Scott Belsky

Belsky attended Cornell University as an undergraduate and later received an MBA from Harvard Business School; before founding his company he was an associate at Goldman Sachs.⁠[1][2]

In 2006, Belsky co-founded Behance in New York; its founders initially bootstrapped it. The platform lets graphic designers, illustrators, photographers, web designers and art directors showcase portfolios, discover creative work and develop their careers, and he served as its CEO. He also co-founded 99U, an annual conference devoted to the execution of ideas, held in New York for ten years.⁠[3][4][2][1][1]

In April 2010, Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen was published by Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin. That year he was named to Fast Company’s list of the “100 Most Creative People in Business” and began making early-stage angel investments.⁠[1][1][5]

Behance raised a $6.5 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures (USV), with individual investors including Jeff Bezos through Bezos Expeditions, Chris Dixon and Alexis Ohanian. Belsky subsequently became a limited partner in USV’s funds, frequently angel invested alongside USV, and served as an unofficial mentor to many USV portfolio companies.⁠[3][3][6]

Adobe announced it had acquired Behance and planned to integrate its community and portfolio features into Creative Cloud; Behance then had about 1 million members and 32 employees. Adobe did not disclose the terms; the price was reportedly slightly more than $150 million in cash and stock, with growth goals over multiple years. Belsky became Adobe’s vice president of community.⁠[3][3][3][7][3]

After a little more than three years at Adobe, the 35-year-old Belsky joined the venture capital firm Benchmark as its sixth general partner. Benchmark partner Bill GurleyBill GurleyBill Gurley is a venture investor, author and podcast host who spent many years as a Benchmark general partner, investing in and serving on boards of technology businesses including Uber and Zillow. He moved from computer engineering to securities research and became known for internet marketplace investments, the Above the Crowd blog and the career book Runnin’ Down a Dream.Open the full entry wrote that Belsky came to the firm’s attention through his early-stage investing in and advising of companies including Uber, Warby ParkerWarby ParkerWarby Parker is a U.S. eyewear and vision-care company founded in 2010 by Neil Blumenthal, Dave Gilboa, Andrew Hunt and Jeffrey Raider, and headquartered in New York. Starting with direct online sales, it expanded into stores, contact lenses and eye exams, and is developing intelligent eyewear with Google and Samsung. Its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under WRBY.Open the full entry, Pinterest and Periscope.⁠[2][2][2]

In December 2017, Belsky rejoined Adobe to lead product development across Creative Cloud as chief product officer, later also serving as chief strategy officer and executive vice president of design and emerging products. At Adobe he helped bring its products to the cloud, mobile and the web, and helped launch the Firefly generative AI products, the open protocol for Content Credentials and products such as Adobe Express.⁠[8][9][1][1][9]

Belsky’s second book, The Messy Middle, was published by Portfolio as a 416-page hardcover. Based on more than five years of interviews with founders, artists and executives, it discusses the hardest, middle stretch of ventures and bold projects, divided into three parts, Endure, Optimize and The Final Mile, with more than 100 insights.⁠[10][1][11][11][11][11][11]

Belsky was a driving force behind Adobe’s $20 billion attempt to acquire the product design platform Figma. The deal collapsed in 2023 under pressure from UK and EU regulators, and Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion termination fee.⁠[9][9]

In early June 2024, Adobe asked users to re-accept its revised Terms of Use, which said Adobe may access user content through automated and manual methods, prompting a strong backlash from designers and creators on X: one designer urged professionals under NDA to cancel Adobe and delete all its apps, saying “Adobe can not be trusted”; some users called it a “spyware-like” update and feared their work would be used to train AI.⁠[12][12][13][13]

On June 10, Belsky and Dana Rao responded in a joint post on Adobe’s blog, acknowledging that the re-acceptance had raised concerns and promising updated terms by June 18; they reiterated that Adobe had never trained generative AI on customer content or taken ownership of customers’ work, that Firefly was trained only on licensed content such as Adobe StockAdobe StockAdobe Stock is Adobe’s stock content service, launched on June 16, 2015, offering royalty-free photos, vectors, illustrations, videos, templates, audio, and 3D assets that can be searched and licensed directly within Adobe apps such as Photoshop and Illustrator. It is built on Fotolia, the stock image website Adobe acquired in 2015, and was one of the sources of training data for the first version of Adobe’s generative AI model Firefly.Open the full entry and public domain content whose copyright had expired, and admitted that Adobe “should have modernized our Terms of Use sooner.” The same day Belsky wrote on X that the team was committed to getting it right.⁠[14][14][14][14][14][14][12]

Belsky announced he was leaving Adobe to become a partner at the independent film studio A24, based in New York and leading its tech and innovation projects, while remaining an adviser to Adobe. He wrote on X that seven years after returning to Adobe following the Behance acquisition, he was turning to filmmaking and storytelling, a longtime passion. Adobe chief marketing officer Lara Balazs said he would build tools and resources at A24 to support filmmakers’ creative visions, and that the two companies had begun discussing a partnership.⁠[8][8][8][15][15]

Google DeepMindGoogle DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry and A24 announced a research partnership to help artists develop new workflows and techniques, and Google made a $75 million investment in A24.⁠[16][16][16][17]

The partnership drew criticism from A24 fans and filmmakers. Actress and filmmaker Justine Bateman wrote on X that it was disappointing for A24 to make such a deal right after the box office triumph of BACKROOMS by the staunchly anti-AI director Kane Parsons, and warned A24 directors that their films could be altered against their wishes. Belsky, head of A24 Labs, defended the deal, saying there are better uses of AI that preserve creative control and support risk-taking, and that the new tools “won’t look anything like the prompted generation type of AI that people feel uncomfortable with.”⁠[17][17][17][17][17]

Union Square Ventures introduced Belsky as its first-ever Product Advisory Partner, helping early-stage portfolio companies with product, positioning and user experience and taking part in USV’s evaluation of startups. USV wrote that the role recognized an informal one he had played for nearly fifteen years. When USV announced $900 million in new funds on October 8, it listed him among its newest team members alongside new general partner Michael MignanoMichael MignanoMichael Mignano is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, co-founder and CEO of the podcasting platform Anchor, which Spotify acquired in 2019. He was a partner at Lightspeed and since 2026 has been a general partner at the New York venture firm Union Square Ventures (USV).Open the full entry and venture partner Jared HechtJared HechtJared Hecht is an American entrepreneur and investor, co-founder of the group chat app GroupMe and the small-business financing platform Fundera, which were acquired by Skype and NerdWallet respectively. Since 2024 he has been a venture partner at the New York venture firm Union Square Ventures (USV).Open the full entry.⁠[6][6][6][6][4]

Belsky invests at the early stage under the capitalB name, focusing on consumer, marketplace and “transformation by interface” companies, and with his operating partner Sheldon has supported more than 80 founding teams. Exited investments include Pinterest, Uber, Warby Parker, Reddit, Airtable, Periscope and Scale AI; current investments include Notion, Replit, Supabase, Etched, Ramp, Carta and Mercury, as well as crypto projects such as OpenSea, dYdX, Filecoin and Starkware.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5][5][5][5][5][5]

Belsky serves on the board of directors of the collaboration software company Atlassian, as a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, on the board of COOP Careers and on the entrepreneurship and tech councils at Cornell University; he is also a partner in Kindling Holdings, which manages small brands including the Action Method line of organizational products.⁠[1][8][1][1]

Belsky writes the industry newsletter Implications, covering advances in technology, shifts in culture, and product design and team building, with more than 42,000 subscribers; he also co-authored several books under the 99U imprint published by Amazon Publishing.⁠[18][18][1]

Personal website: https://www.scottbelsky.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[19]

Newsletter Implications: https://www.implications.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[20]

X: Public account: https://x.com/scottbelsky (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottbelsky (opens in a new window)⁠[19]

Union Square Ventures: Official website: https://www.usv.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[21]