone who works with this person is going to want to keep working with them, and so will I.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “Dramatic improvement, difference, and every conversation being like, whoa, new level, new plane, new plane, new plane. And then now having gone through that investment from the whole period of seed through product market fit through acquisition by Twitter, I think one of my beliefs is that it was that chemistry with them that actually kept me engaged and also kept their team engaged with them. Like it was just one of those traits, again, that I actually try to look for. So I actually try to meet candidates for senior roles twice. And I try to do a delta comparison between the first conversation and the second. And oftentimes it's the same. People are like, why am I here again?”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “But what really drew me to them was every kind I had a conversation with Kabon and his co founder Joe, it was always like a step function more interesting than the one before it. And I remember juxtaposing that with most conversations I have that are sort of replays.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “It's so hot. We'll have to take a break in And this mic, I can barely handle anymore. But, anyways, but so when I met with that team and they were doing some things kind of different, they were saying, hey, even though every real-time video thing is more about selfies and showing what you're doing to others, like we believe it's actually about seeing the world through someone else's eyes. They had a lot of things like that.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “Sure, because otherwise you're always making exceptions, you're always deviating. But if you have courage, you will take on and be consistent. And so I was like, well, then how do you hire for that? And he was like, hey, I look for people who went through shit like I did. And it was interesting that that lens into why adversity actually is important when it comes to building a great culture and actually a product and brand and everything that's consistent. The other one brings me back to the story of working with the Periscope team. So this is a team that was building a live streaming application back in the day when actually there were Snapchat and other products that were more about facials and whatever, but yeah, not facials.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “That I was kind of struck by that kind of made it to the cut at the end of these insights. One of them is hiring people who've endured some form of adversity and another one is hiring people with whom every conversation you have with them is a step function more interesting than the one before it. On the adversity front, super quickly, Tristan Walker, who's an entrepreneur, started Walker brands and has built a real business. He talks about how he grew up, he had a tough upbringing and he feels like one of the things that he really carried from his upbringing was courage. And he feels like he wanted to make that a true value of their company. And I asked him, like, why is that sounds nice, but why does that really mean? And he said, only with courage can you practice the same values consistently? Yes”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Wrapped up. What's the Carl Young quote, that understanding the darkness in others, or understanding the darkness in you and others is transferable, right? Like all these insights we get. And I think the other piece here is just that don't measure initiative based on stuff within the field you're hiring the person for. Like recognize that initiative is transferable. That past initiative is the best indicator of future initiative and be a little liberal with like, you know, how directly applied it is. A couple other things on the assembling the crew.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Me, initiative, it's really when you're genuinely interested in something, do you take relentless, persistent, and continuous action? Is it something that you hold your eyes up at night to do more of versus are you confining yourself to the job description? So in some of it, I always like to say, I feel like so much of the future is done by people doing work they didn't have to do. And if that's true, it's really about people who take initiative over what they believe their job is, which basically comes from having a lot of experience. You start to become a little bit more confined because, hey, you've been down this road before. You've seen it 10 times. Like, let me do my thing.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “A common story. It is counterintuitive. And even if you benefit from that, you actually still start to operate differently when you start having the resources at your disposal. The same thing, by the way, goes for hiring. Another thing that I've observed in many instances is initiative being more important than experience. And you're hiring people and you could be when you have the resources, you tend to become a resume snob and you're like, oh, well, I'm going to have the VP of this from Google or whatever. But when you don't have the resources, you actually have to hire for something else because you can't afford to hire those people. And so you start to measure people based on, well, are they the type of person that takes initiative on anything they're working on? Like, what's their history of doing that? And will they continue to do that here?”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “By the way, I mean, it's true on the individual level, on a small team level. There's also a company, a company called Skybox, that was started by four Stanford students. They decided that their goal was to build a satellite with off-the-shelf parts at a time when satellites cost hundreds of millions of dollars. And they were like off-the-shelf parts. That is the ultimate constraint. And that was the fuel of innovation. They ended up building satellites between two to five million, which is a fraction, right? of what satellites were being built for. And then like a year or two later, Google acquired them because of their innovation in the space of economically and resourcefully building something that was otherwise out of touch.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “And what that means is, first of all, if it's a human head's perspective, it's like, well, like. Inherently don't happen when you have resources at your disposal. When you don't, they have to happen. And when you have to choose between the two, it has to be force, I guess is my point. And that has become like a real actual principle for me as a manager and as a board member and as an advisor is constantly challenging teams to like find creative ways they can refactor and also making the case even if they have the resources as to why that benefits them.”

    2018-09-13 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #336: Scott Belsky — How to Conquer the Messy Middle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT