product/design/storytelling obsessive, founder, author, investor
New York, New York, United States
224K followers
500+ connections
About
Scott Belsky is a Partner at A24, an independent film, television, music, and publishing studio based in New York City, and is the founder of A24 Labs. He is a product, storytelling, and design obsessive, and previously served as Adobe’s Chief Product Officer and Chief Strategy Officer and EVP of Design & Emerging Products. Scott was Founder/CEO of Behance until the company’s acquisition by Adobe in 2012.
Scott's passion is to make the creative world more productive, connected, and adaptive to new technologies. He founded Behance, the leading online platform for over 55 million professionals in the creative industry to showcase and discover creative work and develop their careers, and served as CEO until Adobe acquired Behance in 2012. While at Adobe, Scott oversaw a period of transformation that brought Adobe's products to mobile and the web, launched foundational products and models for the age of AI, and launched innovations like the open protocol for content credentials that fosters attribution for creators and products like Adobe Express that advances Adobe's mission of creativity for all. Over the course of this period, Adobe grew from being a ~$19B market cap company to over ~$160B in 2025.
Scott actively advises and invests in businesses that cross the intersection of technology and design, and help empower creative people. He serves on the Board of Directors for Atlassian, and is an early advisor and investor in Pinterest, Uber, sweetgreen, Good Inside, Ramp, Airtable, as well as several other startups in the early stages. He's also a partner in Kindling Holdings, which oversees several small brands that foster tangible creativity, including the Action Method line of organizational products for designers.
Through his work as a founder and investor, Scott has become an advocate for technology and community initiatives that empower creative people. He is the author of [Implications](http://implications.com), a widely-read industry newsletter sent to tens of thousands of product leaders, investors, designers, and other leaders every month. He also authored the international bestselling books Making Ideas Happen (Portfolio Imprint, Penguin Books, Apr, 2010), and The Messy Middle (Portfolio Imprint, Penguin Books, Oct, 2018), and co-authored several books under the 99U imprint for Amazon Publishing. Scott was named to Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in 2010 and serves on the board of the Museum of Modern Art and the entrepreneurship program at Cornell University.
scottbelsky.com // @scottbelsky
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224K followers
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Scott Belsky shared thisthe first “favored” agents that get proprietary and preferred access to the banks and stores and other online processes that we use on a daily basis will have an incredible advantage. Right now, agents are trying to navigate websites made for humans and pass login constraints designed to block bots, but favored agents that pass some level of security authentication should be able to go direct to the data and the services of the companies that we interact with daily...
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Scott Belsky shared thisgreat video about the customer and a milestone for a team I got to watch from early days, but the thesis that got me most excited is missing: the demand side for artisanal, chef operated, n=1 crafted experiences will grow exponentially. in some ways, this team is building for offline experiences what shopify did online.Scott Belsky shared thisOwner has raised $240M, reached a $2.3B valuation, and crossed $100M ARR. Goldman Sachs Alternatives led the round, joined by Meritech, Redpoint, Headline, & Jack Altman. The world is racing to build AI to replace people’s jobs. Owner is building AI to do the opposite: To do the jobs for small business owners they’ve never been able to afford. I started building what would become Owner at 17, to help my mom. We've now helped thousands of local business owners like her. This year alone, more than $1 billion dollars will be made by local restaurant owners using Owner. We wouldn’t be here without our team, investors, and earliest supporters. Thank you to: Jack Altman, Jason M. Lemkin, Alex Bard, Dylan Field, Fidji Simo, Max Mullen, Shalini Rao, Alex Kurland, Naval Ravikant, Jonathan Neman, Claire Hughes Johnson, Dharmesh Shah, Cory Levy, John Andrew Entwistle, Andrew Steele, Joshua Browder, Sean Rad, Scott Belsky, Brett Schulman, Mike Vichich, Andy Pforzheimer, Harris Pollack, Stephen Kerns, Kimbal Musk, Max Altman, Ben Braverman, Geoff Donaker, Nick Bunick, Alexis Ohanian Sr., Kipp Bodnar, Ankur Nagpal, Henry Schuck, Parker Conrad, Justin Mateen, Marcus Lemonis, Shaan Puri, Sam Parr, Tanay Tandon, Josh R.on, Josh R., Immad Akhund, Garrett Langley, Guillermo Rauch. Dean Bloembergen, the team, and I are deeply grateful for everyone who has supported us, including those not tagged here. Owner exists to close the gap between small businesses and huge corporations. We’re starting with restaurant owners. They represent the American dream. 80% start as cooks or servers, then become first-time business owners. But they’re forced to compete with massive corporations, which spend billions on tech & marketing and hire entire teams of experts. We don't want local businesses to get crushed. Owner gives AI superpowers to small businesses, doing work they could never afford before, so they can do more than compete. They can win.
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Scott Belsky posted thisAgent personality, proficiency, and personalization are the new UX.
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Scott Belsky shared thisnew edition of IMPLICATIONS explores: (1) the industry-leading software becoming tailor-made software (2) the emergence of “favored agent” status (3) five things you MUST love as a product leader (4) and some quick takes on “focus, as a service,” holding companies gobbling up SaaS darlings, “to be or not to be a DAU, that is the question,” rare datasets, and AI safety layers...5 Things Top Product Leaders Love, “Favored Agent” Status, & Tailor-Made Enterprise Tools5 Things Top Product Leaders Love, “Favored Agent” Status, & Tailor-Made Enterprise Tools
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Scott Belsky shared thisgood clip of Mike Cannon-Brookes breaking down how jevon’s paradox is growing the market of software developers. things that couldn’t be created before, because ROI wasn’t there, are now being built.Scott Belsky shared thisAtlassian CEO & Co-Founder Mike Cannon-Brookes on why cheaper software creation could actually mean more software developers, not fewer: "I think fundamentally that with the cost of technology creation going down, there will be far more people creating technology." "If something costs you half as much to create, you can choose where to put that saving." "You can create twice as much technology. You can create technology you would not have created before because previously it was too expensive to create." "We've continued to make the creation of technology cheaper and faster at almost every point in the last 50 years. And we have more software developers today than we ever had."
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Scott Belsky posted thisobserved: the more people you consult for advice, the more likely you’ll make a bad/average decision. why? (1) people are, on average, risk averse...and, in quantity, many average risk averse opinions will blunt your boldness. (2) people are liable to envy (and subsequently hate on) opportunities they lack. advice is, by default, tinged with subconscious bias from insecurities. (3) people tend to mix cynicism (bad) with criticism (good) when providing their opinion. (4) ultimately, conviction > consensus. amp up the volume of your own intuition rather than adding too many voices (too much noise) what should we do when we're asked for advice? smart helpful friends ask great questions rather than state their opinion. questions are the unlock to further thought/realizations that build conviction.
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Scott Belsky shared thissome thoughts on wrangling back our own attention... AI will make algorithms exponentially more effective at keeping us tied to the day’s programming and stuff we already know. But originality and other forms of uniquely human creations will only come from the time we spend following our curiosities, expanding our surface area of inputs, and further baking our ideas.
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Scott Belsky shared thisturns out everyday work and agent actions are far more efficient AND far more accurate with a teamwork graph under the hood! the platforms that host work are best positioned to enable work in the AI era ahead.Scott Belsky shared thisJust wrapped Q4 earnings after a standout quarter and year. In my Loom, I talk about context and why the Teamwork Graph gives Atlassian a durable edge in the AI era. https://lnkd.in/eAESRrduQ4'26 Results, Accelerating Cloud Growth Fueled by AI and Our Context AdvantageQ4'26 Results, Accelerating Cloud Growth Fueled by AI and Our Context Advantage
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Scott Belsky liked thisToday we’re expanding Detection Mode for code review so that you can choose the ideal performance profile for each review: - Ultra: Frontier bug detection for the most consequential reviews. - Balanced: Industry leading high bug detection. This is the default mode. - Precise: Similar bug detection as Balanced mode, but higher confidence findings due to additional agentic validation to reduce noise from false positives and low-value findings. - Budget: Fast, low cost bug detection. We’re all accustomed to choosing different intelligence-level models for different tasks… the same should be true for code review. I’m particularly proud of this launch because Macroscope’s Balanced pipeline is already exceptional and (according to the latest independent benchmarks from Martian), has the highest f1 score of any other code reviewer. Our new Ultra pipeline is a further 10% improvement on this!Scott Belsky liked thisWe just expanded Macroscope Detection Mode, giving teams more control over how each code review balances recall, precision, latency, and cost. You can select the ideal performance profile for each code review : - Budget ($0.025/KB): Fast, low cost bug detection. Lower bug detection and precision compared to more premium modes. - Balanced ($0.05/KB) (default): Industry leading high bug detection. Recommended for teams who use Agents to review PR comments, where the inconvenience of occasional false positives is minimal. - Precise ($0.06/KB): Similar bug detection as Balanced mode, but higher confidence findings due to additional agentic validation to reduce noise from false positives and low-value findings. Recommended for teams who prefer to spend more budget (dollars and latency) to ensure high precision findings. - Ultra ($0.20/KB): Frontier bug detection for most consequential reviews. Leverages a much higher number of parallel agents using more advanced coding models. Useful when maximizing bug detection matters more than cost. Detection Mode can be configured per author or repository, per PR or per review. These modes are not simply “better” or “worse.” Each targets a different performance profile, so you can choose the tradeoff that makes sense for the code being reviewed. Learn how to configure Detection Mode: https://lnkd.in/gmgugdRt
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Scott Belsky liked thisScott Belsky liked thisOver the last year I coordinated with over 100 apps and services at Adobe to ensure they properly label things as edited or created with AI. The release quietly went out recently and was so unbelievably smooth. Large thanks to my team in no particular order: Eric Scouten Tania Mathern Michael Klein Colin Murphy Gavin Peacock Raymond Murillo Shruti Kangokar Austin Le Natalie Leuenberger Massy Mahamli Nicholas Salvemini. Apologies to anyone I’m missing and no apologies to those who never added me on LinkedIn and thus cannot receive my gratitude - I’m looking at you Maurice.
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Scott Belsky liked thisScott Belsky liked thisWhen I called the Teamwork Graph the most underappreciated part of Atlassian in our latest shareholder letter, this is exactly what I was talking about. 👇 Great piece in The Information from Laura Bratton, Aaron Holmes, and Kevin McLaughlin on why graph technology is such a big deal for the enterprise. Every day I see the Teamwork Graph help customers leverage top AI tools like OpenAI Codex and Anthropic Claude Code to build faster while using dramatically fewer tokens. Give it a read: https://lnkd.in/eRsGMAZK
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Manny E. Reimi
So many teams are hitting the same wall: their AI is “good”, but never as good as their best people. Over the past few months at Escape Velocity Labs, we kept seeing this across sciences, professional services, law & finance, compliance-heavy operations, and the modern software stack — marketing, product, research, hiring, vendor selection. Everywhere accuracy actually matters, teams hit the same reality: at some point, you need your own model… and that’s exactly where the MLOps and infra pain begins. Every team needs to know where general-purpose models fall short. And any team that cares about production-grade accuracy and robustness eventually needs to fine-tune or post-train their own model. This is the gap we’ve been obsessed with solving — that's why we built Depura. Today, we’re unveiling it — and opening applications for our Design Partner Program. Depura lets domain experts directly teach and shape AI models using their own judgment through a clean, no-code, evaluation-driven workflow. Whether you’re refining a marketing voice, a hiring rubric, a compliance checklist, a quality review standard, or a complex research process… Depura captures the nuance your work demands — without needing to write code or understand how model training works under the hood. We’re inviting you to join a small group of founders, builders, and tinkerers to work closely with us as alpha users. Our founding team brings 50+ years of experience across product, engineering, and growth — with deep expertise in edge-case, accuracy-critical AI. As a design partner, you’ll get: - Early access to Depura’s evaluation & model refinement platform - White-glove onboarding and direct collaboration with our team - Real influence over our roadmap, UX, features, pricing ... and more - Compute & platform usage fully covered during the program (we pay while you train your model) - And like all Depura users: your trained model is yours to keep — export it, download it, or have us host it for you If you want your AI to reflect how your team actually thinks, here’s how to join: 1️⃣ Go to depura.ai 2️⃣ Enter your email to join the waitlist 3️⃣ Tick the box to apply as a Design Partner If you’re in my network, I’d really appreciate: - A follow for Depura and Escape Velocity Labs - A repost or comment on the official launch post - A reaction or share of this post And if you have AI or Web3 needs — integrations, workflows, agents, product/engineering/growth support, or getting applications fully embedded with AI — just DM me. We offer consulting, fractional, and build-for-hire services, and I’m happy to provide a free discovery session to understand what you’re working on and how we can help. Let’s bring real expertise back to the center of AI.
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