Scott Belsky
42 statements across 7 episodes · 22 bullish · 2 bearish · 5 people on the record · first statement May 18, 2023 by Scott Belsky · said 18 times in 8 episodes since 2022 · 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 Lenny Rachitsky (8), Alistair Croll (4), Josh Miller (1), Grant Lee (1), Casey Winters (1), Brian Balfour (1), Anuj Rathi (1), Alexander Embirikos (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2025 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2024 4 mentions in 1 episode
2023 11 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
- Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO)
- An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma)
- The full-stack PM | Anuj Rathi (Swiggy, Jupiter Money, Flipkart)
- Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
Everything said about Scott Belsky, oldest first
May 18, 2023
Users in the first 30 seconds are lazy, vain, and selfish
“In the 1:30 seconds of using a new product, you are lazy, vain, and selfish.
You want to get it done super quickly.
You want to look good to your colleagues or to your friends.
You want to feel successful very quickly by engaging in this product.
You don't wan…”
May 18, 2023 positive
May 18, 2023 positive
May 18, 2023
Scaling requires continuously redesigning onboarding for increasingly skeptical users
“The new customers you have in the early stages of your product are typically more willing and forgiving customers.
And you might nail the onboarding process for them, and then suddenly realize that, wait, it's not being as effective anymore.
And the reason is,…”
May 18, 2023 positive
AI will enable applications to dynamically personalize onboarding experiences
“And I actually think that the role of AI, you know, going forward will be to have applications increasingly meet us where we are.
You know, to this day, we've always had to generalize onboarding experiences for the most part for everyone.
And I'm really excite…”
May 18, 2023
Early product MVPs should optimize for the problems teams want to have
“Whenever I'm asked by teams what features need to be part of their MVP, how do they decide, you know, which features they need to ship first and whatever. I always tell them to optimize for the problems they want to have. You want the problem of customers gett…”
May 18, 2023
May 18, 2023
May 18, 2023
Higher consumer tech literacy helps incumbent platforms absorb feature apps
“Fast forward to today, where all of us are far more technologically literate, and we are able to manage a lot more cognitive load in our everyday technology lifestyles. And so there, you know, suddenly we don't mind five tabs. We don't mind Features hidden and…”
May 18, 2023 positive
Extraordinary venture outcomes inherently require defying standard best practices
“Anything, anything amazing in the venture world is ultimately An exception. And with all the best practices, Lenny, that you and I just discussed and all the stuff that we read in books and whatever else, I always try to remind myself that, you know, at the en…”
May 18, 2023
May 18, 2023 negative
Consumer apps serve as VC-funded R&D for tech incumbents
“I think that a lot of these other more recent consumer products are just kind of clever momentary interfaces. And they are in effect at the expense of venture capitalists R and D for the platforms that already have the network effects and already have the dist…”
Oct 5, 2023 bullish
Balfour: AI Tooling Will Enable Much Smaller Teams and Empower Super ICs
“All of this AI tooling is going to give these like super ICs, these captain level ICs, even more leverage in solving problems and their creation abilities as part of that. And so I think in the future, what we're going to see, and I'm not the first one to say …”
Nov 29, 2023 positive
Belsky: Asking candidates about their personal limitations tests for blame deflection.
“I like asking about something people have learned about themselves that reveal the limitation in how they work. You know, it's a way to test like introspection and when this person hits their limits or struggles, can they be open and introspective or are they …”
Apr 28, 2024 neutral
Beykpour: Musk Held Two-Hour Transition Meeting at Twitter HQ with Isaacson Present
“And in that massive conference room, it was me, Scott, Elon, and then at the very, very end of the room, Walter Isaacson, who, by the way, like, I had a hard time I knew I recognized, I never met Walter in person, but I was like, is that Walter Isaacson? But h…”
Nov 3, 2024 positive
Scott Belsky seeded Behance by interviewing top designers who refused invites
“He said that for the launch of Behance, he reached out and asked all these influential designers to join his platform. And they said, no. And then he said, oh, okay, pivot. Hey, I'd like to do an interview about you for my platform. And they said, oh sure. And…”
Dec 11, 2024 positive
Belsky: Novelty precedes utility in driving initial product adoption
“Novelty does precede utility, and we have to sometimes remember that when we are planning and prioritizing roadmaps for our products, it's very easy to be reasoning-oriented of what we know the customer is saying they want, as opposed to the things that they'l…”
Dec 11, 2024 positive
Belsky: Screens must answer user origin, current action, and next steps
“Whenever I review any part of a product, any screen, I'm ultimately asking myself three questions in every moment. When I see something new, I'm asking, how did I get here? What do I do now? And where do I go next? To me, this is almost like the ultimate objec…”
Dec 11, 2024 positive
Belsky: Social media engagement rises post-posting to check ego analytics
“When you talk to people who work at companies like Instagram, what they will admit is that the engagement
And a product like that actually goes up after the user posts something, which suggests that maybe people are actually going back to the product more ofte…”
Dec 11, 2024 positive
Belsky: Organizations must suppress team cultural resistance to graft new talent
“You have to prioritize grafting talent as much as hiring talent. This is something that I've learned the hard way many times, right? When you hire some amazing person, but you fail to suppress the immune system of your team that has always done it a certain wa…”
Dec 11, 2024 positive
Dec 11, 2024 positive
Belsky: Product teams must own copy internally rather than outsource
“Believing that it effectively copies part of the product experience and needs to be born from within a product team. It's part of the overall end-to-end, and most companies are not structured that way or will even outsource copy to some degree, and that's neve…”
Dec 11, 2024 positive
Belsky: Collapsing talent stacks by hiring cross-disciplinary operators unlocks organizations
“When you do have that opportunity to hire that product leader with a design background, or that designer who was a front-end engineer, you know, or the growth hacker who was also a designer, that conduit that you then collapse is an incredibly effective way to…”
Dec 11, 2024
Scott Belsky: Eliminating secondary features increased Behance's core engagement
“When we had groups, we had something called Tip Exchange, we had something called Circles, we had something called Work in Progress, and we realized that every time we killed one of those things, the engagement on the core feature that actually mattered most, …”
Dec 11, 2024 positive
Belsky: Lead with questions over criticism when frustrated in product meetings
“When I am frustrated or disappointed, what I challenge myself to do in product meetings is just to ask in a barrage of questions. To tune into my curiosity on what's off, what's wrong, and just go poking with questions and questions and questions to the point …”
Dec 11, 2024
Dec 11, 2024 neutral
Belsky: Early user cohorts are forgiving, but later cohorts demand simpler onboarding
“Early cohorts are more willing and forgiving, and then later cohorts are not willing and forgiving. They are sometimes against their own wishes, and they better get a very simple experience and a different experience in the onboarding.”
Dec 11, 2024
Dec 11, 2024 positive
Belsky: Pinterest solved site speed perception by preloading pin background colors
“I remember the early days when Pinterest started to scale in, like, 2011, 2012, and the team was, like, racing to keep this product up and running. There was this big road map, you know, of how to get scalability and performance and improve performance of the …”
Dec 11, 2024 positive
Belsky: Merchandising progress to users and teams drives continued progress
“People make more progress when they feel like they're making progress. As product leaders, we need to merchandise to our team the progress they're making to get their continued commitment, and similarly to customers, helping customers understand the progress t…”
Dec 11, 2024 bullish
Belsky: Design will increasingly commoditize tech in the AI era
“And then in the age of AI, more and more of our choices in every industry are being made at the surface, right? And I think that's another opportunity, another argument that design will increasingly commoditize tech to some degree, and that having this designe…”
Dec 11, 2024 neutral
Belsky: Complexity creep and simple alternatives fuel Silicon Valley's product life cycle
“Users flock to simple products. We love simple products, both as enterprise customers and as individuals. Those users, you know, all sort of inundated products, and what does the product do? It takes those users for granted by saying, oh my goodness, now we ne…”
Dec 11, 2024 positive
Dec 11, 2024 neutral
Belsky: Using a product reveals whether internal teams communicated effectively
“When you use a product, you can kind of tell by using the product who did and didn't talk to each other, Right? Did they get along? Did they not get along? Was the copywriter in the room or not in the room? Did the marketing department have to get the product …”
Dec 11, 2024 negative
Belsky: Failed seed founders prioritized visionary end-states over daily customer empathy
“And if I were to characterize some of the entrepreneurs that I've backed over my years as a seed investor that I was most inspired by that were not successful, it was because they were so governed by their passion for the end state of what the world needed to …”
Dec 11, 2024 positive
Dec 11, 2024
Belsky: A product's core differentiator must be exceptional at MVP launch
“Whatever you put out, your instinct as a team will always be to iterate from there, and so to also make sure that while it can be the minimum viable version of most things, the thing that distinguishes your product the most needs to be done extraordinarily wel…”
Dec 11, 2024
Dec 11, 2024 positive
Belsky: Product leaders should use data as a compass, not a map
“Data is a compass, not a map. Right? The idea that we ultimately need to determine what mountain to climb, right, with the intuition we have, with our understanding, and with our empathy and yet data is ultimately what helps us climb the mountain we choose, an…”
Dec 11, 2024 neutral
Dec 11, 2024 positive
Scott Belsky replaced Adobe's quarterly tenure awards with impact awards
“And when I came into Adobe, they had these tenure awards that I was supposed to do every quarter at my all hands. And I was like, wait, I'm celebrating someone for how long they've survived here, as opposed to someone who's come in and made an impact on day tw…”
Nov 13, 2025
Products must win over users who are selfish, vain, and lazy
“I think one approach is you think about new users as you almost have like a cynical view of them. You have to think about them being selfish, vain, and lazy, right? Like they're coming in, they have no desire to learn a new tool. And so what can you give them …”