Creativity, Artificial Intelligence and Time | Scott Belsky (Dad of 3, Chief Strategy Officer and EVP Emerging Products at Adobe)

Scott: They want a parent that will grab the basketball and take it away when you're throwing it at your siblings or when you keep feeding and not coming in for dinner and you're not listening. They want a parent who can assert and take control.

That's different than like yelling and punishing. So it's not as if there isn't discipline. It's just that there isn't scorn and sort of abandonment.

Adam: Welcome to Startup Dad, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of dads who are also leaders in the world of startups and business. I'm your host, Adam Fishman. In today's conversation, I sat down with Scott Belsky. Scott is a multi decade technology veteran and entrepreneur. He is currently the chief strategy officer and EVP of design and emerging products at Adobe.

A role he took on after being the chief product officer for their flagship creative cloud products. In 2006, Scott founded a company for creative professionals called Behance, which he later sold to Adobe. He has also been a venture investor and is an active seed investor. Having invested in companies like Pinterest, Uber, Carta, Warby Parker, Ramp, Airtable, and more.

He's a loving husband and the father of three kids. In our conversation today, we spoke about creativity, artificial intelligence, and how to prioritize your time. We talked about Scott's evolution from a startup founder with no kids to an executive at a publicly traded company with a family, the support structures and systems he has in place to enable a dual working household and his optimism for an AI powered future, along with his thoughts on what AI might do to transform and improve the world of education.

It. I hope you enjoy today's conversation with Scott Belsky.

Adam: I would like to welcome Scott Belsky to the Startup Dad podcast. Scott, it is a pleasure having you on the show today. Thank you for joining me.

Scott: No, Adam, thanks for having me.

Adam: Let's jump right into it. You are well known in the tech community. You started a company, sold it to Adobe over a decade ago. Now you're a titan of industry at Adobe.

You're also a family man. You have three kids. Has your perspective on building businesses changed since you've had a family?

Scott: Well, first of all, you know, building businesses for me is kind of secondary to building. Like I like making things, think part of that is that I feel most fulfilled, you know, when I'm making stuff, I feel most utilized and I've come to believe that I am most happy when I feel fully utilized.

And and I mean that in a holistic way, when I feel like I did amazing things at home, you know, with my family and had those moments, those windows with my kids that matter. And I feel like I did the same sort of thing with my teams and with customers and we advanced something that matters materially in some way, you know, those are the days when I go to bed happiest feeling like every muscle was sort of used today and a little sore, right?

I'm tired. But that is a big part of my happiness. So the role that my kids play in all this is that's like part of my utilization is part of what makes me feel fulfilled and it makes me feel like every day is you know, is being lived the way I would want it to.

And of course there are a million things we can discuss in terms of building a business and building teams that are very much correlated with things you learn as a parent. But those are just some initial thoughts.

Adam: Awesome. If you were giving advice to founders, you put on your Behance founder cap. Founders who are also starting a family, trying to build a company at the same time, there's a lot that listened to this show. What sort of advice would you give to people who are going through both of those kind of very hard things at the same time?

Scott: Founding and parenting.

Adam: Yeah.

Scott: Yeah. and I know a number of folks that I love that are going through this, you know, with their businesses my wife's an entrepreneur. So I'm getting some taste of this myself. Listen, it's all about brutal prioritization and compartmentalization. And when I think about my days founding Behance back in 2007, 2008, you know, those early years before I was a dad or had any responsibility, I was so wayward and reckless with my time.

I would just, you know, just take so much time to do things. I would do so many things that didn't move the needle forward. Now you could argue some of those things were those non scalable things that make a big difference in building a brand and a product. But truth is most of them probably were just because I had tons of time almost like when you're in college, you just take forever to do anything. And you have to radically refactor and be protective of every minute and be very, very purposeful on how you spend your time. It just starts to surface your values. And it hardens them both in how you operate within the workplace and how you operate with your family. And I love that. I think it's so important. Maybe I get too rigid about it sometimes, but it definitely has changed me in that way.

Adam: So tell me about your family now. You have a wife and three kids and we'll get into what your wife does. Cause it's very fascinating to me. How did you and your wife meet each other?

Scott: We met in college very original and we you know, didn't start dating until years later, but you know, she's a psychologist by background and when you are an entrepreneur, you need 24/7 psychology or so. We did a lot together over the years.

Adam: And then you have three kids. What are the ages of your kids?

Scott: The kids are 11, nine, and five.

Adam: Fun. You're almost to the teenage years.

Scott: She's showing early signs of wanting to be a teenager. So we'll see.

Adam: Same. I also have an 11 year old daughter, we can commiserate on that. So when I just learned that your wife has an amazing job she is a psychologist, as you mentioned, but tell me about this job that she has this kind of co-founder role.

Scott: She went to, Get her PhD at Columbia with a woman named Becky Kennedy and they became friends being in the program together. And then during COVID Becky, who is also a psychologist by background and really focused on, on helping parents, you know, navigate the challenges that they face with their kids.

She started posting some content related to a framework she was developing on Instagram. Under the name Dr. Becky. And Erica and her started talking about taking this framework and turning it into a business that would ultimately yield a book and a podcast. And their vision was to build a parenting platform or a co-pilot, if you will, that helps all of us deal with the challenges that we face as parents.

And so they built this team together and they branded it Good Inside. And so Becky you know, is the face of this business. Erica is the co-founder and chief operating officer of the business. And they've now built a, you know, an awesome team of people. And it's been really fun to have an entrepreneur in the house that I get to work with and to see them building a product that I actually think really needs to exist because frankly, the adults that I know or have managed that have struggled most in their lives.

Actually struggle most with being able to regulate their response to things, their emotional response, their anger, their jealousy, their insecurities. I mean, so much of being a successful adult is being able to regulate. I remember this researcher in the army that I once met through an Adobe program we were doing, who was talking about the data of over a million people in the military and what really helped some of them ascend to these leadership roles.

And one of those traits was self regulation, you know, in times of stress, you know, how do you manage and are you able to regulate their response? And the process of responding. And I remember asking like, where does this skillset come from? And the response was parenting. So it kind of went full circle for me.

And that's one reason I got really passionate about what Erica and Becky are building.

Adam: Oh, that's awesome. I can't wait to maybe have the two of them on this show. Tell me about the decision for you and Erica to start a family together.

Scott: Well, starting a family. I think that we both, I mean, just always assume that we would, however, I have to say that we were both like super intellectually curious about the process as well. You know, she's a psychologist and loves thinking through the parenting journey, which is why she landed in doing what she does for a living.

 You know, and for me, you know, my love is creativity. And one of the most fascinating things for me when we had our first daughter, you know, our first child, she, you know, in the first year or so the inputs that a child is exposed to are very limited. You kind of know everything they've been exposed to, you know, the three Disney movies they've seen, you know, the relatives that they've met, you know, the inputs, because it's a pretty constrained set.

And so when you start to see the outputs, you're like, oh, like I can trace that back to a combination of this thing, And that thing, and it's this amazing moment where you get to see where creativity comes from because it's such a small data set. And of course, once a child becomes two, three, four and goes to school and they have all these inputs from the world, you know, you kind of lose track.

And then the rest is, you know, creativity is typically a black box. So I found it very intellectually interesting as well to kind of watch a child's mind develop and start to answer my own questions about where creativity comes from.

Adam: Amazing. That is actually a beautiful segue, so all of your professional life pretty much has been steeped in creativity and you work at Adobe now you founded a company that's like by my last check Behance works with like 30 million plus creative professionals is fostering creativity in your kids something that you actively? And purposefully work on. And if so, how do you do that?

Scott: Well, the answer is I have wanted to, you know, and I've always exposed them to the drawing apps that we launched on the iPads. And, you know, when they are up early in the morning and we need to get some more sleep and we’re tempted to just put a movie on instead, I'll just say, hey, here's a, here's an Apple pencil and an iPad like draw.

And I'll end up with like, you know, 50 cloud documents of random drawings that I have to sort through in my own Adobe ID. But I do try to do that. But what I also have learned though, is that you can't prescribe creative work. What I think you need to do with your kids is follow where their mind is going and serve their curiosity. And I've been more successful in just kind of watching where their minds are and trying to just kind of support it. So going to Michael's Arts and Crafts. And seeing what things they want to put in the cart, you know, is a good place to start because then it's like they're using the utensils that they found.

You know, at one point my daughter said she wanted a 3d printer and that was a great day, you know, so I was like, yes, it must be doing something right. You know, we got one of those little toy box, 3d printers that she could pick designs from her iPad and make small modifications and print them in her room.

That's been the playbook for me so far is following their lead.

Adam: Yeah that's amazing.

Scott: And by the way, Adam, like what is creativity? I mean, to me, it's just genuine interest combined with initiative. So whatever our kids are like super interested in, whatever it is. How do we support them taking initiative in that thing to expand their curiosity in that space in creative ways is what it is in terms of, you know, the meaning to me.

Adam: One of the things that specifically I wanted to bring you on the show and ask you about is I read an article, it was sort of like an end of the year, roll up article and the information and you were one of the people that was referenced in it, and they asked all of the people what their favorite picture was from the previous year.

And you, I think, submitted a picture of you and one of your kids paddling on a river. And so that was like the most special or favorite picture for you. Why was that so special?

Scott: Well, we live in New York city and these kids are city kids. I wasn't a city kid growing up. So it's a different world. I try to do everything I can to get us all out of here. And being in the great outdoors, you know, the expanse And, you know, in, in this instance, paddle boarding down, you know, the North Fork river in Colorado.

You know, that to me was one of those moments where, you know, we were just immersing ourselves in, you know, in nature, which is one of my favorite things to do. So that's probably why it went to the top of the stack for me.

Adam: Awesome. How challenging is it to paddle down a river with a young child?

Scott: Well, you know, it's the balance issue, you kind of want to probably sit down and paddle as opposed to stand up and paddle because at any moment there might be a whim that, that throws you off balance. But hey, like, is that not a metaphor for parenting in general?

Adam: Oh, absolutely. What are some of the more surprising things that you've discovered as a dad?

Scott: The windows that matter, you know, is surprising. You can spend all day. With kids and have no real meaningful connection because it's all logistically burdensome time. And then, you know, you can be at that time and have this most amazing conversation, so I try to optimize, you know, to make sure I have those windows.

And when I am managing a travel schedule, it's pretty rigorous. Even if it's like fly back from a conference in Las Vegas to be here one night before the next day, flying all the way back from New York to San Francisco, which seems like a very geographically unwise schedule. You know, I've learned to really appreciate just the value of that one night having dinner, putting the kids to bed, you know, and having those windows.

I think that's the difference. And I think all too often we count, you know, days and we're very rational in that way, but maybe it's just those concrete moments that matter.

Adam: Yeah. You just mentioned a pretty grueling travel schedule. And then obviously your wife is co-founding a company. You two are busy. What sort of structures or support systems did you have to set up to have three kids, two really busy professional lives? Like, how do you make it all work?

Scott: Well, a lot of communication and I think whenever we get too busy to communicate, that's where things break down. I mean, listen, it's all about prioritization and values again. So. We try to always be home for at least two dinners a week, and then we also try to never travel on the weekends.

We, you know, really invest in making sure we have the right, you know, nanny to support us and help us with some of the logistics. It's also about making sure you have, you know, a pulse on where each of the kids are. But listen, like I don't think I could truthfully say we figured it all out.

I mean, it's always sort of a, process. And you know, one thing I've come to believe is that balance that you want to achieve doesn't happen at every moment in time, but ideally happens over time. And so when you are on the road for two weeks straight, it's important to then be home, you know, for a long period of time to make up for that.

And that seems to work when I feel the pressure though, of, oh my gosh, like, you know, I, on a weekly basis, everything needs to be balanced. It's hard because the practical reality is, you know, with two people's work schedules and stuff, that can be difficult.

Adam: Yeah. So kind of like company building, you got to play the long game, right? Like look at things over a longer time trajectory and optimize for that.

Scott: That's right. And I grew up with two working parents and what I really was impressed by you know, they impressed on me was just the value of their work ethic, their passion for what they did. How dedicated they were. Those had lasting impressions on me. So maybe I'm just rationalizing to myself why Erica and I both plan to be able to work and and why we haven't decided that one of us, or we should have less ambitious careers or what have you.

But I do think that we're at least setting that bit and there's a trade off. There's no doubt about it, but they see us both building and working on things that we're passionate about. And I hope that there's some benefit to that.

Adam: Yeah. you've spent a lot of time thinking about writing about consuming AI. And I've had some founders on the program who work in AI. I personally believe that this is one of the biggest technological advances that's going to come along and in my lifetime, internet, mobile AI.

I don't know what else we'll see what the robots create after this. But I wanted to approach artificial intelligence from a parenting lens and ask you a couple of things. The first thing is what big changes do you think AI is going to have on how your kids experience the world, or maybe what has already changed for them?

Scott: Well, I do think about this a lot. And I think about when we have a step function change in technology that not only reduces friction, but removes the process altogether that we once went through to get something done. It does rob us of understanding the process we wouldn't sort of had to take. I don't remember how to do long division anymore.

And now that I have a third grader who's like doing this, I have to like relearn it. Because I have a calculator, I don't do that. So is that good? I mean, should we never even teach long division or is there something about this process of thinking that develops a muscle memory or a set of muscles that can be then leveraged in other ways and shapes and forms in our other parts of our life and work.

It's hard to say, I'm not a brain scientist, so I'm not an authority on it. But you think about getting answers. You know, our kids grew up with Alexa in the house and whenever they wanted to figure something out, they just asked Alexa now that's smart, but it's also like, they're not doing a process that they could have done that was more cumbersome that might've exposed them to more, you know, sources of developing logic and that sort of thing.

So I don't know, you know, how that will all, that will all pan out, but I'm net positive on the role that AI tools will play. I think that AI is going to liberate us to do higher order things that only humans can do. Instead of the minutiae, mundane, repetitive work, why shouldn't we tap our humanity to tell extraordinary stories?

And just pursue more possibilities that, you know, time never allowed. I’m more on that side of the equation.

Adam: I think I saw that you wrote something about your thoughts on AI and the education system and you just mentioned asking Alexa for answers or should your third grader learn long division? And you know, I don't know the answer to that. I also don't remember any long division.

We're going through that too with our third grader. What do you think is going to change or what sort of Powers or superpowers is AI going to do in an education system that hasn't changed in a hundred plus years.

Scott: Well, in fact, the part of industry that I'm most excited about being refactored by AI are the parts that are the most cumbersome antiquated old school processes that are just wildly outdated. And unless you have a fundamentally new technology that slices through it, like. hot knife through the butter of bureaucracy.

You're never going to really fundamentally change. So education, what a perfect area for this technology to transform in terms of assessing where students are, where they need help. Every single student in the world, regardless of income background, whatever, will have a AI tutor. And I can really meet them where they are and help them understand whatever it is according to their learning style.

And I just think that's such an amazing unlock. I just can't even comprehend the magnitude of impact that can have on education. I also think AI is going to be using a lot of fun ways. So for example, you used to read a book about a character and then write a history report about Harriet Tubman or whoever you were reading about, why not also have a AI that is trained on that person's history and experience and life experience that you can actually interview. Students love doing interviews and writing a report. What an amazing idea. This is all now possible, right? It's actually in market already. I just think teachers have not yet figured out how to embrace it. And worse, a lot of them are just purely, you know, outlawing it out of fear.

And I do think we have to get over that.

Adam: Yeah. One of the things that I've been most excited about for kids with AI is, you know, you talked about being builders in your family and the unlock on things that you can build without having to have tons of advanced knowledge. So at a very young age, if you have taste and creativity and things like that, you can do a lot with these tools and explore in, in new and interesting ways. And so I'm excited about that

Scott: And Adam, you mentioned one interesting word there too, that I think a lot about which is taste. And so if AI is going to offset a lot of the things that we once had to achieve skills to do to compute, what does that mean for you know, the human competitive advantage that sustains our careers and jobs, and maybe it's taste, you know, maybe it's our ability to know really, what's interesting, you know, what's special, what sort of cuts into the zeitgeist or challenges minds in a unique way that will, you know, advance a brand or a model or whatever the case might be. So taste, I think will be a big part of this.

Adam: Yeah, I have a question about advice that you might give yourself if you could go back in time before your kids were born. We get a lot of advice dispensed at us as parents, as expecting parents, and, you know, you don't know how to process any of that. So I'm curious if you could hit the time machine and go back in time and you're talking to younger Scott, 12 maybe ish years ago. What advice would you give the younger version of you about becoming a dad?

Scott: Well, one piece of advice I would give myself is to make sure I compulsively capture like things that are said and moments and the memories that age, like fine wine, you know, and become far more incredible and valuable later on. Even, you know, short videos of your kids asking or answering questions and then being able to do that same sort of thing.

I remember there was one Behance project in the very early days by a guy named Jack Radcliffe, who basically took a photograph of his daughter every year for like 30 years. And he put together this composition of one photograph that represented every year. And in this story, he shared that in this creative project that he had as a photographer, his daughter let him into her life in a way that a dad may not normally get access. Like there's one, you know, a photo of her 18, like sitting with a group of friends smoking a cigarette, you know, and you're like, oh my gosh, like what father would, you know, allow that. But he had some form of like a separation where he was like, listen, when I, as a photographer, I want to chronicle like your story.

But I will never judge, you know, like if I can get access, was my takeaway from the project, but it was really just a stunning portrayal of, girl's journey through life captured by her father, which made it like especially interesting. And I wish I had prioritized some of those things earlier on.

I'm starting to do some now, but it's even better when you can start and have a very like, you know, thoughtful, creative project in mind from day one.

Adam: On the flip side, what's something that you got dispensed as a piece of advice that you would tell your younger self to ignore?

Scott: Well, I think a lot of traditional parenting I don't subscribe to. I mean, that's, that is, you know, one thing I've also learned from Erica and Becky. As it relates to a good insight in their framework for parenting, a lot of the stuff that our parents did. Like when you have a hard time regulating your own feelings as a three year old or a five year old or seven year old you're sent to your room.

You're told to be alone and suffer with feelings too big for your body alone without any guidebook on how to proceed, you know I don't think that those are the right approaches to parenting, you know, even though that's sort of the popularized approach, right? Is to punish kids when they are misbehaving.

Well, what if they're misbehaving is simply a lack of regulatory capability that they have yet to develop and you need to help them find that capacity. And also, by the way, your ability to partner with them in doing so strengthens your relationship with them as their parent. You know, that sort of is a new way of looking at things.

So I definitely, you know, tried to discard some of the old theory.

Adam: Yeah. I took a parenting class one time around positive discipline. And one of the statements that they made early on was when did we ever get the idea that to make kids do better, we had to make them feel worse, you know? And so this idea of sending in their room or sort of, disciplining or punishing is the tool that's going to teach you.

I tend to agree with you. That doesn't mean you don't have rules. But it does mean that you dispense those rules and how you create them together matters a lot more.

Scott: I think in the good inside parlance, kids want sturdy parents.

Adam: Yeah.

Scott: They want a parent that will grab the basketball and take it away when you're throwing it at your siblings or when you keep feeding and not coming in for dinner and you're not listening. They want a parent who can assert and take control.

That's different than like yelling and punishing. So it's not as if there isn't discipline. It's just that there isn't scorn sort of abandonment, you know, whenever there's struggle.

Adam: I would ask if you've developed any frameworks or guardrails for parenting, but your wife's entire job is this. So I guess you probably subscribe to the good inside philosophy in, your household. Yeah.

Scott: And it's, I gotta say, and it's obviously I have a bias here, but I really have changed as a parent, as a result of the work that they've done. And every time they have, whether it's a script for how to deal with a tantrum or sibling rivalry or, you know, refusing to go somewhere like all these things that we face as parents, when your impulse is to just raise your voice and use physical force to just get them out the door.

It's been very informative for me. So I do prescribe to it, but then again, even Becky will say, you know, that she never does it 100 percent of the time, but when we don't, and we do something with our child that we regret, she also talks a lot about repair. And that's another thing that's really resonated with me is whenever you feel like you've done something and you regret it, I think that I used to just be like, I hope my kid doesn't hate me, or I hope this doesn't scar them in their later life that, you know, I wasn't there for that.

And I miss that, soccer game or whatever the case may be. And what I've also learned from the good inside approach is just this idea of like repair and the way Becky talks about it as it's almost like taking a file out of the cabinet of their life's memory that was filed away and then opening it and then revisiting the file and editing it before you put it back into the file cabinet.

And it's really amazing. Like I'll, you know, I'll say to one of our kids, like, listen, I really regret, you know, missing that soccer tourney. I know how much that meant to you. And it's really been on my mind, you know, can we talk about it? And it's almost like, you know, I'm, I feel like I'm in some ways editing, you know, a mistake that I may have made or something that I regret

Adam: Yeah. I wanted to follow up on that and ask if there's a, you know, the soccer tournament is one thing, but is there another mistake that you've made as a dad that you've had to do repair on or something that you've thought a lot about over the last, you know, 10 or 11 years?

Scott: Probably every day.

Adam: I did ask this question to someone one time and they said, wait, today or ever, what are we referring to here?

Scott: I think that the things that I get most like frustrated with myself about are when I just don't prioritize something well. So it's usually three dinners in a row and I miss, you know, seeing the kids and having any sort of bedtime moment with them and reading a book with them or whatever.

And I'm just like, what was I doing these three days? And how could I have not caught that in the calendar two weeks earlier? You know, it's stuff like that, that I make all the time. I would like to say, I try to learn from it with mixed results.

Adam: So you're married to what I would say is a parenting expert or someone who's really trying to, like we all are. And partnership is super important. What is something that you and your wife don't agree on when it comes to parenting.

Scott: Oh, that's easy. I mean, timeliness. I run a relaxed unit here. When Erica is away, you know, on a business trip or something like that. It's a stress free zone. We make it to school seven to 10 minutes late, you know, we may miss reservations. You know, we may have to rush in the last mile of catching a show or an exhibit or something like that, but that's my, preference, you know, I just, I'm always doing the cost benefit scenario.

And I'm like, well, the benefit of having no stress before school clearly outweighs the cost of being seven minutes late to fricking like, you know, preschool. So it's okay. You know, Erica would disagree and she, you know, she runs a tight ship. So I think that it's probably in that area.

Adam: I love that one. Timeliness. That's great. Last question for you if people want to follow along or be helpful to you, what's the best way for them?

Scott: Well, thanks for asking. My latest big monthly challenge that is the most intellectually rigorous thing I've done in a while is just write a monthly newsletter called Implications. So it's implications.com. It is now you know, getting to be a wide reach of industry leaders across technology and beyond just talking about not the news of what's happening in the world of tech and whatever, but the implications of it whether it's education or culture, societal norms, business models, you know, what have you.

It's a really fun exercise because it forces me to think about the implications of all these things I'm reading about and get creative about it. It also really yields a lot of feedback now from a lot of people who either agree or vehemently disagree with my assertions. And it's just become a great way to connect the dots.

So I welcome folks to not only, you know, it's a free signup, but also, you know, chime in and let me know what you disagree about. I'd welcome the feedback.

Adam: Awesome. We will link to that in the show notes. I read some of them in my preparation for this discussion, so it's a great thing. I also liked the fact that it's monthly, you're not trying to crank something out every week. Like the process it's deep and it's thoughtful and the process takes time.

So I appreciate that it is a once a month, and that's what you get.

Scott: It is dense. That's one thing I could get, but hey, I got to cram a lot in there

Adam: You know what? I think we can all benefit from some dense content these days. So I like it. All right. We've got a few minutes left. You're a busy guy, so let's go through rapid fire. If you have a couple of minutes for it, rapid fire is pretty straightforward. There is, but one rule I ask you a question.

You say the first thing that comes to mind, and it's a judgment free zone, but usually lots of laughs. So here we go.

What is the most indispensable parenting product that you've ever purchased?

Scott: Frida baby stuff, all of their stuff. It's like, you know, you never know when you're going to need it, but when you need it, you're happy you have it.

Adam: What is the most useless parenting product that you've ever purchased?

Scott: Probably too many of those like crib camera things that we installed and never actually used.

Adam: Finish this sentence. The ideal day with my kids involves this one activity.

Scott: Something surprising and immersive.

Adam: What is the most frustrating thing that has ever happened to you as a dad?

Scott: Oh, I have, clearly getting thrown up on in a parrot's restaurant.

Adam: How many parenting books do you have in your house?

Scott: I have a subscription to Good Inside. I don't need parenting books.

Adam: How many parenting books have you ever read cover to cover?

Scott: Zero.

Adam: What was the most embarrassing thing that you have ever done in front of one of your kids as described by them as embarrassing, by the way?

Scott: Oh try to be cool in front of their friends.

Adam: Okay. Never do that. As a creative person, how do you manage the mountain of children's artwork that starts coming home from school at the earliest of ages?

Scott: I have a beautiful big plastic box, right? Preserve it for infinity.

Adam: What is the most absurd thing that one of your kids has ever asked you to buy for them?

Scott: Uh, first class round trip ticket on Emirates.

Adam: That's a great one.

Scott: The answer was no, by the way.

Adam: Of course, yes. What was the most difficult kids TV show that you've ever had to sit through?

Scott: Probably Blue's clues.

Adam: Blue's Clues. Okay. What is the worst experience you've ever had assembling a kid's toy or a piece of furniture?

Scott: Definitely art easels that kept flipping around and couldn't stay sturdy.

Adam: I know exactly what you're describing, by the way. Which nostalgic movie can you just not wait to force your kids to watch?

Scott: Forrest Gump.

Adam: Ooh, good one. How often do you tell your kids back in my day stories?

Scott: Rarely.

Adam: And finally, you live in New York, so I think I know the answer to this, but what is your take on minivans?

Scott: We haven't gone there. Not yet. Haven’t done that yet.

Adam: It's a non-starter for a New York resident, I think. All right, well, Scott, we've landed this airplane right on time. So thank you very much for joining me today. It was, amazing. I learned a ton about you I really appreciate you taking the time.

Scott: Thanks for having me, Adam.

Adam: Thank you for listening to today's conversation with Scott Belsky. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe, share, and leave me a review on Apple or Spotify. It'll help other people find this podcast. Startup Dad is a Fishman AF production with editing support from Tommy Heron.

You can join a community of over 10,000 subscribers and stay up to date on my thoughts on growth and innovation. and parenting by subscribing to the Fishman AF newsletter at www.fishmanafnewsletter.com. Thanks for listening and see you next week.