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com slash podcast network. All right, everyone, this is Sam. I am sitting in a La Quinta Inn.
If you're not American, that is like a budget motel type of place. I'm in the middle of Texas driving to New York City. It's close to 11 p.
m. And you know what I did, or at least what I wanna do after driving a few hours on my way to New York? I wanna talk to you, and I wanna listen to one of my closest friends, Sean, interview my hero. So today's episode is with Scott Belsky.
Scott is an acquaintance of mine, and he invested in the hustle, and I've looked up to him for years, and I'll tell you why. First, his accomplishments. So Scott is the chief product officer at Adobe.
If I had a bet one day, he'll be CEO. Maybe soon, but prior to that, he had this wonderful company called Behance. Behance, you go to it and designers can't upload their portfolio.
It's awesome. If you're a designer, you definitely know what this is. If you're not a designer, go to Behance.
You'll see it. It's a B-E-H-A-N-C-E. He sold that company for about $150 million.
And when he sold it, it was mostly bootstrapped. He eventually raised a little bit of money, like six or $7 million, but they raised that money right before they sold. So they had built most of the business without funding.
And he funded the company by selling notebooks and speaking at conferences. It's a pretty amazing story. And also, he used to get traffic at Behance, and he'll tell the story, I believe, from this company called Pinterest.
And he was getting traffic from Pinterest, and he emailed the guy and goes, what the heck is this thing Pinterest? And he talked to Ben, the founder, and they were just a small company at a time, I think a couple of folks working on it. And he eventually invested in that company, invested $15,000 into that company. I think at the time, they were worth something like three or $4 million.
So if you do the math, I mean, that investment could be worth like $50 million. That same week, Scott got, he had a friend who was buying his notebooks, and he looked up who this guy was, was buying the notebooks, and he hollered at him, and he worked at this company called StumbleUpon, and his name was Garrett Camp. And Garrett goes, hey, I'm working on this other startup.
Would you wanna invest in it? Basically, it's gonna replace taxis. It's called UberCab. And Scott was like, well, I don't have too much money, but you've bought my notebooks.
I kinda feel like I've gotta support you. And I don't think this idea is that great, but I'll invest in it anyway. And he invested another $15,000.
I believe that round was valued at the company at like $3.5 million. And so whatever the valuation of Uber is today, like $90 billion, $80 billion.
I mean, that's worth like, I would imagine close to $100 million from that 15K investment. Pretty amazing story. So he's incredibly accomplished as an entrepreneur and as an investor, but he's a product genius.
I mean, this guy is amazing. I've only hung out with him a handful of times, and he invested in my company, but I admire this guy so much because of the way he thinks about product. But then also his vibe, his energy, it's always calming to me.
He's very inspirational and he's got a wonderful outlook. And so what we're gonna do is, Sean's gonna interview him. He did this like maybe 12 months ago.
And I'm gonna tell you some thoughts as Sean is interviewing him, and I'll do some quick interruptions. So let's get to the episode.
SPEAKER_00
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days on.
On the road, let's travel, never looking back. But here's the amazing thing,
SPEAKER_05
is that when you ship a number of features and then you start killing a few of them, what you find is that the core stuff gets used more.
SPEAKER_00
A lot of social consumer products, you know, ultimately engage some of the people
SPEAKER_05
who are interested in the product. Ultimately engage someone based on something they're insecure about.
SPEAKER_03
Hey guys, Sean here. I got a different kind of episode for you that I think you'll like. And just to set the scene for you.
So I'm recording this right now. It's Christmas Eve. Got about an hour to go till Santa hits the chimneys.
And this episode is gonna be with Scott Belsky, probably one of the coolest people I met this year doing the podcast. And as I'm recording this, you know, I'm just supposed to do the intro and tell you what this is about. But I'm feeling a little reflective because it is the end of the year.
I started this podcast about six months ago on a whim. I was bored. We were selling our company and we were in the due diligence period.
And I was just getting itchy, waiting for lawyers to finish doing what lawyers do. And I was like, I wanna start something new. And so I knew I couldn't start a company.
So I started a podcast. And I didn't know if anyone would listen. And amazingly, you know, I really thought nobody would listen to this thing.
And now here we are six months later, I'm looking at the dashboard right now and there's 526,000 listeners. So over half a million listeners already just last few months. And so I never thought that that would happen.
If you're listening to this right now, thank you. This has been a kind of an amazing new addition to my life.
SPEAKER_02
Hey, what's pretty funny is this Pat, I mean, I'm recording this at the end of June. I mean, we're in, Sean was giving that speech we were at. Like, well, I don't know, maybe 60,000 downloads a month.
Now we're at like 800,000 downloads. So whatever he's saying we had after like six months, we get that way over that per month now. So kind of funny how hearing him say that.
SPEAKER_03
I started the podcast because I thought it would be a great excuse to hang out with interesting people. I don't drink coffee, no caffeine from me. Never had the taste for it.
So I didn't like inviting people out to coffee or trying to make up excuses to meet. And I thought the best excuse would be, hey, come on my show, come on my podcast. And for whatever reason, that kind of flattery works.
So I wanted to invite people like Scott onto the podcast. And somebody like Scott's interesting because start the show with this, which is he's done basically every job I've ever thought about doing. So he bootstrapped his own startup.
He raised venture capital and ready to grow that way. He sold his company and then he became a tech executive. He's currently the chief product officer at Adobe, which is obviously Adobe's a massive company.
So he's been a founder, he's been a tech executive, he's been an author, he wrote a book called The Messy Middle, which is an awesome book about the process of creating stuff. So he, creative guy, he wrote a book. He's been an angel investor in companies like Uber or Pinterest, AKA two of the best angel investments of the decade.
And then he was a VC with Benchmark, one of the top funds that exists. So the guy basically has done everything. And what I was blown away with and what you'll get out of this conversation is he's just a good dude.
He's a very down to earth, smart person who, I think he says this somewhere in it, which is his goal wasn't to become any of those things. I didn't say I want to be a tech executive. I want to be a founder.
I want to be an investor. He was just curious and followed his curiosity and it kind of led him down those paths. And I found that kind of inspiring.
So, you know, as the new year hits, I'm thinking about all these different episodes we've done. I don't know about 25 episodes, meeting all these great people. And then even getting a chance to meet some of, you know, if we got half a million listeners, that's a cool number, but I've gotten to meet, you know, hundreds of you in person at one of the live shows or people who email me.
And we're going to try to squeeze in a Q and A episode this week. So if you are listening to this and you have a question that you wanted to ask, you know, it could be about business, could be about investing, it could be about a podcast, whatever, I'll answer. Just shoot me an email.
My email is just puri. So puri.Sean.Gmail.com. So just shoot me an email. I'm going to do a Q and A episode.
I already have like 20 questions or so, but send them in and I'll try to get through as many as I can. I hope you enjoy this episode. We're not going to do a super fancy intro.
We're just going to go right in. And it's a little bit different. We recorded this thing at night.
You know, I just didn't have the energy to do the whole, okay, let's start with your story from beginning to end. I just hopped around on whatever was interesting to me. And it made for a fun convo.
Me and Scott, I consider us friends now after this because the conversation was that fun to be a part of. So it kind of hops around. It's a little bit of a different flavor.
I hope you guys like it. And again, thanks so much for supporting the show. The podcast is already bigger than I ever dreamed it would be.
And all that made me want to do was make, grow it even 10 times bigger. So that's what we'll be doing next year. All right guys, enjoy the show.
SPEAKER_01
Oh my gosh, we're been, we're pumping this guy up so much. And we're both recording at night. So that's that's something.
Let's go.
SPEAKER_04
Scott, welcome. Thank you. I'm Scott Belzky.
So I don't like doing intros because usually I butcher it when I do it. But what I thought was interesting about having you was like, you've done the career path that's like everything I've thought of doing, you've actually already done. So it's like, you know, you've written a book, you bootstrapped a company, you raised venture capital, you sold the company, you've invested, you've been a tech executive at Adobe.
So I'm like, all the potential career paths you've actually explored. It sounds like, okay.
SPEAKER_05
So we're a career identity crisis at all times.
SPEAKER_04
Yeah. Either you know exactly what you're doing or you have no clue what you're
SPEAKER_05
doing. Right. Fine line between the two maybe.
SPEAKER_04
Right. And currently, which one of those paths are you in at the moment?
SPEAKER_05
Yeah. I mean, listen, sometimes I think, what is my happiest state professionally? Actually just generally. Okay. And I think it's the feeling of feeling fully utilized. And I think that personally, you know, I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm a friend, you know, you feel utilized in all those ways.
And then professionally, I feel fully utilized in a day like today actually, where I had meetings with product teams. I had meetings kind of bleeding change in a big organization, those types of meetings. I also had pitches, a couple pitches from companies that I might invest in.
I also helped make a couple introductions to companies that I'm already investor in. And I also even had a quick talk related to the book. And so I feel like every muscle was stretched in some way.
That's a day. Yeah. It's a day. And so I think that I've always just tried to pull, pull threads on curiosities.
And I do, you know, I, you know, for better or for worse, I kind of am enjoying, you know, both ends of the spectrum these days.
SPEAKER_04
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's like 9pm on a, what is it? Tuesday, Monday night, I don't know. Right. Tuesday night, some day. You squeeze it in.
I was telling you, I was like, I give you credit because I know it's easy when you're like two weeks out and you're like, sure, yeah, we'll make it work. And then the day of you're like, and you're like ninth Uber of the day and you're like, what am I, who, who's this podcast?
SPEAKER_03
What am I going to do?
SPEAKER_04
I'm feeling good. I'm feeling good. But I, yeah, give you props.
In fact, on the last episode, I sort of put out one of my, my life theories, which is 80% is just showing up. And most of the things that you don't want to show up for it, if you just build that discipline to just show up, uh, good things happen. I agree with that.
You just have to, you just have to do it. Okay. So you've done a bunch of things. If I'm listening to this, I'm like, okay, why am I interested? So you've created Behance, which if you're a creative person, you know exactly what Behance is, but if you're not somebody who's a, maybe a designer or somebody in the creative world, what, what was Behance?
SPEAKER_05
Yeah. So Behance was inspired by a bit of a sense of frustration with the creative world and just how disorganized it was. A lot of my friends in the creative community, architects, designers, people from college, their careers were at the mercy of circumstance.
And I felt like, you know, they felt like they never got attribution for their work. And I felt like they were not doing their, the greatest they could be doing in their career as a result of that. And so Behance was an effort to organize the creative world and people would always say, yeah, good luck with that.
But the, um, the idea back in the day was why are people having their portfolio sites sitting on some websites out in the ether, only visited by people who know them. Their work should also be broken out and searchable and sortable based on the client, the search term or whatever, and then through someone's work, you discover who that person is, then you see their portfolio and then you see who they are. And so it was inverting the model to some extent and it was a long slog.
I mean, Behance was five years of bootstrapping, two years as a venture-backed business acquired by Adobe, three years of integration. It was an incredible journey. Partridge and a pear tree.
SPEAKER_05
We kind of saw it all. But it's great. I mean, I love building products for creative people.
I find that ultimately across all industries, creative people are the ones that really move things forward. And they compel us to take action. They prompt emotion through media, movies, whatever it is.
So it's just kind of an honor to build things for creative people. It's always been something that gets me going.
SPEAKER_04
Yeah. Somebody asked me, why do you like to do that? Why that? In traditional terms, I don't seem that creative. I'm not a designer.
I'm not an artist of some kind, not making music. Anytime you're trying to make something new happen, you're being creative. Fundamentally, you're problem solving something new.
And I'm like, it's really simple. I like the new shit in the world. I get excited about new shit.
And if you want new shit, you need people to be creative and you need creative people to have all the tools at their disposal to do what they do best.
SPEAKER_05
Well, I think it's creativity is genuine interest combined with initiative. You have deep interest into something. It doesn't matter what it is to your point, but you also have the initiative to do something with it.
And those are the folks that get fascinated by those edges that will someday become dissenters. And that's what makes these work.
SPEAKER_04
And so normally on the bottom, like, OK, be Hans, great. That's the mission. How did you think of the idea? How did you get your first hundred customers? Those are the normal ones.
And so if you're here to listen to that, sorry, I'm not going to do it this time. There's people who have asked you those questions. I've seen those interviews.
So actually, I don't know if it's because it's 9 p.m. I'm in the mood to just talk about other things. One of the things I want to talk about is you wrote this book, Messy Middle, which is cool.
I'll tell you the premises I understand. Yeah, sure. The premises I understand it is 95% of the conversation is around the beginning and end of companies.
I'm guilty of it myself, but, you know, press and media is much more, you know, that's their bread and butter is like somebody's starting something, somebody's ending something either from failure or success. And so 95% of the talk or 99% of the talk is about 1% of the time that actually goes into any venture. And everybody just sort of fast forwards the middle, the actual sort of doing and navigating of the unknown.
And so that's what the Messy Middle is about. It's about that middle section. I think Eric Rees has this good phrase where he's like, Act One, we go into depth about the hero and how they came up with their idea.
Act Three, you know, the resolution and Act Two is the montage, which is all the hard work and it's just like all the training. You just quickly fast forward through all of it so you can get to the good.
SPEAKER_05
It's not sexy, but it's kind of all the matters. And so why write the book? Well, I was fascinated by that big period of volatility that just seemed like an endless succession of lows and highs. I was interested in the idea that we're not our best selves at the lows or the highs.
We're not our best selves at the lows because we make decisions out of fear. You know, at Behance, we saw new companies, new competitors emerge and we made a lot of mistakes at times where we would suddenly try to emulate and then realize, wait, we just lost touch with what we really are and what we're good at. And then you're also not your best self at the highs because you falsely attribute the things that you did to the things that work.
And so there's something to be learned at those moments. There's a practice to be developed and how you endure the lows and how you optimize like hell, anything that works. And that was what was interesting to me and I wanted to interview and chronicle a lot of stories and insights from people that I've worked with, boards that I was on, entrepreneurs that I partnered with and also things that I learned in my own experience.
And originally I kind of started this as a project for myself and then I realized I had this Evernote notebook of like 680 or so insights and I said, okay, like I'm going to pare this down and ship it. So that was the origin of the book.
SPEAKER_04
Cause I was thinking, I was like, why not a blog post? Right? Like I read a bunch of blog posts. Part of the reason why I wanted to have you on is your blog is actually really good and you can share what's the domain.
SPEAKER_05
It's just like Belski.com, right? Yeah, I guess, yeah, it's like on medium, but I don't know. You can get there through many different ways.
SPEAKER_04
Okay. So I read a bunch of your things and you have these like, almost like watercolor art, like diagrams of stuff. Yeah. So I've been reading these for a long time and I have a couple of friends. Sam from the hustle who you invested in and Greg, Greg Eisenberg, he says amazing things about you.
So that's why I wanted to have you on like your philosophies that I have read and then friends who vouch for you. And why not just like do a blog post? Why did it have to be a book?
SPEAKER_05
Yeah, I mean, it's a good question because a book is kind of stagnant. You can't really update it as easily. I think though that a book is a forcing function to just still it all down and also try to find the threads and then to package as a piece of art.
One thing I did with this book is every insight has like a statement that is also like presented in sort of a design section to give it some gravity. Gotcha.
SPEAKER_04
Like what's an example of one of those?
SPEAKER_05
Like an example is the science of businesses scaling the art of business is the things that don't scale.
SPEAKER_00
And then it's like, okay, what is that? Right.
SPEAKER_05
So yeah, unpack that. And so that will be like a two or three page section about how we sort of perseverate over all the science nuances and actually our instinct is to not want to do anything in our businesses that doesn't scale because we feel like that's a waste of time when in fact a lot of the greatest examples of distinguishing a brand or a service are the things that don't scale like Airbnb sending out photographers for every apartment or I mean every company has their example of the things that they did that don't scale that ended up being the art and how do you also preserve that as you grow and how do you decide what your art is? And so that's like an example of one of maybe 200 or so insights in the book. Gotcha.
SPEAKER_02
And by the way, I don't know if Sean clearly said this, but Scott had just come out with a book at this time called The Messy Middle. So it's awesome. I actually, I bought it, I read it.
It's pretty badass. All right, back to it.
SPEAKER_04
You write this book and I like it because there's some books where you can kind of tell the person who's writing this, like they're either, you know, nowadays not trying to make money off this, but they're trying to parlay this into speaking gigs or things like that. But like you already had your sort of success and wins. So this, it feels like it comes from a different place.
It comes from a place of like, I want to share wisdom or like first tap into the wisdom, the scattered wisdom you had in your Evernote files, like put it together for yourself and then like generously give. Is that like a, yeah, it was weird.
SPEAKER_05
It was actually, I remember the moment when I was kind of entering another one of those things I had observed over, you know, a board meeting or something. And then I realized, gosh, like there are so many in here. And I think it was on a plane and I remember being like, gosh, if this thing goes down, like no one's ever going to see any of this stuff.
It's only going to be for me. And so that was one of those moments. I also, you know, I think there's a part of me that aspires to do more coaching and helping people build products.
One of the things that I love doing and done it with Sam and also with Greg and others is help them develop their products and then build their product teams and hire the right designers and design culture. And I wanted to, I did see this a book as an opportunity to kind of help share some of the things I've learned, some of the things I'm thinking about and do more of that stuff. So it was in some ways like a cornerstone of that, of that intention I have for the next part of my life.
SPEAKER_04
What's something that you commonly, so when you advise people to say on building products and making better products, obviously as an entrepreneur, you'd always be better. You will never turn down the opportunity to make your product better. It is your rock.
Let some common things you find yourself constantly advising people to do or, you know, questions you keep asking or advice you keep giving. Is there anything that's sort of a pattern you're noticing as you do this for different companies?
SPEAKER_05
I mean, there are a lot of them. I would say like two that come to mind. You know, one is obsessing over the first mile of the user's experience of the product, which ironically typically is the last mile that a team spends actually thinking about.
And yet it's the only part of the product experience that every customer will in fact experience. After that is just drop off.
SPEAKER_04
And first mile just so people know about that.
SPEAKER_05
Yeah, sorry. So it's like literally the onboarding, the splash page onboarding, step by step, the questions you're asked before you get into the product, how quickly you actually realize any form of value in the product, the defaults of the product, you know, does it show you everything at once or only a few things, the progressive disclosure or functionality? Like all of these factors are things you must consider as you're nailing that first mile experience, which is in fact probably what determines the fate of most products, frankly.
SPEAKER_04
You know, you get 60 seconds or 90 seconds with the bulk of your customers.
SPEAKER_05
You do. And I like to remind folks that every customer as great as they may be and as wonderful as your product may be, every customer is lazy, vain and selfish in their first 15 to 30 seconds of using your product. How are you going to cater to them at that in that world before? And I think the mistake we make is we have to we expect our customers have too much faith in us as product builders.
They don't care. In fact, they shouldn't because their life is too busy and they shouldn't spend any amount of time, energy or effort, you know, until they actually know that they're going to get value out of it. And so that's the conundrum.
So that's like one example of something that, you know, I love working on with product teams. Another example is kind of unpacking the psychology of their customer. A lot of social consumer products, you know, ultimately engage someone based on something they're insecure about, right? Something they want to have validated, something they want to learn or they're worried about.
I mean, there's a lot of like underlying nuances of a product that are really driven on psychology. You know, I was talking to the team at VSCO the other day and, you know, they decided not to aggregate the number of followers that you have visible to you, nor do they let you see how many likes something has. That's very counterintuitive to what we know about ego analytics and the things that drive social consumer product usage.
But they had an insight, right? Which was the type of customer and how they wanted to use the product. That sort of thing is very important thing to kind of distill and then make as a core principle.
SPEAKER_04
And so when you're investing in companies, I'm guessing you're looking for in that first couple, you know, first conversation with the entrepreneur, you're trying to figure out what insights do they have about the psychology of their customer. And also when you demo the product, how's this first mile experience? Those are probably two of the, you know, first tests of your investment.
SPEAKER_05
Yeah, they are. And of course, you know, for consumer products and for enterprise products, there are different types of tests or different types of lenses you look at them through. But I think that those actually apply to both, you know, in the enterprise, you realize that everyone wants to look better in front of their boss.
Everyone is, you know, sometimes even more lazy in terms of what they're willing to do. And so you have to build products and first mile experiences that take those things into account. So these are important things to think about as you're considering as an investor.
If you're a product-arranged investor like me.
SPEAKER_04
Right. And what are some of the investments you made that you're proud of?
SPEAKER_05
Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, my first ever investment was Pinterest. So I met Ben Silverman back in 2010. And I had no business being an angel investor.
I was just leading my own company. But I had met him. You met him how? You just.
.. I met him through, of all people, I think it was our intern. And he, you know, but Ben was coming through New York to raise money because he had a hard time filling his round out here.
And we both were building products that we were orienting towards designers to some degree. And a lot of the pins on Pinterest were driving to behind pages. And I was seeing that all those slow but rapidly growing, you know, source of traffic.
Right. Back then it was a forest Google, but then stumble upon and tumblr and made a couple others. And then I just started working with him first as a product advisor.
And then when he was raising the seed round, he was like, do you want to participate? And I was like, okay. So that was, you know, that was the first foray. It was amazing because it was just cool to see a product at that stage and to share some of what I learned, but also just engaging a lot of healthy debate.
And so I think there, you know, there've been a bunch of every product experience that I've had with the team has been remarkably different. I sat on the board of Sweetgreen for a few years, you know, a totally different world, right? But then again, Sweetgreen is thinking about efficiency behind the counter and how to, you know, reduce operations time or preparing salads. The form factor of the actual bowls and how that increases efficiency and is better for the environment, the design of the space.
And then the mobile experience, they had this ambition of having over 50% of all orders, you know, started on mobile, you know? And so I just, I love getting a bit geeky with product problems and, you know, and helping solve them. Right.
SPEAKER_02
That's amazing. So what fascinates me and gets me pumped up about Scott is his passion. So we just jumped from Behance, which is this thing for designers.
We went to Sweetgreen, which is fancy, healthy salads. We did Pinterest, which is whatever you, however you describe Pinterest. I mean, he just jumps from thing to thing to thing.
And so his tastes are eclectic. Like he likes all types of stuff, but it's all kind of boils down to this, like this passion about making widgets that just like, we don't have to like pretend and act like Pinterest is saving the world. I mean, maybe it is, maybe it doesn't matter.
I mean, it definitely isn't like we can say that safely, but he cares about and his passion about making it great. And I admire that about him. I know I get burnt out on stuff and I'm like, oh, everything's stupid.
This is so dumb. This podcast, it's so stupid. This is meaningless.
I mean, we all get that way, right? And I get pumped up hearing him about how passionate he is about this. It gets me excited. But then also, did you hear how, and I actually believe this to be true when Ben asked him to invest, he goes, well, okay.
And it was a small company and there was the first round of funding, but he defaulted to optimism. It's something that I don't always do. Sometimes I'll default to, well, this won't work for this reason, this reason, and this reason.
Scott doesn't tend to do that. I've talked to him. It seems like he doesn't do that.
And I admire that. And I think that's a really, really good takeaway that you should all listen to in his voice is this optimism. There's something about it.
It's like, it's the American dream. I don't know what it is. It's one of the reasons why I love immigrants.
It's one of the reasons why. I like people who are down on their luck, but they still get after it. There's something here that I find addicting and invigorating.
And just listening to his voice and him describe these things, it gets me pumped. It gets me fired up.
SPEAKER_04
Okay. So when you made that first angel investment in Pinterest, you don't have a budget for this. You're not like, okay, I've made it because you're still doing behance at the time.
You had not exit, correct? And so you said, I'm in no position to do angel investing, but you did it anyways. What risk did you take there? So like when you put in whatever you put in, like what percent of your like net worth were you putting on the line at that time?
SPEAKER_05
Yeah, it was probably a good chunk of my salary. And the other thing I did though, to rationalize it for myself, I remember is Ben had worked at Google. He had a network on the West Coast.
I was this like, you know, new entrepreneur in New York that didn't have any of that network. I actually felt like I would learn a lot from this. And so in some ways I was like, you know, I'm sort of paying for an education, if nothing more.
And it was again, like I just knew so little about everything I do now back in 2000 and what is it 2010. So it was nine years ago. It was, if you have a real deep curiosity about something and then you find someone you really respect and give a lot to learn from them, find a way to get closer to them, find a way to work with them, just always leads to something and you may not expect what it is.
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, this is timely. So I just yesterday invested in the self-driving car company. And my last sort of like as I was going through the last checklist of like, okay, should I do this? You know, this is meaningful money to me.
I'm not at the point where, you know, when I invest dollars in, I actually really want those dollars to come back. I'm not, this is not like the philanthropy angel investing that some people do. And so my last thing was like, look, I'm going to learn so much about robotics, machine learning and self-driving cars.
And I that's the future. Whether it's this company or the next one, these guys are the future. And this might just be my education.
And worst case scenario, this is my education. And I started helping these guys, you know, last couple of days, try to get, you know, get their business off the ground. And already I feel like I'm get to live in the future a couple hours a week just by working with them.
SPEAKER_02
Do you guys want a funny update on that? I'm almost positive. That company either has gone bankrupt or Sean has completely written it off. And I asked him if he should have done that.
And this is funny. He's going to kill me for saying this. I think don't entirely quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure he said that he regrets it because he wasn't entirely interested in, you know, after learning a bit, he's like, I don't actually don't know if I'm actually that interested in self-driving cars.
But the guy who started it was pretty interesting. And I was cool taking that risk. But that was in fact his education.
I don't think he regrets that investment. But I think that it's fun.
SPEAKER_01
It's just to give you that update. It went out of business, I think.
SPEAKER_05
It's like a, you know, it's a long term view on the value of learning and relationships. But also for those that aren't ready to write a check to people, there's so many ways of getting closer to people that you admire and want to learn from and keeping those relationships. I mean, I think platforms also like Twitter are amazing in that regard.
There's some people that I somehow got connected to on Twitter that I've never even met in my real life who just reached out to me and just started to share like enough information and witty observations and feedback on something that I wrote that I just start to follow them. And then I follow them for a year and two years. And then, you know, these are folks that feel like you know them.
SPEAKER_02
This is how I met Scott, by the way. I followed him on Twitter and this is how I met Sean. I met Sean this way.
I started emailing him and we got to know each other online, even though we lived a few miles away from each other. This is how I've gotten in touch with most of my friends. So what Scott's talking about, it works, this podcast is the results of it.
The company that I started, the Hustle, it happened because I took a course called the Copywriting course by Neville Madora. I emailed him, became friends with him. He taught me about writing.
I wanted to start a newsletter. So if you are sitting on your ass right now with nothing to do and you want more, reach out to people and in particular, start a Twitter and start tweeting and use that same picture on Twitter for the rest of your social profiles, including your email. People feel like they get to know you and get to know your picture because they see your content.
They see you commenting on stuff. I recognize people who comment on my stuff. Sean has 150,000 followers.
I think on Twitter he recognizes people who comment on his stuff. I'm telling you, it works. It's pretty amazing.
I'm sitting in this hotel, like I said, in Texas. I'm driving to New York. I'm going to stay at a friend's house.
I've become great friends with him. I can serve him a family friend. We met on Twitter telling you this works.
Do it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05
And anything that they were probably doing next, I would probably be first in line to help support or at least learn more about. And so it's just enlightening that anyone can kind of do their own insights and just hard work and knowledge sharing, generosity in that sense, build relationships these days.
SPEAKER_04
I learned this the hard way in the sense I host these mastermind groups. Do you do anything like this, like a dinner series or anything like that with the same set of people where you get together every two months or so where it's like your peers. Do you do anything like that?
SPEAKER_05
Yeah. Only informally, there's probably groups that I do that with. But tell me about a.
..
SPEAKER_04
So the regret was I moved to San Francisco and I got invited to one of these and I was like, this is great. This is an awesome way to learn and meet people because the good thing is you're at a table with founders and they're not selling because it's like, you're not their employee, you're not their investor, you're not their customer. So they're actually telling you what's up with their company and you're sharing likewise.
And so the first couple of groups I was in, if I had just written checks to all of them blindly, I said, you know, like with no judgment, I'm just writing the same $10,000 check and all of you guys, you know, calm was in that crew.
SPEAKER_05
They would have paid off, right?
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, exactly. They would have paid it off clear bit was in that crew, product hunt, Zola Electric, which is the biggest solar company in Africa. So that portfolio would have done amazing.
So I looked back and I was like, man, I did the first part, right? Which is what you're saying. You know, I just spent time with interesting people and added value to them through sharing ideas and sites, whatever, hope it being helpful. But then the lesson I learned was why wasn't I investing? And to me, I kind of asked myself this and I thought, because I wasn't thinking of myself like an investor.
And so then it happened again and I saw this company called Lambda School. I thought it was really big. It was really early on and I started, you know, talking to Austin and I was like, this time I'm not going to fuck this up.
And so I convinced my friend. I was like, I found a company that's amazing. If you invest, this is, I'm your scout here.
If I, if you invest, you know, give me 15% of your, your action and, and let's, let's do it. And so then that was like my first like deal deal where, you know, I was able to put it in and since then now, you know, once we sold, I got a little more money. So I could do it myself.
But the lesson I learned and what I would tell anybody's listening to this is don't count yourself out as, as a player in the game, either as a founder or investor.
SPEAKER_05
There is a way if you're willing to be creative and helpful enough. I think that's one of the greatest cultural attributes of the system of kind of early sage founders is that we all know how much those circumstantial relationships matter and how much we learn from one another and how we actually can't do it alone.
SPEAKER_02
This podcast started from those dinners, by the way, Sean and I and a bunch of friends would meet and he always had a bunch of groups, but we would meet and explain what we were suffering from in our business, what we weren't suffering from. And then eventually we would just brainstorm and that's kind of how this podcast started.
SPEAKER_05
And you know, that, that manifests itself in ways like what you're describing.
SPEAKER_04
Did you invest in Uber? Is that right?
SPEAKER_05
Yeah, I did. So that was also kind of early on and the funny story there. So we were bootstrapping our business, the hands early days with paper products of all things.
We had some products for creatives to be organized. Actual and paper and they're called action books that are actually still out there. And so, so, and one of our core partners for Behance from a traffic perspective and partnership was, was Stumblepun.
Garrett had recently purchased Stumblepun back from eBay. So he had sold it and he bought it back. And so he was in my apartment, which was also my office back in the day in New York.
And we were kind of jamming on some product stuff and he whipped out one of our action books that I'd given him previously. And I was like, Hey, you know, check this out. I'm like working on this side project.
And then he shows me... He literally invested in the sketch of Uber. Literally shows me these sketches of this product where it's about summoning a black car as opposed to having a dial for it.
And I'm like, Dude, you should be focused on your business. You just bought it back. Right. Now I'm a founder CEO struggling. You're a founder CEO now struggling.
Like you're thinking of making it. It's a distraction. Yeah. It's basically like that's a textbook distraction, right? And so fortunately he didn't take my advice. 60 billion dollar distraction.
And he said, you know, do you want to be involved? And I think I kind of was like, I don't know. But then I also became a product advisor for him. And this was actually even before Travis was in the picture.
Ryan was involved. And then of course, you know, that team got up and running. And so I had, he asked me if I wanted to invest.
And again, it's like, sure, but I very small check, which is all I could do at the time. And I was a journey as well.
SPEAKER_04
And so you're, you do this sort of starter's product advisor. And because of that, you're at the table. And so when, when the time came to you, you were, you were in good position.
SPEAKER_05
I try to, I try to fall in love with the product in the sense where it's still on my mind, you know, and I'm like thinking through the problems and maybe, you know, what's wrong with the interface or how could that bother me better?
SPEAKER_04
So what's something in Uber that the product, a product changed early on, like probably before any of us touched it that you remember. Was there anything like that?
SPEAKER_05
I remember, I remember a debate with Garrett around the brand and this notion of, should it be a, it was UberCamp at the time. Right. Right. It was UberCamp at the time. Should it be an expensive feeling brand where it looks like it's aspirational, but something you couldn't afford? Or should it be a, an accessible brand where it feels like this is something that everyone should be doing? Right.
And it was actually a really healthy argument because you intuitively think it should be accessible to everyone. I mean, if you want to make a big company, but Garrett's view is that it should be something that feels like a superpower, like everyone's private driver. It should feel expensive even though it was intended to be accessible.
And so that was part of the, you know, part of the thought behind the black kind of logo and, and the branded entity that like sort of suggested that, that feeling. The luxury, the elite feel. Exactly.
So I remember that debate and I think that was also the right choice. That's amazing.
SPEAKER_04
Okay. And what are you excited about nowadays? Like going either a space, a company, a problem that you think needs solving. What's got Scott interested?
SPEAKER_05
Well, I think, I think there's, I think there's, there's a lot of different things that are interesting me at any point in time. I mean, in my day job, it's building products for creative people and kind of thinking about the future of not only the creative tools we know, but also things like augmented reality and, and how we're going to actually infiltrate and build content in that new medium that would otherwise die if it wasn't enriched with like interactive, animated hyperintelligent content. So it's thinking about that, working with a lot of our partners like Apple and others to help think through like, how does that even happen? It's been like a really fun thing for me by day.
And uh, you know, by night, I mean, there's been a lot of really interesting enterprise companies that are thinking about the future of work. If you're in a big company, you know how hard it is for them to even think about a remote workforce and how to make a transition. Even though a lot of us all know it's coming, what are the steps to get there? What kind of technologies need to come about? I also think that, you know, social has been out of favor.
SPEAKER_02
Well he called that one. Good job, Scott. Right.
SPEAKER_04
Which makes it interesting.
SPEAKER_05
Which means it's the, yeah. You know, when everyone says interesting is dead, it means that something's being born. Right. And now's the time. So I'm thinking a lot about consumer products that help people connect with one another in new and you know, privacy driven premium ways.
Gotcha.
SPEAKER_02
By the way, let's just, let's, we gotta recap. He just said a lot in that set. And so he talked about everything's dead or when people say things are dead, it's, it's gonna go back.
What, what is it? I mean, a lot of people are saying remote work is, is taking over. Yeah, it is. But what's the opposite of that? You know, going in person or I actually don't know what the opposite of that is, but that's like an interesting thing to think about retail.
We all, I mean, I would think retail is dead. I think the next like in person retail, you know, brick and mortar stores. I thought the same too.
I've been talking to a lot of my friends who are doing Ecom all their sales are down because people are getting out of the house and shopping. I would have said that retail is dead. I would have said like going to Macy's and all and going to Target, going to Walmart, like why on earth would you do that? Why would you go to a store when you can just order it online? Now I get out of the house just to go because I want to be around people.
That's kind of interesting. And so it's pretty wild. He talked about the future work.
I mean, this guy is so funny that we're only a few months, 12, 18 months. This was pre COVID, but I think he actually predicted a lot here. And he also talked about privacy.
I've been paying attention. I probably actually not knowing it started paying attention to it because I started listening to Scott, but a lot of my friends have started talking about that about 24 months ago. I think we are on the cusp of something big with privacy.
We look at what Apple's doing. They're changing their, how their ads work Facebook, changing how their ad works. I have the latest iOS on my, on my iPhone and I have the latest operating system, my computer.
They have things like different privacy features. They also have things that ask you to, you know, your screen time limit. So if you hit a certain time, they say, are you sure you still want to use your screen? I think that before we would have thought that's ridiculous.
No one would ever do that, but I think that's going to be popular. So screen time, I think, uh, people, normal average Joe's are going to be weary of giving their data to big companies. I talked to the founder of Pandora about this.
He said, you know, just your average dentist in Missouri is playing Pandora is nervous about submitting to different privacy statements. And if you look at the traffic of duck.go, duck.
go is this really, really cool. Uh, uh, Google alternative that tracks your privacy is way differently. And it's way more, um, concerned about people's privacy.
Go to Google duck, duck, go searches per month. And they actually reveal what their searches are per month. It's growing like a weed.
This looks like a vert ramp. I mean, is exponential as exponential can be. So I would highly recommend if you're, if you're looking for what's next in the next five or 10 years, I think we've just talked about a few things here.
So let's get back into it. All right, everyone. This episode is brought to you by HubSpot CRM platform.
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SPEAKER_04
What's a day in the life? Is there a wake up time morning routine that you like that kind of works for you?
SPEAKER_05
Oh, I mean, every day is different, right? But I'm trying to think of anything that would be useful and helpful.
SPEAKER_04
But I ultimately normal is also useful. You know, because people are like, Oh, there's no secret. He just wakes up and eats his breakfast, ties his shoes, a little bit groggy and gets out
SPEAKER_05
the door like that's okay too. Yeah, I know. I mean, I think that I do try to switch it up.
You know, I'm actually not one of those people that has like everything has to be the same and whatever else. But I do. I mean, there are a couple of things I do.
Like I do try to audit my calendar in retrospect. A lot of people only look forward. Not many people would back.
SPEAKER_04
I do a time audit, you look back at the last week or what do you do?
SPEAKER_05
I do. I typically look back at the last week and I typically ask myself, you know, how do I spend my time? It's actually a really interesting thing because you're typically at least ashamed of one day and not more than one day.
SPEAKER_05
And how you did it and you look at these blocks, like what did I do during that period? But why did I meet with that person for that long or whatever it is? Is this advancing, you know, what's most interesting and most important to me? And that could be personal things and work things, right? But it's just this audit and it's, you know, it's prompted some difficult realizations. It's like, wow, like that was more important than, you know, seeing my family.
SPEAKER_04
Family time. Yeah. It's important. I saw a version of this that I really liked.
So there's a guy, you probably know his name is Matt something. He's like the like coach, CEO coach to a bunch of CEOs in Silicon Valley. He just wrote a book called The Great CEO Within, I think it's called.
He just came out. And so Emmett, who's the CEO at Twitch, he, I think he works with him. I might be getting all these details wrong.
SPEAKER_00
Name wrong, book title wrong. Directionally.
SPEAKER_04
Yeah. Something like this. Let's just wave our hands a little bit.
So this guy works with a bunch of CEOs. He wrote this book and I saw his like, like you had your 680 Evernote notes. So he had a bunch of Google Docs that were just like quick, you know, like principle after he worked with somebody CEOs.
He was noticing some things. He would just start writing them down. And he called this one the energy audit.
And so it's the same thing you're talking about where you go back in your calendar, but you said get two markers, right? Red and green or whatever. Red means this took this, this activity takes energy away from you. You feel less energetic after you do it.
Green means that activity gives you more energy, right? Like the gym is this weird thing where you would think you go to the gym, you put all this energy in and you exercise and that should deplete you. But actually you walk out and you feel more energy for the rest of the day, right? So like there's these activities. So he said, just start highlighting and just look at the, step back and just look at the colors and then be like, okay, that's where you're at today.
Let's try to move towards more green. And different things give you energy, like the sort of doing things that are in your zone of genius, right? Things that you're good at, things you know that are important and you're, you can just get in flow and do them. And I really liked that because it was, it's one of those things that you know when the first time you do it, you're going to like, it's going to look bloody.
It's going to be like, oh, this is not a, not a good use of time.
SPEAKER_05
I think that would be interesting. I wonder, I feel for me, as I have like a natural introvert tendency and they say that introverts get their energy from being alone, right? I wonder if I'd be skewed a little bit.
SPEAKER_04
All the non-meeting times are green.
SPEAKER_05
Like, oh, that was the best time. But, but I like that. I like that idea because I mean, listen, there are meetings where you're like, right? And there are meetings where you leave with a lot that you're thinking about.
Maybe that's another measure also is after you spend time with something or someone, right? Are you leaving thinking about things? I mean, that is a, one of the things I have used over the years to determine founders I want to work with as an investor is if I feel like every conversation with him or her was a step function more interesting than the one before it, or was it a repeat? Right. A lot of conversations we have with people are repeats.
SPEAKER_05
That's like, oh, you know, I talked about the same thing last time. Right. Every now and then you meet someone where you just pick up where you left off and it just gets like actually even, right, you know, better and better and richer and more dynamic and whatever else. I mean, that was like the story with Periscope.
I met Kavan and Joe and they were doing this thing called down to you up at the time, but every conversation with them about what they were trying to build and whatever was, was like infinitely more interesting. Right. And it was like, okay, we got to work together.
SPEAKER_04
And what you're saying is it's not just that the results were getting better every time
SPEAKER_05
because nobody does that, right? It was the ideas, right? It was the ideas and the, and the, you know, the, maybe also chemistry, like building upon an idea to make another idea, right? It's like, oh my gosh, sort of like seeing the world through someone else's eyes. Oh, it's like teleportation. Yeah. It's like, oh, teleportation. Right. And I was like, what am I going to do? You know, maybe I'm better than I go into bed. I just want to like drop into Tokyo and like walk around.
It's like, oh yeah, like maybe you could do this. Oh, you could go and see a tennis match that's at Wimbledon when you're in New York. And then you suddenly like, oh wow, like what are the media rights implications of that? And maybe there's a business model there and she's like, thing to thing to thing to thing to thing.
And it's like, okay, this feels good.
SPEAKER_04
Right. Yeah. I like, I have a similar thing where I call people Pokemon because it's like, you know, Pokemon just sort of evolve. Right. It's like the next time you see him, oh my God, this, this whole person has evolved into a better person. Yeah, and those are the most like fulfilling people to like spend time with.
SPEAKER_04
I like that. Pokemon. Yeah. Here we go. New book.
One thing I wanted to ask you because the way I look at it is this is a guy who's achieved a lot of things that I'd like to achieve in my life. Right. So just sold our company, but you know, I'd love to write a book. I'd love to, to, you know, achieve success in the next thing or invest in great companies.
So you're still setting goals for yourself. What's a goal you have set for yourself now? Like what can you share? That's, that's something you're like, all right, here's a goal I have for myself nowadays.
SPEAKER_05
Yeah. Well, I think that there, I think there's some ideas that I'm like brewing that I want to give some time to, right? So I am trying to kind of sporadically schedule time to just think through these things. I actually love flights for that reason because I can give myself a chunk of hours that you ordinarily never get on the ground, right? I think we'll just take a shower.
SPEAKER_05
You know, just uninterrupted time. I mean, I do believe in this constantly connected world that disconnection is a competitive advantage because you can actually think deeply about something as opposed to just constantly react and heck away at the collective inboxes around you. Right. Yeah, I think that also certainly have some goals for like the changes I'm trying to bring upon the teams that I'm leading now, you know, as this chief product officer role at Adobe. I mean, this is just a company that bought my company, a lot of my DNA is in this business.
I care about where these products land and what we know. And so I've set some like KPI driven even, you know, goals around and it's just, it forces you to start making big swings and think about like how you're going to lead those changes and get people to go along with it and, you know, and then it's about narrative and merchandising and all these other things that it's fun. You kind of have to build a internal marketing campaign at times just to get people to change their minds.
Totally. So, so those are just a few examples.
SPEAKER_04
Okay. And if you were 21 again today, so I'll let you keep all the knowledge you have, but you give me back sort of all your, all your assets, your reputation, nobody knows you, you're 21 years old again. What do you think you do? How do you think you would go about spending, you know, the next few years of your life?
SPEAKER_05
Well, I would, I would definitely start something again if I had really a deep interest. I think I would probably aspire for more empathy for the customer suffering the problem as opposed to my passion for the solution. I think a lot of the mistakes that I made early on was that, were that I was always like super passionate about what I know needed to happen.
And then we would realize eight months later, we were like 30 degrees off.
SPEAKER_04
Like cherry pick evidence that might fit.
SPEAKER_05
Yeah. The need for that solution. And then you get excited by a prototype and a vision and you want alignment.
So you force alignment and then you realize, wait, had I just spent more hours next to a customer seeing what their actual life was like, what they actually thought of my product, I would have known better. Right. So I think those were some of those, they were, I think a few last years as I like to call them in Behance and that five year bootstrapping period, but we had to rebuild a lot of stuff. And I can't say I would do that all over again.
You know, if I had the choice, although I would say that it definitely built us as a team, like a culture that we went through a lot to adversity.
SPEAKER_04
We'll do that to you.
SPEAKER_05
It did. Like what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Like definitely true.
Right. And it seems struggling. I think I would also try to do fewer things.
I, you know, and I go back and forth on this. I've heard two contradictory these years about, about like what makes a great entrepreneur. Either you are really, really great and willing to take risk or you're really good at hedging risk.
It's like, wait, those are like, which one is it? Right. I, I was always a hedger. You know, I always was thinking about the contingency plan and that caused me to do a number of weird things.
Number one, it caused me to go to business school simultaneously as I was starting a business and not drop out. I see. Little did I know that dropping out would be way better PR value than finishing.
SPEAKER_04
No one would give a shit about an MBA. Right. Right. The second. And so the other, the other way you had taken, let's say taken the risks, that would be what? Okay.
So dropping out's one. What were some other ways that you were doing contingency plans? Does that mean like?
SPEAKER_05
Oh yeah. Sorry. I was going to say like also like another example was the number of products we were building. You know, because I was like, if this one doesn't work, then this one will work.
Right. And, and even like features. Yeah. It's like the insecurity of shipping many features in a product is basically, I don't know what's going to work. Right. But here's the amazing thing is that when you ship a number of features and then you start killing a few of them, what you find is that the core stuff gets used more and gets more attention from the team too. And it was one of those really strange realizations.
I would say four years, three or four years into the hands, which is again, probably two years too late or too much later than it should have been where we killed a few major features. Like this tip exchange thing where creatives could leave like tips for another and build upon each other and vote them up and down. It was like a mini dig at the time, but within the hands, there was a groups functionality where people could share and then we killed both like one after the other.
And then suddenly people created more projects. Right. You see goes up and they use, and they use the core fee functionality more. And I just again, wish I could have gone back and just really drove it down to like, what do we actually have to ship? And how do we make sure it's amazing?
SPEAKER_04
What space would be interesting to you? 21, would you be like building tools for creatives or would you go into bio hacking or, you know, like whatever? Yeah. Is that that point you have a long time where you can ramp up or go into any space? You're not sort of committed.
SPEAKER_05
Sure. And I guess the question is if I was 21 today or I was 21 back then, because back then I think 21 today. Yeah. 21 today, I would definitely be doing something different. First of all, I mean, we're still living in an app driven world, which is crazy.
I mean, apps were born in the world where there was no GPS. There were no notifications. There was no AI.
And so you had to download apps and then use them for things. Now within a modern OS that should know where you are and what you're most likely to want to do based on where you are and when you're there and with whom you are with, the whole operating system, the whole notion should be completely different. There shouldn't even be apps, frankly.
There should be superpowers that are suddenly there and then they're suddenly gone. And if you think about, and I think that we're going towards that end, I think that we will see operating systems evolve. I think that the notification systems we know them today will be totally antiquated to do this more, you know, actionable interface that just is always like the sixth sense, the appendage that we never know we needed.
And I think about like what are the applications that are going to thrive in such a world. I also think about marketplaces that are more sustainable. You know, the modern notion that every freelancer marketplace essentially taxes the transaction is silly, right? And that's actually the on demand model for on demand marketplaces and it's all the same formula.
There's a totally different model that should exist. Maybe it's blockchain driven. Maybe there's some other mechanic at play for value distribution.
So there's a lot of these things that I think a bit about some of them overlap into my day job. Some of them I'm looking for companies and entrepreneurs that are tackling and want to help them.
SPEAKER_04
What I like about your approach is that you didn't start with some idea. Oh, I want to build this or a generic space, but it was more like a wire things the way they are. Wait, shouldn't they be different? Like you basically were like wire apps and notifications the way we use this phone now that we have XYZ or why do all marketplaces do this rent seeker model where they just, you know, sit in the middle and grab from every transaction.
SPEAKER_05
It's funny, like one of the things I learned most working with the benchmark team for a little while was I really went in there thinking the greatest investors are really good at making the future. And what I left there believing is that the greatest investors have a really deep and concrete understanding of us and how the present is like about to change and you can kind of, but not, you know, distant, distant long shots are fun bets, but they're bets. Right. But if you really have a tune into the current dynamics and just how they're slightly shifting and start getting ahead at really interesting things.
SPEAKER_04
And so you, um, where do you like to learn from? So like, what do you listen to? What podcasts do you listen to? What book do you read? Who do you think is really smart? Where if there's talking, you're listening. What, what, what do you like to feed your brain?
SPEAKER_02
So before I haven't commented in a second because I've been listening. I love this guy. Um, when I raised a little bit of money from Tim Ferriss to Tim is the popular author investor, he told me, I actually asked him this question and he told me the first he goes, there's two people who I listened to for investing advice.
The first is Naval. The second is Scott Belsky, whatever Scott Belsky says, I usually trust he's my thought of figure on investing. So this is a good question to ask.
I think it's great. I'm very eager to see here who he says.
SPEAKER_05
Yeah. No, it's something that, so I'll tell you like my first answer is I have, I am a huge fan of Twitter. I think that is an incredible, it sounds like such a cliche answer, but I have carefully curated a group of people, they are astrophysicists, they are biologists, they are economists, they're political scientists, they are other entrepreneurs and designers and illustrators.
These are the people who curate for me every day. What's interesting to them. I just think that's freaking amazing.
SPEAKER_04
You get to surf on top of that. It is.
SPEAKER_05
It is. And so some people say, oh my gosh, it's been so much time on social media. Actually, it's just literally going through and reading.
Yes. If you think about it, but curated by the people. And I also learned about the books that I want to read.
And that's, so I love reading books related to psychology and I love reading, I'm starting to listen to a lot of history podcasts. So like some of those like Kings of Kings type podcasts, I think are super interesting because you're just learning about this notion of history rhyming. Like it's so true.
I mean, you're learning about what happened in like Rome, you know, and you're like, oh my gosh, it's happening all over again now in America. There's just a lot of that. So I, but I try not to, you know, I actually don't have like one feel that I'm just like, I love reading just this genre or whatever.
And I don't read too many business books. I, well, I find that most of them are a big book about a little idea. You know, so I feel about most books.
It is, but you know, I think that, and I have an argument with my publisher about the messy middle because I came in with this like this, this big book of like, you know, between 100 200 insights that were completely disconnected from one another, although there was some sort of red, but you know, and they were like, this is not what you're supposed to do. Just write a chapter book. And I was like, well, let's read each of us.
Right. At least my audience, they're too busy. You know, there's certain companies are changing companies.
They just want actual insights. They'll make them think about something differently.
SPEAKER_02
This is a funny insight. So one of my favorite books ever, I believe Paul Graham and his wife, Jessica, I forget it or less, I'm living, said wrote it. It's called Founders at Work.
And all it is, is interviews. And this was written, I don't know, oh five, maybe it's in the early, it was before Twitter was around because they interview Ev Williams, the guy who started Twitter and he was called the founder of blogger, his old company. So whenever Twitter launches before that.
And it's like 18 or 20 or 30 interviews and it's called Founders at Work. And they just, they just ask questions. That's all it is.
It's Jessica asking questions and the, the, it's like this podcast basically is this podcast kind of in book form a little bit. It's awesome. And I agree with Scott here.
I actually love these types of books. They aren't chapters I can flip through and they're just quick insights, like 10 pages. I think you could actually build a book that's like founders at work or make a book founders at work, but then do like engineers at work.
You can do designers at work. You can do, and all you do is release a series of books. You can do it every year, every two years, every three years.
And it's just sold for $29 or whatever books cost $18. And you just do this over and over and over again. It's like, remember that, you know, those books like bee keeping for dummies, SEO for dummies, whatever the four dummies, I think you could do the same thing.
So if you're looking for an idea, I think you could do that.
SPEAKER_05
And like we're going to go to learn more, right? Turn the page and then like, you know, turn on your brain.
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, that's the least that I want. Yeah. Great. All right. I know you got to help on a flight.
So I clock, look at this perfectly on time.
SPEAKER_01
That's my podcast or instincts.
SPEAKER_04
Great. 10 p.m. flat. Yeah. This was fun. I hope you guys liked this conversation.
If you want to follow Scott, where should they follow you? Reach out to you.
SPEAKER_05
Hey, just a Scott Belsky at Scott Belsky wherever, whenever you can.
SPEAKER_02
Awesome. That's it. That's the podcast.
That was a quick one. I think like the introductions took up a lot of it, but Scott's amazing. I hopefully, I hope you enjoyed this.
I enjoyed just sitting here listening to it. It's cool, man. It's got, I mean, I just get fired up.
I'm kind of a lost for it because I'm thinking about what Scott said. The guy's amazing. I love his attitude.
I'm going to keep doing these. This was another greatest hits app. Let me know how you, how you feel about these.
The Sam Parr is my Twitter handle. I read all of them. And let me know what you think.
I'm digging it. I like doing them and I hope you, I hope you liked listening to them. So let me know what you think.
And by the way, it's now close to midnight over here. I'm staying up late doing this. I'm doing this all for you.
And you know what I want? Just click that subscribe button on iTunes, that follow button on Spotify and leave me a review, leave us a review. We check them in. We iterate quickly in the podcast because we review those all the time.
So thank you. This is a Sam Parr calling you from like Waco, Texas or somewhere. And I'll look Quinta in.
Talk soon.
SPEAKER_00
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like no days off on a road. Let's travel never looking back.