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
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  1. “That is If you hear it, that is water, not my stomach. And you know what? We made a mistake. We took our eye off the ball. We spent a few major cycles of our business trying to make our own version of this small little snapshot thing. And then we realized it actually distracted from the core part of the product that made Behance good. And it was, again, like bad judgment out of fear. And I didn't have that self-awareness at the time to realize that I was skewing our entire product roadmap and convictions that the team had out of my being at a low point in that example. So I think that's one of those examples where it was more in retrospect. I think at the time, though, I just try to find, I try to ask myself why I react to things in certain ways. Why did that meeting make me feel unsettled? What was it? Is this something that someone said? And if I can trace it back, why does that either make me afraid or make me feel like I think”

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

  2. “Well, I think it's probably a little bit of both. I mean, on the fear, for example, there were the early days of Behance, there was another product out there called Dribble that was doing little 400 pixel snapshots of people's work. And by the way, that always looks better than the full project because you can pick which little 400 pixel by 400 snapshot you take and get a nice little beautiful drop shadow, and that will always look great. And we were just sort of bewildered by this. It's like, wow, it's taking off so fast. It's obviously a real differentiation from our product. And the fear of that made us suddenly shift our shift. I can hear the T. I'm sure people can.”

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

  3. “Hurts, and that can be a fatal flaw. And when things are not going well, and it's suddenly fear driving you, then you can start paying too much attention to competition and start looking like them.”

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

  4. “For me, it's probably two things. I think that it is the realization that I'm not my best self when things are going the best or when things are going really badly. When things are going really, really well, I'm not my best self because my ego can get in the way. And when things are going really badly, I'm not my best self because my fear is getting in the way. And so when it comes to that question around self-awareness, I think that was actually a big breakthrough, at least personally for me, was like, gosh, it's when things are going really well that you start to say, hey, you know, we don't have to pay attention to competition anymore, taking our eye off the ball. Hey, we must have actually, it's a false attribution problem. We must have done everything right, so we're going to keep doing that stuff. And then again.”

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

  5. “Especially in moments where I've had to make a difficult move, fire somebody, make a difficult call, have a difficult meeting. There is that sometimes whisper. Of, hey, yes, I could try to find other ways to make me feel good about this, or I'm just going to tell myself that this is what it takes.”

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

  6. “And that's like the positive part that helps you keep going. I think there's also, though, the other discipline belief that, first of all, you just have to sometimes just do your fucking job.”

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

  7. “I also found a lot of random screenshots of people saying nice things about the product. And then I remembered, gosh, I used to always try in a regular rhythm to send those around. We didn't have Slack at the time, but you would post them on Slack now, I guess. Those are, again, like those little jolts of reward that are keeping the team feeling it's the narrative. But it doesn't happen naturally, right? And you have to look for it, you have to merchandise it. But yeah, I was surprised by how much of that five years was just kind of this, gosh, like, you know, late nights, because you can also see the timestance of screenshots. It's like, gosh, I was lying in bed at 2 a.m. looking at typos and stuff and sitting around. But that was a big part of it.”

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

  8. “Well, and it goes back to that reward thing, I think, as well. I went back in my phone to that five years because I was actually surprised by how much I had forgotten. And I was wondering, did I forget it? Because I wanted to. Was there just nothing that is worth remembering? And so, yeah, they flick back really quickly and my phone back to those years. And what did I find? I found tons of screenshots. I found a few, you know, I remembered how many late nights I was always trying to find like the flaws of our product and send them to our team. Like this kind of never feeling done sense.”

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

  9. “Leaving your team constantly with energy even after those very difficult bouts, I remember one guy I worked with a guy named David Wadwani, who's now the CEO of App Dynamics, a company out in Silicon Valley, but I remember every time I was in a meeting with him and they could be like just the most depressing meetings, he would always kind of end with a recap that would again like spin it around towards we got this we got the right people. These are the open questions. This is the plan to solve them and everyone kind of end on and up, right? And it's another one of those tactics, right? To keep people engaged, enduring.”

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

  10. “There's a lot of tough moments in that middle. There are a lot of meetings that don't have answers at the end. There's a lot of periods again of that ambiguity where you're kind of going in circles. There's rework. You launch something, you realize that it was built on the wrong tech stack or that it was totally toward the wrong type of customer and you have to redo it again.”

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

  11. “Yeah, no, it's when I get a material chunk done. When I feel like I, I mean, as I talk about this, this sounds ridiculous, but it's not, right? Like, how don't we take more active roles in governing ourselves and merchandising and playing sales tactics with ourselves, with our teams? Just like we do with customers in the rest of the world. And yes, it works for me chocolate, good music. Sometimes that's enough to get me doing what I'm supposed to be doing.”

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

  12. “The chocolate flake bars that I get from London whenever I'm there only Only something I can have when I'm in the zone writing in this case.”

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

  13. “And their snack Oh man, you know, these really nice kind of flaky buttery things that are dipped in chocolate that they sell in those, I don't even know what you call them. Delicious.”

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

  14. “Yeah, yeah, there's a couple of great sort of melodies that I kind of love. I mean, one is this piano melody by a woman named Carly Commando that I discovered once. There are, gosh, I mean, there are just a few other things that I love that I think I can work with that I didn't want to burn out. But I also just wanted it to be like that reward when I'm back in the writing zone, I'm feeling it.”

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

  15. “To be in the zone, and when I find myself going to social media or checking email or whatever, I make myself stop it and I am not allowed to start it again until I'm back in the writing zone.”

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

  16. “Well, I mean, I guess it's short circuiting my own reward system. I find the process of writing, for example, pretty painful. I have a writing playlist that I only allow myself to listen to if I'm writing.”

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

  17. “It's merchandising. I mean, think about the amount of capital that is spent on billboards and advertising that compels us to take action and do things every day. It's obviously powerful, yet why don't we use those same mechanisms to get our team to do things, to get ourselves to do things? I think it's an important muscle. You're also trying to help your team accept the burden of uncertainty, right? And it's just so much easier when this stuff is around you”

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

  18. “Yeah, so I mean, a few things. One is we had a few different products. We were kind of pursuing, or a few different angles rather. And I would oftentimes play out, hey, if this doesn't work, maybe we can reuse the technology for this. Or if this business model doesn't work, we'll try that. And you know what? If this doesn't work, look at what we will have learned over the next three years. I mean, we are going to be so marketable. This is going to be one of the best experiential educations any of us has ever had. And we're going to be able to get salaries at X instead of Y. And that was also part of the, huh, I remember people feeling like a little more comfortable when, in fact, the reality is we were working in, again, complete ambiguity and uncertainty and a little lost.”

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

  19. “Maybe less discussed muscles of a leader of a startup is to build that narrative and keep kind of walking people through. I mean, one of the things that I would oftentimes do is play out best and worst case scenarios with different dimensions.”

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

  20. “Few different things. In some ways, I use the analogy of driving your team in a car with the windows blacked out so no one knows where they are and how far they are in the journey. And that is sort of what a startup experience is like, by the way. You don't know where those milestones actually are. You don't necessarily even know where you're going and how far along you are. The only thing that makes that more comforting or tolerable is a great narrative during the journey. Okay, we just cross a state line. Oh, you know, there's this on the right, there's this on the left. Even if it's not necessarily answering the question of, well, how far are we and where exactly are we going? There's something about being talked through it. And I think that's one of the jobs of someone at the helm is to build that narrative. And part of that is a creative endeavor because you don't necessarily know what to say, but you have to say something. And I think that's one of those.”

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

  21. “Show up as a legitimate result. And I kid you not, like six months later, Beyonce became super popular. Who lost that for a little bit? But then we got it back. There were all kinds of fun things like that. We made bets all the time about things that people would have to do if we got to a certain milestone. And those became this new reward system that govern and actually kept us together. And we remarkably didn't really lose many people, at least voluntarily for a number of years.”

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

  22. “We're almost oriented towards short-term rewards, checks on the tests, grades in the courses, salary, bonus, and whatever, and when you embark on something very long term and you unplug from that, maybe you have to supplement it with something else. That is a creative endeavor when you're leading a team. I mean, for us, there were a few fun things we did. I mean, for starters, we had a name for our company called Behance, which didn't mean anything, didn't exist. And so every time you typed it in Google, it said, do you mean enhance? Do you mean enhance? And so short-term reward number one was maybe we won't be a mistake someday. Let's get enough people to put portfolios up there. Let's get enough blog posts and link backs and whatever else. And we would always search BNS and see if we actually showed up. It felt like a more achievable way to keep us oriented. And soon enough, we actually did suddenly.”

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

  23. “And what I learned very quickly was that the idea that we wanted to come together for that thing that motivated us to in some ways, in some cases, quit our jobs or take huge risks or start incurring more debt in our lives. That was enough to get us to get started. That wasn't enough to keep us engaged on a daily basis for years. And I think that's one of those myths that if the vision for what you want to achieve in the long term is great enough, you can just keep persisting and keep at it. In fact, you need to short circuit your reward system in some ways. And I remember there was a conference we had a number of years ago for Behance where Fred Wilson, venture capitalist in New York, spoke, and he talked about two great addictions in life, heroin and a weekly salary. And his point was, when you unplug, for me they're one.”

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

  24. “Yeah, for Behance, the insight was that the creative world, meaning any sort of design photographer, architect, illustrator, in the world of creative production, these are some of the most interesting people in the world. They make our lives interesting. It's also the most disorganized community on the planet. There's very little attribution about who did what these folks oftentimes feel like their careers at the mercy of circumstance and the idea behind Behance, which was my startup back in the day, was to help organize these people in some ways build a LinkedIn for the creative world. You could describe it that way. And some of the products to help them get organized. But we didn't really know what we were doing. It was a bit of a team of misfits in the sense that all of us had roles we weren't necessarily qualified for when we were building this team in the early days.”

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

  25. “Sure. No, so I think that if we go in that order and you think about endurance, one of the, there were a number of different observations around, and especially from my own experience building a sort of been bootstrapping for five years and keeping people when we actually weren't really making any money. We didn't really have customers. No one really cared about or knew about what we were doing.”

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

  26. “Better. And also, how are you constantly, in some ways, A-B testing the way you work and making yourself better? And, you know, obviously I'm sure books could be written on that, but that was my second theme. The third theme, which is a bit more narrow, I call the final mile. I found that whether it was entrepreneurs I've worked with over the years that involved me in their acquisition process or writers that I know right before their book comes out, people in the final mile of something being done or almost being done. There's a lot of interesting stuff that happens, some self-sabotage, new doubts, you think you know what you're doing because you got that far and then you realize, oh shit, I don't know what I'm doing. So those are the three themes. And I was like, okay, for starters, let me just start to break them into the themes. And that's where it all began.”

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

  27. “Sure, well, I have to say, when I started to, it was actually on a plane a couple years ago, I was going through this file of about 800 and something notes, and I realized that, first of all, if this plane goes down, they're all gone. And second of all, this is really disorganized. Should I start to kind of organize them based on some theme? And ultimately, it came down to three things. One was endurance. How do you navigate the endless self-doubt, uncertainty, ambiguity, extraordinary volatility in whether it's a new venture or a turnaround of something or a bold creative project? I feel like a lot of them, that was the theme. Like, how do you just stick with it long enough to figure it out? How do you have the persistence and the patience and everything related to endurance? The second theme that came out, which is a pretty broad theme, I would say, maybe I was cheating a little bit, is optimization. How do you make the product better? How do you make the team?”

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

  28. “Partner at a venture capital firm. Total context switch, learned a lot of things, some the hard way, then realized I miss building, want to get back to it. Now I'm an executive at a big public company. Adobe the same company that acquired us, but totally new position. And I would say that whenever I think about best practices, if there's ever such a thing, or I actually realize that they all conflict based on whatever context you're in and the things that I thought were super important as a startup and were the rules of the road, if you will, actually maybe the exact wrong playbook to play at a later stage company or then at a public company or an eventual capital firm. In some ways makes you kind of throw everything you accept as conventional wisdom out the door because you realize that everything kind of conflicts and it's really based on the context.”

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

  29. “Yeah, Calcutta for better or for worse. But I was an entrepreneur back in 2005 starting a very small, almost a lifestyle business at that point to help organize the creative world, a company called Behance. Five years of bootstrapping as a small team, valuing resourcefulness over the resources we didn't have. A few near-death experiences in that process. Then became a venture-backed company, which is a little bit more of a traditional Silicon Valley-like story being venture-backed for a few years, growing really fast, went through an acquisition. Then started, I found myself working in a very big company. As a vice president, given what I came in with, as well as a few other projects and a few new muscles there, navigating a big corporate experience, then I decided, you know what, I've been a seed investor for a while. I like this. People are telling me I should be an investor. Jumped in and became a job.”

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

  30. “A lot of Evernote notes, but specific to what we're Yeah, I think it was this, it started at maybe 830 or so a couple years ago when I started trimming it down”

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