Scott Belsky - On Tech/Product, Creativity, & Making Ideas Happen - Issue #9

Firms (and its many incarnations, like agencies, salons, etc) are a relic of a time when skilled professionals didn’t have easy-to-use tools to handle operations, manage clients, and grow their businesses. There were no social graphs or systems to track reputation. For the first time ever, a truly independent career is possible, which calls the exi... See more

…Makes me wonder if the path to truly win the modern “productivity app” category is launching an underlying set of APIs for every aspect of project management + personal productivity with a wide and evolving set of products and interfaces (native ones and third-party creations) that users can switch between (and, in the process, endure a light “cle... See more

A firm’s brand as a proxy for a person’s reputation was born out of laziness and lack of access to data. No doubt, top talent enjoys working together, but it’s no longer a necessity. You are seeing this in spades right now within venture capital, as individual investors are banding together to support entrepreneurs who would prefer a group of hand-... See more

More often than not, the greatest innovations bring us back to the way things once were. Before the internet and before the advent of the “firm” during the industrial revolution, the reputation of people and relationships mattered more than anything else. My hope is that the latest technology returns us to our roots and enriches the potential of in... See more

Consider the cascade of specialized productivity apps (not suites) over the years, like Evernote, Wunderlist, Any.do, Todoist, Trello, Clubhouse, Basecamp, and the list goes on. Many of these are stable businesses, but they all claim a small piece of a large pie (and one could argue, were not great VC investments from a multiples perspective). The ... See more