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My guest today is Scott belsky Scott was the co-founder and CEO of behance the world's largest creative Network and is a prolific angel investor having made early stage investments in Pinterest Uber Carta and irritable. His company was acquired by Adobe in 2012 where he is currently the chief product officer in this conversation. We cover the importance of focusing on the
My love a customer's experience with your product why every user is at first either lazy vain or selfish and what the rise of creativity tools means for creators and investors in the future. We also cover the major trends that Scott thinks will dominate for the next decade. This was one of those conversations where I left with 10 great lessons that will stick with me for a long time. Please enjoy my conversation with Scott belsky. So Scott have been so excited to do this with you. I think we'll make the first part of this conversation about the
psychology and process of building great products and then we'll talk a lot about everything else that you do. You have your hands in so many interesting things my opening question. I guess it's just very broad, which is what is your philosophy of building great products generally speaking.
That's a great question and I am ultimately anchored by customer Journeys. I've always believed that a prototype is worth a hundred meetings and the greatest failings. I've seen in the product world including my own Arwen.
You build something out of passion for a problem rather than have empathy with those suffering from the problem, which means you just have to kind of get more shoulder to shoulder. Then you've ever felt you could with customers and it's somewhat counterintuitive because a lot of those things you do are just not scalable, but they're what you do to just really feel what a customer is feeling and I think that dictates not only product experience which we can talk about and the first mile of product experience, which I think is woefully,
Neglected then underestimated and underinvested in but also the marketing experience the copy the email frequency the notifications. I mean every single aspect of customer experience ultimately is anchored with what the person experiencing them will feel and so how could you orchestrate all that without really getting close to the
Bone talk a little bit about forgiving customer Journey whether that's a business that you're investing in and looking at or something that you're building yourself at Adobe. Where do
You begin you mentioned the first mile. That's kind of an interesting phrase or concept. How do you begin to understand or attack? One of these
Journeys? I do you think it starts with that first mile? Because at the end of the day all that matters is really who you can get into your funnel and then whatever customer or potential customer sees first at the top of the funnel is the only thing that all customers will ever experience and then it's just downhill from there. It's only at the end where designers and engineers and developers and product leaders are thinking wow. So what should the defendant?
Fault blending state in this product be and what should the copy be when you land there for the first time a lot of these things are that what the Tour all these things are just kind of last-minute decisions often times, especially in startups. It's like the only thing all of your customers will ever see so I think that that's a good Anchor Point and then as you go deeper you have to start to decide and because the reality is always trade-offs which problems you want to optimize to have later and which ones you have to solve now.
That's the path of building a
product. Can you give me an example from your own experience of working to make a first mile better?
I would pick Creative Cloud, which is a massive Suite of products that I'm responsible for and it was built out of a hodgepodge of different products that were bundled together first on a business level and over time as a product and so for us, it's come down to all right, like let's start to understand every screen of the experience. What are the various landing pages? What do customers get immediately?
For signing up when they land do we know anything about them? Oh, no, we don't know anything about them. Well, how do we build a personalized experience for them based on their first my like what we detect and what they tell us and then you start to go down various Paths of well if they stop doing this, how do you help them? But they struggle with this. How do you help them? And again, it's all empathy driven because if we can actually understand what each individual customer is going through then we start to craft those paths for them. And that's where it gets a lot of data intensive experience.
Has as well because now you're dissecting the funnel and you're trying to extrapolate from that personas, you know in different Journeys that customers are getting lost in now, here's the tricky part. Is that once you get a first mile that's working in a product. It doesn't mean it will continue working because every cohort of new customers is different. I think a great example, this is Twitter Twitter had the perfect first mile experience for people who were willing to craft their own timeline those of us who went in and would follow people and unfollow people over you.
Is to make the perfect time online news source for us Twitter was optimized for that out of the gate and then they hit like a ceiling of people who are willing to do that and everyone beyond that came for news. And the idea of having to follow accounts was just too myopic for that next generation or that larger cohort of customers. I don't know what it was like the first hundred million or so, we're willing to tolerate this and it broke down from there. And so of course they've had to do lean in towards topics are always thinking about
Out how do we have it a more topics interest experience and you're seeing that in the product but you have to kind of go back to the first mile continually and say hey now, let's have a new sense of empathy with our newest cohort of customers. Where are they struggling?
What have you learned about user progress? I've been studying video games a lot and it's amazing how finely tuned the feedback loops are in the best say mobile games for making the user feel like they're learning something very rapidly and quickly. Does that same concept that sort of user progress?
Apply to First Mile and great product experiences. Do you think
so I actually think it applies to every product even Enterprise products and I don't think a lot of people understand this I call it ego analytics people want to know and see that they are being successful and I always like to say that in the first 30 seconds of every product experience every user is lazy Vain and selfish. They want everything to be done for them. They don't want to read something. They don't feel like their time should be spent on anything new and you have to
to craft hooks that get people through that laziness vanity and selfishness. What are famous examples will stripe they were like developers with only two lines of code. You can get payments into your product appealing to laziness to some degree and then vanity to some extent when they achieve payments in their product so quickly and I think every product actually has some of that now even the most cumbersome Enterprise products, I believe are successful when they make their users look good to their bosses.
So some Enterprise products. I advised to have an export function where you can export a spreadsheet that is editable. That looks beautiful that is editable by its user so that he or she can then get it make it look like it's theirs save it as a PDF and send it to their management team and then suddenly it's like, oh my goodness who did this level of diligent analysis? That's an example of how you make an Enterprise product Thrive through that sense of ego analytics and making sure people know that they can look good through using the product. So I think it'll
Applies to Social and to Enterprise on the social side. It actually means you have to think about dashboards and instant sources of feedback and there's a debate about is this stuff a slippery slope and are we Building Products that then become addictive and I think that is like the problem is that we know that these are mechanisms that work especially on the consumer product development side, and we have to evolve them to some
degree. I want to click even one level up in the customer Journey, which is what I'll call like the attention.
Phase so user progress is obviously once they're engaged a little bit before that has to be like they have to be aware you exist and care and be interested. What have you learned about? I guess that's the very very top of the journey awareness and attention and
interest a good example was the early days of Pinterest Ben silbermann always had the vision of a discovery Network where you could discover your interest but the real reason people would actually try that product when they had never heard of it or even could barely pronounce it because it was so new
New was the utility of collecting stuff at the time delicious which was owned by Yahoo. And there are a few other bookmarking sites that weren't image Centric and he talked about how everyone has like something they collect or want to keep track of and so let's make sure that we come over the top with the utility for you before we try to get you convinced that there is a future utility that you won't get now back to the laziness vanity and selfishness with behance my product it was all about
People showcasing their work to get jobs. And of course, we felt like creators who want to see each other's work and get inspired by each other's work. But a lot of other competitors of ours were always focused on the inspiration side and our team was like, well, the last thing creatives need more of is creativity. They don't need more inspiration. In fact, if you ask any creative, they'll often times say that they have a hard time getting shit done because they have too many ideas and they've got too many things to try and they need to actually Focus.
Be more focus on execution. And so out of the gate we decided we would never use the words creativity or inspiration in the behance product. And we also focus on top of funnel utility of manage a portfolio site that also is broken down into projects so that people can discover them who don't know them because what we found from our audience was that they had these websites out there that no one other than their parents and people they knew would go to and they wanted to get discovered for
Jobs, and so it was like, hey, we will help you get more job leads by breaking your portfolio down into its parts and making it all searchable. And so that was our top of funnel value prop that you described.
There's a kind of raw utility job to be done hook that's one version of this in the past you and I have also talked about this concept of window dressing that sometimes will get you in the store isn't the thing you actually need. Can you talk about this concept of window dressing as sort of a second side of the coin of utility
the window dressing has to appeal.
Again to that laziness vanity and selfishness piece. It has to make sure that your accounting for the thing that the customer would take that step because there's some immediacy to the value and discover the long-term value when they're ready. And actually that is one of the biggest mistakes we all make as Founders and leaders of products because we become not only in love with our products, but we also fall in love with our power customers and we see the value they get and we're always like if we could just show the value that they're
Getting to new customers. They would try our product to the problem is is that the new customers see that as unachievable for their moment it for the 32nd, you know moment that they're in and so you kind of have to have in some ways to Value props for everything you're promising and then whatever you put in the window is the thing that brings someone in the door and then once they're in the door, you show them other merchandise think about this with book titles and book graphics and stuff. I mean, it's so silly that whatever.
The illustrator that you're working with and the publisher thinks is clever and ends up being the representation of 300 Pages worth of insights and research and how sad is that? But at the same time again laziness vanity selfishness and how do we get someone to crack open that book and read that first page and it's a totally different Art and Science that we have to disconnect from are more like purposeful long-term Visions for our product.
So we've talked mostly about the customer side of this so far getting their attention getting them moving that first.
I'll love the idea that that's just a way under considered. I'm guilty of attitudes. It's like the laughter thought that you deal with at the end of building the actual product. I want to turn to the product itself both books that you've written the messy middle and making ideas happen. I think are sort of an Ode to hard work cranking it out after the spark of inspiration more about the 99% perspiration. So having built a lot of products yourself and been behind a lot of great product builders in your investing career. Tell me what you've learned about that messy.
Middle about the process of taking something from an idea to an actual functioning long-term high
value product. The inspiration that I had for these books was really my frustration with the creative process in general and you know as humans, we're not wired to embark on multi-year projects. We're wired towards short term rewards if the average lifespan was 25 years back only a hundred years ago yet alone hundreds of years ago then the idea of embarking on
Without a foreseeable end is actually biologically not smart. And so how do we hear and short circuit our teams in ourselves with our products to achieve something great. That does take years to bake to me. It's that's like the funnest part of management for me is hacking those reward systems coming up with fun things to do to keep a team engaged long enough believing that the competitive advantage of startups is just sticking together long enough to figure it out. If you have the right people, even if you don't have the right idea you'll just
keep iterating until you find it if you have the right people. So I think a lot of it comes down to rewards if I were to sum it all up and with a product, how can you make sure you're getting the satisfaction of satisfying customers soon. I think that the unsung heroes of a lot of great companies out. There are the early customers that for whatever reason we're so willing and forgiving to lean in despite. They didn't have any equity in the company. They weren't employees. They just for whatever reason we're sitting in some Enterprise or were some
Kid in high school who like wanted to play with something that wasn't really working yet because they were so fascinated by it and then they shared feedback with the team. And then that was the source of the early satisfaction that kept the team going and so that's one reason why I always encourage teams to not try to get any customer in the beginning but get those like willing and forgiving customers
first. I'm curious the reward circuitry itself. I'm sure you've tried this a lot of different ways breaking down even if you kind of know where you're going over a multi-year period the most
Effective ways of breaking down that reward circuitry to keep people motivated and the problems that you've seen and learned to
overcome. I'll share like a couple of fun stories. You know that I think eliminate what I'm talking about here. So in hands we were bootstrap for five years before raising our first round of capital from Square Ventures and folks like Jeff Bezos and Chris Dixon and a few others, but for five years, we were kind of hand-to-mouth and it was rough. It was also over the course of 2008, which was also a hard time in the economy.
And so I realized that all I had to do is keep the team together and keep cranking. I mean we believed in this we knew that the need was there we had to survive and we had to kind of iterate with our customers. And so we started to have some fun with how we would feel like we were making progress when there was no official semblance of progress. We weren't making any money and we weren't having volumes of people join our site yet. The technology wasn't there yet. And so we started fun things. We had these things called slap bets. I'm not sure what we called them. Slap. That's what we
We make these little games. I have been a vegetarian since the age of seven for whatever reason are like small engineering team was like, you know what Scott if we reach a hundred thousand members like you're going to agree to any form of meat we want you to eat off of one of our forks, and I was like whatever, you know is if that's ever going to happen. We'll see so I said sure and you know, lo and behold like three years later at a Christmas dinner, I was doing that but it was like one of those kind of fun short-circuited rewards it wasn't real but it was actually pushing Us in the right direction.
I remember 2007 when we came up with the name behance every time you type in behance into Google it said do you mean enhance and it was like really frustrating and so another short-term kind of go we had was let's just get enough blog post and enough linkbacks to portfolios that were a legitimate search results and then six or eight months later we came in and alas finally Google no longer thought that we were a mistake and then I always like to tell the story that Beyoncé became super popular a year later and be lost.
Over again, but then we regained it. So, you know, I think you have to do some of those fun things and that's why also I think that the talent of merchandising the journey to your team is important you are as a leader you're driving this like cross-country road trip with your team with the windows blacked out in the backseat. And unless you narrate the progress you're making and I'll end with this like Teresa amabile. I write about this in the book Professor Harvard Business School due to research study on motivation and companies.
She had people journal every day and talk about how motivated they felt and what they were getting accomplished and through this whole study her basic takeaway. Was that progress begets progress? You have to feel like you're making progress to make more progress and that's what I mean by merchandising and being creative with what that progress actually
is. So it's almost your job on the coast to coast road trip to pick the 15 pit stops Each of which is sort of celebrated in a milestone along the way. I love that concept. So if this fascinating dichotomy of being on top of
Most frankly one of the most interesting company turnarounds. I'll call it at a do be transitioning from a very old line software business to one of the leaders of the sort of cloud Suite of services very successfully can look up a stock chart if you don't agree and also investing quite a lot in some of the iconic companies technology software companies of the last decade when you're looking at a company with your investment hat on. How does this learning about customer Journey?
And product and window dressing and user progress all these things. We've talked about leadership. How does that transfer into a unique lens for you to evaluate companies where you're not going to be involved?
It's why when I get on a zoom or meet it with a Founder. I just want to jump into his or her product quickly because I want to see how they unveil it to me. I want to see I always use the word object model. I don't know if that's the right term but I like to understand like when I look at the product.
I really do believe that every product is sort of the DNA of its team. And so if someone explains to you the product by jumping into some part in the middle as opposed to saying, well, here's how you add this. And then when you do that it goes here and then if you step back you'll see that that's where it all comes together. And then this is how people get oriented your that to me represents like the DNA of a product leader that will manifest itself in the product as something that is easy to navigate.
Eight and a product that will care about its first mile. My little Theory here is that if you can nail the first mile of any product essentially if you can have a window dress that gets everyone in the door then if you're solving a problem you have the right team you will do something once people are in your shop that will make them pay you but the problem we have in this world is that no one goes into doors because everyone's busy so that's what I'm always trying to understand and I go through the same thing when I hire people to work for me at Adobe. I also want people who can
Take a step back and understand the context of where a customer is in their journey. And for a long time Adobe has had a legacy of products that were so indispensable and that people would feel it was a badge to overcome the learning curve of Photoshop where to understand the cockpit of After Effects. And in fact now that there are lots of competitive products out there that have a very compelling front door and they're easy to get started and it really easy for Smiles that get it keeps us on our toes we have to reinvent.
Ain't our first of all, that's why I love being a subscription business because we can really think about getting people in the door and then adding value over time is
their example of this that stands out in memory of a company you've invested in where you had this magical first interaction with the founding team and them showing you the product. You're not supposed to pick favorite kids, but just one that pops to mind first as exceptional
when I first heard about boober from Gary Kemp, he and I had a partnership because he was running StumbleUpon at the time which he had purchased back from eBay and I was
We had so we were doing a lot of these like cross-promotion things and he like whipped out a sketch pad of this idea of summoning a car and I had previously before being an entrepreneur going into the creative industry. I was working at Goldman Sachs of all places where whenever I needed a car to go home at night. I'd have to fill out this little form and then I had to give it to the dispatcher and then the give one of the driver and then one got back to me and I'd to give it to an assistant to file when he kind of walked me through and Garrett actually is a very
Like first mile product thinker he does start from design first. He does think about okay. Well a customer would just have to click this and let's remove all navigation and all and that was actually one of the first things that compelled me about what he was building. I also gave him the worst advice ever which was dude you're running some will upon you should be focused like you can't start two things at once. I'm like gosh like I'm so glad he didn't listen to me but there are a bunch of Enterprise products. We're kind of think of one in a good example, but it starts
Object model
if I an object model and I want to make sure I understand that
the best way to describe it is I drop you somewhere and do you know where you are? Do you know a how you got there be what you're supposed to do there and see what you're supposed to do next and it sounds so obvious but actually very few products get this right because first of all you might find Dave ring always like to say the devil's in the default wherever you land and whatever is there is what 80
percent of all customers will always see someone once told me that the LinkedIn profile page back in the day always had this like interstitial of like welcoming you with a little X at the top right hand corner and apparently I know and whatever click that X so it was you be on LinkedIn for years. You'd still have like the welcome interstitial devils in the default. And then when you're there is it clear how to go back if you make a mistake. Is it clear when you go forward what the breadcrumbs were so you kind of understand and why is this stuff matter because it's
Can you familiar with the product so that you know how to use it so that you don't get lost when your attention is diverted somewhere else and then you get discombobulated. I mean when people say oh I'm a technophobe maybe what they're really saying is that this design language and this object model of this product is not native to me. And that's also why I advise teams that get creative around their UI their user interface and how their product works. I'm always telling teams don't reinvent familiar things.
Familiar patterns are your friend they breed utilization. The only time you want to introduce an unfamiliar pattern to the product is when you're like truly innovating on something that's like never existed before otherwise use the same familiar patterns of Facebook. Everyone knows how to
use it. I love the one foot in the known one foot in the unknown concept respecting that user laziness what other user psychology elements you've mentioned several.
Do you find the most important to keep in mind and I'm thinking here of like the seven deadly sins? Who what you hear about sometimes in product design. Are there other aspects of user psychology? We haven't covered that you think are important to
respect we talked about Lizzy being selfish. I think another aspect of your psychology is really understanding the insecurities of a customer at every moment in time. So in an Enterprise product, it's typically job security. It's not knowing what to do next. It's not having the time to spend on things and worrying that they're going to fall behind.
And in a social product is often times how people feel about their self-esteem. I think that maybe this goes to the empathy piece, but I do think that a lot of even like a lot of notetaking products these days, you know, if they make you feel more organized by the way, they're designed then they address and insecurities that a lot of us have a feeling disorganized and overwhelmed. I think a lot of great design makes people feel secure with whatever it is. They're doing another example of that. It's kind of fun.
Any is that a lot of these new products out? There are AI driven to find a solution for you. So for example a travel website where you're trying to find the best deal on something and the funny thing is that obviously these are super computers running algorithms and stuff. It can tell you simultaneously what the best flight value is, but instead as you've noticed in a lot of these sites it gives you a little like thinking icon. It makes you wait for six seconds. Why is it doing that? It's doing that.
Because it needs processing time. It's doing that because it's making you believe and feel secure in its in the result. Like you want to feel like the computers thinking and doing in searching the globe and sorting and applying scientific algorithms of blah blah blah blah. Oh and then your best deal is this and so I think that's another example of like a design pattern that instill security and confidence in a customer experience. How do you
ensure that? All of these things are true when you're building a product. So what is the
This is all kind of qualitative things. You want to respect how do you know once you're building something that you are in fact caring about the users in security or acknowledging their laziness? How do you actually make this come to
life? Yeah. Well, it's easier to know when it's not coming to life because you start realizing that people are turning the people aren't getting through the first miles if 95% of people that come to a landing page and have certain behaviors that suggests that they're engaged enough to take the next step are not taking the next.
There is a concrete reason and then the question is as you optimize to get make it better. Are you asking the questions we're talking about is the copy helping them understand their immediate utility as opposed to the long-term value of gain from this product laziness vanity and selfishness. Is this customer feeling secure with what we're offering that's why you know, we used to see all those labels on the internet about like verified blah blah blah blah like Better Business Bureau blah blah blah and whatever these badges.
And I think they kind of stopped because everyone was just using them even though they weren't even going to certifications. It was like wasteful pixels. But what they were there for is to make you feel safe. So you would click that button and proceed especially in the early days of Commerce online. So I think it comes down to using data to understand that something is not working and then starting to ask the right questions around some of the principles were discussing to make the right changes in
test. I'd like to turn now and talk about some of the things you've written.
That you're observing in the world that may turn into really interesting Trends in software and just in Commerce generally speaking. I always loved people that are just insatiably curious about the present and try to see kernels or breadcrumbs for what the future might hold the first one that really stood out when you wrote about this to me was what you call the era of edu ployment and this interesting blurring line between the traditional system of learning and then going and doing something. Can you talk about what you mean by that concept and what you're seeing that makes you believe that
That is coming.
So what I refer to as IG appointment, is it a new trend? I'm seeing where companies will basically solicit students for a trade to learn come and learn painting with me is a company called Main Street or come and learn how to repair every Appliance you can imagine and get certified in each Appliance. That's a company called Nana this two examples and then they train you up with certifications and online training and then they say hey now that you're
Side, this is the lead gen for you to then now practice your trade in Nana's in case they actually go to all these manufacturers of whirlpool and all these others and these manufacturers get so much in down from customers with problems and then they're not in the business of service. And so they're willing to just offset all of that volume of demand to people who can provide for it. And if Nana is like training people up for every specific Appliance and they can in a very high-quality whey service any need of
an End customer and so what you're seeing is this vertically integrated stack of both education and employment that is fascinating and it's actually really empowering for the next generation of small businesses and people it's like the next generation of leveraging some of the benefits of uber some of the benefits of great online education courses and stuff like that and then and then Market places Etc. And I think that also part of that is this notion of the reverse franchise model you are an appliance repair person, but you don't have the ability to take
Payments you don't have SEO you don't even know what that means. All these other like aspects of your stack are missing and so a company can kind of come to you and say hey in exchange for making it up 7 percent of your income going forward. Will I get you on the full latest stock of everything and you can operate your small business but actually like grow your business, you know leveraging all of the latest technology. What do you think that
means for the traditional education model especially College, which I feel like you've been reading about the demise of
Of especially the longer tail certainly not like top 20 universities, but everything else could be a bad deal, right you come out with a ton of debt and sort of this weird general-purpose education. That's not tailored to any one real job to be done in the real world. Do you think that this trend might actually make that long tail start to go away? Well, I do
because their education has been one of the most weird Roi type of Investments people ever make because they pay a fortune and go in debt for no guarantee of any return at least
From a career perspective and yeah, we have a job department and we'll have a career fair and then good luck. And in this new world we live in there will be new models that give you a higher guarantee than that. And so then the question will be how will these compete by can go to a small college and maybe get a job or I can go to this company and get trained and get a guaranteed employment and it's not just in painting and appliance repair. You know, it's also in digital and marketing analytics, you know and other roles.
Like that, you know, you saw the rise of companies like general assembly and these schools are like trade schools, you know, then there's the argument of oh, but how about the classic liberal arts education and the types of things you learn to be well-rounded maybe those learnings come from other sources. We're all online these days. We have instantaneous access to things like masterclass and like all these other online sources of knowledge. Like why wouldn't we augment our development personally as opposed to for a fortune?
Unrelated to one of my second favorite trends that you've written about which is and covid obviously is key part in all this you see people that have been contributors to some media organization or whatever leaving hanging up their own shingle using a suite of tools whether it's sub stack or something else to sort of go direct to Their audience. What are you seeing beyond that just kind of obvious General high-level Trend in the way that talent and Their audience grows together interacts engages in Commerce together. What do you think the
Future holds
here. I think this is one of the most exciting things to me about the error we're living in right now, you know this notion this entire notion of the shingle whether it was for an agency a creative agency of Law Firm a venture capital firm any of these entities, the reason they have names that are not the people's names, but the name of the business is because there was credibility that people needed it to graft onto and there were back office functions.
That people had to share in order to be able to be competitive. And so you just take those two needs out. Now you build your reputation based on the knowledge that you share you can really and Weevil you and I both seen examples of people who just go on social media sites like Twitter start sharing great insights into a particular vertical that they're in and then suddenly amassed a huge following and no one's even met the person people just emerges as thought leaders and experts some of them are even Anonymous and we
oh them and like really learn from them Etc. So if that's any indication there is there's never a true meritocracy. We've got lots of problems in society, but it is kind of exciting the individuals build a following now and they don't need to associate themselves with a shingle to be able to get opportunity. And then of course as you mentioned the second part of that is the full stack of everything required to operate a state-of-the-art business these days that as we both know at this point, we can all get for maybe paying.
30 and 50 bucks a month from five to ten different vendors. So exciting.
What do you think are weird Frontier aspects of this trend that may emerge are there ways that this gets even more extreme in terms of people not needing to be a part of a firm at all. Like do you think that this starts to you've also written about decentralization like with more and more pieces like the back office handled by some generic piece of technology could this get really strange where it's like basically companies
Of one all over the place.
Well, if you think about it from a customer view, you always want to work in certain disciplines. It's all about the person. So I have a lawyer. It's really about him if he said I'm going to hand you off to so and so I'd be like no I don't want to do that. My accountant is a person that I've gotten to know over the years and I don't care where he or she works. I just want to work with that person and I think we're seeing it in Spades Venture Capital right now because at the end of the day as a Founder you're
person on your board you're building a relationship with an individual and who that individual is what they're good at matters deeply to you historically, you've had to go to a shingle and pitch a bunch of people that you didn't know and then you get one of them now you can actually get enough money from individuals that you know and follow online or hear about or get to know whatever or who came from a great startup you admire, you know, you want to learn from and you can have that specific person and actually
Really when you tell people who's investing in you you'd almost rather say it's that person as opposed to whatever legal entity they set up to operate. And so I think that we're seeing of people in firms there. Obviously, of course all building a name for themselves when they are in a firm that doesn't give them good economics they leave because they realize that they're getting deals because of who they are not because of the who the firm is and then you're also seeing individuals raise hundreds of Millions on their own because that's what matters so it's the market speaking.
It's people capitalizing on this phenomenon that you and I are describing. So I actually think we will if you fast forward, I do believe that we're going to have a lot of individuals that we work with that have all of the benefits of a back office of being in a business, but are in fact, so Louis as I like to call them. What
does that mean for you as an investor? It almost makes me think like to use your messy middle term in a very different way that this future then is about this like long tail of individuals and maybe like a very concentrated set of Mega.
Of businesses, you know the Microsoft's that kind of infrastructure layer businesses that make all this long tail possible and then the middle sort of Falls away the slight organization the law partnership the whatever it is that's in the in between those two things becomes less relevant. How do you interpret that as an investor? Does it then just mean you basically want to invest in the enablers in sort of the platform type plays the shopify's of the
world was an investor. I have a very strong thesis around this empowerment of The Soloist and how that will crack.
Vertical, you know, I am looking for businesses that allow people to operate independently and solve their problems. So, you know, if one problem is lead-gen or if one problem is CRM for the individual type business when you look at products, like sub stack and others, you know, those are marketing tools for The Soloist generation. And so I do have that lens for things that I'm looking looking for and I don't think big companies are going away. I actually think though that there
Are going to start to behave more as people and what you're going to see is more leaders having a known relationship with their customer as opposed to standing behind their shingle and maybe we'll be a lot more social media accounts for the people who work within companies and probably a lot more marketing campaigns where it's more about people that are at the company than it is about the company perhaps
so you've got these two lenses of like called back and front office the back office. I think of another way to think about that as
Productivity,
you've also written about how so much software is just putting work flows into now web-based software to make people more productive just sort of standardized workflow processes and that you believe that maybe this will begin to shift more towards enabling creativity. So as we cover off more and more of the productivity stuck into software paper and pen and spreadsheet prophecies that opens up people's time to be creative. What do you think? That means what does that represent in how the world will change if there's this?
Us move towards more creative tooling
this also connects, of course with the conversation. We had earlier about employment and trade schools and stuff like that because take a step back for a second. It's very clear that much of the work that was done by people of course is being done by algorithms and software. We all know that that trend is locked and loaded and on its way to happening. And so it's funny that we used to be measured in the workplace based on their productivity and that's why companies like Microsoft and others that deployed productivity software across the Enterprise.
Were the rulers of the land and still are to some extent and that's great. I mean we're going to be able to achieve all productivity needs with computers. But then the question is are we going to stand out and compete based on being more productive anymore or is there something else that we become measured by and standout through and I firmly believe that the most human thing that only we can do is to be creative whether that means to visualize data and compelling ways to tell a great story whether that
Means to merchandise decisions more effectively in an organization to get alignment around them whether it means everyone participating in building and critiquing a prototype. I just think that there is a moment where the creativity tool deployment across the Enterprise will be much like the productivity tool appointment was in decades past and I think that what are the implications of this number one we're going to have to train people to be creative. It can't be art class on Fridays anymore. This has to permeate
The curriculum when you're writing a history report, it shouldn't be a paper anymore. It should be a multimedia presentation where you're forced to learn video and audio Tools in these are the skills that are going to help these kids, you know have future-proof careers and then in companies, it means that we can't rely on training everyone to use products like Photoshop and illustrator. We have to have content first and collaboration first experiences via web as opposed to Bulky desktop software. There's a next generation of creativity that we need to enable. It sounds like cheese.
But for the future of humanity, we kind of have to train people up to do stuff that's different and differentiating the computers. I mean, it's kind of obvious. What do you think? It means to
get better or more creative get better at creativity or become more creative. Is that something that I could send you a generic person and you could train them somehow or show them a tool kit to become more creative. Like what have you learned about making that a thing in someone's
life? Yeah, once people do become trained. They like a blank canvas. They like to just have their utensils and
Start to work, but for the majority of us, we want to see things that we feel compelled by and then we want to click remix and basically make it our own that is that broader democratization of creativity opportunity. And so if you were to give me a handful of folks and say make them creative, what I would do is expose them to a lot of templates that address the problem. They're trying to solve and then when they clicked one, I would automatically
With their company's brand or their past posts or whatever else so that they get the design consistency by default as opposed to a creative professionals job is to like continue design consistency. There's this whole notion of a design system and every organization where your funds and your color is like all these things are consistent, but if you can do that by default for this non-creative Pro that we're discussing then they're Off to the Races because now they can actually turn out real time.
Assets on behalf of their product for all these different social media formats and everything without needing a design team to work for them. And you know, it's one cool thing. Remember the Super Bowl and the Lights Went Out yes and within 30 seconds the Oreo social media accounts tweeted and posted you can still dunk in the
dark. It's
amazing and I was like, that's amazing. But here's what's really cool about it. It's impossible that a creative professional design team.
In a product like Photoshop made that within 30 seconds and posted it and all social media accounts not possible. But some social media marketing folks were outfitted with the right templates with the right brand elements with the right fonts with the right imagery and they were able to turn this out and think and act in real time. And if you think about the social media World we're living in now think and act in real time might be the future of marketing and it's not going to be driven by big.
Agencies and creative teams is going to be driven by social media marketers that have everything at their disposal and can do it. Now.
What do you think is the maybe we'll even get into like the Sci-Fi kind of Realm the future of interfaces. You mentioned earlier that you kind of don't want to do something new unless it's really unlocks a lot of potential that wasn't possible before. Where do you see that being true or some sort of user interface is really new Innovative and disruptive to our current
interfaces something. I've been thinking about it hasn't 16 or
I wrote an article called the interface layer and my argument was that design is going to commoditize everything underneath and I got a lot of backlash from friends who are engineers and data scientists. They like Scott dude, like, you know, I know you're all about design and stuff and you got like the bias of behance and whatever but come on like it's all about the technology and my response is well customers don't love technology for the technology. They love to
technology for the user experience of the technology. You can have really incredible Tech. But if the UI is like impossible to use your dead out of the gate so by Logic that means that the interface layer does actually determine the Fate as much if not more than whatever is underneath and then fast forward in a world where we've got apis for every service imaginable and tons of underlying Services. We use all these like Enterprise products and even consumer products that we use
If we could just bring them together and Superior ways will use the aggregating product and you know, you just saw new startup called text launch which is trying to aggregate all of your messages into one interface, which is really hard to do because Apple Google and others are always competitive with their messaging products, but with the mind on the interface layer, my view is that we are going to become agnostic to the underlying Services themselves if you need a ride, do you care if it's Lyft or Uber or whatever else?
Do you just want to say I don't know to Alexa? Maybe I need a ride or to Siri. Those are disruptive interfaces because their audio and if those interfaces then send that request down to a layer that competes and finds you the closest and best price car. You'll just take whatever car shows up. And so that's very disruptive now will those companies release apis that allow some company to, you know, have those compete underneath the surface, maybe not now, but I think they're going
Have to because the interface were is like a slap of hand game the better more Superior more accessible interface. I'm actually surprised if I were running one of these big consumer electronics companies, I would offer to install screens in every kitchen for free because if you could own the indispensable real estate of a family
Which is the screen it's amazing how big of an industry there is around Billboards and stuff to own this real save when I'm driving, but when we're in our kitchens, if every family in America gracefully accepted a free screen in their kitchen that is an example of a disruptive interface because Suddenly It's just there and if you buy things or request things you're agnostic often to the services underneath and so that's fascinating to me. It's sort
of like a way of saying you just want to own the front door the on-ramp all the way through where we started the first my
Like you're right you want to own from user intent or interest you want to be the first place that the lowest friction place that they can go fulfill that intent
you do and goes back to the tower designers. I just think that the end of the day designers are the ones who are influencing the decisions that we make it's in the interface there. We make every decision in our lives these days
are there any principles of good design that you would leave people with that you've learned from working with so many over the years of what good design
means. Well, I guess if you thought
that's why it is I do think that rate design is ultimately manifested as small things that make a big difference and whether it's the emission of something or the thoughtful indication of what's active versus inactive or are you on mute right now or are you unmuted like what is the button actually do? I mean all these little nuances really address or either fuel or release our anxiety based on the decisions that are made so
I think also great designers are also grounded in some of the stuff. We talked about earlier round object model So and I've worked with a lot of designers and what I find is that there's some people that are so talented but for whatever reason they make things look beautiful, but the object model is not there in other words when I look at the design, it's not clear how I got there what I'm supposed to do and what I'm supposed to do next after that but some designers really get that and I think it has in part to do with empathy in part to do with a sense of product Sensibility.
Do you know how things are built and what the states should be this notion of I love the term when you're building a product of progressive disclosure and what that means is that it only shows you what you need to know when you need to see it be designer will like show everything you need and do it beautifully and thoughtfully, but an a designer and a level designer will only show you the things when you need when you need to see them and will really work the product team to understand the customers needs because the less noise the more signal the more
Informed we are do
you think that we're slated for a decade ahead that is explosive or is sort of regressive coming out of covid. What is your sense for the way that the business and sort of economic world will go do you think pent-up demand is a real thing. Are we in for the Roaring Twenties that that Everyone likes to talk about?
Yeah, so I do believe we are and I think that it's going to be a really wild emergence. I
think that we have no idea what the impact of our pent-up lives will be. But what I can say is that the world and experiences have never been more accessible to us products like Airbnb products that allow you to take audio tours of every nook and cranny of the world and really excited about the next slate of augmented reality experiences think Pokemon go but thank doing scavenger hunts to find hidden Bitcoins and all kinds of fun.
An interactive augmented reality experiences out in the world that technology has sort of teed up for us. But over the last year all went kind of dormant and people were just heads down. So I actually do think you know, I was talking to my friend Jen Hyman who runs Rent the Runway and she was talking about her team's work planning the fashion collection for the next year for 2022 and 2023 and how they're really convinced alongside the fashion designers that they
consult that there is almost like a culture bending aspect of the Resurgence that we're all going to have of the Roaring 20s, you know where we're going to want to just not only get out there but maybe be like a little bit more adventurous and self-expressive than maybe we were beforehand. So listen, I'm an eternal optimist. It's actually probably why I never saw myself as a classic Venture Capital investor because I think in some ways you have to be a gift to see by default what could go wrong as a great investor of a lot?
Anywhere as a seed investor or product person like me, you just have to see the potential of something to get excited. But but that's my take. Well this
has been so much fun. I mean such a great set of lessons on how to build great products and respect the user. I guess at the end of the day their needs their laziness their selfishness. I think it's a great set of lessons. And also these fascinating Trends about what the future might hold. I asked the same closing question of everybody that I talk to which is to ask. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you
think the kindest thing is really
To make time when there's clearly nothing in it for them. We all now know and you get into your into a point in your career where you start getting a lot of inbound stuff. It just started user start to filter it all out and it's like, oh, you know, I just need a few and you say focus on my family and make sure that I do what's absolutely sorry at work and take the occasional opportunity when it comes from like a really great source, and then you start to close everything else out. But when I look back, you know, I remember certain people who were like really great leaders in their industry who made time
For like a kid at in high school in some cases or in business school. And so I now I realize just how kind that was. You know how I kind of selfless it was it was so like a sort of a Pay It Forward Motion. I guess I challenged myself to somehow like prioritize that even when it becomes a little less like, you know easy to do so.
Well Scott, there's been so much fun the way I'm starting to Mark these episodes is like how many little portable ideas can I walk away with and go, you know, go be productive with thanks so much for your time then excited to do.
This thank you. Awesome Patrick. Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode you can sign up for a new email newsletter sent out each week called Inside the episode each week. I condensed that week's episode to my favorite Big Ideas quotations and more. I've been recommending books to members of this email list for years and will keep doing so in this weekly email you can sign up at investor field guide.com forward slash book club.
