Episode #357: Scott Belsky on Startup to Scaleup to Big Exit

Scott Belsky is the author of the international bestselling book MAKING IDEAS HAPPEN and his latest book, The Messy Middle, explores finding your way through the hardest and most crucial part of any bold venture. Scott has spent his career making the creative world more productive, connected, and adaptive to new technologies.

He founded Behance, the leading online platform for the creative industry to showcase and discover creative work, and served as CEO until Adobe acquired Behance in 2012 for $150 million.

He is a Venture Partner with Benchmark, and is an early advisor and investor in Pinterest, Uber, sweetgreen, Cheddar, and Periscope as well as several others in the early stages.

Scott also founded 99U, a publication and annual conference devoted to productivity in the creative world and serves on the Board of the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Scott is currently serves as Adobe's Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Creative Cloud.

In this episode, we many topics, inlcuding:

How to keep your team motivated, even when there is little cause for celebration
How to build a culture of transparency and psychological safety
Why organizations who make fast decisions are more likely to win; and
What the most sustainable competitive advantage you can have is

We explored this and a whole lot more so strap yourself in for a conversation with the one and only, Scott Belsky.

Topics Discussed:

Why the media glorifies starting up and exiting, but not scaling up
Why entrepreneurs shouldn’t conflate raising capital with success
Why its about how you respond to peaks and valleys that matters most
Why being resource strap breeds resourcefulness
Why scaling is so much harder than starting
The importance of self awareness
How being the master of your devices gives you an advantage in the attention economy
Engineering small wins into your team culture
The role of luck in success, and the narrative fallacy
Why it pays to have tension in your workforce
Minimum viable bureaucracies
How to build a culture that values people over process
How to make fast decisions and why you should
Why longevity requires knowing your weaknesses
On transitioning from Behance to Adobe
On Adobe’s aquisition of Behance and what they did right
On making the leap from Goldman Sachs to Behance