Achieving a Balance Between Engineering and Art for Adobe's Scott Belsky

The tech industry holds a kaleidoscopic perspective for Scott Belsky. In almost every aspect of the ecosystem, the creative, entrepreneur, and author have been involved. His experience includes founding and running a startup, working at a household brand, and investing and advising companies like Pinterest, Uber, Sweetgreen, and Periscope.

‍

While the Cornell graduate currently serves as Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Creative Cloud at Adobe, he bootstrapped the creative portfolio company Behance while attending Harvard Business School, something he says may have been unwise in the past. He admits that the past few years have been tough. Nevertheless, he was also inspired to focus on organizational design during his time at Goldman Sachs. Over the course of his career, he has learned lessons about leadership development there.

‍

In 2012, Adobe acquired Behance under Belsky's leadership. As a member of Adobe's cloud-based subscription team, he helped the company launch its service, which is now used by nearly 30 million people. As the company's leader, he also focused on its mobile strategy.

‍

Belsky spent a few years as an investor after Adobe acquired him four years after the acquisition. In his opinion, he made a career mistake by listening to others. As an investor, he felt semi-retired at the time.

‍

After a long absence from Adobe, Belsky returned in 2017. Chief Product Officer, he oversees a massive organization with many distinct products, many of which were developed alongside Behance: "These were all products I used to work with - Photoshop, Illustrator, and video products - which suddenly became my domain." By bringing together product design and engineering parts, I could really create an organization I was proud of.

‍

His focus has remained on the creative community throughout the years. With the blossoming of creative technologies, he places high importance on "interactive, creative experiences.". The fact that partners understand the importance of content is so rewarding, he says.

‍

On Tuesday, January 17, 2023, Belsky spoke at Bloomberg's Global Headquarters in New York City as part of the Cornell Tech @ Bloomberg Speaker Series with Scarlet Fu, host of Bloomberg Television and Bloomberg QuickTake. The "Cambrian explosion" of AI-generated art was one of the topics he discussed, along with managing teams through transition.

‍

Finding Out What Motivates Us

During his time at Goldman Sachs, Belsky began thinking about Behance. During his mentorship at the time, he was told there simply wasn't much money available in companies for creatives, and he had always wanted to facilitate creative work.

‍

It struck Belsky that these people make life interesting: "They're the ones who make it interesting," he says. It is no accident that every billboard and every book that can move someone was created by someone with an interest in art and design."The idea of starting a company to empower and organize creatives was intriguing to me," he says. 2006 marked the year when he founded the company.

‍

There were so many products on Behance for the first five years that investors were hard to find. There were several ways in which the creative world was organized. With Behance, a physical notebook called a vision notebook was created - this product is still sold today through a partner - and a conference called The 99% Conference was launched (speakers exclusively discussed their workflows and executions, instead of their big ideas. VCs balked at this multi-faceted mission, but Belsky says it helped develop a brand as a mission-centric, medium-agnostic company with multiple ways to carry out its mission.

‍

A focus group was conducted by Behance for the first time in 2006. There were a few cheap bottles of wine and a meeting of artist friends. Artists' social networks weren't widely adopted at first. Creatives were encouraged to connect with established competitors such as DeviantArt and LinkedIn because of the crowded market.

‍

Upon asking the group what they were struggling with, Belsky's team discovered two obvious problems: Artists had difficulty getting attribution for their work, and their portfolios were hard to locate online. According to Belsky, "we suggested that they have a professional social network in which their portfolios are the center of attention."

‍

Focusing Teams in Transition

It's always fun to talk about what happens at the beginning and the end of everything," says Belsky. As the title of his 2018 book and a period he experienced during the early years of Behance, "the messy middle" is particularly meaningful to the entrepreneur.

‍

"To keep you going, you can't rely on the long-term vision of what you'll accomplish in five years," he says. A startup struggling to secure initial investors can follow this advice just as well as a company facing an economic downturn. The business's sustainability through difficult times can be attributed to his team's efforts over the past five years. According to him, the people behind Behance were all passionate about what they were doing and truly believed in the product.

‍

It might be possible to actually stick together long enough to achieve success if you create a culture that encourages people to enjoy working together and solving the problems they're solving.

‍

Adobe acquired Behance for $150 million in 2012 after Behance got it right. As Belsky recalls, it was a very exciting time for the software company: It was moving towards what became a massively successful subscription model, and "the company literally changed overnight." As far as acquiring smaller brands and turning them into industry leaders goes, Adobe has experience acquiring smaller companies and transforming them into industry leaders. In addition to Photoshop, another Adobe flagship product was acquired as well. According to Belsky, "we have a culture like that.". "The company kind of grows from what comes from within."

‍

Adobe announced in September 2022 that it had acquired the collaborative design platform Figma as part of this strategy. Upon acquiring Figma, Adobe will gain a new market of designers, developers, copywriters, and executives, according to Belsky. He appreciates Figma's potential to allow more stakeholders to participate in the design process in a field where everyone is competing to produce the best content possible. Belsky says it's unlikely Adobe will simply absorb Figma, given the company's history: "Figma should change Adobe." "Figma is the new DNA of Adobe."

‍

AI-Generated Art: Ethical Stewardship

Due to Adobe's recurring revenue model, the company has been able to develop robust web apps along with cloud processing and artificial intelligence capabilities. In recent years, however, AI has become a flash point in the artistic community, and concerns have emerged about the minimization of working artists and compensation for model-trained artists.

‍

It seems that with this technology there are only Cambrian explosions of possibilities at the moment.

‍

As the space continues to change, Belsky expects that people's "creative confidence" will increase as these tools become more accessible. Creative professionals will also be able to sketch preliminary ideas for clients more seamlessly and easily.

‍

Professional creatives won't be rendered obsolete by AI-generated art, however. Rather than work created by humans being lowered by technology, he says, it will be elevated: "Process-oriented tools will enhance creative work."

‍

There was a controversy recently sparked by a screenshot of Adobe's Terms of Service posted by an artist developer group. The legal document has been interpreted by some Adobe users as suggesting the company uses customer content to train generative AI.

‍

The artist misinterpreted the terms because they were 10 years old, Belsky claims. "We have never trained an AI model with anything in our store," says Belsky. This has never happened before. He describes it as frustrating and a wake-up call. As part of his team's efforts, he's working on updating the data policy to clarify how the data will be used for analytics and feature improvement.

‍

AI-generated art has a bright future, but Belsky says engineers and designers must be intentional as technology advances.

‍

"It's a powerful technology, but like all technology, it needs to be stewarded," says Hecht.