Scott Belsky
Partner, A24 · 1 appearance on the record.
computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →
founderexecutiveinvestorauthor@scottbelsky ↗LinkedIn ↗scottbelsky.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Scott Belsky co-founded the creative platform Behance, which was acquired by Adobe in 2012, and spent years as an executive leading Adobe's Creative Cloud and product initiatives. He is an active early-stage investor and the author of Making Ideas Happen and The Messy Middle.
46statements → 8claims → 0claims resolved → 3.71/5average certainty → 2.18/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 22said about them ↓
6 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
5 predictions · 3 assertions · 34 insights · 4 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Scott argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Scott Belsky on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Scott Belsky said on Lenny's Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Scott Belsky: Early-stage users of any product are lazy, vain, and selfish
“Every customer of any type of product, I would argue, even in the enterprise, in their early stage of using the product is lazy, vain, and selfish.”
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…”
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…”
AI will collapse organizational hierarchies and eliminate specialized intermediaries
“We're entering the era where we collapse the stack in every organization, where instead of having to go to someone for anything, you can kind of do more things yourself. It's very empowering to get the answer from data as opposed to having to go to a data scie…”
Creative professionals will not be replaced by generative AI
“And some people are like, oh my gosh, creative pros are going to be replaced. No, no, no, no, they're not. They're just going to find 10 X better solutions. They're going to have that capability to explore more possibilities.”
Scott Belsky: Product teams must optimize shallow value before deep value
“You need to optimize for shallow value before you optimize for the deep value.”
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…”
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…”
Belsky: Conviction should outweigh consensus to differentiate products
“Conviction should outweigh consensus. When you have faith and trust in somebody who feels suddenly super strongly, you know, that's when you can make a non-popular decision that differentiates you in the market.”
Belsky: In the AI era, taste and intuition matter more than skill
“As skill becomes offloaded to compute and AI agents are assisting you, it's really your intuition and your taste that is ultimately going to make some of the most important decisions in your organization and in your product.”
Belsky: Creative product solutions always fall outside training data distributions
“You know, models are trained on the distribution of data in the middle, but great, great decisions and new creative solutions to problems always fall outside the distribution of what's been done before. Otherwise, they would have been done already.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
AI automation will expand employment within the experience economy
“I think that there will be far more people engaged in delivering experiences. You know, I'm very long the experience economy, because I think that there will be Some people liberated to focus more on the non-scalable things that really move the needle for expe…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Belsky: A product's default state is often the only state users experience
“Oftentimes we think about the default state of our product in the final mile of shipping it, when in fact, it might be the only state of the product that most of our customers ever experience using it.”
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…”
Belsky: Empathy for customer problems outperforms passion for solutions
“I think that empathy, empathy for the problems our customers are suffering with outperforms passion for the solutions.”
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 …”
The other half of the tape: Scott Belsky's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 18 times in 8 episodes on Lenny's Podcast. 4 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Lenny Rachitsky 8Alistair Croll 4Josh Miller 1Grant Lee 1Casey Winters 1Brian Balfour 1Anuj Rathi 1Alexander Embirikos 1
Statements about Scott Belsky, by other people (4)
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 …”
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 …”
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…”
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…”
Every mention by year
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 →
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Lessons on product sense, AI, the first mile experience, and the messy middle | Scott Bels | May 18, 2023 | 41m |
Played on the show (2)
Episodes where a recording of Scott Belsky was played rather than Scott taking part, or where the tape carries an address with nobody putting questions to them. Listed because the words are on the record, kept out of every score on this page because they were not said on this show. We read this off the tape: who was spoken to, who was asked something, who answered whom.
| Episode | Date | On tape | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Making and Leading Products People Love (Scott Belsky) | Lenny & Friends Summit 2024 | Dec 11, 2024 | 24m | aired address |
| My favorite interview questions from 100+ guests | Nov 29, 2023 | 42s | clip played |