#32 - Product Genius: Scott Belsky

**Scott Belsky** (0:02)
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. Lot of social consumer products ultimately engage someone based on something they're insecure about.

**Sean Puri** (0:23)
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 going to 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 want to 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 in just the 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.
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 for 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 I 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 go that way. He sold his company and then he became a tech executive. He's currently the chief product officer at Adobe, which is, you know, obviously Adobe is a massive company. So he's a, you know, 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, you know, he creative guy, he wrote a book, he's been an angel investor in companies like Uber or Pinterest, AKA, you know, 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. He 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, as the new year hits, I'm thinking about all these different episodes we've done, 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 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&A episode this week. So if you are listening to this and you have a question that you wanted to ask, it could be about business, could be investing, it could be about a podcast, whatever, I'll answer it. Just shoot me an email. My email is just puri.shaaan. So puri.shaaan.gmail.com. So just shoot me an email. I'm going to do a Q&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.