#32 - Product Genius: Scott Belsky

but here's the amazing things that when you ship a number of features and then you start killing a few of them what you find is that the core stuff gets used more lot of social consumer products you know ultimately engage someone based on something they're insecure hey guys sean here i got a different kind of episode for you that i think you'll like and just to set the scene for you so i'm recording this right now it's christmas eve got about an hour to ago till santa it hits the chimney and this episode is gonna be with scott be probably one of the coolest people i met this year doing the podcast and i'm recording this and i'm just supposed to do the intro and tell you what this is about but i'm feeling a little reflective because it is the end of the year i started this podcast about six months ago on a whim i was bored we were selling our company and we were in the due diligence period and i just getting itchy waiting for lawyers to finish doing what lawyers do and i was like i wanna start something new and so i knew i couldn't start a company so i started a podcast and i didn't know if anyone would listen and amazingly you know i really thought nobody would listen to this thing and now here we are six months later i'm looking at the dashboard right now and there's five hundred and twenty six thousand listeners so over half a million listeners already he just last months and so i never thought that that would happen if you're listening to this right now thank you this has been a kind of an amazing new addition to my life i started the podcast because i thought it would be a great excuse to hang out with interesting people i don't drink coffee no caffeine from me never had the taste for it so i didn't like inviting people out to coffee or i'm trying to make up excuses to meet and i thought the best excuse would be hey come on my show come on my podcast and for whatever reason that kind flattery works so i wanted to invite people like scott onto the podcast and somebody like scott's interesting because start the show with this which he's done basically every job i've ever thought about doing so he bootstrap his own startup he raised venture capital and ready to go that way he sold his company and then he became a tech executive he's the chief product officer at adobe which is you know obviously adobe is a massive company so he's a you know he's been a founder he's been a tech executive he's been an author he wrote a book called the messy middle which is an awesome book about the process of creating stuff so you know he creative guy who wrote a book he's been an angel investor in companies like uber or pinterest a aka you know two of the best angel investments of the decade and then he was a vc with benchmark one of the top funds that exists so the guy basically has done everything and what i was blown away with and what you'll get out of this conversation is he's just a good dude he's a very down earth smart person who i think he says this somewhere in which is his goal wasn't to become any of those things i he didn't say i wanna be a tech executive i wanna be a founder i wanna be a investor he was just curious and followed his curiosity and it kinda led him down those paths and i thought found that kind of inspiring so you know as the new year hits i'm thinking about all these different episodes we've done i don't know about twenty five episodes meeting all these great people and then even getting a chance to meet some you know if we got half a million listeners that's a cool number but i've gotten to meet you know hundreds of you in person at one of the live shows or people who email me we're gonna try to squeeze in a q and a episode this week so if you are listening to this and you're you have a question that you wanted to ask you know it could be about business it could be investing it could be about a podcast whatever i'll answer just shoot me an email my email is just p p r dot sean s h a n so p dot sean at g dot com so just shoot me an email i'm gonna do a q a episode i already have like twenty questions or so but put send them in and i'll try to get through as many as i can i hope you enjoyed this episode we're not gonna do a super fancy in we're just gonna go right in and it's a little bit different we recorded this thing at night you know i just didn't have the energy to do the whole okay let's start with your story from beginning to end i just hopped around on whatever was interesting to me and it made for a fun con me and scott i consider us friends now after this because the conversation was that fun to be a part of so it kinda hops around a little bit of a different flavor i hope you guys like it and again thanks so much for supporting the show the podcast is already bigger than ever dream do it be and all that made me wanna do was make grow it even ten times bigger so that's what we'll be doing next year alright guys enjoy the show scott welcome yeah so scott be so i don't like doing intros because usually i butcher it when i do it but what i thought was interesting about having you was like you've done the career path that's like everything i've thought of doing you've actually already done so it's like you know you've written a book you bootstrap a company you raised venture capital you sold the company you've invested you've been a tech executive at adobe so i'm like all the potential career beds who've actually explored so sounds i like a career identity crisis at all yeah either you know exactly what you're doing or you have no clue what you're doing right fine between the two maybe right and currently which one of those paths are you in at the moment yeah i mean listen sometimes i think what is my happiest state professionally actually just generally okay and i think it's the feeling of feeling fully utilized and i think that personally you know i'm a dad i'm husband i'm a friend you know you feel utilized in all those ways and then professionally i feel fully utilized and a day like today actually where i had meetings with product teams i had meetings kind of leading change in the big organization those types of meetings i also had pitches a couple pitches from companies that i might invest in i also helped make a couple introductions the companies i'm already investor in right and i also even had a quick talk related to the book and so i feel like every muscle was stretched in some ways that's day yeah it's a day and so i think that i've always just tried to you know pull both threads on curiosity and i do you know i you know for better or for worse i kind of i'm enjoying you know both ends of the spectrum these days yeah to give people a sense it's like nine pm on what is it tuesday monday night i don't know tuesday night some someday squeeze it i was telling you i was like i give you credit because i know it's easy when you're like two weeks out and you're like sure yeah we'll make it work and then the day of you're like in your like ninth uber of the day and you're like what am i who who is this podcast what am i getting gonna do yeah good go ahead but yeah yeah give you props in fact on the last episode i i sort of put out one of my my life theories which is eighty percent is just showing up and most of the things that you don't wanna show up for if you just build that discipline to just show up good things happen i that you just have to you just have to do it okay so you done a bunch of things if i'm listening to this i'm like okay why am interested so you've created be hands which if you're a creative person you know exactly what be but if you're not somebody who's maybe a designer or somebody in the creative world and what what was pants yeah so be was inspired by a bit of a sense of frustration with the creative world and just how disorganized it was a lot of my friends in the creative community architects designers are knew from college your careers were at the mercy of circumstance and i felt like you they felt they they never got attribution for their work and i felt like they were not doing their the grace they could be doing in their career as a result of that and so was an effort to organize the creative and people would always say yeah good luck with that yeah but the the idea back in the day was why are people having their portfolio sites sitting on some websites out in the ether only visited by people who know them their work should also be broken out and searchable and sorta based on the client to the the the search term or whatever and then through someone's work you discover who that person is then you see their portfolio and then you see who they are and so it was invert the model to some extent and and it was a long slot i mean be answer was five years of bootstrapping two years as a venture back business acquired by adobe three years of integration it was an incredible and a pear right right because we kinda sell it all but but it's great i mean i love building products for creative people i find that ultimately across all industries creative people are the ones that really move things forward yeah and they compel us take action they you know prompt emotion through media movies whatever it is so it's it's just kind of a an honor to you know build things for creative has always been something that gets me going yeah somebody asked me like why do you like to do that why why that in traditional terms i don't seem that creative i'm amount of designer i'm not an artist of some kind not making music you know i'm trying to make something new happen you're being creative you know fundamentally you're problem solving something new sure and i'm like you know it's really simple like i like the new shit in the world i get excited about new shit and if you want new shit you need people to be creative i you need creative people to have all the tools that they're disposal do what they do best well i think it's you know the creativity is genuine interest combined with initiative you have like deep interest into something it doesn't matter what it is to your point but you also have the initiative do something with it and those are the folks that get fascinated and by those edges that will someday become the centers and you know that's what makes sense work and so normally on the bottom like okay be hands great that's the mission how did you think of the idea how'd did you get your first time customers those are the normal ones and so if you're here to listen to that alright gonna do it this time yeah there's people who have asked you those questions is i've seen those interviews so actually i don't know if it's because it's nine pm i'm in the mood to just talk about other things one of the things i wanna talk about is you wrote this book messy middle yes which is cool i'll tell you the premises i understand sure premises i understand it is ninety five percent of the conversation conversation is around the beginning and end of companies i'm guilty of it myself but you know press and pete you know the media is much more yeah that's the bread and butter is like somebody's starting something somebody's ending something either for failure or success it's a ninety five percent of the talk or ninety nine percent of the talk is about one percent of the time the goes into any venture and everybody just like sort of fast forwards the the middle the actual like sort of doing and navigating of the unknown and so that's what the best messy middle is about it's about that middle section i think eric says is good bra where he's like act one we go into depth about the hero and how they came up with their idea act three you know the resolution and act two is the montage right what was just all the hard work and it's just like all the training you just you just quickly fast forward through all of it so you can get to the good not sexy but it's kind of all the matters and so why write the book well it's fascinated by that big period of volatility that just seemed like an endless succession of lows and highs i was interested in the idea that we're not our best selves at the lows or the highs we're not our best sales at the lows because we made decisions out of fear you know hands we've saw new companies new competitors emerge and we made a lot of mistakes times where we would suddenly try to emulate and then realize wait we just lost touch with what we really are and what we're good at and then you're also not your best self at the highs because you also attribute the things that you did to the things that work and so there's something to be learned at those moments there's a practice to be developed in how you endure the lows and how you optimize like hell anything that works and i just that was what was interesting to me and i wanted to interview and chronic a lot of stories and insights from people that i've worked with hoard that i was on on that i partnered with and and also things that i learned you know my own experience and originally i kind of started this as a project for myself and then i realized i had this evernote notebook of like six hundred and eighty or so insights and i said okay like i'm gonna pair this down and and ship it so so that was the origin of the book because because i was i was thinking i was like why not a blog blockbuster right like i read a bunch your blog but probably part of the reason why i wanted to have you on is your blog is actually really good and you can what's the domain just like del dot com right thanks yeah i guess yeah it's like on medium but i know you can get there through many different ways okay so read a bunch of your things and you have these like almost like watercolor art like diagrams of stuff yeah so i've been reading these for a long time and i a couple of friends so sam from the hustle who you you invested in and greg greg is he says amazing things about your why i wanted to have you on like your philosophies that i've read and then friends who vouch for you and why not just like do a blog post why did it have to be a able yeah i think it's a good question because a book is kinda stagnant you can't really update it as easily right i think though that a book is a forcing function to just still it all down and also try to find the threads and then two packages is a piece of art one thing i did with this book because every insight has like a statement that is also like presented in sort of a design section to give it some gravity gotcha and what's an example of one of those like an example is the science of business is scaling the art of business is the things that don't scale and then it's like okay what was that right no yeah unpack that and so that will be like a two or three tapes section about how we sort of per over all the the science nuances and actually our instinct is to not want to do anything in our businesses that doesn't scale because we feel that's a waste of time when in fact a lot of the greatest examples of distinguishing a brand or a service are the things that don't scale like airbnb sending our photographers for every apartment or i mean every company has their example of the things that they did that don't scale right that ended being the art and how do you also preserve that as you grow and how you decide what you're is and so that's like an example of one of maybe two hundred or so insights in the gotcha you write this book and i like it because there's some books where you can kinda tell the person who's writing this like they're either you know nowadays not trying to make money off this but they're trying to par this into a speaking gig or things like that but like you already had your sort of success and win so this it come feels like it comes from a different place it comes from a place of like i wanna share wisdom or like first tap into the wisdom the the scattered wisdom you had in your evernote files yeah like put it together for yourself and then like generously give is that like a yeah it was weird there's actually i remember the moment when i was kind of entering another one of those things i had observed over you know a board meeting or something and then i realized gosh there are so many in here and i think it was on a plane i remember being like gosh this thing goes down like no we're gonna see any of this stuff only gonna be for me right and so that was one of those moments i also yeah know i think there's a part of me that aspire to do more coaching and helping people build products right one of the things that i love doing and done it with sam and also with reg and others is help them develop their products and then build their product teams and hire the right designers and build the design culture and and i wanted to i i did see this book as an opportunity to kind of help share some of the things i've learned some of the things i'm thinking about and do more of that stuff so it's in some ways like a cornerstone of that of that intention i have you know the next part of my life what's something that you commonly so when you advise you to let's say on building products and making better products obviously as an entrepreneur you'd always be better you will never turn down the opportunity to make your product better sure it is your your rock let some like common things you find yourself constantly advising people to do or you know questions you keep asking or advice you keep giving is there anything that sort of a pattern you're noticing as you do this for different companies i mean there are a lot of them i would say like two that come to mind you know one is ob over the first mile of the user's experience of the product which ironically typically is the last mile that the team spends actually thinking about and yet it's the only part of the product experience that every customer will in fact experience right after that it's just drop off and first mile just so people sorry so it's like literally the onboarding the splash page onboarding step by step that the the questions you're asked before you get into the product how quickly you actually realize any form of value in the product right the defaults of the product you know does it show you everything at once or only a few things that the progressive disclosure of functionality like all of these factors are things you must consider as you're nailing that first mile experience which is in fact probably what determines the fate of most products frankly yes because you know you get sixty seconds or ninety seconds with the bulk of your customer of your new potential customer and i like to remind folks that every customer as great as they may be and as wonderful as your product may be every customer is lazy vain and selfish in their first fifteen to thirty seconds of using your product yeah how are you going to cater to them at that in that world before and i think the mistake we make is we have two we we expect our customers have too much faith in us right as a product builders they don't care in fact they shouldn't because their life is too right shouldn't spend any amount of time energy or effort you know until they actually know that they're gonna value out of it right so that's the conundrum so that's like one example of something that you know i love working on with product teams another example is kind of unpacking the psychology of their customer a lot of social consumer products you know ultimately engage someone based on something they're insecure about right something they want to have validated it's something they wanna learn or they're worried about or i mean there's a lot of like under underlying nuances of our product that are really driven once like ecology you know i was talking to the the teen at vis the other day and you know they decided not to aggregate to the number of followers that you have visible to you nor do they let you see how many likes something has that's very counterintuitive to what we know about ego analytic and the things that drive social consumer product usage but they had an insight right which was the type of customer and how they wanted to use the product that sort of thing is very important thing to kind of dis and then make as a as a core principle and so when you're investing in companies i'm guessing your looking for in that first couple you know first conversation with the entrepreneur you're trying to figure out what insights do they have about the psychology of their customer and also when you demo the product has this first mile experience those are probably two of the you know first test of your there and of course you know for consumer products and for enterprise products there are different types of tasks or different types of lenses you look at them through but i think that those actually apply to both you know in enterprise you realize that everyone wants to look better in front of their boss everyone is you know sometimes even more lazy in terms of what they're willing to do and so you have to build products and first mile experiences that take those things into account so these are important things to to think about as you're considering as an investor if you're a product oriented investor like right and what what are some of the investments you made that your product yeah i mean i think that you know my first ever investment was interest so i met ben silver back in two thousand ten yeah and i had no business being an angel invest sir i was just leading my own company but i had you met him how you just i met him through of all people i think it was our intern and he you know but ben was coming through new york to raise money because he had part time filling his round on here and and we both were building products that we were orient towards designers to some degree and a lot of the pins on pinterest were driving to hands ages and i was seeing that although slow but rapidly growing you know source of traffic right back then it was first google but then stumble upon and tumble media others and and then i just started working with him versus as a product adviser and then when he was raising the seat round and he was like do you wanna participate and i was like i okay so that was you know that was the first foray it was amazing because it was just we'll to see a product at that stage and to share some of what i learned but also just engaging in a lot of healthy debate right and so i think they're you know there been a bunch of every product experience that i've had with the team has been remarkably different i said on the board is sweet for a few years you know a totally different right world right but then again sq is thinking about a behind the counter and how to you know reduce operations time preparing salad the form factor of the actual bowls and how that increases efficiency and it's better for the environment the design of the space and then the mobile they they had this ambition of having over fifty percent of all orders you know started a mobile you know and so i i just i love getting a bit d yeah with product problems and you know and and helping solve them right that's amazing okay so so you when you made that first angel investment in pinterest yeah you don't have a budget for this you're not like okay i'm i've made it because you're still doing pants at the time you had not exited correct correct and so you you said i'm in no position to do angela angel investing but you did it anyways what risk did you take there so like when you put in whatever you put in like what percent of your like net worth were you putting on the line at that time yeah it was it was probably a good chunk of my salary and you know but the one the other thing i did though to rationalize it for myself i remember is then had worked at google he had a network on the west coast i was just like you know new entrepreneur in new york that didn't have any of that network i actually felt like i would learn a lot from this and so some i was like you sort of paying for an education yeah if nothing more and it was again like i just knew so little about everything i do now back in two thousand and what is it two thousand and ten so it was nine years ago it was if you have a real d curiosity about something and then you find someone you really give a lot to learn from i'm finding a way to get closer to them find had a way to work with them just always leads to something and you may not accept what it yeah this is timely so i i just yesterday invested in the self driving car coming and my last sort of like as i was going through the last checklist of like okay should i do this you this is meaningful money to me i'm not at the point where you know when i invest dollars in i've actually really want those dollars to come back i'm not this is not like the phil angel investing that some people do and so my last thing was like look i'm gonna learn so much about robotics machine learning and self driving cars and i that's the future and whether it's this company or the next one these guys are the future yeah and this might just be my education and and worst case scenario this is my education and i started helping these guys you know past couple of days try to you know get their business off the ground and already i feel like i'm get to live in the future yeah a couple hours a week just by working with it it's like a you it's a long term view on the value of learning and relationships but also for those that aren't ready to write a check to people i mean there's so many ways of getting closer to people that you admire and one learn from and and keeping those relationships i mean i think platform is also like twitter are amazing in that regard there's some people that i somehow got connected to twitter that i've never even met in my real life right who just reached out to me and just started to share like enough information and witty observations and feedback on something that i wrote right that i just start to follow them and then i follow them for a year and two years and then you know these are folks that feel like you know them yeah yeah i and and anything that they were probably doing next i would probably be first in line to help support or at least learn more about and so it's just enlighten that anyone can kinda of through their own insights and just hard work and and and knowledge sharing like you know sort of generosity in that sense right build relationships these days i learned this the hard in the sense i host these like mastermind groups do anything like this like dinner series or anything like that with with a with sort of a the same set of people where you get together every two months or or so where it's like your peers do you do only like informally that's probably your group that i do that with but i'd tell me about a so the regret was i moved to san francisco and i got invited to one of these and i was this is great this is an awesome way to learn and meet people because the the good thing is you're at a table with founders and they're not selling because that's like you're not their employee you're not their investor you're not their customer so they're actually telling you what's up with their company you're sharing likewise and so the first couple groups i was in if i had just written checks to all of them blindly i said you know like with no judgment i'm just writing at the same ten thousand dollar check in all of you guys you know calm was in that in that crew paid off right yeah exactly they would've have paid it off clear bit was in that crew product hunt z electric which is the biggest solar company in africa like so so that portfolio would have done amazing so i looked back and i was like man i did the first part right which is what you're saying you know i just spent time with interesting people and added value to them through sharing ideas and insights whatever hope it being being helpful yeah but then the lesson i learned was why wasn't i investing and to me i i kinda i asked myself this and i thought because i wasn't thinking of myself for like an investor yeah and so then it happened again and i saw this company called lambda school that i thought was really really big it was really early on and i started you know talking to austin and i was like this i'm not gonna fuck this out and so i convinced my friend i was like i found a company that's amazing if you invest this is i'm your scalp here right if i if if you invest you know give me fifteen percent of your your action right and and let's let's do and so then that was like my first like deal deal where that's great you know i was able to put it in and since then now know once we sold i got little more money so i could do it myself but the lesson learned and what i would tell anybody's listening to this is don't count yourself out as as a player in the game either as a founder or investor yeah there is a way if you're willing to be creative and helpful enough i yep that's why i rent i think that's one of the greatest cultural ass attributes of the the ecosystem of kinda of early stage founders is that we all know how much those ci substantial relationships matter and how much we learn from one another and how we actually can't do it alone and you know that that manifests self and in ways like what you're describing yeah did you invest in uber birds that right yeah i did so that was also kinda early on right and the funny story there so we were bootstrapping our business be hands early days yeah with paper products of all things we were making paper products for creative to be organized there actual pay action and they're called action books they're actually still out there okay yeah and so so and and one of our core partners for hands from a traffic perspective and partnership was was stumble upon garrett had recently purchased stumble back from ebay right had sold it and then he bought it back and so he was in my apartment which was also in my office back in the day in new york and we were kinda jamming on some product stuff and he whipped out one of our action books that i given him previously and was like hey you know check check this out i'm like working on this side project and then literally invested in the sketch literally shows me these sketches of this product where it's about summon a black car as opposed to having a dial for us yeah and and i'm like dude you should be focused on your business you just spot it that right now i'm a founder ceo struggling you're a founder ceo and now struggling like you're thinking of making it it's a distraction yeah this basically like that's a textbook distraction right and so fortunately he didn't take my advice billy felony distraction and he said you know do you wanna do you wanna be involved and i think it kind of was like i don't i don't know but right but then i also became a product advisor for for him and this is actually even before travis was in the picture ryan was involved you know and then of course you know that team got up and running and so i had i he asked me if i wanted to invest and again like sure but i very small check which is all i could do at the time right and i was a journey and so you're you did this a sort of starters product adviser and because of that year at the table and so when when the time came you you were you were i to i i tried to fall in love with the product in a sense where it's still on my mind you know and i'm like thinking through the problems and you know maybe you know what what what's wrong with the interface or how do they onboarding me better so what's something an uber that the product a product change early on like probably before any of us touched it that you remember was there anything like that i remember i remember debate with garrett around the brand and this notion of should it be a it was uber expensive right it uber cab at the time should it be expensive feeling brand where it looks like it's aspirational but something we couldn't afford or should it be a an accessible brand where it feels like this is something that everyone should be doing right it was actually a really healthy argument because you intuitively think it should be accessible to everyone i mean if you wanna make a big company but garrett view is that it should be something that feels like a super superpower like everyone's private drivers i feel expensive even though it was intended to be accessible and so that was part of the you know part of the thought behind the black kind of logo and and the brand entity that like sort suggested that that feeling elite field exactly so i remember that to date and i think that was also the right choice that's amazing okay and what are you excited about nowadays like i going on either a space a company yep problem that you think need solving what's got scott interest well i think i think there's i think there's there's a lot of different things that are interesting me at any point in time i mean in my day job it's building products for creative people and kinda thinking about the future not only the creative tools we know but also things like augmented reality and and how we're going to actually infiltrate and build content in that new medium that would otherwise die if it wasn't enriched with like interactive animated hyper intelligent content mh so it's thinking about that working with a lot of our partners like apple and others to help think through like how does that even happen it's been like a really fun thing for me by day and no by night i mean there's been a lot of really interesting enterprise companies that are thinking about the future of work if you're in a big company you know how hard it is for them to even think about a remote workforce and how they transition right even though a lot of us all know it's coming what are the steps to get there what kind of technologies need to come about i i also think that you know social has been out of favor right which makes it interesting which means it's yeah you know when everyone says interesting is dead it means that something's being born right and now is the time so i'm thinking a lot about consumer products that help people connect with one and the other in in in new and you know privacy driven premium ways gotcha it so what's a day in the life is there a a wake up time morning routine that you like that that kind of works for you i mean every everyday erin right but i i'm trying to think of anything that would be useful and helpful but i ultimate normal is also useful because people are like oh there's no secret he just wakes up and you know eats his breakfast ties shoes a little bit groggy gets out the door like that's okay too yeah no i mean i think that i think that i i i so i do try to switch it up you know i'm actually not one of those people that has like everything has to be the same and whatever else but i do i mean i there a couple of things i do like i do try to audit my calendar and that with little lot of people only look forward not many people look that you do a time out you that you look last week or what do you do i do i typically look back at the last week and i typically asked myself now how do i spend my time but it's actually a really interesting thing because you're typically at least ashamed of one day and i'm more than one show yeah you know and how you did it and you look at these blocks like what day do during that period but or why did i meet with that person for that long or whatever it is is this advancing you know what's most interesting and most important to me right and that could be personal things and work things right but it's just this audit and it's some you know it's prompted some difficult realizations like wow like that was more important than you know seeing my family time right it's important i saw a a version of this that i really liked so there's a guy you probably know his name is matt something he's like the like coach ceo coach to a bunch of ceos in silicon valley he just wrote a book called the great ceo with i think it's called just came out and so emmett who's is a ceo at twitch he i think he works with him i might be getting all these details wrong name wrong book title wrong directional yeah something like this let's just wave our hands a little bit so this guy works with a bunch of ceos and so he he wrote this book and i saw his like like you you had your six hundred eighty evernote notes so he had a bunch of google docs that were just like quick you know like principal after he worked with some many ceos he was noticing some things he would just start writing them down and he called this one the energy audit it so it's the same thing you're talking about where you go back in your calendar everybody said get two markers right red and green or whatever red means this took this this activity takes energy away from you you feel less energetic after you do it green means that activity gives you more energy right like the gym is this weird thing where you would think you go to the gym you put all this energy in and you exercise and that should deplete you but actually you walk out and you fit more energy for the rest of the day right so like there's these activities so he said just start highlighting and just look at the step back and just look at the colors and then be like okay that's where you're at today let's try to move towards more green and different things give you energy like the sort of doing things that are in your zone of genius right things that you're good at things you know that are important and you're you can just get and flow and do them mh and i really like that because it was it's one of the things that you know when the first time you do it gonna like it's gonna look bloody it's gonna be like oh this is not a not a good use of time i think that would be interesting i wonder i feel for me as i have like a natural inner inter introvert tenancy and they say that introverts get their energy from being alone like i wonder if i'd be skewed a little bit non meeting times or green like oh that was the best time but but i like that i like that idea because i mean listen there are meetings where you're like right you and there are meetings where you leave with a lot that you're thinking about maybe that's another measure also is after you spend time with something or someone like are you leaving thinking about things i mean that is a one of the things i have used over the years to determine founders i wanna work with as an investor is if i feel like every conversation with him or her was a step function more interesting than the one before or was it a repeat right a lot of conversations we have people are reviews yes that's like yeah the time i talked about the same thing last time right every and then you meet someone where you just pick up you left off and it just gets like actually even right you know better and better and richer and more dynamic and whatever else i mean that was like the story with periscope and i met c on and joe and they were doing this thing called down up at the time but every conversation with them about what they were trying to build and whatever was was like infinitely more interesting like and it was like okay we gotta work together and what you're saying is it's not just that their results were getting better every time because nobody does not right it was the ideas right it was the ideas and the and the you know the maybe also chemistry like building upon an idea to make another idea right it's like oh my gosh sort like seeing the road through someone else's eyes oh it's like teleportation yeah like teleport teleportation but what i wanna do you know maybe i'm bed at night going to bed i just wanna like drop in tokyo and like walk around and it's like oh yeah like maybe you could do this oh you could go and see it a tennis match that said wimbledon dan and when you're in new york then you suddenly like wow like one the media rights and implications of that and maybe there's was a business model there and right like thing the thing the thing the thing the thing and it's like okay this feels good yeah i like i i have a similar thing where i call people pokemon because it's like your pokemon just sort of evolve right like the next time you see them oh my god this this whole person has evolved been to a better person yeah and those are the most like fulfilling people to like i like that yeah mind yeah here we go new book one thing i wanted to ask you because the way i look at it is this is a guy who's achieved a lot of things that i'd i'd like to achieve in my life right so just sold our company but you know i'd love to write it i'd love to to you know achieve success and in the next thing or invest in great companies so you're still setting goals for yourself what's a goal you have set for yourself now like what can you share that's that's something you're like alright here's a goal i have for myself nowadays yeah well i think that there i think there's some ideas that i'm like growing that i wanna give some time to right so i am trying to kind of sporadically schedule time to just think through these things i actually love flights for that reason because i can give myself chunk of hours that you ordinarily never get went around right i think or just take a shower yeah right you know just uninterrupted time i mean i i do believe in this constantly connected world the disconnection is a competitive advantage yeah because you can actually think deeply about something as opposed to just constantly react and heck away inbox around you stay i yeah i think that i also have certainly have some goals for like the changes i'm trying to bring on the teams you know that i'm that i'm leading now you know as this chief officer role at adobe i mean this is just a company that bought my company a lot of my dna in this business i care about where these products land and what we you know and and so i i've set some like api driven even yep you goals around and it's just it's forces you to start making big swings and and think about like how you're going to lead those changes and get people to to go along with it and you know it's and then it's about narrative and merchandising and all these other things that it's it's fun you kinda have to build a internal marketing campaign the times just to get people to change their minds totally so so those are just a few examples okay and and if you were twenty one again today so i'll let you keep all the knowledge have but you give me back sort of all your all your assets your reputation nobody knows you you're twenty one years old again what do you think you do how do you think you would go about spending you know the next few years of your life well i would i would definitely start something again if i had really a deep interest i think i would probably aspire for more empathy for the customer suffering the problem as opposed to my passion for the solution because i think a lot of them mistakes i made early on was that were that i was always like super passionate about what i know needed to happen and then we would realize eight months later we were like thirty degrees off like and cherry pick evidence that might fit yeah the need for that solution exactly because you're you know you get excited by a prototype and vision and you want alignment so you force alignment and then you realize weight had i just spent more hours next to a customer seeing what their actual life was like what the actually thought of my product i would have known better so i think those were some of those there were i think of few last years as i like to call them in be hands in that five year bootstrapping period or we had to rebuild a lot of stuff and i can't say i would do that all over again know if i had the choice although i would say that it definitely built us as a team like the culture true like that we went through a lot to ago adversity will do that to it it did like what what doesn't kill you makes you stronger like definitely true right and the team struggling i think i would also try to do fewer things i you know and i i go back and forth on this i have heard two contradictory at about yeah about like what makes a great entrepreneur okay either you are really really great and willing to take risk or you're really good at hedging risk it's like wait those are like which yeah right i and i i i was always a hedge you know i always was thinking about the contingency plan and that caused me to do a number of weird things number one it caused me to go to business school simultaneously as i was starting a business and not drop out i see little did i know that dropping out would be wave better p value and finishing finishing i would you shit about an mba right the second and so the other the other way you had taken let's say taken the risks yeah that would be what sister so dropping out one what were some other ways that you were doing contingency science does that mean like yeah sorry i gonna say like also like another exam was the number of products we were building yeah because i was like this one doesn't work and this one won't work right you and and even like features yep it's like the insecurity of shipping many features in the product is basically i don't know what's gonna work right but you amazing things that when you ship a number of feature and then you start killing a few of them what you find is that the core stuff gets used more right and get more attention from the team too and it was one of those really strange realizations i would say four years three or four years and to be answers again probably two years too late or too much later than it should have been where we killed a few major features we had this tip exchange thing where creators could leave like tips for another and build a punch each other and both them up and down it like a mini dig at the time but within there was a group's functionality where people would could share and then we kill both like one after the other and then suddenly people created more projects using goes up and the use the the core fee functionality more and i just again wish i could have gone back and just really drove it down like what do we actually have to ship and how do we make sure it's amazing and what space would be interesting either your twenty one would you be like billing link tools for creative or would you go into bio hacking or you know like whatever like is at that point you have a long time where you can ramp up or go into any space you're not sort of committed sure and i guess the question is if i was twenty one today or i was twenty one back then because that then i twenty one today yeah twenty one today i would definitely be doing something different first of all i mean we're still living in an app driven world which is crazy i mean apps were born in the world where there was no gps there were no notifications there was no ai and and so you had to download apps and then use them for things now with a modern os that should know where you are and what you're most likely to want to do based on where you are and when you're there and with whom you are with the the whole operating system the whole notion should be completely different there shouldn't even be at frankly there should be super superpower that are suddenly there and then they're suddenly gone right and and if you think about and i think that we're going towards that end i think that we will see operating systems evolve i think that the notification systems as we know them today will be totally antiquated to do this more you know actionable interface that just is always like the six sense the append that we never know we needed it and i think about like what are the applications that are going to thrive in such a world i also think about marketplaces that are more sustainable you know the the the modern notion that every freelancer marketplace essentially taxes the transaction is silly right right and that's actually the on demand model for on demand marketplaces and it's all the same formula right there there's a totally different model that should exist maybe it's blockchain driven maybe there's know some other mechanic at play for value distribution so there's a lot of these things that i think a bit about some of them overlap into my day jobs some of them i'm looking for companies and entrepreneurs that are tackling and wanna help but i like about your approach is that you didn't start with some idea i wanna build this or a generic space but it was more like why are things the way they are wait shouldn't they be different like you basically were like why are apps and notifications of the way we use this phone now that we have x y z or why do wall marketplaces do this you know rent secret model where they you know sit in the middle and and grab from every transaction so funny like one of the things i learned most working with the benchmark team for a little while was i really went in there thinking the greatest investors are really good at in the future and what i left there believing is that the greatest investors have a really deep con any of doesn't and and how the present is like about to change and you can kind of but not you know distant distant shots or fun bets but their bets right right but if you really have a tune into the current dynamics and just how they're slightly shifting and start getting ahead of really interesting i see and so you where do you like to learn for so like what do you listen what podcast you listen what book do you read who do you think is really smart where if there's talking you're listening what what what what do you like to feed your brain yeah no it's something that so i'll tell you like my first answer is i i i am a huge twitter i think that is an incredible it sounds such a answer but i have carefully curated a group of people they're they are astrophysicist they are biologists they are economist their political scientists there are other entrepreneurs and designers and illustrator these are the people who curate for me every day what's interesting to i just think that's freaking right you got to surf on top of that it is it is and so some people say oh my gosh it's been so much on social media actually it's just literally going through and reading yes if you think about it but but but curated by the people and i as learned it about the books that i wanna read right and that's so i'm my love reading books related to psychology and i i love reading i'm sorry to listen to lot of history podcasts so like some of those like kings of kings type podcast podcasts i think are super interesting because you're just learning about the this notion of history r like it's so true i mean you're learning about what happened in like rome you know and you're were like oh my gosh it's happening all over again now in america right there's just a lot of that so i i but i i try not to you know i actually don't have like one field i'm just like you i love reading just this genre or whatever you know i don't read too many business looks i understand well i find that most of them are a big book about a little idea you know so i feel about most books it is but you know i i think that and i have an argument with my publisher about messy middle because i came in length like this this big book of like you know between a hundred two hundred insights that were completely disconnect from one another although there was some sort of red you know and they were like this is not what you're supposed to do just write a chapter and i was let's reach out books right you know at least my audience they're too busy you know they're certain companies they're changing companies they just want insights i'll make them think about something differently right and like we're gonna go to learn more right turn the page and then like you know turn on your brain basically that's at least that i want yeah alright i know you gotta help on a flight size fuck look at this perfectly that time that's my podcast instincts great at ten pm flat yeah this is fun hope you guys like this conversation if you wanna follow scott where should they follow you reach out to you hey just scott at scott wherever whenever right feel you do i connect awesome