Scott Belsky is an entrepreneur, investor and author of the new book 'The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture’. He is currently Chief Product Officer at Adobe, serves as a board member to several early stage companies, and is a Venture Partner at Benchmark, a legendary venture capital firm based in San Francisco. Scott was previously the founder and CEO of Behance, a leading online platform to showcase and discover creative work. He is also the creator of 99U, Behance's think tank and annual conference devoted to execution in the creative world. In addition to ‘The Messy Middle’, Belsky is also the author of Making Ideas Happen and coauthor of the 99U book series.
In this episode, we cover:
- 2:40 - It's the middle that makes or breaks you
- 4:48 - Start, Endure, Optimize, Finish, Repeat
- 5:48 - Breaking your business growth into chapters
- 8:35 - Build the narrative before your product
- 9:54 - Building a creative team
- 10:56 - Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull
- 11:28 - Short chapters as prompts
- 14:27 - Make one subtraction for every addition
- 17:21 - Kevin Rose
- 20:56 - Getting ignored by Google
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- twitter.com/scottbelsky
- www.scottbelsky.com
- themessymiddle.com
- Tools: Evernote, Wunderlist, Twitter, Adobe Spark
- Books: Herding Tigers by Todd Henry, Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- Album: OK Computer by Radiohead
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