Scott Belsky
72 statements across 8 episodes · 16 bullish · 7 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Feb 27, 2017 by Scott Belsky · said 88 times in 34 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Scott Belsky's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Harry Stebbings (59), Jason Lemkin (9), Kayvon Beykpour (6), Semil Shah (2), David Luan (2), Des Traynor (1), David Frankel (1), Brianne Kimmel (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 3 mentions in 1 episode
2025 12 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- Opendoor CEO, Kaz Nejatian: OpenAI and Oracle, How Can Either Afford to Do This · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Figma’s IPO: The Full Breakdown & Why Melio’s $2.5BN Acquisition is “Discouraging” · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Why Apple Needs a Management Overhaul & Why Google is Catching Up with Hyperscalers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO @Snowflake: Deepseek is Not a Threat to OpenAI & OpenAI Beats Anthropic|E1258 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Mikey Shulman, CEO @Suno: The Future of Music, What is Gonna Happen? | E1244 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- David Luan: Why Nvidia Will Enter the Model Space & Models Will Enter the Chip Space | E1169 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jean-Michel Lemieux: Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | E1129 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jason Lemkin: PluralSight S*** the Bed & The Next IPO Candidates | E1160 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 4 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
- Des Traynor: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI | E1082 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Snap's VP of Product Jack Brody: The Future of AR; Snap Glasses; Evan Spiegel's Product Mind | E1006 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- The Ultimate Guide for Building a Two-Sided Marketplace | a16z's Jeff Jordan · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- a16z GP Jeff Jordan: The Ultimate Guide to Two-Sided Marketplaces | 20VC #966 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 47 mentions in 12 episodes 4 per episode
- Kayvon Beykpour: How to Structure and Manage the Best Product Reviews | 20VC #894 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Julio Vasconcellos: Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and then Cratering | 20VC #928 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Tony Fadell: Product Marketing Lessons I Learned from Steve Jobs | 20VC #884 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Luc Levesque: The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring for Growth | 20VC #906 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Semil Shah: Lessons Learned Scaling from a $1M to a $50M Fund | 20VC #951 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Marty Cagan: Product Lessons from Steve Jobs and Elon Musk; Why do we idolize engineers? | 20VC #957 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Spotify CTO Gustav Söderström: TikTok's Music; How Olivia Rodrigo Gamed the Algo | 20VC #936 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Kevin Weil: Lessons from Leading Product at Instagram & Twitter | 20VC #934 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2022 →
2020 2 mentions in 1 episode
2019 7 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Figma Founder Dylan Field on The Biggest Mistakes Young Founders Most Often Make, How To Go Slow To Go Fast With Venture Dollars & How The Design Process Will Fundamentally Change Over The Next 5-10 Years
- 20VC: Why The Current VC Financing Mechanism For Consumer Brands Is Broken, Why The Infrastructure To Power Emerging Brands Is Broken and What The Re-Platforming of Retail Means For The Next Decade in Consumer with Adam Pritzker, Chairman & CEO @ Assemble
- 20VC: Worklife Ventures' Brianne Kimmel on Why More Operators Should Start Their Own Fund, How To Structure Your Round for the Highest Signal Round & What The Multi-Stage Funds Playing At Seed Means For The Rest of The Asset Class
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Lessons Learned Scaling PillPack from Seed to Amazon Acquisition, Why Investors Should Spend More Time Assessing Human Capital Risk Taken by Founders & The Right Way To Think About Capital Efficiency in Scaling with David Frankel, Managing Partner @
- 20VC: Why Serial Entrepreneurship is Overrated, Why You Will Get Fired If You Listen To Your Board & How To Construct Investor Update Emails The Right Way with Joe Fernandez, Founder & CEO @ Joymode
- 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
2017 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund
- 20VC: Why Cheque Size & Follow On Decision-Making Does Not Matter, Why Intelligence Is Overrated & Why You Should Do Everything You Can To Make Other People Successful with Anthony Pompliano, Founding Partner @ Full Tilt Capital
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
Everything said about Scott Belsky, oldest first
Feb 27, 2017
Feb 27, 2017 negative
Feb 27, 2017
Belsky: Venture capital is fundamentally a business of exceptions
“Venture capital and investing in general is a business of exceptions, and whenever you talk to any seasoned investor about some of their greatest hits, you know, they'll tell you that the Team didn't look right, or the market seemed too small, or, you know, th…”
Feb 27, 2017 neutral
Belsky: Angel investing bets on potential; traditional VC demands momentum
“I think as an earlier stage angel seed investor, it's all about investing in the potential of a product or the potential of a team. When you start to do more traditional venture capital And certainly venture capital at the benchmark level level. It's a lot mor…”
Feb 27, 2017 negative
Feb 27, 2017 neutral
Belsky: Product onboarding must be continuously re-optimized for new user cohorts
“If you get the first mile, the onboarding, the initial user experience of a product perfect for a period of time, you have to continually revisit it and optimize it for new groups of new users with different psychographics, you know, different expectations, di…”
Feb 27, 2017 neutral
Feb 27, 2017 negative
Feb 27, 2017 neutral
Belsky: Founders struggle by prioritizing long-term gains over initial onboarding
“Entrepreneurs struggle because they are always focused on that long-term gain from using a product, and they're always trying to get people invested in the product in order to get that benefit, when in fact, they should just be focusing on the first mile.”
Feb 27, 2017 positive
Belsky: Bootstrapping enforces real-time financial discipline necessary for sustainable growth
“Well, I think when you're bootstrapping a business, you get a tremendous feel for the granularity of your business, the money coming in, the money coming out, the true cost of every decision that you make. And it's a very healthy way to build a sustainable bus…”
Jan 7, 2019 negative
Belsky: Micro direct-to-consumer brands are poor fits for traditional venture capital
“These companies aren't necessarily great candidates for venture capital backing. However, they have a much lower risk ratio than a lot of typical venture backed companies. So the expected outcome is maybe smaller, but the risk is lower, which may be called int…”
Jan 7, 2019 negative
Belsky: Celebrating financing rounds and press drives non-productive startup behavior
“We can't celebrate fake wins. You know, I see some teams celebrate financing, celebrate getting an award that frankly they paid for, or getting some press coverage that they clearly paid for, and that is dangerous because what you're doing is you're getting th…”
Jan 7, 2019 positive
Belsky: Transparent pitches highlighting operational friction are better than hype
“I get so many pitches these days where people talk about the fact that they're in their messy middle. First of all, it's great that we start having a truthful exchange from the offset as opposed to we're going to change the world. We're building this. It's ama…”
Jan 7, 2019
Belsky: Adding feature complexity eventually drives users back to simpler products
“Users flock to a simple product. They get so excited by something new, novel, simple, shiny, and then that new simple product that enjoyed its launch on product hunt and, you know, has all this really great simplicity that people are compelled by. That new pro…”
Jan 7, 2019
Jan 7, 2019 positive
Belsky: Greatest investments create new markets rather than exploiting existing ones
“The greatest investments typically made markets as opposed to, like, We've exploited a common knowledge, large existing market that everyone's excited about, and in order to make a market or expand a market vastly beyond what it is, it has to fundamentally cha…”
Jan 7, 2019 positive
Belsky: Initiative matters more than experience when hiring leaders
“I think I believe more in initiative over experience, and I think that there's just, everyone's obsessed with resumes, and everyone's obsessed with what the experience is Someone has and how those can help them be the most effective leaders in something new. A…”
Jan 7, 2019
Belsky: Define brand narrative and positioning before building the product
“I love the idea of building a splash page before even building a product of thinking about the brand language and the typography and just the one liners of value proposition before starting to build the product. Because to me, these are parts of your compass f…”
Jan 7, 2019 neutral
Belsky: Twitter's early onboarding failed newer user cohorts seeking news
“The newest customers of Twitter, it seems just want the news. You know, they just want to see what's going on. And so in some ways, Twitter's onboarding was like the perfect onboarding for maybe a hundred and fifty million people. And then the newest cohort of…”
Jan 7, 2019
Belsky: Assess hires and founders by exponential progression in successive conversations
“How do you hire people, and how do you find which teams to invest in, and one of the things I always apply is, is this someone whom every conversation is more interesting than the one before it, or is it a replay? You know, most people we actually meet, I don'…”
Jan 7, 2019
Jan 7, 2019
Belsky: Prioritizing the newest user experience sustains product simplicity over time
“As product teams, we need to constantly prioritize the newest users experience and recognize that newest user changes, like different cohorts and newest users need different things. And that is, I think, the secret weapon in a product organization to sustainin…”
Jan 7, 2019
Belsky: Overcapitalization prevents startups from building operational resilience and resourcefulness
“And those companies oftentimes fail and they fail because they never build the muscle memory, the instincts around how to mine difficult moments, how to run postmortems, not because you want to, but because you need to, because you can't screw this up again or…”
Jan 7, 2019
Belsky: Startups should raise war chests only after finding product-market fit
“I mean, there are certainly stages of certain businesses where they should raise a war chest. Because of the nature of the competitive climate, they've already found product market fit. You know, now it's a race for globalization, or it's a race for acquiring …”
Jan 7, 2019
Jan 7, 2019
Belsky: Happiness in life and work correlates with full skill utilization
“I actually feel like happiness is very correlated with utilization. When you feel like all of your interests and curiosities and skills, when you feel like a number of different things you're doing in your life truly utilize everything about you that you want …”
Jan 7, 2019
Belsky: Talent recruitment is the ultimate test for stretching executives
“The litmus test for me is always, how will they perform as recruiters? Will people want to work for them? Are they going to teach and mentor people? The people that are coming up in the team. You can make any rationalization for why someone could stretch and f…”
Jan 7, 2019
Jan 7, 2019
Belsky: Product teams paradoxically treat user onboarding as an afterthought
“We'll spend years building a product, and then we'll spend the final mile of our period building the product, like the last few months, thinking about things like the tour and the onboarding and the default user states and everything else. And so in ultimate i…”
Jan 7, 2019 negative
Jan 7, 2019 bullish
Belsky: Venture capital is inherently a non-scalable business
“I think one thing I also learned from the team is that it's not a scalable business. I've always admired how the team over the years has defied many of the spotlights of seduction, whether it is building an online database or a website for a Entrepreneurs to u…”
Oct 14, 2019 positive
Elad Gil and Scott Belsky drive strong Series A signaling
“Investors like a lot Gil, Scott Belsky, the entire collective of hashtag angels, angels who are both helpful, but I think most importantly, they've established this track record in the ecosystem where they have the ears of series A investors.”
Feb 9, 2022
Belsky: A product always reflects its team's organizational DNA
“I feel like a product Always speaks to the DNA of the team behind it. You can tell who wasn't talking to one another, you know, what the values were, whether there was a designer outsourced or in the room sufficiently empowered, et cetera.”
Feb 9, 2022
Feb 9, 2022
Feb 9, 2022
Belsky: Users overwhelmingly stick with default product settings and landing screens
“As humans, we typically just take and stick with the default of every experience that we're given. Wherever I land you is where you stay. You know, whatever I outfit you to use in the product by default is what you keep.”
Feb 9, 2022 neutral
Belsky: Very few product leaders master both design vision and data iteration
“There are different types of product leaders for different stages of a product. You know, some are very comfortable being very design-driven, setting a product strategy, a vision, rallying the troops around this, and ensuring that the experience is exactly wha…”
Feb 9, 2022
Belsky: Existing teams must adjust to accommodate star hires
“I think that's a mistake most leaders do, because you hire an all-star, and then you're like, oh, she's an all-star. She'll figure it out, when in fact, if she's in a great team, you know, the team needs to adjust in order to accommodate her.”
Feb 9, 2022
Feb 9, 2022
Feb 9, 2022
Belsky: Initial product reviews should exclude engineers to preserve creative freedom
“First of all, I believe that some of the initial product reviews should only be with the product and design team. Engineers are really there to discuss the cost of something, but how can you reconcile the cost of something while you're actually first starting …”
Feb 9, 2022
Belsky: Set objective success metrics before launch to avoid post-launch bias
“You know, I mean, listen, you have to set metrics, objective metrics, of what you believe progress looks like up front for a few different reasons. First of all, you know, as the messy middle Is you get lost in it, right? And along the way, the progress you're…”
Feb 9, 2022
Belsky: Product teams need a three-year prototype as a strategic anchor
“I love not only a prototype of what you're building now, but even a reachy prototype of what you believe the world will look like in three years with your product, because then it's like an anchor. It's like, okay, that's our conviction over the long term. Let…”
Feb 9, 2022
Belsky: Design solves product performance issues faster than engineering replatforming
“You know, even when it comes to the speed and performance of a product, you know, design is actually oftentimes a solution before engineering is a solution, just based on the fact that sometimes you have to replatform something, right? Sometimes you have to ch…”
Feb 9, 2022
Feb 9, 2022
Belsky: Defer feature enhancements until after achieving product-market fit
“You should not try to do those things for launch. You should not try to do those things before you have product market fit. It's really important. They're great ideas, but just do them later. The things you need to do now are the things that would get in the w…”
Feb 9, 2022
Feb 9, 2022
Feb 9, 2022
Feb 9, 2022
Feb 9, 2022 positive
Feb 9, 2022
Belsky: Real-time feedback tracking during reviews dictates product success
“I am maniacal about capturing things during these conversations. So, you know, if there's a piece of feedback shared, but I don't see the pen move of the designer that's on that area, you know, I will say, like, did you capture that? Because I feel like that's…”
Feb 9, 2022
Belsky: Users in the first 90 seconds are lazy, vain, and selfish
“Every customer, at least initially in their 1:30 seconds of a product experience, is lazy, vain, and selfish, right? You know, you don't want to read stuff, you don't want to watch a video, you don't want to take a tour. You kind of want things done for you.”
Feb 9, 2022 positive
Belsky: Adobe replaced Photoshop's blank start page with templates and tutorials
“When I came back to Adobe four years ago in this chief product officer role, I looked at products like Photoshop that literally opened up with a blank black page of, you know, just nothingness, right? And it's like, there was no orientation of what to do now o…”
Feb 9, 2022
Belsky: Products miss product-market fit due to insufficient customer proximity
“The reason that most products are 30 degrees off of what the customer needs, or more, and fail to really achieve that product market fit where it just sings, right, is that we're not shoulder to shoulder with customers enough.”
Jun 8, 2022 positive
Scott Belsky wrote a substantial early seed check for Periscope
“Scott was like, I mean, I want to support you guys. He wrote us, I don't want to share how much the check was, but he wrote us a substantially sized check and was like, I want to be on the team and help you guys make this come to life.”
Jul 6, 2022
Jul 6, 2022
Jul 6, 2022
Belsky: Focus groups universally rejected the Behance concept in 2006
“We had a focus group back in 2006, and we got a group of creatives together that we wanted to build a portfolio network for. You know, we asked folks, do you need, you know, we described what we were building, and universally everyone said, no, I don't need th…”
Jul 6, 2022
Feb 3, 2023
Belsky: Software products directly reveal the organizational DNA of their teams
“A product always speaks to the DNA of the team behind it. You can tell who wasn't talking to one another, you know, what the values were, whether there was a designer outsourced, or in the room, sufficiently empowered, etc.”
Feb 3, 2023 positive
Belsky: Founders should retain direct control over their superpower function
“I think you should abstract yourself out of almost every function, except for the one that is your superpower, that you are the unique person in the world to do, and you should keep doing that as long as humanly possible.”
Dec 20, 2023 positive
Dec 20, 2023 bearish
Dec 20, 2023 neutral
Dec 20, 2023 positive
Dec 20, 2023 neutral
Dec 20, 2023
Dec 20, 2023 positive
Belsky: AI hallucination is a feature, not a bug, in creative tools
“In, in some ways, listen, for some practices hallucination, hallucination is a bug, but in some areas it's also a feature, right? So if I'm trying to discover some cool new music, I mean, I can imagine that might be a feature as opposed to a bug. You know, whe…”
Dec 20, 2023 positive
Belsky: Future UI design is evolving into persona and tone design
“UI in some cases should disappear, but there's new UI these days in the form of the tone of a product and the way that something is is the inflections that are used, the persona. You know, I'm like thinking about UI design in the future as in some ways like pe…”
Dec 20, 2023 positive
Belsky: Adobe never trains AI models on customer creations without opt-in
“We don't ever train our models off of the customer's creations. So, like, what the customer makes does not train our models, unless they submit it to stock and want it to train our models in which case they get compensated for it.”