In this interview from his home in Berkeley, California, Scott shares how creative play, human connection and meditation guide his life and work. The following interview was first published in 2019 and has been edited.

WHAT DID YOUR PARENTS DO FOR WORK?

My parents were self-employed, my father as a cabinetmaker and my mother as an artist. They worked together on Plexiglas sculptures in the ’70s, my mother started working with anodized metal in the ’80s and glass in the ’90s.

WAS THERE A PERSON OR EXPERIENCE THAT INFLUENCED YOUR FOCUS IN BUSINESS?

Andy Warhol was the first influence that made me want to combine business and art. My parents were a peripheral part of his art scene in New York in the sixties and told stories about his parties and art. In high school, I started reading more about Warhol and became infatuated with creating an “art business” like Andy did with The Factory—minus the drugs.

The second influence was Gary Kildall, the father of my childhood best friend. Gary created the first microcomputer operating system and during the late ’70s and early ’80s was on equal footing as an entrepreneur
with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. His company, Digital Research, dominated business PC operating systems for about seven years with its hardware-agnostic OS, CP/M.

“We’re not in it for the money. We’re in it for the technology, for the thrill of pushing the world forward.”

Gary Kildall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall

Gary died young, but he was the well-rounded, compassionate entrepreneur we all wish for when we complain about the lopsided personalities of
the Titans who built our tech giants. Gary was a bona fide genius with a Ph.D. in computer science; a brilliant hands-on coder who’d rush to a colleague’s house at 2 am to demonstrate a breakthrough; a handsome, athletic, vivacious connoisseur of life’s pleasures; and a compassionate human being who’d make a beeline for the one lonely person at a party and get them laughing and engaged. I interned at Gary’s company during middle school, shipping commercial software at 11. Gary made me believe running a company was creative, fun, and meaningful; you could maintain an authentic personality and a full life while being a CEO.

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST “REAL JOB”?

Right out of Brown, I joined some friends who had started CoSA (The Company of Science and Art), which had recently been acquired by Adobe. I worked on an early version of the special effects software After Effects, building several innovative features, including a computer-vision-based motion tracker, a keyframe animation system, and a web-based animation format similar to Flash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_of_Science_and_Art

After Effects transformed the effects industry, making “online” effects systems that cost $1000 an hour obsolete with a $300 program you could use on the first color Macs. Eventually, After Effects were used in everything from Star Wars to TV and commercials, and they have earned over a billion dollars in revenue for Adobe since the 1990s.

LET’S TALK ABOUT ONE OF YOUR INNOVATIONS, THE AR CAMERA (FOR META), HOW DID YOU GET THE IDEA?

Meta acquired Eyegroove for its real-time augmented reality technology and the team talent in video tools, at a time when it was ramping up to compete against Snapchat. There were hundreds of people working on these teams at Meta.

Our team started out by integrating our engine for real-time augmented reality video effect into Spark AR (formerly AR Studio), eventually reaching
over 500 million people through Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Over time we also created an engine for music effects, and contributed to other augmented reality and video features. After a year on video sharing, I moved to Building 8, Meta’s experimental hardware division founded by ex DARPA and ex-Google ATAP director Regina
Dugan. Building 8 was later renamed Portal after its first product release, and I worked there for two years on home-based augmented reality products.

WHAT WISDOM DID YOU GET FROM THAT PROJECT?

The sheer power, velocity, and aggregated talent of the teams at Meta was what first awed me. I was impressed by the processes Meta has for organizing and motivating large groups of people towards a singular effort. I was also impressed by the freedom employees are given to choose their day-to-day work, and the ease in moving between teams, while still working together as a whole to deploy new products and features.

I loved the strengths-based management philosophy at Meta (described in Marcus Buckingham’s First Break All the Rules), where, instead of trying to improve employees’ weaknesses, you allow them to double-down on their strengths, by focusing on the intersection of what people are good at and what they love. The idea is that trying to improve one’s weaknesses will only ever get you to mediocre performance, but focusing on your strengths can make you a superstar.

“Today more than ever before, if a company is bleeding people, it is bleeding value. Investors are frequently stunned by this discovery.”

Marcus Buckingham’s First Break All the Rules

https://books.google.com/books?id=sJxgCRr3D8UC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA23#v=onepage&q&f=false

I was also impressed at how much a single person can make an impact at Meta, if they have the guts to simply write up their idea, seek and integrate feedback, and be coached on how to get it funded and executed.

On the flip-side, I saw how the distribution of user experience across many teams, and an emphasis on incremental A/B tests to develop small features, can sometimes muddy the personality and quality of software products, and lead to unintentional side effects, both technical and social.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY IF YOU WERE TO DO IT OVER AGAIN?

When I arrived at Meta, I had spent 16 years working independently as an artist or entrepreneur. My leadership style — decisive, enthusiastic and opinionated — had worked well for me in my past roles. At Meta, the leadership style was more humble, collaborative and data-driven. At times, when debating leadership, it required one to “disagree and commit” in order to succeed. And of course, as in any large organization, there was elaborate politics.

In hindsight I would have spent more time observing and asking questions of everyone around me, to understand the political complexities of the organization, before diving into projects. I’d recommend this approach to anyone in a similar situation. I joked with friends at Meta who were also former entrepreneurs, that the company should offer a course called, “How to Have a Boss.”

WHAT KINDS OF PROBLEMS COULD WE SOLVE WITH AUGMENTED REALITY THAT ARE INTERESTING TO YOU?

In today’s mobile, physically disconnected social life, there’s an opportunity for augmented reality to bring people together to share activities they used to experience face-to-face. “As we see commerce AR platforms emerge over the coming years, I hope that companies bend towards applications that create and sustain genuine human connections rather than developing addictive, consumptive applications that succeed in drawing attention without building meaningful human connection, or even pull people further apart.” As an example of the wrong direction to go, I’d hate to see familys’ relationships mediated by AR glasses, replacing eye-to-eye connection and physical contact.