Greatest Hits #7 - Revisiting The Idea Episode with Product Genius Scott Belsky

this episode is sponsored by the hubspot podcast network the hubspot podcast network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business whether you're looking for marketing sales service or operational guidance the hubspot podcast network hosts have your back listen learn and grow with the hubspot podcast network go to hubspot dot com slash podcast network alright everyone this is sam i am sitting in a la qui and if you're not american that is like a budget motel type of place i'm in the middle of texas driving to new york city it's close to eleven pm and you know what i did or at least what i wanna do after driving a few hours on my way to new york i wanna talk to you and i wanna listen to one of my closest friends sean interview my hero so today's episode is with scott be scott is an acquaintance of mine and he invested in the hustle and i've looked up to him for years and i'll tell you why first his accomplishments so scott is the chief product officer at adobe if i had a bet one day he'll be ceo maybe soon but prior to that he had this wonderful company called be be you go to it and designers can't upload their portfolio it's awesome if you're a designer you definitely know what this is if you're not a designer go to a hands you'll see it it's a b e h a n c e he sold that company for about a hundred and fifty million dollars and when he sold it it was mostly bootstrap he he eventually raised a little bit of money like six or seven million dollars but they raised that money like right before they sold so they'd had built most of the business without funding and he funded the company by selling notebooks and speaking at conferences it it's a pretty amazing story and also he used to get traffic at a hands and he'll tell the story i believe from this company called pinterest and he was getting traffic from pinterest and he emailed the guy and goes what the heck is this thing pinterest and he talked to ben the founder and they were just a small company out of time i think a couple of folks working on it and he eventually invested in that company invested fifteen thousand dollars into that company i think at the time they worth something like three or four million dollars so if you do the math i mean that investment could be worth like fifty million bucks that same week scott got he had a friend who was buying his notebooks and he looked up who this guy was was buying the notebooks and he and he holler out and he was worked at this company called stumble upon and his name was garrett camp and garrett go goes hey i'm working on this other start would you wanna invest in it basically it's gonna like replace taxis it's called uber cab and scott was like well i don't have too much money but you've bought my notebooks i feel like i've gotta support you and i don't think this idea is that great but i'll invest in any anyway invested another fifteen thousand dollars i believe that round was valued the company at like three point five million dollars and so whatever the valuation of uber is today like ninety billion eighty billion i mean that's worth like i would imagine close to a hundred million dollars from that fifteen k investment pretty amazing story so he's incredibly accomplished as an entrepreneur and as an investor but he's a product genius i mean this guy is amazing i've only hung out with him a handful of times and he invested in my company but i i'd admire this guy so much because of the way he thinks about product but then also his vibe his energy it's always calming to me you know he's very inspirational and he he's got a wonderful outlook and so what we're gonna do is sean gonna interview him he did this like a maybe twelve months ago and i'm gonna tell you some thoughts as sean is interviewing him and i'll do some quick interruptions so let's get to the episode yeah i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back 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 a lot of social consumer products you know ultimately engage someone based on something they're insecure about 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 you 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 as i'm recording this know 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 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 was 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's just last few months and so i never thought that that would happen if you're listening to this right now thank you this has been kind of an amazing new addition to my life hey what's pretty funny is this pat i mean i'm recording this at the end of june i mean we're in what sean was was given that speech we were at like like well i don't know maybe sixty thousand downloads a month now we're at like eight hundred thousand downloads so whatever he's saying we had after like six months we get we get that way over that per month now it's kinda funny how how here hearing him save that 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 for 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 me i thought the best excuse would be hey come on my show come on my podcast and for whatever reason that kind of flattery works so i wanted to invite people like scott onto the podcast and somebody like scott's interesting because start to show with this which is 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 currently the a chief product officer at an adobe which is you know obviously adobe a massive company so he's 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 a 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 fun 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 someone's in it 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 let 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 and we're gonna try to squeeze in a q and a episode this week so if you are listening to this and you you have a question that you wanted to ask you know it could be about business could be investing or it could be about a podcast whatever i'll answer just shoot me an email my email just p p u r i 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 and a episode i already have like twenty questions or so but but 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 intro we're just 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 them whatever was interesting to me and it made me for a fun combo 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 it's 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 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 oh my gosh we're been we're popping this guy up so much and we're both recording ed thanks so that that something let's go scott welcome yeah so it's scott be key 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 you've actually explored it sounds i like oh 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 line 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 professional 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 in 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 invest right and i also even had a quick talk really into 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 pull threads on curiosity and i do you know i 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 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 like who who is this podcast what am i gonna gonna do yeah i'm good good but i 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 agree that you just have you just have to do okay so you done a bunch of things if i'm listening to this i'm like okay why am i interested so you created be pants 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 registration with the creative world and just how disorganized it was a lot of my friends in the creative community architects designers calling knew from college your careers were at the mercy of circumstance and i felt you know they felt like they never got attribution for their work and i felt like they were not doing their the greatest they could be doing in their career as a result of that and so answer was an effort to organize the creative worlds 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 site 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 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 was five years of bootstrapping two years as of venture backed business acquired by adobe three years of integration it was an incredible cartridge in a pair right right because we kinda saw 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 can 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 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 not a 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 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 creativity is genuine interest combined with niche if you have like deep interest into something it doesn't matter what it is to your point but you also have the initiative to do something with it and those are the folks that get fascinated by those edges that will someday become the centers and you know that's what makes sense work and so normally on the bottom i'm like okay be hands great that's the mission how did you think of the idea how'd you get your first hundred customers those are the normal ones and so if you're here to listen to that sorry i'm not gonna do it this time yeah there's people who have asked you those questions 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 is around the beginning and end of companies i'm guilty of it myself but you know press and you know the media is much more yeah that's their bread and butter is like somebody's do starting something somebody's ending something either for sit 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 that actually 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 messy middle is about that's about that middle section i think eric recess is good bra where he's like act one we're 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 well what all the hard work and it's just like all the training you just you just quickly fast 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 was fascinated by that big period of volatility that just seemed like an endless succession of lows in hot i was interested in the idea that we're not our best selves at the lows or the highs we're not our best selves at the lows because we made decisions out of fear you know be hands we've saw new companies new competitors emerge and we made a lot of mistakes at 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 about 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 practice to be developed and how you endure the lows and how you optimize like hell anything that works mh 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 worked with hoard that i was on entrepreneurs that i partnered with and and also things that i learned you 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 that was the origin of the book 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 the reason why i wanted to have you on is your blog is actually really good and you can what's the domain this is like del dot com right thanks yeah i guess yeah it's like on medium but i don't know you can get there too many different ways okay so i read a bunch of 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 have a couple of friends so sam from the hustle who you you invested in and greg greg is he says amazing things about you that's why wanted to have you on like your philosophies that i've read and then for who vouch for you and why not just like do a blog post why did it have to be 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 steal it all down and also try to find the threads and then two packages a piece of art one thing i did with this book is every insight has like a statement that is also like presented in sort of a designed section to give it some gravity gotcha and what's an example of one of those like an example is the science of businesses scaling the art of business is the things that don't scale and then it's like okay what is that right 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 to not want to do anything in our businesses that doesn't scale because we feel like 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 setting up photographers for your 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 do you decide what your art is and so that's like an example of one of maybe two hundred or so insights in the book gotcha and by the way i don't know if sean clearly said this but scott had just come out with a book at this time called the messy middle so it's it's it's awesome i actually i bought it i read it it's pretty bad ass alright right back to it 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 gigs 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 those things i had observed over you know a board meeting or something and then i realized gosh like there's so many in here and i think it was on a plane i remember being like gosh this pain goes down like no one's ever gonna see any of this stuff it's only gonna be for me right and so that was one of those moments i also you know i think there's a part of me that inspires to do more coaching and helping people build products right one of the things that i love doing and done it 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 the design culture and i wanted to i i did see this as book as an opportunity to kind of help share some the things i've learned some 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 for you know the next part of my life what's something that you commonly so when you advise her 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 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 for different companies i mean there are a lot of them i would say like two they 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 infect experience right after that is just drop off and first mile just so people sorry so just like literally the onboarding the splash page onboarding step by step the 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 progressive disclosure or 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 yeah you know you get sixty seconds or ninety seconds with the bulk of your customer of your new customer and i like to remind folks that every customer as great as they may be and as wonderful as your product may 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 of too much faith right as a product builders they don't care in fact they shouldn't because their life is too busy right shouldn't spend any amount of time energy or effort you know until they actually know that they're gonna get value out of it right so that's the conundrum so that's like one example of something that you 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 underlying nuances of ever product that are really driven on psychology you know i was talking to the the teen at vis the other day and you know they decided not to aggregate the number of followers that you have visible to you nor do they let you see how many like something has that's very counterintuitive to what we know about ego analytics 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 you're looking for in that first couple you 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 how this first mile experience those are probably two of the you know first test of your and of course you know for consumer products and for enterprise products there are different types of tests 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 san and 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 lending right and what what are some of the investments you made that your product yeah i mean i think that know my first ever investment was pinterest so i met ben silver back in two thousand ten yeah and i had no business being an angel investor i was just leading my own company but i had met you met him how you just i net him through of all people i think it was our intern and he you know but then was coming through new york to raise money because he had part time filling his round out 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 be age and i was seeing the although slow but rapidly growing you know source of traffic right back then it was of forced google but then stumble upon and tumble maybe a couple 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 you wanna participate and i was like okay so that was you know that was the first foray it was amazing because it was just well 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 there you know there been a bunch of every product experience that i've had with the team has been remarkably different i saw on the board of sweet green for a few years you know a totally different right world right but then again sweet greens is thinking about efficiency behind the counter and how to you know reduce operations time and preparing salads 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 experience they they had this ambition of having over fifty percent of all orders you know started the 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 so what fa me and gets me pumped up about scott is his passion so we just jumped from be which is this thing for designers we went to sweet green which is fancy healthy salads we did pinterest which is what whatever you however you described pinterest i mean he just jumps from thing to thing to thing and so his tastes are ec like he likes all types of stuff but it's all kind of boils down to this just like this passion about making widgets that just like we don't have to like pretend an act like pinterest is saving the world let me maybe it is maybe it isn't doesn't matter i mean it definitely isn't like we can say that safely but he cares about and his passionate about making it great and i admire that about him i know i get burnt out on stuff and i'm like oh everything's stupid this is so dumb this podcast it's so stupid this is meaningless i mean we all get that way right and i get pumped up hearing him about how passionate he is about this and it gets me excited but then also you hear how and and i actually believe this to be true when ben asked him to invest he goes well okay and it was a small company and that was the first round of funding but he defaulted to optimism it's something that i don't always do sometimes i'll default to well this won't work for this reason this reason and this reason scott didn't doesn't tend to do that i've talked to him me it seems like he doesn't do that and i admire that and i think that's a really really good takeaway that should all listen to in his voice is this this this optimism there there's something about it it's like it's the american dream i i don't know what it is i it's one of the reasons why i love immigrants it's one of the reasons why i like people who are down on their luck but they they they still get after it it's just there's something here that that i find addict and in and and just listening to his voice and him describe these things it gets to be pumped it gets me fired up 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 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 myself laurie and you know but the one of the other thing i did though to rationalize it for myself i remember is ben had worked at google he had a network on the west coast i was just like you know new entrepreneur in new york that have any of that network i actually felt like i would learn a lot from this and so some ways i was like 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 two thousand ten so it was nine years ago so if you have a real deep curiosity about something and then you find someone you really restock and give a lot to learn from them find a way to get closer to them find a way to work with them just always leads to something and you may not accept what yeah this is timely late 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 know 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 angela 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 a worst case scenario this is my education and i started helping these guys you a couple of days try to get you know get their business off the ground and already i feel like get to live in the future yeah a couple hours a week just by working with it do you guys want a funny update on that i'm is positive that company either has gone bankrupt or sean has completely written it off and i asked him if he should have done that and this was funny he's gonna kill me for saying this i i i think don't entirely quote me on this but i'm pretty sure he said that he regrets it because he wasn't entirely interested in or you know after learning it but he's like i don't i actually don't know if i'm actually that interested in self driving cars but the guy you started it was pretty interesting and and i i was cool taking that risk but that was in fact his education i i don't think he regrets that investment but i think that it's fun it's just to give you that update it went out of business i think it's like a you know 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 and there's so many ways of getting closer to people that you admire and wanna learn from and and keeping those relationships i mean i think platforms also like twitter are amazing in that regard there's some people that i somehow got connected to twitter that i've never that 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 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 him this is how i met scott by the way i filed him on twitter and this is how i met sean i met sean this way i i started emailing him got to know each other online even though we lived a few miles away from each other this is how i've gotten in touch with most of my friends so what scott's talking about it works this podcast as a result of it the company that i started the hustle it happened because i took a course called the copywriting course by i neville door i emailed him became friends with him he taught me about writing i wanted to start a newsletter so if you are sitting on your ass right now nothing to do and you want more reach out to people and in particular start twitter and start tweeting and use that same picture on twitter for the rest of your social profiles including your email people feel like they get to know you and get to know your picture because they see your content they you commenting on stuff i recognize people who comment on my stuff sean has a hundred and fifty thousand followers i twitter he recognizes people coming on his stuff i'm telling you it it it it works it's it's pretty amazing i'm i'm sitting in this hotel like i said in texas i'm driving new york i'm gonna stay at a friend's house i've become great friends with him i can say my family friend we met on twitter tell you this works do it 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 just enlighten that anyone can kind 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 way in the sense i i host these like mastermind groups do anything like this like dinner series or anything like that with with same 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 only like informally there's probably a groups i do that with i'd tell me about a so the regret was i moved to san francisco and i got invited one of these and was like 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 the same ten thousand dollar check in all of you guys you know calm was in that in that crew we paid off right yes 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 and 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 yep but then the lesson i learned was why wasn't i investing and i to me i i kinda 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 one i thought was be really big it was really early on and i started you know talking to austin and i was like this time i'm not gonna fuck this up 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 you know once we sold i got a little more money so i could do it myself but the lesson i 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 in enough fighting yep so that's why i widespread rent i think that's one of the greatest cultural attributes of v 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 this podcast started from those dinners by the way sean and i and a bunch of friends would meet and he always had a bunch of groups but we would meet and explain what we were suffering from in our business but we weren't suffering from and then eventually we would just brainstorm and that's kinda how this podcast started and you know that that manifest itself and in ways like what you describing yeah did you invest in uber 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 yep with paper products of all things we were making paper products for creative to be organized there were actual pay action and they're called action books they're are 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 upon back from ebay right had sold it and then he bought it back and so he was in my apartment which was also 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 i was like hey you know check check this out i'm like working on this side project and 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 at that right now i'm a founder ceo struggling you're a founder of ceo and struggling like you're thinking of making it it's a distraction yeah it's a basically like that's a textbook distraction right and so fortunately he didn't take my advice sixty billion compelling 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 know but right but then i also became a product adviser 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 it's 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 stub you did this a sort of sa product adviser and because of that you're at the table so when when the time came you you were you were i try i try to fall in love with the product in the sense where it's still in my mind you know and i'm like thinking through the problems and you know maybe you know what when what's wrong with the interface or how do 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 i remember i remember debate with garrett around the brands and this notion of should it be a it was uber expensive right it was uber cab at the time it should be expensive feeling brand where it looks like it's aspirational but something you couldn't afford or should it be an accessible brand where it feels like this is something that everyone should be doing right and it was actually a really healthy argument because you intuitively think it should be accessible to everyone i mean you wanna make a big company but garrett view is that it should be something that feels like a superpower like everyone's private driver 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 branded entity that like sort of suggested that that feeling elite field exactly so i remember that date and i think that was also the right choice that's amazing okay and what are you excited about nowadays i go on either a space a company a problem that you think needs solving what's scott scott interesting 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 of 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 to make a transitioned 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 well he called that one good job scott which makes it interesting which means it's yeah you know and 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 or the other in in in new and you know privacy driven premium ways gotcha okay by the way let's just let's we gotta recap he just said a lot in that sentence so he talked about everything's dead or when people say things are dead it's it's gonna go back what what are is it i mean a lot of people are saying remote work is is ticking over yeah it it is but what's the opposite of that you know going in person or it i actually don't know what the opposite of that is but that's like an interesting thing think about retail we all i mean i i would think retail is dead i think the next like in person retail you know brick and mortar stores that i i i thought the same too i've been talking to a lot of my friends who are doing e com all their sales are down because people are getting out of the house and shopping i would have said that retail is dead i would've have said like going to macy's and all and going to target going to walmart like why on earth would you do that why would you go to a store when you can just order it online now i get out of the house just to go because i'm i wanna be around people that's kinda of interesting and so it it's pretty well he he he talked about the future work i mean the this guy it's so funny that we're we're only a a a few months twelve twelve eighteen months this was pre covid but i think he actually predicted a lot here and he also talked about privacy i've been paying attention i i probably actually not knowing started paying attention to it because i started listening to scott but a lot of my friends have started talking about that about twenty four months ago i think we are on the cusp something big with privacy we look at what apple's doing they're changing their how their ads work facebook changing how their ad works i have the latest ios on my on my iphone and i have the latest operating system on my computer they have things like different privacy features they also have things that ask you to you know your screen time limit so if you hit a certain time they say are you sure you still wanna use your screen i think that before we would've have thought that's ridiculous no one would ever do that but i think that's gonna be popular so screen time i think peep normal average joe's are gonna be weary of giving their data to big companies i talked to the founder of pandora about this he said you know just your average dentist in missouri he's playing pandora is nervous about submitting to different privacy statements and if you look at the traffic of duck dot go duck dot this really really cool google alternative that tracks your privacy way differently and and its way more concerned about people's privacy go to google duck dot go searches per month and they actually reveal their searches are per month it's growing like a weed this looks like ver ramp i mean is exponential as ex exponential can be so i would highly recommend if you're if you're looking for what's next in the next five or ten years i think we've just talked about a few things here so let's back into it alright everyone this episode is brought to you by hubspot crm platform it's very simple this is really easy stuff but it sounds complicated i'm gonna break it down it may helps you make landing pages so you can align with key sales plays and even personalized content for a complete strategy so basically you wanna sell something you spin up this landing page people come they see it it's customized to the person seeing it boom you get the sale number two documents so you can use documents to manage a library of approved sales enabled assets so your content will always be on brand and three quotes create a beautiful looking quote or proposal in seconds hubspot quoting capabilities often also give you the option to collect e signatures or receive payment via strike oh music to my ears hubspot learn more about how you could scale your company without scaling complexity using hubspot dot com 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 oh i mean every is isn't 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 talk you know eats of breakfast size shoes a little bit groggy and gets out the door like that's okay too yeah i no i mean i that i think that i i i saw 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 are couple of things i do like i do try to audit my calendar and retro lot of people only look forward not many people look you do a time out of you that you last week or what do you do i do i look back to the last week and i typically asked myself you know have do this spend my time but it's actually a really interesting thing because you're typically at least ashamed of one day not more than one show yeah you know and how you did it and you look at these blocks so like what i 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 right but it's just this audit and it's you know it's was prompted some difficult realizations it's 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 because like the like coach ceo coach to a bunch of ceos in silicon valley he just wrote a book called the great ceo within i think it's called it just came out and so emmett who's a ceo at twitch 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 her hands a little bit so this guy works 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 of many ceos he was noticing some things he would just start writing them down and he called this one the energy on it so it's the same thing you're talking about where you go back in your calendar because 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 in flow and do them mh and i really like that because it was it's one of the things you know when the first time you do it you're gonna like gonna look bloody it's gonna be like oh this is not a not a good use of time i think know would be interesting i wonder i feel for me as i have like a natural inner inter introvert tendency and they say that introverts get their energy from being alone like i wonder if i'd be skewed a little bit all non meeting times or green mike 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 know 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 right 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 yes that's like oh yeah the time i talked about the same thing last time right every and then you meet someone where you just pick up where you left off and it just gets like actually even right you know better and better and richer and more dynamic and whatever else mean that i was like the story with periscope i met c on and joe and they were doing this thing called down at the time but every conversation with them about what they were trying to build and whatever was was like infinitely more interesting right 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 upon an idea to make another idea right it's like oh my gosh it's sort like seeing the road through someone else's eyes oh it's like teleportation yeah like oh teleport teleportation but what i wanna do you know maybe i'm bed night going to bed i just wanna like drop in tokyo and like walk around it's like oh yeah like maybe you could do this oh you could go and see it a tennis match a wimbledon when you're in new york and then you suddenly like wow like one were the media rights implications of that and maybe there's a business model there and right it's 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 you're pokemon just sort of evolved like the next time you see him oh oh my god this this whole person has evolved into a better person yeah and those are the most like fulfilling people to like time i like that yeah pokemon yep 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 get achieve success in 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 and like growing that i wanna give some time to right so i am trying to kinda sporadically schedule time to just think through these things i actually love flights for that reason because i can give myself a chunk of hours that you ordinarily never get round right i think we'll just take a shower yeah right you know just uninterrupted time i i i do believe in this constantly connected world the disconnection is a competitive advantage yes because you can actually think deeply about something as opposed to just constantly react and heck away the collective inbox around you stable it i yeah i think i also certainly have some goals for like the changes i'm trying to bring upon the teams you know that i'm that i'm leading now know as this chief walked off circle roll 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 you know and so i i've set some like api driven even yep no goals around and it's just it's it forces you to start making big swings and and think about like how you're going to need 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 at the time 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 you 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 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 i think a lot of the mistakes that 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 your customer seeing what their true life was like well he actually thought of my product i would have known better right so i think those were some of those there were i think all 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 or you know if i had the choice although i would say that it definitely built us as a team like the culture true and like that we went through a lot to like adversity will do that to you it did like what what doesn't kill you makes you stronger like definitely true right i and a team struggling i think i would also try to do fewer things things i you know and i i go back and forth on this i've heard two contradictory 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 it's like wait those are like 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 see little bit did i know that dropping out of you way better p value and finish it how would you shit about an mba right the second and so the other the other way had taken let's say taking the risks yeah that would be what okay so so dropping out one what were some other ways that you were doing science does that mean like yeah sorry i was gonna say like also like another example was the number of products we were building yeah because i was like this one doesn't work then this one will work you know and and even like features yep like the insecurity of shipping many features in a product is basically i don't know what's gonna work right but here 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 it's used more right and get more attention from the team too and it was one of those really strange realizations i would say four year three or four years into to be hands just again probably two years too late or too much later than it should been where we killed a few major features we had this tip exchange thing where creators could leave like tips for another and build the pint each other and vote them up and down it like a mini dig at the time right within the hands there was a group's functionality where people share and then we kill both like one after the other and then suddenly people created more projects right you goes up and and they 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 to your twenty one would you be like a 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 guess the question is if i was twenty one today i was twenty one back then because that then i think 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 within an 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 apps frankly there should be super superpower yeah 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 we know them today will be totally antiquated to do this more you know actionable interface that just is always like the six cents the append that we never know we needed and i think about like what are the applications that are going to thrive in such a world i also think about marketplace 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 market places 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 oh 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 seeker model where they just 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 concrete understanding of us and and how the present is like about to change and kind of but not you know distant distant long shots or fun bets at 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 spicy see and so you where do you like to learn 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 so before i know i haven't commented in a second because that i've been listening i love this guy when i raised a little bit of money from tim ferris tim tim is the popular author investor he told me i actually asked him this question and he told me the first he goes there's two people who i listen to for investing advice the first is neville the second is scott be whatever scott be says i i usually trust he's my authority figure on investing so this a good question to ask i think right i'm i'm very eager to see here who he says yeah no it's something that so i'll tell you like my first answer is i i i am a huge twitter who i think that is an incredible it sounds like a answer but i have carefully curated a group of people they're they are astrophysicist they are biologists they're are economist they're political scientists they're are other entrepreneurs and designers and administrators these are the people who curate for me every day what's interesting to i just think that's freaking you get to surf on top of that it is it is and so some people say oh my gosh it's spend so much time on social media actually it's just literally going through in reading yes if you think about it but but but curated by the people and i i 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 a lot of history podcast 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 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 i love reading just as genre or whatever you know i don't read too many business plus i 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 my publisher about messy middle because i came in length this 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 right you know they were like this is not what you're supposed to do just write a chapter book and i was like wants reach out us right you know at least my audience they're too busy know they're sorry companies they're changing companies they just want actual insights they'll make them think about something differently this is a funny insight so one of my favorite books ever i i believe paul graham and his wife jessica i forget a last name livingston wrote it it's called founders at work and all it is is interviews and and this was written i don't know o five maybe it's in the early it was before twitter was around because they interview f williams were the guy who started twitter and he was called the founder of blogger his old company so whenever twitter launch it was before that and it's like eighteen or twenty or thirty interviews and it's called founders at work and it they just it just at they just ask questions i saw it is it's jessica asking questions and the the it's like this podcast basically is this podcast kind of in book form them a little bit it's awesome and i agree with sky here i actually love these steps of books they aren't chapters i can flip through and they're just quick insights like ten pages i think you could actually build a book that's like founders at work or make a book founders at work but then do like engineers at work you could do designers at work you can do and all you do is release a series of books could do it every year every two years every three years and it's just sold for twenty nine dollars or whatever books cost eighteen dollars and you just do this over and over and over again almost like remember that you know those books like bee keeping for dummies seo for dummies whatever the four dummies i think you do the same thing so if you're looking for an idea i think you could do that right and like we're ready gonna go to learn more turn the page then like you know turn on your brain basically that's the least what i wanted alright i know you're gotta help on a side fuck look at this perfect that time that's my podcast instincts great at ten pm flat yeah this is fun i hope you guys like this conversation if you wanna follow scott where should they follow you reach out to you hey just scott be that's scott wherever whenever feel you connect rate awesome that's it that's the podcast that was a quick one i think like the introductions took up a lot of it but scott's amazing i hopefully i hope you enjoyed this i enjoyed just sitting here listen to it it's cool man it's scott i mean i just get fired up i'm the i'm kind of a lost words because i'm thinking about what scott said the guy's amazing i i love his attitude i'm gonna keep doing these this was a another greatest hits up let me know how you how you feel about the sam par is my twitter handle i read all of them and let me know what you think i'm digging it i like doing them and i hope you i hope you liked listening to them so let me know what you think and by the way it's now close to midnight over here i'm staying up late doing this i've doing this all for you and you know what i want just click that subscribe button on itunes that follow button on spotify and leave me a review leave us review i we check them and we we iterate quickly in the podcast because we we review those all the time so thank you this is sam park calling you from like waco texas or somewhere and a la qui inn talk soon yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back