Scott Belsky is an entrepreneur, author, investor, and currently serves as Adobe’s Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Creative Cloud. He is best known for co-creating Behance, the famous platform that serves as a portal to share or find the most creative work.

If you discover Scott, you’ll discover a passion to move mountains and a dedication to pushing ideas forward. He has a wide background in helping creatives in tech and often offers his pragmatic approach to bringing ideas to life in dedicated blog posts or even best-selling books like Making Ideas Happen or The Messy Middle.

How did his career start?

After graduating from Cornell University, Scott started his career at an investment banking firm, where he worked closely with European Markets and later with Pine Street Leadership Development Initiative, where his main goals were to strengthen the relationships with clients.

Creativity was no stranger to him even during this period, when working in a total opposite environment, and it kept being the voice in the back telling him to embrace it in his professional life.

Founding Behance

As a true product professional, Scott Belsky sensed a need in the market that wasn’t satisfied and the right product for this market fit. Even if back in the early 2000s, technology was emerging at a fast pace, a platform for showcasing creative work didn’t exist, so he took this project into his own hands.

Getting to know the intricacies of such an idea was his top priority, so he started working intensely after-hours to discover them. What impact it would have on society and what were the main needs to be satisfied in this industry with the soon-to-be Behance?

Founding a design-centric business requires a deeper understanding of this type of professionals, and because Scott wasn’t one, he started to get in touch with everyone he knew to be related to this area of work. This was a successful path he took, as he discovered the perfect design expert to partner with and with whom he eventually founded Behance.

Fast-forwarding to today, Scott’s idea became the go-to platform for creative professionals to showcase their work and to get discovered and it’s the world-leading platform for self-promotion in this industry.

Always at the forefront of game-changing products

The best product people are known for their sharpness connecting with the world and always with one step ahead of their times. This is how we can characterize Scott Belsky also, who is always identifying the next successful products and actively investing in them.

He has been part of many successful projects that have had an impact on the way we’re interacting online and even offline — he is is an early advisor and investor in Pinterest, Uber, sweetgreen, Carta, Cheddar, Flexport, Airtable, and Periscope (now part of Twitter) as well as several others in the early stages.

❝Periodic disruptions of various kinds provide perspective and make people stay fresh and alert. The only way to stay strong is, therefore, to keep shaking things up.❞

An active advocate for creative people in tech

Scott Belsky is a big fan of creativity, creatives, and most of all, of putting that creativity to work. A common myth among this community is that they have plenty of ideas, but rarely carry them to completion, or as Scott names this process: The Idea to Idea Syndrome. Therefore, he has dedicated a lot of his work to pragmatic approaches to this process, as he wants to empower creative people and help businesses leverage the creative potential of their people.

From detailing the steps needed in “the first mile of a product” to how to put creativity to work, Scott is an active ambassador of critical thinking and often spells out his thoughts in dedicated articles on his blog or even books — he’s a bestselling author, with two renowned titles in his record: The Messy Middle and Making Ideas Happen.

These are some takeaways on creativity and innovation if you want to learn some secrets from a leader in this industry:

🚀 Time is key to innovation — keeping those windows of non-simulation open so you can churn through what’s in front of you and allow your mind to just wander

🚀 In this hyperconnected age where you’re constantly keeping up with your inbox and you’re overwhelmed and managing inflow, maybe being disconnected is a competitive advantage. Taking the time to disconnect and have original thought is becoming the real scarce resource.

He declared in an interview for The Startup.

Inspiration comes to those who seek it, so don’t hesitate to electrify your ideas with Scott Belsky at Techsylvania 2020!