Scott Belsky

Who they are

Scott Belsky is a Partner at A24 — he founded Behance in 2006, sold it to Adobe, then spent a decade as Adobe's Chief Strategy Officer before joining A24 in January 2025 to launch A24 Labs.

Person

Scott graduated from Cornell with a BS in Environmental Economics in 2002, then got his MBA at Harvard Business School — an unusual pairing that shows up in how he moves between creative and operational worlds. He started at Goldman Sachs as a European Markets Associate, then left to found Behance in 2006, the online portfolio platform for creative professionals, which Adobe acquired; he stayed on as VP of Products, Mobile and Community, then climbed to Chief Strategy Officer, a role he held until January 2025. At Benchmark he was a General Partner in between, giving him a VC lens that informed his early bets — Uber and Pinterest among them. He joined A24 in January 2025 when the studio was already an established independent film brand but had no formal technology and innovation function; he came in to build exactly that, founding A24 Labs. His public writing spans two books — 'Making Ideas Happen' (2010) and 'The Messy Middle' (2018) — plus the Implications Substack at implications.substack.com, which covers product development, creativity, and the future of technology. He also sits on the Atlassian board, MoMA's board of trustees, and the Cornell Tech Council, and keeps a personal site at scottbelsky.com. The through-line: he gravitates toward the intersection of creativity and product infrastructure, building the tools, processes, and institutions that help creative work scale.

Company

In November 2025, Google announced a $75 million investment in A24 as part of an AI research partnership with DeepMind — Alphabet's first stake in a film studio — making A24 Labs the most visible corporate expression of Hollywood's cautious, filmmaker-first approach to AI. This followed a $250 million funding round in 2024 led by Thrive Capital that valued A24 at $3.5 billion. Also in November 2025, management and production company 2AM ended after producing films in partnership with A24, a notable partner departure. In May 2025, A24 shuttered its documentary division with five layoffs. Belsky joined in January 2025 specifically to oversee technology and innovation, and the Google DeepMind partnership is the clearest signal of what that mandate looks like in practice.

Market

A24 occupies a distinctive position in independent entertainment — filmmaker-driven, with a track record of critically and commercially successful titles including 'Moonlight,' 'Everything Everywhere All at Once,' 'Hereditary,' 'Euphoria,' and 'Beef.' The broader industry has been resistant to AI integration, with pushback tied largely to how tech companies have framed AI to creative workers; A24's partnership with Google DeepMind is a deliberate counter-narrative, positioning AI as a tool for filmmakers rather than a replacement. The AI content creation space saw a 50% funding increase in 2025, signaling significant capital flowing into the category A24 Labs is now entering.

Network

No direct edge data is available, but Belsky's institutional footprint points to a dense network across tech, venture, and creative industries. He was interviewed by Ben Thompson of Stratechery in 2023 on Adobe strategy, appeared on the LionTree KindredCast for 2026 predictions, and has been on The Tim Ferriss Show, the a16z Podcast, and HBR IdeaCast. His board seats at Atlassian and MoMA, plus his Cornell Tech Council membership, place him at the intersection of enterprise software, arts institutions, and New York's tech scene.

Ben Thompson· Founder, Stratechery
Tim Ferriss· Author and podcaster, The Tim Ferriss Show

How they likely show up

Founded Behance in 2006 and stayed through the Adobe acquisition and a decade as CSO → comfortable with long arcs; not a flip-and-exit operator.
Hybrid role type (operator + investor + board member simultaneously) → runs multiple tracks at once and is probably comfortable context-switching between strategic and executional conversations.
Active public writer across two books, a Substack, and a personal site → processes thinking publicly; likely arrives at meetings with a formed point of view, not an open question.
Early investor in Uber and Pinterest alongside a GP role at Benchmark → has a pattern-matching frame from venture that he applies even when operating; will think about your problem in terms of analogues.
Moved from Goldman to founding Behance to VC to Adobe CSO to A24 Labs → each move is a deliberate expansion of domain, not a lateral; he chooses contexts where he can build something new inside an existing institution.
Joined A24 when it had no technology function and immediately stood up A24 Labs → defaults to building infrastructure, not inheriting it.

Conversation tips

→ He has strong formed views — come with a specific position of your own, not an open-ended 'what do you think?' He engages with people who have done the thinking.
→ Reference 'The Messy Middle' or Implications specifically, not just 'your writing' — he will notice if you've actually read it versus name-dropped it.
→ The Google DeepMind partnership is the live edge right now — asking how A24 Labs is thinking about AI as a filmmaker tool (not a cost-reduction tool) will land better than generic AI questions.
→ He's a Cornell and Harvard alum active on the Cornell Tech Council — shared institutional context there is a genuine warm signal, not just small talk.
→ Don't position things as 'disrupting' Hollywood — his public framing is about supporting creative professionals, not disrupting them.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on A24 Labs and the Google DeepMind deal — he joined in January 2025 specifically to build A24's technology function, and the $75 million Alphabet partnership announced in November 2025 is the clearest public proof point of what that mandate looks like; asking what 'AI for filmmakers' means at A24 Labs versus elsewhere is a direct, substantive opener.
Reference 'The Messy Middle' (2018) and ask how its thesis — navigating the hardest part of building something — applies to standing up a technology function inside an established creative institution; it connects his intellectual framework to his current work in a way that signals you've actually read it.
Bring up the Atlassian board seat — he's a product thinker sitting on the board of a major enterprise collaboration company while also building A24 Labs; the tension between tools for knowledge workers and tools for creative professionals is a live question he's thinking about from both sides.

Discovery questions

A24's brand is built on filmmaker autonomy — how do you draw the line at A24 Labs between technology that serves the filmmaker and technology that starts to constrain creative decisions?
You spent a decade at Adobe as CSO after founding Behance — what did the inside view of a major creative software company teach you that you're now applying differently at A24 Labs?
The Implications newsletter covers the future of creativity and technology — what's a belief you hold about AI in creative industries that most people in Hollywood still disagree with?

Avoid

Don't frame AI as a cost-cutting or efficiency story — Belsky's public positioning at A24 Labs is explicitly about supporting creative professionals, and the industry's resistance to AI has been driven precisely by that framing.

Make it yours