Scott Belsky is an American entrepreneur, author, and investor whose subject across a career has been the gap between having ideas and finishing them.
He founded Behance in 2006 as an online platform where creative professionals could publish and discover work, and built alongside it the 99U conference, which was deliberately named for the Edison line about genius being one percent inspiration. The conference addressed execution instead of inspiration, which was an unusual position in an industry that mostly celebrates the idea.
Adobe acquired Behance in 2012 and Belsky joined the company, later serving as chief product officer and then as chief strategy officer. Before Behance he worked at Goldman Sachs, where he helped develop the Pine Street leadership program.
Making Ideas Happen, published in 2010, came out of six years of observing which creative people and teams consistently shipped work. His conclusion was that execution is a learnable skill built from organizational habits, accountability, and community, and that talent is close to irrelevant to it. The Action Method it describes divides every meeting and every burst of thinking into action steps, references, and backburner items, with a discipline about wording that makes the difference between a task and a wish visible.
The Messy Middle, published in 2018, addresses the long unglamorous stretch of any project after the excitement has gone and before the end is visible, which is where most ventures and most manuscripts die.
He has been an early adviser and investor in Pinterest, Uber, Sweetgreen, and Periscope among others, and has worked as a venture partner at Benchmark. He later became a partner at A24. He writes a newsletter on product and creative work and remains one of the few people in that world who writes seriously about finishing.
Scott Belsky
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