I really enjoyed my wide ranging and reflective conversation with Scott Belsky – Chief Product Officer at Adobe – about building great product, the creativity boom, the great refactoring, and seed stage investing.

Scott has spent his career working to organize the creative world. Scott’s company Behance was acquired by Adobe in 2012.

Scott works closely with a number of venture capital firms including Benchmark and Homebrew, and is an early advisor and investor in Pinterest, Uber, sweetgreen, Carta, Cheddar, Flexport, Airtable, and Periscope (now part of Twitter). Over the years, Scott has pursued other projects to help organize and empower the careers of creative people. These include 99U, Behance’s think tank and annual conference devoted to execution in the creative world; and a popular line of organizational paper products that help organize creative people and teams.

Scott is also the author of the international bestselling books Making Ideas Happen (Portfolio Imprint, Penguin Books, Apr, 2010), and The Messy Middle (Portfolio Imprint, Penguin Books, Oct, 2018). You can read more about Scott here.

It was fun getting Scott to talk about his product ideas for Twitter, his explanation of the power of Tik Tok’s and why it is for everyone, and what he calls the ‘great refactoring‘ which you will just have to listen to appreciate.

We talked about his experience as a venture capitalist at Benchmark and what he looks for in founders and his wins and misses and the early days of Behance where he was bootstrapped and often panicked.

His two favorite productivity products today are Notion and Airtable and he explains why they are so brilliant.

I can’t wait for my next conversation with Scott.

You can listen to the podcast here on Spotify or go to the Apple podcast app.

Have a great Sunday.