Season 3, Episode 6: Behance (with Scott Belsky)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:11)
Welcome to season three, episode six of Acquired, the show about technology, acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:18)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:19)
And we are your hosts. Today we are covering Adobe Systems' 2012 acquisition of Behance. Since acquiring Behance five years ago, Adobe's market cap has 5x'd to $130 billion. They've successfully moved all of their creative software from a box software model to a subscription service, and they have bought several companies to expand both the creative business and grow beyond it. Now we're super excited that we have with us today Scott Belsky, the founder and CEO of Behance and Adobe's Chief Product Officer. So welcome, Scott.

**Scott Belsky** (0:50)
Thanks, guys.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:51)
Really appreciate you coming on.

**Scott Belsky** (0:53)
Of course.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:54)
All right, so listeners, Scott is someone who has done many awesome things in the tech world. He's currently, obviously, Chief Product Officer at Adobe, which acquired Behance. However, unlike what you might imagine, his path from founding Behance to the acquisition by Adobe was not a straight line, which we will get into, and especially to the position that he's in today. In addition to all of the above, he's a prolific angel investor. He has co-founded three companies, was a general partner at Benchmark, and is now a venture partner at Benchmark, and has written two books, the latest of which was The Messy Middle, which is a very apt title for the journey that we are about to discuss.

**Scott Belsky** (1:28)
Indeed.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:32)
If you are new to the show, you can check out the Slack at Acquired.fm. It's the place where David, myself and 1,600 of our favorite listeners discuss episodes right after we release them, along with hot takes and the biggest tech news of the day, and really just get to know you, the listener and the community better. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (1:53)
So Crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider, specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners, and literally Crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. And because Crusoe's cloud is purpose-built for AI and run on wasted, stranded, or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:19)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:24)
The other element that makes Crusoe special is the environmental angle. Crusoe, of course, locates their data centers at stranded energy sites. So, think oil flares, wind farms that can't use all the energy they generate, etc. And uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:42)
Yeah. Obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on costs, since Crusoe doesn't rely on the energy grid. Energy is the second largest cost of running AI after, of course, the price you pay NVIDIA for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (2:59)
It's super cool that they can put their data centers out there in these remote locations where quote-unquote energy happens, as opposed to the other hyperscalers such as AWS and Google and Azure, who need to build their data centers close to major traffic hubs where the Internet happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:15)
Yep. If you, your company, or your portfolio companies would like to use the lower cost and more performant infrastructure for your AI workloads, go to crusocloud.com/acquired.
That's crusoecloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. Well, Scott, we couldn't be more pumped to have you with us. This is a topic that's near and dear to my heart, and I think we'll get into this a lot in the episode. But I worked on Office for iPad at Microsoft right as we were taking a lead from Adobe and switching to Office 365 Cloud first subscription model. And it's really been amazing to watch the transformation that you guys have gone through from $700 box of Photoshop to where you are today with Creative Cloud.

**Scott Belsky** (4:00)
It's been an adventure and really interesting for me to learn and observe this as well. When we came in to Adobe through the Behance acquisition, this was late 2012, the company was just going through that transition at that point. I think that there were a lot of folks internally that were still resistant to it. I think there was a lot of kind of a rude awakening as to what does this mean to actually start measuring monthly active users and have a relationship with customers as opposed to selling box software and not necessarily knowing who was using it and how many people were using it. It was quite a whirlwind of an education for me.