Scott Belsky
Product/design obsessive, founder, author, investor based in New York
Scott Belsky serves as the Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President of Design & Emerging Products at Adobe. In this role, he is responsible for corporate strategy, design leadership across Adobe's product lines, and the incubation of emerging products, including 3D & Immersive technologies, Adobe Stock, and Behance. His focus is on identifying future opportunities and leading investments within the startup ecosystem.124
Before his current position, Belsky was the Chief Product Officer at Adobe, where he oversaw the development of the Creative Cloud suite, launching key products like Adobe Express and enhancing flagship applications such as Photoshop and Illustrator for web and mobile platforms. He has been instrumental in initiatives like the Content Authenticity Initiative, which aims to foster transparency in digital content.124
Belsky co-founded Behance in 2006, a platform that has grown to support over 50 million creatives, and served as its CEO until Adobe acquired the company in 2012. He has also worked as a venture investor at Benchmark and has advised various startups, including Pinterest and Uber, focusing on the intersection of technology and design.1234
He holds a bachelor's degree from Cornell University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Additionally, Belsky is an author of two best-selling books, "Making Ideas Happen" and "The Messy Middle," and is involved with several boards, including the Museum of Modern Art and Cornell University's Entrepreneurship Program.124
Highlights
The Dartmouth Scar Experiment (via @SahilBloom newsletter) is a study that showcases the default "victim mentality" many of us have...good reminder to avoid wasting too much energy on perceived obstacles we can't influence and focus on what we can control. https://t.co/dgWvLs9AMh
So much of humanity has been all about "HOW to do" something (aka skill development). Our educational system, product onboardings - and entire categories of products, were all about teaching us how.
Now it feels like we're entering an era of humanity all about "WHAT to do" (as ideation, writing and application development and deployment all collapse into each other), where taste will outperform skill, and creative choices will distinguish every story, brand, and business more than anything else.
Thinking a lot about what industries will be reimagined as a result of the shift of constraints from HOW to WHAT, and what new genre of products will help...?