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On the walls of its Soho offices in Manhattan, Behance showcases artwork from its network of designers, photographers, typographers and illustrators.
IdeaPaint-covered walls allow its 30 staff to write with whiteboard pens almost anywhere: one wall charts a freelancer payment system, another, a green gyre of code.
Scott Belsky, the company's 32-year-old CEO, wants to pair talent with employers: his marketing and career services department for creatives has showcased more than two million projects from a million members in 172 countries. In December 2012, Adobe Systems bought Behance for a reported $100-$150 million (£67-£100 million), to make it part of its software and services subscription bundle. "We now have the opportunity to go 'upstream' in the creative process and help creatives connect as they work," he says.
A headhunter's business, Belsky claims, is predicated on obscuring its sources: look at a building, a film's credit sequence or an ad campaign and no one knows who did what. "Companies take the credit for this stuff, but who really did the creative work?"
A decade ago, Belsky worked as a consultant at Goldman Sachs before attending Harvard Business School. There, he noticed a peculiar practice. "Companies that come to campus try to hire people based on certain factors," he says. "One of those is creativity. Yet they're all collecting black-and-white Microsoft Word documents that are supposed to represent what you're capable of as a creative person." Belsky's friends agreed: there had to be a better way to design a CV. "I said, 'What if there was a LinkedIn for the creative world?'" In January 2006, he and designer Matias Corea launched Behance to do just that.
The CEO, who wrote Making Ideas Happen and launched the 99U conference, sees Behance as a chance to give credit where it is due. Above his desk hangs a yellow poster with a mission statement (with the words of Herb Kelleher, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines, and printed by Kyle Van Horn). It says, "We Have a Strategic Plan. It's Called Doing Things."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
