Adobe's transformation and resilience
My chat with William Allen, a veteran Adobe alum and crypto founder
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William was an early employee and exec at Behance, a designer-focused startup founded in 2006 by Matias Corea and Scott Belsky. Adobe acquired it in December 2012.
When the Behance team joined Adobe, Adobe underwent a long-forgotten transition of reluctantly embracing HTML5 and abandoning Flash. It was letting go of proprietary web and mobile development standards and embracing the open Web. 2013 was the biggest inflection year in Adobe’s recent history. It announced that the future versions of the Creative Suite apps would only be available on the cloud and for a subscription. It was transitioning out of its licensing and boxed software days. Today, Adobe is one of the strongest and largest SaaS companies and has been in the news for its Figma acquisition.
William spent almost a decade at Adobe and was the GM of Behance (including Behance.net, Adobe Portfolio & 99U). He has been working on a stealth startup these days. This conversation is about his journey leading up to it.
Sar: You were early at Behance, which Adobe bought at the end of 2012. Can you share a memorable early experience that most people wouldn’t know about?
William: Given the current discourse around Twitter, I find it somewhat amusing that one of the rules I made early on was that we could NOT sleep in the office.
We would have ‘build nights’ where we deployed the latest code for Behance to our servers on Rackspace. Of course, this never happened until 10 pm at the earliest. Fueled by pizza in our smelly Soho office with the A/C broken, we’d all hang around until someone had the honor of pushing a few buttons on the keyboard and deploying the code. It was exhausting and glorious.
Sar: Is there anything from the 2010-2013 NYC tech era that you are nostalgic for?
William: I worked in Chris Anderson’s home in the earliest days of launching TED.com around 2006 before TED even had an office space.
I was living in the greatest city in the world in my twenties in a shoebox-sized apartment with six-foot ceilings and didn’t have kids yet - so of course, the world seemed full of possibilities. I do recall a general sense of optimism. A tight-knit group of folks was trying to build the future of the internet, willing and able to help each other out. There seemed to be new social networks popping up every other day, and they were FUN. I recall no broad cynicism – only the sense that we could build something great.
I try to retain that sense of optimism, grounded at least somewhat by a realistic perspective on the consequences of technological advancement. Every technology has potential downsides - I helped build Adobe’s trust & safety department, so I know this firsthand - but our future is defined by those who build and try to improve the world, not those who try to stall progress.
Sar: What would you want outsiders to know about how Adobe went about the transformation internally in the early 2010s?
William: Most of my career by that point had been working on global web properties – TED.com and Behance - so boxed perpetual software was foreign to me. While moving to a subscription model is obvious in retrospect, I didn’t fully appreciate how massive and visionary this effort was at the time. Years later, I’m still in awe of what Shantanu (CEO), David Wadwhani (SVP at the time), Mala Sharma (VP), and others were able to do.
Behance was a small team at the time of our acquisition in 2012 - 32 of us - but I like to think we had an outsized impact on this transition. Scott Belsky, the founder, joined as a VP and became the EVP/CPO. Bryan Latten - my current cofounder - brought the CI/CD systems he first created for Behance to the rest of the company and became a VP of engineering. Eric Snowden ran mobile for Behance and has been the VP of design responsible for the global design team for years. Some of the foundational parts of running a global SaaS business – trust & safety, global profiles & community - started in my team.
It took everyone – from finance to legal to engineering to product to design - to row in the same direction for this transition to happen. That doesn’t happen by accident. It was the work of countless individuals who bought into the vision and strategy executed day in and day out. That only happened because we trusted and believed in Shantanu, David, Mark (CFO at the time), and others.
Part of this trust came from a well-articulated strategy that was constantly repeated - everyone was clear about where we were going and what needed to happen to get there. Part of it was recognizing that it wouldn’t be easy, but hard work and excellence would be worth it since we would do it together.
This sounds cheesy, but I think it’s true - no one was afraid of losing their job if they tried something that didn’t work. Don’t get me wrong: the stakes were high, and it wasn’t a given that everything would be successful.
Sar: What is underrated about Adobe CEO’s operating style? He is in the hall of fame of turnaround CEOs.
William: Working with Shantanu is like working with Steph Curry. Are you telling me this guy is the best 3-point shooter of all time, an incredible defender, a deeply intuitive player, a great coach that elevates everyone around him, demands excellence day in and day out, AND is a kind, caring person? Shantanu is the GOAT.
He is infamous for pushing and probing in every meeting, diving deep into every subject, and zooming back out to connect it to the overall strategy. He demands excellence in whatever subject you discuss but does so with respect. These meetings energize you if you care about building great products.
He’ll ride the elevator and know the name and story of every employee he interacts with. Five minutes later, he hops on a sales call with another CEO to close a big deal and then does a deep engineering and product review right after that. I feel lucky to have worked with him.
Sar: You cofounded the Content Authenticity Initiative at Adobe. What are some unexpected learnings about starting new things inside a big organization?
William: To build anything, particularly something inside a big company, you must understand Newton’s First Law of Motion. Inertia is one of the most powerful forces in the universe.
You have to expend enormous energy to change a company’s or product’s direction or create something new. You have to be the external force.
There is this misconception that building something new at big companies involves getting a ton of new resources and starting the work. That’s precisely inverted: you usually work late at night, proving there is something there. And only after you get some traction do you (maybe) get additional resources. It’s distinct from a startup in that you aren’t going bankrupt or losing your job if it doesn't work.
In the earliest days of the Content Authenticity Initiative, Dana Rao (EVP, Chief Trust Officer), Stacy Martinet, a few others, and I worked through this in small rooms. The demands of the other parts of our jobs didn’t go away, but we all felt this was important and needed to happen. So we worked like crazy, calling in every favor internally and externally.
Sar: Is there any widely considered best practice for designers working with product managers and engineers that you think sneakily slows down product innovation or shipping velocity?
William: A school of thought says a designer should always design the ideal end state, then confer with the product & engineering team to reduce the scope and find the right way to get the product to market. Said another way, don’t constrain yourself at the outset; let those constraints come in later.
I’m sympathetic to that view in many scenarios, but you frequently need to fix something and fix it quickly. Maybe you have a few engineers with spare capacity, or the problem is getting too big to ignore. Having a designer strategically ignore the bigger picture can sometimes be a competitive advantage if it means you can ship a fix faster.
Yes, you’ll accrue more ‘design debt,’ and it won’t be perfect. But your product will be better than it was the day before, and that is what users care about the most.
Sar: There are many tropes about what product leaders in large organizations do and how they operate. Which ones do you find yourself frequently debunking?
William: The truth is that many of them are accurate! The most annoying product leaders – where these stereotypes originate – are too distant from their products. They try to remain too ‘strategic’ and no longer use the products they oversee or even have a vision for them.
The best product leaders I’ve ever worked with – Zach McCullough, who currently runs Behance, comes to mind – are practitioners, have a strong strategic point of view, and remain very receptive to feedback. You must be obsessed with every part of the product and running an organization.
I am not a visual artist by any stretch of the imagination. I’m not an engineer; I didn’t get an MBA. What I brought to the table was an unrelenting focus on specific problems. For Behance: how do we get these creatives more jobs!? For the Content Authenticity Initiative: if the world is awash in an infinite supply of media, how do we know where they originated and how they had been edited along the way? This obsession is part personality quirk – I tend to latch onto things until I understand them, for better or worse - but it’s also just part of the job that anyone can do. You have to care deeply about the problem you’re solving.
Sar: Ambitious early career folks often get frustrated when they get layered on their teams. What have you found to be the best way of persuading them to see it positively without feeling like they have been robbed of growth?
William: A truism that remains helpful is that success begets success. If the product you are working on is successful - even if you played only a small role - things tend to get easier for you when looking for your next move. Adding more layers can sting, but take it in stride and focus on building the best product possible. There were few things I loved more as a leader than when individuals would just execute, that I could have complete trust that they would take our strategy and make it happen. Be that person - no matter at what level or in what capacity.
This comes with an important caveat: don’t wait too long. At a certain point, you have to make a call if you’re pigeonholed, which unfortunately happens too frequently. There is no hard and fast rule when that happens, but it’s time to move on if you can recognize the signs.
Sar: You recently started a new company. What can you tell us about it?
William: I never imagined spending a decade at a big company like Adobe, especially after founding/working in startups, but I loved my colleagues, the culture, and the products I could create and lead. I still miss them!
Yet a problem has been bugging me for a few years now: crypto is too hard to use and too insecure for many folks to fulfill some of its promises. When I realized Bryan - who I worked with in the early Behance years and became a VP of Engineering at Adobe - was similarly obsessed, it was obvious that we had to work together again.
It felt less like a choice and more like a calling: my mind won’t rest until we solve this problem. I am excited to share more when we’re ready.
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