- Hey everybody, what's up?
It's Chase.
Welcome to another episode of the Chase Jarvis Live Show
here on CreativeLive.
You know this show.
This is where I sit down with the most amazing humans,
and I do everything I can to unpack their brains
with the goal of helping you be more awesome
and live your dreams in career, in hobby, and in life.
My guest today started out as an associate at Goldman
and then, through a radical transformation,
launched his own company called Behance, which is the place
if you're a creative to have your portfolio online.
It now has more than 12 million creatives on that platform.
He had that company, acquired by Adobe.
He's an author, he's an investor,
and he's now the chief product officer at Adobe.
He's my good friend.
Scott Belsky in the house.
- Chase. - Thanks, bud.
(gritty rock music)
(audience applauds)
They love you!
Appreciate you.
Before the cameras started rolling,
we were just talking baby, Adobe Mac's,
new book, like, all in the same 10-day period?
(Chase laughs) You look great!
- Yeah, you can't really complain.
You gotta just like, roll with it.
- You look great.
I don't know what's the secret.
- The book, I mean, the book is a five-plus year project,
and two years ago, a pub date was chosen,
and then, you know, and I didn't really even know
what role I would have at that time, what would be going on.
- Yeah, like planning it?
- I mean, all this stuff just is colliding at once.
But, I mean, in some ways, it's kind of meta,
because the book, The Messy Middle,
is all about navigating the volatility of a journey,
a bold creative project, of a new venture,
of a product turnaround,
and it's about the fact that you want to plan and you
should plan, but then you have to realize quickly
that nothing goes according to plan.
So, everything is sort of messy at this moment,
which is just so appropriate, don't you think?
(Chase laughs)
- You just took my, that was gonna be my nutshell.
It's like, and how meta is this?
But it's beautiful.
I think great minds think alike.
So, the second time on the show.
- Yes.
- First time, wildly successful,
hundreds of thousands of people loved the material,
and I think it's because, well, let's go back
to your early book called Making Ideas Happen.
So many creatives, and I think this is something that,
the quote that I remember putting out on social,
I think it was something like, so many great ideas die
in the minds, on the desks, and on the floors of creatives,
because they don't get their shit together.
- Yeah.
- And that just hits home with so many people.
'Cause you know the audience, really similar audience
that you serve at Adobe, creators and entrepreneurs,
and as I was reading the new book, which is again
The Messy Middle, must buy, it reminded me
that despite how messy stuff is, like,
having a point of view, being flexible,
and actually being organized is really key to this.
So, you've put a very interesting
layer on the creative industry.
How did you come about to look at this?
Was it from inside the creative industry,
when you looked around and said, oh, this stuff's broken?
Was it back in your sort of Goldman days
with your business hat on?
Like, you have a very unique perspective
to be a part of the creative industry.
Where did you get that?
- Yeah, well, before going into the business world
after college for a few years, I was at Cornell
studying book design and business as an undergrad.
And I was always kind of torn between, do I go
this creative direction, or do I go the business route?
And that's always been the epicenter of my interest,
has been like, how business and creativity overlap.
I actually think that the greatest companies and books
are inspired by some sense of frustration.
You know, Making Ideas Happen, my first book
and Behance was really inspired by my frustration
with my friends in the creative world,
who had some of the most, you know, interesting ideas
and great creative talents but just seemed so disorganized.
And I realized, like, gosh, one of the most important
communities on the planet that makes life
literally interesting for all of us and helps us
engage in every part of our lives is also
the most disorganized community on the planet.
What do we do about this? - Yeah.
- And it was that dose of frustration that inspired,
like, 10 years of my work.
And similarly with The Messy Middle,
I guess the frustration that inspired this book was how much
we're obsessed with the starts and finishes of everything.
We love talking about the romanticism of the start,
you know, when people leave their job and start
something new and take a risk in their careers,
or someone sets off to write the next great American novel,
or whatever it is at the start.
The moment of conception is fun, and it's exhilarating,
and everyone wants to tune in for it.
And then everyone loves to celebrate the finishes,
whether it's a great finish on like an IPO
or an acquisition or a launch of a project or a book
or a piece of art or whatever, or a horrible finish.
People love covering bankruptcies
and going out of business and everything else.
And with all these sensational headlines and pithy
sort of summaries of like, five- to 10-year journeys,
you know, we're left kind of confused,
scratching our heads, wondering what to make of this.
- Yeah.
- And when people even ask me about my own experience
or my career, I'm like, well, yeah, you know,
founded Behance back in 2005, 2006,
you know, bootstrapped for five years, venture-backed
for two years, acquired by a company, integrated it.
It's like, great with like three sentences and a bow.
You know, everything looks perfect, when in fact,
as you know as well as I, like, it's anything but.
(Scott laughs)
- And I know this.
(both laughing)
- The five years of bootstrapping, I mean, there were
many times where we thought of throwing in the towel.
There were moments when things were working, and then things
where we felt like we were working amidst complete
ambiguity, uncertainty, and anonymity for years on end.
I was on my honeymoon when we had three months
left of runway, and I was like, this is irresponsible,
but this is also one of the highlights of my life.
Like, what the hell do I do with this?
And that just continued.
So, that's the frustration that inspired me
to try to pull out the insights for the middle volatility
from a lot of the leaders and entrepreneurs
and executives and writers and artists
that I most admire for their long game.
- Yeah, there's a handful of interviews
in the book or snippets.
I think what you just talked about,
there's a beautiful piece in the book where you actually
give your three sentences like you did right here.
Like, this is what I've said for the last five years
about the previous, you know, 10 years of my life.
I summarize it in three sentences.
- And it tells you nothing.
- And it really tells you nothing.
And that's what I find about, you know, everything that
we have here on CreativeLive and my own personal journey.
I built my individual social following 10 years ago
on the back of letting people into the photography industry,
because no one was talking about it.
It was like, oh, great, it's like models on the beach,
and then there's just this great finished ad campaign,
or starting a film and finishing it, the awards.
There's no real documentation about the inside.
So, let's focus in on that just for a second, and there's
a great, I think the book is largely based on a graph.
- Mmhmm.
- And, forgive me for oversummarizing this.
And it's beautiful.
Your design sentiment is very present here,
and it's an intersection of design and business.
'Cause it starts out the start, and then as soon
as you are like, beyond the emotion of starting,
you basically have a crash, and then it's,
we gotta figure this out, oh, shit,
we're gonna get better, we're dying,
and it's just this amazing up and down.
And now, you talked about some, and I'm gonna avoid
just glazing over them like you did, like we almost
ran out of money, and I was on my honeymoon.
And I'd like to dive into some of those, 'cause I think
with the goal of helping people understand that
even you, who has achieved a lot sitting here,
that there's been some very scary moments.
- Yep.
- So, let's go to the one where you were on your honeymoon.
I think you captured this beautifully in the book,
talking about 20% of your brain not being present,
like literally on your honeymoon.
Help us feel aligned with you.
Help us understand that Scott is imperfect too.
- Oh, man, I have to go back to this moment in my life.
Painful.
No, it was, it really was about, and especially that moment,
learning to bear the burden of processing constantly
some degree of uncertainty, and how any creative brain
has to devote some amount of itself
to processing uncertainty in the background.
And it's not that you're looking for an answer
to a problem you're trying to solve.
It's actually, you're processing the problems
you don't know you have yet, and what those might be,
and how you might solve them.
It's just like, kind of existential crisis
in the back of your mind at all times, because in truth,
you're going against the headwinds of society, right?
I mean, everything about the construct we live in,
it's an immune system that kills off anything that's new.
- Yeah.
- And that's actually how we keep the water running,
and that's also how we keep our teams productive, is we kill
off anything that's new and anybody that's new, by the way.
And in order to sort of break that out, break through that,
you have to be constantly processing what's going on,
and that's just sort of a burden, right,
that we all carry if you're creating something new.
So I talk a little bit about that in the beginning,
as well as how to brace yourself for the long game,
and in some ways, short-circuit
the reward system that governs you.
- Yeah.
- I feel like we are so used to things
like the weekly salary and the gratification
from bosses or parents or colleagues or customers,
but when you have none of that yet,
when you have no customers yet and no revenue,
what do you do to supplement that?
I don't think that the long-term vision
of what may be five years from now is actually sufficient.
That might be enough to get you to jump in and start,
but it's not enough to get you
to continue and endure over time.
- So you're on your honeymoon, and you have this going
in the back of your mind, like,
we've got three months worth of cash left,
and do you just keep going?
Like, what's the solution, 'cause right now,
there's a thousand, whoever's watching this,
they are doing the same thing.
They're having a child.
They're, you know, trying to leave a job.
They're trying to put food on the table,
and they've got like, real commitments, you know,
in another part of their life.
Is it compartmentalization?
Is it endurance?
Is it, you know, is this a muscle that we can strengthen?
So get tactical for a second.
- Well, I think, first of all, it's about accepting this
burden as part of the creative's dilemma, if you will,
and not necessarily fighting it,
because it is just par for the course, right?
I think obviously compartmentalization is part of it.
Can you do something to kind of tend to the, you know,
the uncertainty, but also, can you limit the amount
of energy you spend on what I like to call insecurity work.
There's a lotta stuff that we do that we do
just to assure ourselves that everything is okay,
but doesn't move the ball forward in any particular way.
- This is brilliant in the book.
I love this.
- Well, I mean, it's, you know, looking at analytics,
looking at Twitter social feeds, just consistently looking
at things to assure yourself that it's okay, even though
what you're doing is not moving anything forward.
We have to become aware, oh, what am I doing right now?
I'm doing insecurity work.
I'm doing stuff just to keep me at bay
in this period of uncertainty, and when you identify
work as such, then it's easier to actually
compartmentalize it to a period of time.
So actually, what I would do is I would look at a period
every day, you know, from four to five p.m. or something,
where I would say this is the time where I can just do
all that stuff that really is just for my own self-security.
- Let's put some things in that bucket.
What is insecurity work?
It's like checking your social feeds
to see if you're trending up or down.
- Google Analytics.
How many people came to Behance today?
How many new portfolios were actually published?
How much, you know, what's our SEO in this area
that we're focusing on?
What are our revenues in this?
I mean, all these little things you could
consistently look at searching Behance on Twitter.
My goodness, like how many times did I hit that API
with like, Behance, Behance, Behance, Behance, Behance,
'cause I wanted to see, you know, that was the source
of truth for what people thought of our brand
and whether people liked it or didn't like it
or were struggling, or if there was a bug out there.
Like, all of this stuff surfaced from community,
and I would do that all day every day just to make myself
assured and never do anything productive in the business.
So I had to compartmentalize
all of that stuff to a small period of time.
- He's talking to you.
Just in case you're listening right now,
he's talking to you, and me, and the rest of us.
- And myself. - Yeah.
- 'Cause listen, I try to be a player
as well as a coach in this department.
- You did a nice job of walking that line in the book.
And so, if we're compartmentalizing that work,
is there an antidote to that?
Like, is there a realization process,
or is it just up to each of us to identify that
for ourselves and put it in a bucket?
Like, what are the list of things that are not,
what are the list of things that are moving us forward?
Is it just anything that's not in that category?
- Yeah.
Well, I think it's down to the list of things
that can make an impact, and over time, a material impact.
So, most of the things you do to assure yourself
are actually, they could be done monthly, weekly.
They could be done by somebody else
and reported to you if there's something off plan.
Otherwise, just assume everything's great.
- Yeah.
- But reaching out to customers,
asking them how they're doing, are you struggling,
what can we do to better serve you, that's meaningful.
Going over all of the to do's and making sure
that things are prioritized properly,
sitting down and having one-on-ones with people,
recruiting, like, always finding more and more candidates.
What can you do to channel that tendency towards insecurity
work towards kind of productive action is the kind of thing
we always have to hold ourselves to.
The hard part is that that stuff that we're doing,
that action, isn't living us the assurance that everything
is okay like the insecurity work we just discussed.
So this is part of that, you know,
the mental challenge that we all have to play.
- And people, I find that people like me lie to myself
about no, this is, if I don't have this information,
then I'm actually not gonna be effective,
because I need to know if the last three posts,
I'm just trying to think like all of our listeners
think like, like yeah, then I need to change my game.
So this is actually really critical data.
How do we, that's a slippery slope.
- And by the way, you're right.
I mean, we should know.
It's just a matter of compartmentalizing that stuff
so it doesn't seep out into our life.
Like, for example, the time limits
that the new Apple iOS 12 imposes on us.
I wish I could impose that on stuff that I just do
out of my own kind of self-assurance needs,
and it would be great if, if you have an hour every day
where you can just feed yourself with everything
you need to know to feel like you're on the right track.
(Chase laughs)
But then at that point, like, it stops you.
That would be hopefully the next iteration
of our self-discipline software.
- How are you doing with that, by the way?
- I am constantly, well,
it came out right before book week for me.
- Yeah.
- So I'm just like, 15 minutes,
15 more minutes, 15 more minutes.
- Do you put a governor on it?
- I did, yeah, yeah, yeah, I did,
because I just wanna be, to me, it's like,
I wanna be aware of what I'm doing.
I feel like that's probably the first step
towards a better outcome.
- I think Kevin Rose hacked it.
You know Kevin pretty well, of course.
Put a rubber band on his phone,
just as a reminder, around it.
- Oh really?
- So you could feel it when you touch it.
You can see it, and you're like,
do I actually wanna pick up my phone right now?
- It's like the red little bracelet
from zen-type stuff or whatever.
(Chase laughs) - Yeah.
So, anyway, I've been experimenting with that.
I did it last week, and I found it really interesting,
because it signaled to me before I actually
touched my phone how much we pick it up.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, interesting.
- And I put that in the bucket with distractions
and I think, again, insecure, what is it one more time?
- Insecurity work?
- Insecurity work.
All right, so, if the start is beautiful and emotional
and spirited and the end is a great story,
either good or bad, and the middle is endurance,
and you use the word optimization.
- Yes.
- So, I think optimization is pretty self-explanatory.
You wanna get better in small, incremental steps.
I wanna talk about endurance, because that is a thing
that I, the more I talk to people in our community,
they believe falsely that these are overnight successes
and that once you have a success,
that equals success in the long-term.
- Yep.
- Talk to me about your own journey
in as concrete a set of terms as possible
and how endurance played the role in your success.
- Sure.
Well, I think when you think about the volatility, right,
the lows are where you have a need
to obviously endure the pain that comes along with them,
and the highs are the things you're doing,
whether it's in your product, your team,
or just your own intuition and approach to leadership
that you should continue doing as well.
What's strange is that we have this saying of,
you know, don't fix it if it ain't broken,
which suggests that anything that's working, you should
not focus on, but we both know that that's the opposite.
- Literally the opposite.
- To make a great organization and product,
and they're related, you have to be doing
more of everything that's actually working,
and that's what optimization's all about.
But the other realization with this graph,
and then we'll go to the endurance question,
is that we are not our best selves
whether we are in the valleys or the peaks.
When we're at those lows,
we start making decisions out of fear.
It's like, oh my goodness, something's not going well.
That taints our judgment, and we start to, you know,
copy a competitor and make an inferior product,
or we just start to churn our own roadmap
and disappoint or confuse our team, and it's,
we're really not our best selves.
We're also not our best selves at the peaks,
'cause when we're at the peaks, first of all,
we start to get high on ourselves; the ego gets in the way.
- Yeah.
- And we start to falsely attribute the things
that we did to the things that work, and that's
when companies lose their sense of self-awareness
or people lose their sense of self-awareness.
So, I think that that's, you know, that's some concept
of why the volatility is so tricky, right,
'cause we're not our best at either the lows or the highs.
Now, let's talk about endurance for a little bit.
Endurance is really about bracing yourself
for the long game, and when it comes to your team,
narrating your team through this journey.
The analogy I use in the book is
it's like driving a 10-day road trip with your team
in the back seat with the windows blacked out.
They can't see where they are or if they're sitting
in traffic or if they're making any progress,
and you and your narration of the journey,
we're crossing state lines, there's a monument on the left,
we're making progress, we're a third of the way,
anything you tell them actually makes them stick it out
and not go stir crazy in the backseat.
And that narration is extraordinarily important.
It means that we have to merchandise progress to our teams.
- I like the merchandising.
It's not like you're hiding or showing or flaunting or not;
you have to merchandise.
You have to package it for them to consume it.
- Right, and I think the assumption that people
will just see the progress we're making is wrong,
and I know a lot of great founders who I think are really
great leaders, but they're so efficient and they're not
promoters at all, and as a result, they fail to merchandise
to their team the progress that we're making.
In the book, I talk about this research by a professor
at Harvard Business School named Teresa Amabile
who had thousands of people do these journals
and journal entries every day talking about how motivated
they feel and kind of what feedback they got that day
and basically found this correlation with progress
being the best kind of motivator for future progress.
And so it's just like chicken and egg thing.
You need to feel you're making progress to make more
progress, and when you're enduring those lows, nothing is
more powerful than being told, we are making progress.
Now, that being said, you can't celebrate fake wins,
and I also talk in the book about how.
- A lot about that.
- How dangerous it is, right?
We look for things to motivate our teams,
and sometimes, we actually manufacture fake ones.
- Or celebrate the wrong things.
- Or celebrate the wrong things.
Like, everything you are celebrating,
and you should make up all sorts of celebratory moments,
but they should all be towards the end, right?
They should all be things that condone the right behavior,
as opposed to paying for an award, and then my team.
- I think you say in the book, you say pay for press
and then celebrating the press that you got.
(Chase laughs)
- Yeah, that is actually incentivizing
the exact wrong behavior, right?
We don't wanna get fake press and then celebrate it.
But, you should make up your own milestones, by all means.
I mean, I talk about, in the book, you know, the fact
that even in the early days, Behance, you know, was
a made-up word, and we would type it into Google,
and it would always say, do you mean enhance?
Do you mean enhance?
Do you mean enhance?
- Do you mean Beyonce? (Chase laughs)
- Yeah, right.
We were like, why can't we just not be a mistake, you know?
And so, lo and behold, like, that was one of our first goals
that motivated our SEO efforts and also motivated,
more importantly, us to get more creatives' work
on the platform so that we would have more links
and more link backs, and lo and behold, six months later,
Behance was a recognized term in Google's index.
So there are all kinds of fun things we did
that motivated us in the right way.
- Got it.
So, if we're thinking about, you talked about,
you just framed that really elegantly in terms of a company
and a founder, but when you are on your own road trip,
and you're a solopreneur, an independent artist,
it can still feel like you're on a road trip
with the windows blacked out. - Totally.
- So, help me map that same
sort of narrative onto an independent.
How does an independent, 'cause what you just talked
about is merchandising for some people in the back seat
when you can see where you're going.
So, what about the independent creator,
because we're scared.
We don't know where we're going,
and we kinda get glimpses out the windshield, but.
- Well, listen.
In some ways, I can relate to that in this process
of writing the book, because I was doing it
amidst a full-time job and everything else in my life.
It's a solo project,
and what I had to do is hack my own reward system
to stay up to the beat of where I needed to be.
Part of that is finding some folks who are advisors to you
who you can look to for some accountability.
I hired a woman named Georgia to be an editor
in the process, and I kinda said to her
when we first had coffee, one of your biggest jobs
is just to hold me accountable to a schedule.
Like, nag me, please.
Nagging from other folks is a form of natural selection.
It just gets you to start paying attention
to the thing that you're being poked about,
and I recognized that I needed some dose of that.
And I think anyone who's working on their own
benefits from community to some extent,
even if you don't have a team.
The other thing is to just make those milestones
for yourself and your own rewards for them.
So, if you are planning on going to Europe in three months,
what do you promise yourself you'll get done
before you get on that plane, or otherwise,
you can have no pasta while you're in Europe.
(Chase laughs)
There was a woman I met, an independent illustrator,
who was talking about putting up her own website and making
herself official as an independent illustrator for hire.
And she told me that she promised herself
that in some period of months, she would have that up,
this is a woman in her late 20s, or she would
force herself to write a letter to her high school guidance
counselor saying that she ultimately became a failure.
And she said that that was such an awkward concept.
Like, what would she say?
How would she find his address?
Like, the thing, in her mind, the story was so strange
that she became extremely scared of not getting her website
and launching her sort of shingle up on time, you know?
And so that was just a mental hack, right,
that we use to keep ourselves on track.
- That's beautiful.
You've got this endurance metaphor.
I don't wanna leave that alone yet, because you
haven't given me some of your personal endurings.
You talked about being scared about running out of money,
but one of the best things, I think in the book
you actually reference this, but one of my favorite books
as an entrepreneur is The Hard Thing about Hard Things.
- Mmhmm.
- Written by someone we both know, Ben Horowitz,
Andreessen Horowitz, and what I loved about it
is every other book, business book,
it tells you a story of what it's like when it's perfect.
Like, when you start out, do it like this.
Of course, you would never do it like this.
Do it like this, and when you
do it like this, it works perfect.
Then do it like this, and it works perfect.
But the reality is, appropriately titled,
The Messy Middle is 99% of things don't go as planned,
and you're always adjusting, and what Ben did well
in that book, and I recommend it for anyone who's in that
sort of world is he talked about things like how to fire
a friend, what to do when you have no money, what to do
when you, you know, there's like, just a list of stories.
So can you give us two or three of your personal anecdotes
around what you found that you had to endure,
and the lesson that you learned from it?
- Yeah, and, you know, I include some points from Ben
in the book because he brought to the surface some of these,
you know, extraordinarily awkward yet critical moments.
- Yeah.
- One of the things that I talk about in the book
is when I did have to let someone go
or kill a product that was working.
There were a number of moments where there were
very difficult decisions to be made,
because they, in some ways, weren't obvious
or were always easier to kick down the road.
- Yeah.
- And when you fail to make a decision, you create
what I talk about in the book as organizational debt.
It's the accumulation of decisions that should
have been made, but weren't. - Yeah.
- And your job is a leader is to just make them.
So, there were instances where I had to let someone go.
We had a popular product called Action Method back
in the day, which is a task management tool for creatives,
and we had, I think it was like 16,000 paid customers.
It was growing at a decent rate, and we were using it
ourselves, but it wasn't the promise of a Behance network.
It wasn't this notion of a single place for creatives
to showcase and discover creative work.
In our team, the energy was divided.
Everything that we were doing on one of those products
was 50% of what it could have been, right?
- Yeah.
- And I kept feeling this inkling of people thinking,
we just need to pick one, we need to pick one, we need
to pick one, and everyone kinda knew what that one was.
We knew it was Behance.
And the thought of disappointing our customers
and giving up a revenue stream that we so
desperately needed at the time was impossible to reconcile.
I kept putting it off, like another month,
another month, another month, and finally, with a lot
of candid discussions with the team, it became clear,
like, Scott, you just have to make the call.
And it was around that time where I would start whispering
to myself on frequent occasions, Scott, do your fucking job.
- Beautiful, D-F-Y-J.
- Yeah, DYFJ, right?
DYJF, and I've said that to myself over the course
of my career many times, and it's really what I say
when I know what needs to be done.
I know that a great leader would do this,
and I know that my own either sensitivities
or desire to wait for whatever reason is all that's getting
in the way from doing what needs to be done, and I will
just whisper that to myself, and then I will do it.
And I think that's an important trait that we all have
for ourselves and our own self-discipline,
is to recognize those moments, because a lot of creators
get hung up with this cognitive load of I know
what needs to be done, but I'm not gonna do it
because of a million excuses.
Just DYFJ.
- And if you're an independent, it's exactly the same,
but just applied to your own universe.
You know you need to finish your milestone
before you go to Europe. - 100%.
- DYFJ.
- Or you have to fire that client.
- Yeah.
- You know, a lot of independent creatives that I know
will talk about sort of a lifeline of support
from a client that just takes them off their game
or makes them do work they don't want to do,
but they feel that they just
can't sort of cut the umbilical cord, so to speak.
Yet, when they do, they creatively open up.
They become more permeable by other opportunities.
It becomes one of the most important things they've done.
- Yeah.
- And it's like, just do it.
I mean, really, sure, do the mental math
of whether this is something you should be doing,
but if you know it's something that ultimately will happen,
you're like, yes, we will no longer do Action Method,
or this client is not the right client for me or whatever.
Why are you holding up your career and your life?
Like, do it.
- Yeah, that's organizational debt.
- It is, yeah.
It's accumulation of decisions
that should have been made but weren't.
- What's one of the hardest things that you
did not expect in your journey on Behance?
You didn't see it coming, one of the hardest?
And I know, as someone who gets interviewed a lot,
like, superlatives drive me crazy, like your favorite book.
I'm like, come on.
But just one that was very unexpected,
because I'm trying to help people understand,
you can be as smart and prepared and all this stuff,
and we all feel like we get ambushed.
- Yeah.
- And I'm trying to bear a few.
- There were a few themes, right, or things that didn't,
that weren't expected, that were very difficult to manage.
One was just 2008.
We were a small technology company in New York in 2008,
which was a time of a brief kind of hiatus of growth
and investment and everything else in the world.
The revenues we were making on talent recruiting
and other parts of the Behance business lines,
sponsorship of our annual conference,
which were ticket proceeds that we used
to fund ourselves 'cause we were bootstrapped dried up,
and suddenly, I had to realize, wow, like,
we have to make due with what we have.
We can't hire those three new devops people
and the one new designer.
Like everyone, we all need to do
what we're doing a bit more with less.
And that was a, first of all,
it was a negative message to send to the team,
'cause they were like, I thought we were growing.
What's going on?
How do you get people to stick it out long enough to figure
it out, and I think it was during this period of time
where I learned to value resourcefulness over resources,
you know, resourcefulness being this muscle memory
of how to just manage any situation,
versus resources, which are like carbs.
You know, you can blow through 'em.
Any amount that you have, you can just throw 'em
at problems, and they go away for a moment.
- So true.
- And so, I think that going through a period of time
like that, which is why, if companies that I advise
are not bootstrapped at all, I actually encourage them
to give themselves a slightly constrained budget.
Like, give your team the opportunity
to develop the muscles of resourcefulness,
because they will always, always serve you over time.
- And I don't know anybody who doesn't ask for or want
more resources. - Of course.
We all wanna have the easier way, you know?
We all want a little sugar, and we all wanna do that.
- But the reality is constraints drive creativity.
It's the same thing.
Again, Scott's framing a lot of this in a company setting,
but the same is true for you.
What can you do with limited time, limited budget,
only make it purple, make it less than five feet tall.
What are some constraints?
- By the way, I remember when I was interviewing
a lot of creatives for Making Ideas Happen,
and I would always ask them in the interviews,
gimme a sense of what your worst project ever was.
What just was one of the hardest, you know,
setup to fail type of projects you've ever had,
and a number of people talked about a brief
that was unlimited from a client.
The client basically said, listen, at this point,
no budget, no constraints.
Like, where do you wanna go with this?
Like, big, open brief, and that, oftentimes, was the answer.
And my takeaway from that was the power of constraints,
as you said, Chase, for creativity.
- Yeah.
All right, nice job throwing us some,
like, that's a hard thing, I get it.
Let's flip over to the optimization side,
and I don't wanna talk about optimization
of business processes and products for a second.
I wanna go to a point that you made
in the book about optimizing your person.
- Mmhmm.
- Of course, you harken our good friend Tim Ferriss,
who's the ultimate. - Ultimate optimizer.
- Optimizer, body hacker, and share with us
a little bit about, first of all, the concept,
because I think optimizing yourself,
I expect people to be able to layer on this answer
to their own problems, so don't go specifically
with what Scott's saying, but what did you mean
by self-optimizing, and then I wanna get a couple
of examples of what you specifically do.
- Yeah, sure.
Well, the self-optimize section of the book
is about crafting your own instincts and evolving them.
It's about recognizing when you become less permeable
to your colleagues and to the industry
you're in or to the movements.
It's very easy, especially when things are going well,
to kind of shut ourselves off to all the new opportunities.
I like to say that in any craft or business or project,
self-awareness is the ultimate competitive advantage.
- Yep.
- 'Cause it's understanding how people see you
and how that's changing over time, and whatever you think,
again, worked because of what you did before
versus timing and good luck and other people.
It's amazing; we think we're so self-reliant
in the beginning, and then we realize
just how much more reliant we are on others around us.
We think that when things work well, it's because of us;
when things don't work well, it's because of.
- Them.
- Timing, market, customers, other people.
It's other people's problem.
So, the self-optimization side of this
is really about recognizing that that's wrong
and asking yourself at every turn, you know,
what is it that I could have done differently?
How do you get that feedback as a form of compensation.
How often, our folks who are listening who have clients,
even if you're an independent creative professional,
how often are you asking your clients for feedback?
And not just on the finished product, but hey, did my
cadence of communication work really well with you?
Is there anything that I didn't set up properly
in terms of expectations in the beginning?
What are the things you can ask for
and get some gold that you can leverage
to make yourself the ultimate person to work with.
We oftentimes leave that on the table.
- For sure. - It's so obvious.
- Two things I wanna in there from my personal experience
is one, when you ask someone for feedback,
you have to ask it in a different way, 'cause normally,
you just say, you know, how was the experience?
People, in that moment, when they're just
about to walk out the door will say, they'll just say
fine, it was awesome, so good, thank you,
because they just wanna get out of there,
versus if you frame the question like,
can you give me one piece of feedback, or 21, or whatever,
but one piece of feedback, that if we
could do anything different in this project.
- One nugget.
- Yeah, just give me one nugget.
And people, I find that that just completely
flips the script, and they're like, awesome,
'cause I wanna give you this nugget,
and it's usually something, again, I'm thinking
of the independent creative here, but it's usually something
that is not related to the creativity and to the art.
It's usually process-related, for most people who are
starting their own businesses or a solopreneur or whatever.
And to me, that is how I shaped my career as a photographer,
and all of that, I was able to then carry forward
into CreativeLive and ask every instructor who's ever
been on here, like, what's one thing that you would change?
That's sort of like their exit interview.
- Yeah.
- And to me, it's been radically successful.
- It also builds the relationship.
- Yeah, there's trust.
You do talk a little bit about trust in the book
and about being able to connect with your customers,
your peers, and especially the people you work with.
Can you talk about that a little bit?
- Yeah, I think, and it's also related
to the self-optimization piece, and it's also related
to the product section of optimization.
It's just continually gaining
more and more empathy with your customer.
I get frustrated when people go off and build a company
or a product based on their passion
for a solution to a problem, which actually seems
like what most people would do.
The problem with that is that you can, through your passion,
be so, you know, thrusted into one particular direction
that you end up with something that's 30 degrees off
of what the customer actually needs, and that's actually
what gets in the way of that most.
That's a common product-market fit conundrum,
whereas if you are seeking empathy with the customer
suffering the problem, if you're constantly trying
to understand what their struggle is, shoulder to shoulder,
you will always have a product that is more in line,
right, with what they really need.
And so, getting more and more empathy.
And how you prioritize the time you spend with customers
and the questions you're asking, and how do you
reconcile passion versus empathy, because in truth,
a lot of us as entrepreneurs especially and creative
professionals, we're passionate about our work.
- Yeah. (Chase laughs)
- Another thing is around conviction versus consensus.
You know, how do you make sure that we do want everyone's
feedback, and we just talked about soliciting feedback.
You know, at the same time,
some of the most important decisions we ever make.
- Is ignoring that. (Chase laughs)
- Right.
It's like ramping up the volume of your own intuition.
- Yeah.
- And how do you reconcile those two things?
You know, we talk about in the book also,
conviction over consensus, and knowing the difference
between cynicism and criticism,
knowing when to gain confidence from being doubted,
as opposed to recognizing that you're
just on the wrong track and everyone else is right.
And that's part of the, you know, the crafting of intuition
that self-awareness is all about,
and optimization's all about.
- Yeah, so let's keep on this self-awareness tip.
You've mentioned several times
just in the last, you know, 20 minutes, intuition.
The word intuition's probably been said five times.
To me, it's the most powerful thing that we have,
and when you go against it, you pay.
I'm a loud advocate of this, and the question
that I most often get asked in response to that is like,
how do you know when that's intuition or something else?
- Yeah.
- What's your answer to that question?
- Well, it's a good question, because I actually feel
like there's a common argument against intuition these days.
There's so much data, right, everywhere.
And there's a common set of beliefs these days
that intuition is simply bias, and that bias is bad.
Having any bias is just an emotional flaw, if you will,
and it also is the kind of thing that creates a lot
of prejudice, and a lot of bad decisions that people make
come out of bias, which inherently is intuition.
- Sure.
- This goes down to the art of business
and the science of business,
or the art of a craft versus the science of a craft.
And I actually think that in most cases,
we should be focusing on the data.
We should be really scientific, and in most instances,
for example, when you're building a product or anything,
use familiar patterns.
Don't try to be creative.
Just use whatever's out there that people will recognize.
That's a guidebook for 90% of the journey.
However, the art is seeing an edge
that will someday become a center.
The art is recognizing something
that others don't notice or value, yet.
And where does that come from?
It comes from the biases that we carry,
generated from our past experiences.
The things that fascinate you, because of the unique
shape of the kitchen cupboard around you growing up
that don't captivate me, you know, the mistake of the eye
that I see that you fail to see.
It's those things that we carry that make us notice
and invest in things that aren't rational.
And when people are irrational or unreasonable
about something, you know, that is how innovation happens.
You're pounding the table about something that I just
don't think is logical, and then you see something
that I don't, and that becomes that new center.
So, this is the conundrum here.
We should be scientific; we should be data-driven,
yet, we should be curious about the things
that fascinate us that others overlook, because sometimes,
that is the edge.
- Beautiful, super well said.
And continuing on this thread of the self-awareness,
you reference the zen a lot.
What's your connection to zen?
Why is it a pillar in the book, and is it a pillar
in your life, or are you just looking for great quotes?
(Scott laughs)
What role does this play in your life,
and is it something, you know, I'll leave it at that.
What role does this play, and how is it useful?
- Well, I think I'm fascinated
by how forces balance each other out.
- You just used that, art and science, data and intuition.
- It's all about this kind of war constantly
between different forces within us and around us.
And I think, I don't like the notion of quelling this stuff.
I like the notion of letting it rage,
but have a balance within us.
I think that that's interesting.
The greatest creative partnerships I've had
in my past are with people that are very different.
And my co-founder from Behance, Matias Corea from Barcelona
was a typographer by background and a graphic designer,
and he and I were so different.
And he was on some extremes, and I was on other extremes,
and from that partnership, I really learned
the benefit of having two very, very powerful forces
opposed to one another, but respecting one another.
- Yeah.
- And in some ways, I think that that is, when you think
of yin, yang, and just sort of the different
Eastern philosophies of the forces
dictating life and movement and everything else,
there's a lot there to mine and to relate with.
- Oh.
And I think there's a quote that you pulled out,
I think it was somewhere in the first third of the book
about in order to sort of be
on the path, you have to become the path.
Can you reorient me to that?
Is that right, did I say that right?
- Yeah, it was something along the lines of, it was
something along the lines of that everything we make
is, the DNA of that final product or service or creation,
is a reflection of the path taken to create it.
- Yeah.
- When you use a product and it doesn't make,
like the software, hardware just don't seem to take
each other into account, you know it was done by internal
factions at a company that don't talk to one another
and have different processes and whatever else.
When you see creative collaborations between a brand
and a creative and you know that it was for money
and not for, like, passion or purpose, like, you can tell.
You're like, oh, that brand
just wanted to look cool and paid
this woman to do something really interesting for it.
You can kind of, you can distill from things we use
what actually, the chemistry behind it.
And so, in some ways, what I was trying to say
is that how we choose to navigate this path,
how we choose to navigate the volatility and make
the tough decisions and develop the self-awareness
and everything along the way, actually impacts the product.
We typically think that that's not true, for some reason.
- Thank you for that.
Going back to our friend Tim, time, I find, is something
that I've written a lot about and how important it is
to manage it and how graceful it is when you get some
and that it's a requirement for so many creative processes.
There's a little story in the book about Tim
and how to say no and ranking how important is this
for you on a one to 10.
- Tim Ferriss is the master at this.
- He's the master.
So, but I would like to hear your explication,
and just to signal about the contents of the book.
You don't have to do the whole thing.
But just signal for us your view on time,
the management of it, the defending of it, 'cause I think
the first book was very much about getting shit done.
It's like managing, but there's another part of time
that you have to allow space for creativity.
And so, talk to me about time.
You can reference Tim.
I was just mostly hearkening to that.
- Yeah, no, and I'm not an expert on this one.
I am fascinated by how do we better protect our time,
how do we, I talk in the book about how interesting it is
that we'll trade time for money when we're young
and then money for time when we're older, and how this
shift happens at some point in people's lives oftentimes
because of how precious it is and how we'll never, you know,
we'll never get it back.
The calendar is the ultimate reflection of your values.
If you go back and see how you spent your time this week.
- Time and money, right? - Yeah.
And that is ultimately the source of truth.
If you're gonna audit yourself, which is a somewhat painful
thing to do, what you'll find is that some percentage
of your time is spent doing things as favors for others
'cause you couldn't say no, even though you wanted to.
- Yeah.
- And I do talk in the book also about the types of things
we do that we did because we wanted to or because we felt
compelled to and how to kind of navigate or balance the two,
and when those trades are worth it, and when they're not.
And I'm still trying to figure this out.
I've also been thinking recently, and not in the book,
but I've been having a few conversations, including one
friend who's a very famous YouTuber and video artist
who is considering taking a major sabbatical.
And you know, I think about someone like Stefan Sagmeister,
for example, who every seven years takes a year off
and just totally unplugs, and that is his well of creativity
for the next seven-year period of his life.
How do we, what's the benefit of time for creativity?
We think we can just output.
We think we're just chemistry, and it can
kind of trick ourselves into staying with it,
but in fact, there is some replenishment that happens,
and it's a reality, and I'm still trying
to figure out how to manage that in my life as well.
- What are some things you do do?
Like how do you audit your calendar?
When you audit your calendar,
what do you typically find that you wanna change?
- I think it's hard to say no to people who you care about.
And so everyone always wants more time, and it's like,
you know, I have a family now, I have kids.
- Congratulations on that.
- And there's never enough time, right?
And so it's, and then I have my own interests I wanna feed,
and I have my work commitments to my team,
and there's just some time that you spend
one-on-one with somebody that can't be economized.
And so, how do you say no to more?
How do you just say no to more,
and I do think these days about, and Tim talks a little bit
in the book about, how you can explain to someone,
this is where I am right now.
I'm underwater.
If you really, really need this of me,
because you're a friend, I'll be there for you.
Otherwise, like, it's just a bad time.
And put people in that position.
And he says, like, his close friends understand,
and if they really, really need it of him,
he'll do it for them.
- That's called clarity, right?
I think, 'cause we all ask so many things.
Our culture is very social.
We're a social people, especially with someone
that you like and respect and admire,
but those are also the people who, if they're really those
people, will understand that if it's a 10, I'll be all in.
I'll do all of this for you.
But if it's like a four and you just need
an introduction to this person, like, I don't have it.
- Yep.
And I think we both probably struggle with this,
where people reach out and say,
I love 10 minutes of this or that.
- How many coffees have you had?
- Right.
And on the one hand, I wanna be generous,
because there were certain people that were generous to me
when I was getting started.
- Of course.
- And so I've established some of my own filters
in my life to make sure that I still do spend
some time with people that I wanna mentor or whatever,
but that it's a little bit higher touch,
and it's a little bit more sacred and thoughtful.
- Yeah.
- But it's, I think it's something we all are working on.
You know, I wish I was an expert in this front,
because I do, though, find that the calendar audit
is a very interesting exercise, and I try to do it
usually every few weeks, I'll find myself on a plane,
and I'll literally just go through the last few weeks
and just try to understand, what did I do?
Why did I have that meeting?
Did I get anything out of it?
Did I give anything during it?
Should it have ever happened?
How do I start to learn?
- I actually have my EA do that, because I found
that I couldn't honestly audit my own stuff,
'cause I would credit that meeting, that one-on-one, with,
oh, I think that helped me unlock this.
And so I would credit that to productivity,
and having somebody else who objectively.
Maybe it's a teammate or something like that,
but I think this is a super-healthy exercise.
So, I think it's interesting
that we shared this obsession with time.
What is something that you spend a disproportionate
amount of time on, that either you surprise yourself
or other people would be surprised to know?
Like, what do you over-index on?
Is it reading or meditation
or consuming product briefs from your team?
What is something that you way over-index on, relative
to your peers or that surprises you or other people?
- Well, I think there's different parts of my life
where there are different answers to that question.
- Okay.
- If you ask the teams that I work with, they would probably
tell you that I have an obsession with what I like to call
the first mile of experience that customers go through.
I think, whether it's a retail brand or a store,
you know, I was on the board of a company
called Sweetgreen for some period of time.
- Amazing, yeah.
- Just different, it doesn't matter.
I really am obsessed with that initial experience
that customers have in anything,
and I think that it's largely overlooked, what that is,
because people are so focused on the core experience
that they don't think about kind of the biases
people come into an experience with.
What are the defaults?
What do people see first?
What are they told first; how are they told it?
Are they given something to make them
feel successful up front, or are they trained?
Do they have to be trained, or do they have to be just,
you know, and I find I probably over-index in my
professional life in that area, 'cause I just have a strong
conviction that that's something that's really special.
I think I also look for unexpected experiences.
I don't know how else to frame it.
Every now and then, I will get invited to give a talk
in some place I've never been or whatever, and I do find
that if you don't build one or two opportunities
for adventure every year, that they just won't happen.
- Yeah.
- And the more established your life becomes and family
and every other responsibility.
- Isn't it weird how those things just like,
they just crop up?
- Well, and you start to limit
the opportunity for something to surprise you.
It's almost like everything becomes like, you know,
scheduled and planned, and I try to preserve those periods,
and it gets increasingly hard, but it's important.
It's part of the inputs of creativity,
and it also keeps me on my toes a little bit.
- Can you give me an example?
- Yeah, I mean, a few years ago, I accepted an invitation
to speak at this school called Kaospilot that is in Belgium,
I believe, and it just, you know, a small little town
in the middle of nowhere, and it was a group of students
who were all into studying creativity.
And I first of all wanted to understand what that meant.
Like, what does it mean to say, even in high school
and college age, like, I wanna study creativity?
And it wasn't design.
It wasn't like an art specifically.
It was just creativity.
It also went against kind of my beliefs that it's less
about the ideas and it's more about the execution, and so
I kinda wanted to challenge myself with what an environment
at the other end of the spectrum would look like and feel
like, and I landed in this town that I've never heard
of with signs I couldn't recognize, and I was solely relying
on maps to figure out, where am I supposed to go here?
But it was just one of those external experiences.
Didn't expect it.
A lot of stuff hit me that I didn't
know already and it was, one example.
- So that's in the macro.
Now let's talk about in the micro in your personal life.
Not professional.
I think that's one of the reasons I'm probing here,
is 'cause I love that.
Knowing that you're obsessed over the first mile,
I think that's something that people wanna know,
and then it's nice to know that you want these big
adventure moments, but what about in your day-to-day?
Like, what do you disproportionately spend time on?
And I'm sorry to keep pushing this.
- Probably the answer is pretty easy, cooking.
- Yeah.
- You know, I do like to, I like the sort of meditative
aspects of like, making something, and it's not always
the most efficient thing from a time perspective,
- It's easier to press the button and have food show up.
(Chase laughs)
- And these days, you know, with all these
different services that deliver ingredients,
or obviously delivery services and whatever else,
but I just enjoy the process of making stuff,
and cooking is an excuse to do that whenever I can.
- All right, we talked about the beginning is joy,
the middle is messy, the title of the book obviously.
We've got endurance, and we're optimizing, we're fixing.
The end, as you said, is always, even if it was
a horror story of if it was this,
we're standing on the mountain, everything is great.
So, what about these end stories should we keep in mind
to keep us going in the middle,
because are we just waiting for a good story?
Like, you talked about being the middle, the messy middle,
and trying to like, what are the things
that are keeping you going to that end state,
be it fiery death, or we would all like to be successful.
But when you're tunnel vision, is it eye on the prize?
Is it the greatest good?
What keeps us going to the starry finish?
- Sure, and there are a few things.
I mean, first of all, in the book, I talk about, I call
it the final mile, and there's a period towards an end,
and it's not always the end.
It just be an end. - An end.
- Right? - I love that, yeah.
- It's a different sport altogether; a lot of stuff changes.
One of those things that you have to do is stay in the early
innings, and you know, at Facebook, when you go around,
there are stickers that say like, we're still
in the first inning, we're still in the first inning.
There's a mentality at a lot of companies
and for a lot of creatives that we have to stay grounded
with stuff we don't know, with the questions
as opposed to all the answers we've learned.
There's a sense of killing off the work you have done
in order to enable new work to take hold,
and I think a lot of artists and designers
know exactly what I'm talking about.
As soon as you become well known for something,
it becomes almost like a constraint that you feel
you have to do more of and stay imprisoned by.
And I think a lot of weird stuff
starts to happen towards the finish line.
There's a sense of identity crisis as you associate
yourself with your work, and they become one thing.
And that's tough, because how can you then ever hope
to do something better, if you feel like what you've done
is you, and you just kinda get stuck a little bit.
So this notion of recognizing,
you are not your work, and separating.
It's very hard after a five- to 10-year journey.
- Yeah. - Self-sabotage.
There's a lot of weird stuff that happens with people
wanting to obstruct their own success, 'cause they feel
subconsciously that they don't deserve it.
And I talk in the book about some stories of employees
who, towards the finish line of our journey,
started to really act out and do weird things
in their personal lives or in the workplace,
and I became convinced that they were doing this
because they were, in some ways,
uncomfortable with the outcome that they
were about to have, and why does that happen?
So that's some of the final mile analysis,
but the truth is is we wanna stay in the messy middle.
To be done is to die, to quote Umberto Eco.
- You're either growing or dying.
- Exactly.
And I think that part of the challenge
is to stay in the thick of it as much as you can.
- All right.
One more section, and it's just
gonna be a speed around about Scott Belsky.
But before we do, I would like to ask a favor.
Would you look into this camera, or, for the folks who are
listening, just keep doing what you're doing right now,
and give the nugget of advice that was not in the book,
because afterwards, when you're promoting the book now,
you've written it, you actually finished it probably,
if I'm guessing, based on book publishing,
about a year ago. - Right.
- So there's some things
that didn't make it in there or one thing.
It doesn't have to be the superlative, again, but like,
what's a thing that's not in there that if you could snap
your fingers and put it back in there would be there?
- Hmm, that's a good question.
- We've got time.
I've got a whole cup of water here.
We've got time.
Don't feel. - Yeah, yeah,
trying to think of, what didn't make the cut.
- 'Cause you've learned something.
Presumably, this might help narrow it.
Something's happened in your life since then.
- Sure.
- Maybe it's your new role at Adobe.
Maybe it's, you have a new child, so you have a new
sort of vision on, I don't know what it is.
But maybe it's something that's happened
that you didn't have.
- I think that one of the things that I have learned
recently in my life through the process of being an investor
and then writing this book and, I'm looking at the camera?
- Sure, yeah, deliver.
- I think one of the things that I've learned more recently
in my life is the desire to feel fully utilized
and how, in some ways, maybe happiness
is not about retiring and having time off,
or just being able to bask in your creativity,
or having the life you think you aspire for, because it
would be less tense, less anxiety, and more relaxing.
What if, in fact, happiness comes down to the sensation
of feeling fully utilized, where your skills are being
put to the test, where you're being continually challenged?
And that's one of the things I thought about a lot more
recently, because during the book, I was fretting the idea
of writing more and more while having a full-time job.
I felt too overwhelmed, and actually, what I realize now
is that I was happier feeling fully utilized
than I am feeling partially utilized.
And maybe that's the whole notion of a side hustle,
and of people investing in side interests and making sure
that your life is full, and full, and when it's full,
you feel like you wanna take it easy,
and maybe we think we do, but maybe we don't.
- Beautiful.
Speed round.
This is about you, okay?
You're very good at answering these existential questions.
I like to know that you like to cook.
What are you cooking?
- Well, I'm a lifelong vegetarian.
- Yes.
I've heard you also were, one of the prizes
that you hung out there for your team was that
if we get this thing accomplished, if we ship this product,
I'll try this strange meat.
Is that true? - That is.
(Chase laughs)
It's called hacking the short-term reward system.
- Yep.
- For some reason, the team felt especially motivated
by me eating meat, so.
- Okay, sorry.
I just thought that was a hilarious line in the book, so.
So what are you cooking?
- Yeah, no, I love all kinds of,
all kinds of vegetarian creations.
I'm just trying to make food tasty.
So, stir fries and wok extravaganzas.
- Asian?
- Asian fusion type things,
great Italian meals, making pasta.
- Do you make your own pasta?
- I have. - Nice.
You talk about bold outcomes.
What's a bold outcome from your career?
- Well, I think a bold outcome means
making something that exceeds your own expectations.
- What exceeded your own expectations in your career?
- The reach of Behance exceeded my own expectations.
I think the reach of my first book, Making Ideas Happen,
certainly exceeded my expectations, and also,
the people that I brought on the team and the people
they've now become as leaders, whether they're still working
with me or in other companies or have started companies,
whether it's people like Michael Karnjanaprakorn who started
Skillshare, and then, you know, is onto something new now,
or whether it's people in my team who have become really
well-known designers in their industry or have become
leaders in the engineer organization at Adobe.
I never anticipated what type of team would come
out of this endeavor and what these people would end up,
you know, doing and contributing through.
That was also like, an exciting thing of this journey,
is to see the people that it would develop.
- What did you, there's a line in the book I love
about don't optimize for the short-team deal;
optimize for the long-term.
What is a thing that Scott Belsky gave up
in the short-term to have a long-term success?
- The hardest part, I think, was the five or so years
of explaining to people what I was doing,
and they'd never heard of it, and just them being like,
yeah, yeah, cool, you know, and me thinking
that they were thinking, oh, good luck, man.
And also being asked, oh, well like, who's your VC?
It's like, oh, no, we're bootstrapped.
Oh, you know, and having the implication behind that be,
you must not be able to raise capital.
Having to put up with that five years or so,
especially in the bootstrapping phase,
hiring people, going to events, you know, meeting people.
I think that that was, it built some sense of internal
confidence to balance out the external sort of cynicism.
- Yeah.
- And I think that was tough,
but an important part of my journey.
- A lot of the book is focused on creators,
entrepreneurs, people starting businesses, and yet
right now, you're the chief product officer at Adobe.
You have thousands and thousands of employees who report
to you, 128 billion, 130 billion-dollar market cap company.
What is different for you in this world than the other one?
- Well, I'm always trying to find a way
to be challenged in the areas that interesting me most.
I find that that makes me fully utilized.
It makes me feel that sense of happiness
from feeling fully utilized.
I've always loved building for creative people.
I feel like that's one of those things I felt I was made
to do, and I think I can do that in the context of a startup
and as an advisor, especially on the product side.
I think that being in a company like Adobe
building all these creative tools for the creatives
of the world, I felt like there was a chapter
that I was the right person to lead, and that was
what kind of brought me back and made me excited about it.
And it's also a new suite of challenges.
Like, I wanna learn how to manage a very large organization.
I want to think about what culture change
and product innovation means in a large context.
So in some ways, my learning curve is now steep again,
and I think that's where I'm happiest.
- What's next?
(Scott laughs)
- Well, I have some products to show.
(Chase laughs)
- Actually, can we talk about that for a second?
So, for those, you could be listening to this in 2025
or, which, right now, it's the fall of 2018,
and we're a week out from Mac.
I will see you there.
Looking forward to seeing you on the stage.
- Yep, excited about it.
- Is there any preview, can you give us anything,
or what's in the news?
- Sure.
Yeah, well, I think that the theme for this year
is going to be, and this is my version, my version
of the theme for this year is that we're really delivering
on the promise of this thing called Creative Cloud,
which was the subscription offering of all of the desktop
tools that creatives know and use and love.
But, so far, creativity's very much been bound
to the desktop, and also, I think these desktop products
still function as individual kind of products
you download, install, and use.
- Yeah.
- And it's taking years to redo the architecture
and to rethink what the customer experience should be,
not only for creative professionals, but also
for enthusiasts, anyone that wants to learn new products.
And that's another thing that we find, is that
a photographer will want to get his or her hands dirty
with a product like Adobe XD or Premiere Pro or whatever,
but they're just like so daunted
by learning a new framework. - Yeah, totally.
- So that's one of the things we're trying to change
that we're going to announce next week,
some really exciting changes there.
And I think what we are going to do now is just lay
a new foundation of what people should expect from us
for the next few years, and this is the first
kind of step of the inflection for all of the products.
I'm excited about it. - Congratulations.
That's a huge, huge, huge step for you,
huge step for the company, and I'm super excited
to hear some things that are coming out.
Messy Middle, congratulations, beautiful.
- Thanks, Chase.
- I was looking forward to this.
I love what you've built, just the inventory of knowledge
that CreativeLive has become,
and what people turn to it for and why.
It's nothing short of amazing.
You've been in a messy, volatile journey
yourself building something.
- And you helped me plenty of times.
(Chase laughs)
- I've tried, but I just admire it, and it's so cool.
And also what I love about the content is it does really
apply to leaders of different situations, whether you're
leading yourself through a creative journey, or whether
you're leading a small team or a large organization.
So it's really a pleasure.
- Well, something that you said in the book
resonated with me as I'm applying it to my own life,
and that is, so many things, it's not really
just the tactics, or it's not specifically the craft.
It's so much of the other stuff.
That's what we're seeing with the data,
what people are, you know, emotional intelligence,
body language, having tough conversations.
We think it's just the craft, and it's not.
I think the same is true,
and it really comes out in the book.
That's why they call it messy, right?
It's not just about like, the pixels and the design.
It's managing so many other things.
- Well, hey, listen, the mess it meant to be mined.
There's a lot there.
- Appreciate it.
It's just, you're @belsky, right?
- @scottbelsky, yep.
- @scottbelsky on everything?
Awesome, thanks so much for being on the show, bud.
I really appreciate you. - Thanks, Chase.
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