Scott Belsky - Focus on the First Mile

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (2:13)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:39)
My guest today is Scott Belsky. Scott was the co-founder and CEO of Behance, the world's largest creative network and is a prolific angel investor having made early stage investments in Pinterest, Uber, Carta and Airtable.
His company was acquired by Adobe in 2012 where he is currently the Chief Product Officer. In this conversation, we cover the importance of focusing on the first mile of a customer's experience with your product, why every user is, at first, either lazy, vain or selfish, and what the rise of creativity tools means for creators and investors in the future. We also cover the major trends that Scott thinks will dominate for the next decade. This was one of those conversations where I left with 10 great lessons that will stick with me for a long time. Please enjoy my conversation with Scott Belsky.
So Scott, I've been so excited to do this with you. I think we'll make the first part of this conversation about the psychology and process of building great products, and then we'll talk a lot about everything else that you do. You have your hands in so many interesting things. My opening question, I guess, is just very broad, which is, what is your philosophy of building great products, generally speaking?

**Scott Belsky** (3:45)
That's a great question, and I am ultimately anchored by customer journeys.
I've always believed that a prototype is worth 100 meetings, and the greatest failings I've seen in the product world, including my own, are when you build something out of passion for a problem, rather than have empathy with those suffering from the problem, which means you just have to get more shoulder to shoulder than you've ever felt you could with customers. It's somewhat counterintuitive because a lot of those things you do are just not scalable, but they're what you do to just really feel what a customer is feeling. I think that dictates not only product experience, which we can talk about, and the first mile of product experience, which I think is woefully neglected and underestimated and under invested in, but also the marketing experience, the copy, the email frequency, the notifications. Every single aspect of customer experience ultimately is anchored with what the person experiencing them will feel. How could you orchestrate all that without really getting close to the bone?