2015 Conference Recap
Speakers
We invite the world's leading creative visionaries to share pragmatic, real-world insights on how you can put your ideas into action.
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Stewart Butterfield
CEO & Co-Founder, Slack
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Speaker Bio Stewart Butterfield
CEO & Co-Founder, Slack
Stewart Butterfield is the co-founder and CEO of Slack, the platform for team communication. Prior to Slack, Stewart co-founded and lead Flickr from its inception in late 2003 through its 2005 acquisition by Yahoo! and until 2008 by which point it was one of the largest web services in the world with over 50 million users and billions of photos.
In nearly two decades working on the web, Stewart has had a distinguished career as a designer, entrepreneur, and technologist. He has been named one of the "100 Most Influential People in the World" by Time Magazine, BusinessWeek's "Top 50 Leaders," and been featured in interviews and articles by hundreds of publications and broadcasters, including the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, The New York Times, CNN, the Financial Times and has appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine.
Butterfield graduated from the Universities of Victoria and Cambridge, with degrees in philosophy and retains academic interests in cognitive science, the history and philosophy of science, and economics.
Watch the 99U talk
Stewart Butterfield: How We Scaled the Fastest-Growing Business App Ever
Slack is one of the fastest-growing B2B businesses of all time. So how can the company continue to innovate in the face of breakneck growth? In this sit-down interview with Fortune writer Erin Griffith, Slack founder Stewart Butterfield shares how he leads when his team (and bank account) are getting larger each week. His biggest struggle: finding the right people. “Every practice that we develop for how to manage becomes obsolete in 60 days,” he says.
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Paola Antonelli
Senior Curator, MoMA
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Speaker Bio Paola Antonelli
Senior Curator, MoMA
Paola Antonelli’s work investigates design’s influence on everyday experience, often including overlooked objects and practices, and combining design, architecture, art, science, and technology. In addition to her role as Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA, Paola was appointed director of a new Research and Development initiative in 2012. She lectures frequently at high-level global conferences and coordinates cultural discussions at the World Economic Forum in Davos. A true interdisciplinary, energetic, and generous cultural thinker, Paola was recently rated as one of the top one hundred most powerful people in the world of art by Art Review.
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Paola Antonelli: Rejection Is a Sign You’re Onto Something New
In her 99U talk, Paola shares why failure and rejection are two feelings creative people should not only become familiar with, but should learn to embrace. “[Our work] can be weapons to really help people understand how to be better citizens,” she said. “But only if we will be allowed to do exhibitions that shock, disgust, and sometimes, even fail.”
- Links:
- Museum of Modern Art
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Rob Forbes
Founder, PUBLIC Bikes & DWR
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Speaker Bio Rob Forbes
Founder, PUBLIC Bikes & DWR
Rob Forbes has been a ceramic artist, professor, author, publisher, photographer, and business entrepreneur. He has held executive positions at numerous retail companies including Williams Sonoma, Selfridges, and The Nature Company, but is best known as the Founder of Design Within Reach (1998) and PUBLIC Bikes (2009). DWR pioneered many changes that have become mainstream today: internet retailing of modern design, design blogging, transparent pricing policies, and a focus on designers themselves as much as on their products. PUBLIC bikes is a similar business venture but with a mission to bring design awareness to our public urban spaces and to our civic lives. Rob has received numerous awards and public recognition for his advocacy of design and urbanism and serves on numerous boards in the non-profit sector. He recently authored See for Yourself published by Chronicle Books, which includes over 500 images and asks us to look more carefully and curiously at everyday design in our man-made world.
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Kimberly Bryant
Founder, Black Girls Code
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Speaker Bio Kimberly Bryant
Founder, Black Girls Code
Kimberly Bryant is the Founder and Executive Director of Black Girls CODE, a non-profit organization dedicated to “changing the face of technology” by introducing girls of color (ages 7-17) to the field of technology and computer science with a concentration on entrepreneurial concepts.
Kimberly has enjoyed a successful 25+ year professional career in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries as an Engineering Manager in a series of technical leadership roles for various Fortune 100 companies such as Genentech, Merck, and Pfizer.
Since 2011 Kimberly has helped Black Girls CODE grow from a local organization serving only the Bay Area, to an international organization with seven chapters across the U.S. and in Johannesburg, South Africa. Black Girls CODE has currently reached over 3,000 students and continues to grow and thrive.
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Kimberly Bryant: Break Down Your Biases
We all have biases and blind spots, unconsciously affecting the way we collaborate with others. In this 99U talk, Black Girls Code founder Bryant shares how pervasive these biases are in our society and how that hampers our careers and our culture.
- Links:
- Black Girls CODE
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Chris Anderson
CEO, 3D Robotics
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Speaker Bio Chris Anderson
CEO, 3D Robotics
Chris Anderson is the CEO of 3D Robotics and founder of DIY Drones. From 2001 through 2012 he was the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine. Before Wired he was with The Economist for seven years in London, Hong Kong, and New York.
Anderson is also the author of the New York Times bestselling books The Long Tail and Free as well as Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. Anderson’s awards and honors include: Editor of the Year by Ad Age (2005); Time Magazine's Tech 40, The Most Influential Minds In Technology (2013); and Foreign Policy Magazine's Top 100 Global Thinkers (2013).
Anderson lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and five children.
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Rochelle King
Global VP of Design, Spotify
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Speaker Bio Rochelle King
Global VP of Design, Spotify
Rochelle King is Global VP of Design and User Experience at Spotify where she manages the teams that are responsible for user research and designing the product experience at Spotify. Prior to Spotify, Rochelle was VP of User Experience and Product Services at Netflix. Rochelle has over 14 years of experience working on consumer-facing products.
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Clive Wilkinson
Design Director, Clive Wilkinson Architects
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Speaker Bio Clive Wilkinson
Design Director, Clive Wilkinson Architects
Clive Wilkinson FAIA, RIBA is an architect and strategist working at the intersection of urban design, architecture, and interior design. His large-scale design projects for Google, Nokia, JWT, FIDM, Disney, and Macquarie Bank have established new paradigms for building creative and educational communities. While innovative in its architecture, his design process is primarily focused on the social agenda of buildings, and how people connect with each other.
Clive was born in South Africa and educated in the United Kingdom. His practice, Clive Wilkinson Architects, was established in Los Angeles in 1991 and is an acknowledged global leader in workplace design, with over 100 design awards to its credit. Clive was inducted into the Interior Design ‘Hall of Fame’ in 2005. He was nominated a ‘Master of Design’ by Fast Company magazine in 2006 and a ‘Pioneer of Design’ by IIDA in 2011. After being a finalist in the National Design Awards in 2010 and 2011, his firm won the 2012 Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum National Design Award for Excellence in Interior Design. He has served as a keynote speaker at global media, advertising and design conferences, and has contributed to radio and television shows on architecture and design affairs.
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Anil Dash
CEO, Fog Creek
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Speaker Bio Anil Dash
CEO, Fog Creek
Anil Dash is co-founder and CEO of ThinkUp, a new app that offers deeper insights into our social networks. Dash is also co-founder of Activate, the consultancy which defines strategy for the most important companies in technology and media. Described as a "blogging pioneer" by the New Yorker, he has published his blog Dashes.com continuously since 1999, earning recognition as a Webby honoree. In 2013, Time named @anildash one of the best accounts on Twitter, and some of its half million followers agree.
Dash is based in New York City, where he lives with his wife Alaina Browne and their son Malcolm. Dash is the only person who is quoted in both Chris Anderson's The Long Tail and in Toure's Prince biography I Would Die 4 U, and has never played a round of golf, drank a cup of coffee, or graduated from college.
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Anil Dash: Share Your Values and You'll Share Success
Entrepreneur Anil Dash explains how even the smallest details of our work shape not only our businesses, but the culture around us. This presents us with a unique opportunity, as he said, “When we say ‘somebody ought to do something,’ here’s a chance for us to show our values.”
- Links:
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Franklin Leonard
Founder & CEO, Black List
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Speaker Bio Franklin Leonard
Founder & CEO, Black List
In 2005, studio executive Franklin Leonard surveyed almost 100 film industry development executives about their favorite scripts from that year that had not been made as feature films. The result was the first ever Black List. Since then, the voter pool has grown to about 500 film executives, and the list has become a means to catapult scripts such as Slumdog Millionaire, Argo, and Juno into produced films. Leonard is a graduate of Harvard University and resides in Los Angeles.
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Elle Luna
Author, The Crossroads of Should and Must
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Speaker Bio Elle Luna
Author, The Crossroads of Should and Must
Elle Luna paints, designs, and writes. She also runs a textile venture, the Bulan Project, a collaboration between designers and master batik artists in Bali, and has previously worked as a designer at IDEO and with startups, including Mailbox, Medium, and Uber. Her first book, The Crossroads of Should and Must, debuts in April 2015. She lives in San Francisco.
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Christoph Niemann
Illustrator,
The New York Times
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Speaker Bio Christoph Niemann
Illustrator,
The New York Times
Christoph Niemann is an illustrator, artist, and author. His work has appeared on the covers of The New Yorker, Time, Wired, The New York Times Magazine and American Illustration, and has won awards from AIGA, the Art Directors Club, and The Lead Awards. His corporate clients include Google, Amtrak, Herman Miller, and The Museum of Modern Art. He is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale.
Since July 2008, Niemann has been writing and illustrating the whimsical Abstract City, a New York Times blog, renamed Abstract Sunday in 2011, when the blog’s home became The New York Times Magazine. For his column he draws and writes essays about politics, the economy, art, and modern life. He has drawn live from the Venice Art Biennale, the Olympic Games in London, the 2012 Republican Convention, and he has drawn the New York City Marathon — while actually running it.
Niemann is the author of many books, most recently Abstract City. His latest project is an interactive, animated app called Petting Zoo. In 2010, he was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall Of Fame. His artworks have been subject to numerous exhibitions, most recently at Gallery Max Hetzler in Berlin.
Watch the 99U talk
Creative Blocks
Christoph Niemann: How to Overcome the 3 Fears Every Creative Faces
Illustrator Christoph Niemann shares his three biggest fears: the fear of not being good enough, the fear that our work will be irrelevant, and the fear of running out of ideas.
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Shane Snow
Co-Founder, Contently
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Speaker Bio Shane Snow
Co-Founder, Contently
Shane Snow is an award-winning journalist and entrepreneur, and the bestselling author of Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success. He is the Chief Creative Officer of Contently, which he co-founded in 2010 with the mission of "building a better media world." Shane's writing has appeared in Fast Company, Wired, The New Yorker, and dozens more top publications. He’s been called a “Wunderkind” by The New York Times, a “Digital Maverick” by Details, and his work “Insanely addicting” by GQ—though he wishes they had been talking about his abs.
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Kelly Sue DeConnick
Comic Book Writer
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Speaker Bio Kelly Sue DeConnick
Comic Book Writer
Kelly Sue DeConnick began her comics career writing the English adaptations of Japanese comics. After 7 years and more than 10,000 pages, she transitioned to American comics with 30 Days of Night: Eben And Stella at IDW and Osborn: Evil Incarcerated at Marvel. Today, DeConnick is well-known in the mainstream market as the force behind Carol Danvers’ reinvention as Captain Marvel (the book that gave rise to the Carol Corps) and as the first female writer of an ongoing Avengers title in Avengers Assemble.
In 2013, DeConnick debuted on the independent scene in a big way with Pretty Deadly, a brutal mythological Western co-created with Spanish artist Emma Ríos. Hot on the heels of that critical and commercial success, Image Comics announced DeConnick’s second independent venture—a riff on women in prison exploitation films of the ‘60s and ‘70s, titled Bitch Planet and co-created with Toronto-based artist Valentine De Landro. Despite the polarizing title, Bitch Planet dropped in December of 2014 to both commercial success and the best reviews of DeConnick’s career.
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Erin Griffith
Writer
Fortune
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Wil Reynolds
Founder, Seer Interactive
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Speaker Bio Wil Reynolds
Founder, Seer Interactive
In 2002, Wil founded Seer with a vision to build an agency that puts equal focus on doing great things for its clients, its team, and the community at large. From a one-man shop in his apartment to a team of over 100 on both coasts, Wil's vision has come to life and continues to grow every day.
Wil got his start in internet marketing in '99, when he joined a web marketing agency and began spearheading SEO strategies for Fortune 500 clients. His passion for driving traffic to sites by doing RCS, and analyzing the impact that traffic has on the company's bottom line, has changed the face of the SEO industry and allowed him to permeate other verticals in the digital space.
Wil currently holds the role of Director of Strategy, focusing on identifying industry innovations and developing strategies across divisions to help Seer's clients navigate the challenges their businesses face as a result of those innovations. Prior to his current role, Wil served as Seer’s Director of SEO, guiding the team and driving strategy for all SEO clients.
When he's not working with the team or speaking at conferences, Wil donates his time as an active board member of the Covenant House, an organization serving homeless and runaway youth in the Philadelphia area.
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Heidi Grant Halvorson
Author, No One Understands You and What To Do About It
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Speaker Bio Heidi Grant Halvorson
Author, No One Understands You and What To Do About It
Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson is the Associate Director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia Business School, Senior Consultant at the NeuroLeadership Institute, and a regular contributor to Fast Company and Harvard Business Review. She is the author of several national bestsellers, including Nine Things Successful People Do Differently. Her latest book is No One Understands You, and What To Do About It (Harvard Business Press, 2015).
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Kelly McGonigal
Author, The Upside of Stress
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Speaker Bio Kelly McGonigal
Author, The Upside of Stress
Kelly McGonigal, PhD, is a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University and a leading expert on the mind-body relationship. She is the author of several books, including the upcoming The Upside of Stress, the international bestseller The Willpower Instinct, and The Neuroscience of Change. She has worked with the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education since 2009, co-authoring the Stanford Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) program and collaborating on scientific studies examining how compassion can promote health and happiness. She has consulted for a wide range of organizations and industries ranging from healthcare and higher education to technology and finance, helping to bring evidence-based strategies for resilience and well-being into the workplace.
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Casey Gerald
CEO, MBAs Across America
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Speaker Bio Casey Gerald
CEO, MBAs Across America
Casey Gerald is the co-founder and CEO of MBAs Across America, a national movement of MBAs and entrepreneurs working together to revitalize America. He began his career in economic policy and government innovation at the Center for American Progress, and has worked as a strategist with startup social ventures, including Reboot and The Future Project, as well as companies like The Neiman Marcus Group.
A native Texan, Casey received an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a BA in Political Science from Yale College, where he was a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship. He has been featured on MSNBC, in the New York Times, Financial Times, and other media outlets.
Casey gave the commencement speech at the 2014 Harvard Business School graduation. The speech has gone viral and since then, he has been featured on the cover of Fast Company. Casey has emerged as a voice of the millennial generation for business, entrepreneurship, and finding your purpose.
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Ayse Birsel
Co-Founder
Birsel + Seck LLC
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Speaker Bio Ayse Birsel
Co-Founder
Birsel + Seck LLC
Ayse has developed a unique problem-solving process called "deconstruction:reconstruction" that can be used redesign anything — from an office system to your creative career.
Ayse Birsel has been designing award-winning products for over twenty years. She is the co-founder of Birsel + Seck, an innovative design studio in New York that partners with leading brands and Fortune 500 companies, including Target, Herman Miller, Hewlett Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Toyota and TOTO. She has also consulted GE, Hasbro, The Drucker Institute, and Bridgestone Turkey, among others, on design thinking, strategy and innovation projects. Called affectionately by the press the "Queen of Toilets" and "Queen Bee" for her bathroom designs and office systems respectively, she brings new solutions to old problems by thinking differently, using her user-centered, humanistic design approach and her unique process, Deconstruction:Reconstruction. Ayse is also known for her acclaimed workshops, Design the Life You Love for individuals and Design the Work You Love for corporations, applying her design process to help people design their life and work respectively.
Ayse is the recipient of the 2001 Young Designer Award from the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Athena Award for Excellence in Furniture Design from Rhode Island School of Design, and numerous design awards including the IDEA Gold Award and ID Magazine Award. She is a speaker at international conferences, notably the Aspen Design Conference, IDSA and AIGA Conferences, the Indaba Conference and DMI (Design Management Institute). She is a Fulbright Scholar, has a master's degree in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute and is a graduate of Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art. She lives between New York and Istanbul, with her husband and partner Bibi Seck and their three kids.
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Alex Blumberg
Founder, Gimlet Media
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Speaker Bio Alex Blumberg
Founder, Gimlet Media
Alex Blumberg is an entrepreneur, radio journalist, and CEO of the podcast company Gimlet Media. He currently hosts the Startup podcast, and is a former producer at This American Life and the co-founder of the podcast Planet Money.
Blumberg has won every major award in broadcast journalism, including the Polk, the duPont-Columbia, the Peabody, and several Emmys. Blumberg's award-winning documentary on the housing crisis, The Giant Pool of Money, which he co-reported and produced with Adam Davidson, was named one of the last decade's top ten works of journalism by New York University. He lives with his wife and two children in Brooklyn, NY.
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Rohan Gunatillake
Director, Mindfulness Everywhere
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Speaker Bio Rohan Gunatillake
Director, Mindfulness Everywhere
Rohan Gunatillake leads Mindfulness Everywhere, a creative studio making products which combine meditation, technology, and design. Rohan is best known for making Buddhify, the urban mindfulness app which helps you bring awareness, calm, and kindness to even the busiest of days. Alongside his work as a meditation entrepreneur, Rohan has a specialism in digital innovation in the arts having led major programs with the Edinburgh Festivals and national arts funders in the UK. He is a trustee of the British Council and in 2014, rightly or wrongly, Wired magazine named him as one of 50 people who are about to change the world.
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JB Osborne
Co-Founder, Red Antler
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Speaker Bio JB Osborne
Co-Founder, Red Antler
JB Osborne is a founding partner at Red Antler, a branding company specializing in startups and new ventures. Based in Brooklyn and San Francisco, Red Antler is a multi-disciplinary team of designers, UX/product experts, strategists, and business consultants. Under JB’s leadership, the company has worked with many top clients including Foursquare, Aloha, Birchbox, Vevo, and Casper. JB started his career in advertising at Saatchi & Saatchi, followed by opening the New York office of New Zealand-based agency Consortium. He is an advisor and board member to several startups, regularly speaks to accelerator programs and venture capital portfolios, and serves on the Entrepreneurship at Cornell Advisory Council.
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Scott Belsky
Chief Product Officer & EVP, Creative Cloud
Adobe
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Speaker Bio Scott Belsky
Chief Product Officer & EVP, Creative Cloud
Adobe
Scott Belsky is an executive, entrepreneur, author, and investor (and all-around product obsessive). He currently serves as Adobe's Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Creative Cloud. Scott's passion is to make the creative world more productive, connected, and adaptive to new technologies.
Scott co-founded Behance in 2006, and served as CEO until Adobe acquired Behance in 2012. Millions of people use Behance to display their portfolios, as well as track and find top talent across the creative industries. After Behance's acquisition, Scott helped reboot Adobe's mobile product strategy and led Behance until 2016, when he spent a few years as an investor and advisor to multiple businesses. Alongside his role at Adobe, Scott is a Venture Partner at Benchmark, a venture capital firm based in San Francisco, an early-stage investor, and is co-founder and Chairman of Prefer, a referrals platform that empowers the careers of independent professionals (aka "Soloists”).
Over the years, Scott has pursued other projects to help organize and empower the careers of creative people. These include 99U, Behance's think tank and annual conference devoted to execution in the creative world; and a popular line of organizational paper products that help organize creative people and teams.
Scott is also the author of the international bestselling book Making Ideas Happen (Portfolio Imprint, Penguin Books, April, 2010).
Watch the 99U talk
Scott Belsky: Lessons from the Messy Middle of a Startup’s Journey
Behance and 99U co-founder Scott Belsky is often asked about the inception and acquisition of the companies. But the biggest lessons are found in the sometimes-messy, oftentimes-exciting, and always-challenging experience between those bookend moments. In this talk, Belsky shares his perspective on:
– How to sustain momentum, and morale, during periods of uncertainty
– Why resourcefulness is the ultimate future-proof skill
– What circumstances inspire true innovation
– And how to spot the best opportunities- Links:
- Behance
- Scott Belsky
- @scottbelsky
Master Classes
During our 75-minute master classes, top creative minds share best practices for making ideas happen and take questions in a smaller, more interactive setting.
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Making the Leap: Deciding Between “Should” and “Must”
Elle Luna
The Crossroads of Should and Must
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Branding Your Start-Up Business
JB Osborne
Red Antler
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Design the Life You Love
Ayse Birsel
Birsel + Seck LLC
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Think like a Hacker: How Creative Overachievers Smash the Norm
Shane Snow
Author, Smartcuts
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Making Ideas Happen: Key Insights on Creative Execution
Scott Belsky
Adobe
Studio Sessions
Our off-site studio sessions explore the inner-workings of leading creative companies and allow attendees to meet in an intimate, informal setting.
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First Round Capital
Tech Trends That Are Getting Funded
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Contently
Making the Leap & Jumpstarting Your Freelance Career
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Betaworks
Startup Funding Secrets & War Stories
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Work-Bench
How Small Startups Close Deals With Massive Companies
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Frederator
Navigating the New Online Distribution Landscape
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Shake Shack
Designing Within Constraints
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SYPartners
Making Collaboration Work
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Firstborn
Selling & Pitching Your Work to Skeptics
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MoMA
Creating Compelling & Memorable Physical Spaces
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Spotify
Getting Started with User Research (On a Budget)
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Quirky
Mastering the Art of Collaborative Decision-Making
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IDEO
Using Rapid Iteration to Take Your Designs to the Next Level
