Greatest Hits #7 - Revisiting The Idea Episode with Product Genius Scott Belsky

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
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All right, everyone, this is Sam. I am sitting in a La Quinta Inn. If you're not American, that is like a budget motel type of place. I'm in the middle of Texas driving to New York City.
It's close to 11 p.m. And you know what I did, or at least what I want to do after driving a few hours on my way to New York, I want to talk to you. And I want to listen to one of my closest friends, Shaan, interview my hero. So today's episode is with Scott Belsky. Scott is an acquaintance of mine and he invested in the hustle. And I've looked up to him for years. And I'll tell you why.
First, his accomplishments. So Scott is the Chief Product Officer at Adobe. If I had to bet one day he'll be CEO, maybe soon. But prior to that, he had this wonderful company called Behance. Behance, you go to it and designers can upload their portfolio. It's awesome. If you're a designer, you definitely know what this is. If you're not a designer, go to Behance, you'll see it. It's B-E-H-A-N-C-E. He sold that company for about $150 million.
And when he sold it, it was mostly bootstrapped. He eventually raised a little bit of money, like six or $7 million. But they raised that money like right before they sold. So they had built most of the business without funding.
And he funded the company by selling notebooks and speaking at conferences. It's a pretty amazing story.
And also, he used to get traffic at Behance. And he'll tell the story, I believe, from this company called Pinterest. And he was getting traffic from Pinterest. And he emailed the guy and goes, what the heck is this thing, Pinterest? And he talked to Ben, the founder. And they were just a small company at the time, I think, a couple of folks working on it.
And he eventually invested in that company, invested $15,000 into that company. I think at the time, they were worth something like $3 or $4 million. So if you do the math, that investment could be worth like $50 million bucks. That same week, he had a friend who was buying his notebooks. And he looked up who this guy was, was buying the notebooks. And he hollered at him. And he worked at this company called Stumble Upon. And his name was Garrett Camp. And Garrett goes, hey, I'm working on this other startup.
Would you want to invest in it? Basically, it's going to replace taxis. It's called UberCab. And Scott was like, well, I don't have too much money. But you've bought my notebooks. I kind of feel like I've got to support you.
And I don't think this idea is that great. But I'll invest in it anyway. And he invested another $15,000. I believe that round was valued the company at like $3.5 million. And so whatever the valuation of Uber is today, like $90 billion, $80 billion, I mean, that's worth, like, I would imagine, close to $100 million from that $15,000 investment. Pretty amazing story.
So he's incredibly accomplished as an entrepreneur and as an investor. But he's a product genius. I mean, this guy is amazing. I've only hung out with him a handful of times. And he invested in my company. But I admire this guy so much because of the way he thinks about product, but then also his vibe, his energy. It's always calming to me. You know, he's very inspirational and he's got a wonderful outlook. And so what we're going to do is, Shaan's going to interview him.
He did this like maybe 12 months ago. And I'm going to tell you some thoughts as Shaan is interviewing him. And I'll do some quick interruptions. So let's get to the episode.

**Scott Belsky** (4:18)
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, you know, ultimately engage someone based on something they're insecure about.

**Shaan Puri** (4:39)
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.