Tuesday 16th March 2010, 10:00am
SXSW. Love it. Hate it.
Doug Richard, Founder of School for Startups
By Doug Richard
South by Southwest winds down again. And once again I marvel at how useful and useless it is. As a conference where one can hear provocative ideas, learn new things, and see the edge of what’s going on: it sucks. But as a place to meet people who you really should meet, it is unrivalled.
Let me explain. Austin is a city unto itself. It is the anti-Texas. And as many Austin residents will tell you, they pride themselves on being a centre of sophistication in the midst of a state that is anything but. I admit to having held a bias against Texas for a long time and I am not going to soften it in this essay; but I admit that Austin is special.
It’s special in the way that it is open to the whole world yet retains an easiness that let’s SXSW happen. And that’s important; because SXSW happens outside the panel sessions and the keynotes. It happens at the parties and the strange mashups between the film community and the interactive community, as they quaintly refer to the world of the web and the valley.
It happens at parties like the one I attended Saturday night at the Club de Ville, which is really a big shack, a dirt back yard and cheap Tecate beer with a lime where they held the Battle of the Laptops. Various musicians, if you care to call them that, went head to head with live improvised syntheses of music and imagery. It was an elimination tournament of geek musicians on a warm summery night. Only in Austin. Only at SXSW.
It happened at the party I went to the next night whose name I still cannot fathom but where I met a laundry list of engaging characters from worlds that just do not collide often enough. TV, film, advertising and media with gamers and techies, all looking more and more alike.
Where it doesn’t happen is in the panels. The panels are mostly consensus drifting talk fests where the obvious is repeated, no insights are gained and no one pushes new or controversial thoughts. And in large part that’s because of the nature of their formation. They are egalitarian, self-formed and pulled together by like-minded people who when tossed into a conversation, not surprisingly agree with one another, which is probably good for their karma but less good for an audience that is frequently in front of them and not usefully patronised.
But, really that’s OK. Because if you want to start an innovative company, if you are starting an innovative company you shouldn’t worry too much about what happens at the panels, so much as trying to spot the people you should meet and have that Mexican beer with later on. For that purpose, the panels are fine. They sort people by their interest. And you can read their tweets on the #hashtag for that panel and hear their opinions and introduce yourself shamelessly.
SXSW is important. It is wonderfully relaxed and easy. That’s the Austin in it. It mixes worlds. That’s the oddity of a film festival, an interactive conference and a music experience all rolled together.
Many of the people who read my blog are small businesses or aspiring entrepreneurs. Events like SXSW are relevant to you too. If you happen to be starting an innovative company, you must be in the mainstream. You must find ways to cross the world and get involved.
A cheap plane flight purchased six months ahead of time is £300. You can get a room on craigslist for as little as $60 a night from some local renting out their house, as one young lady I met had done who was on no budget at all. The rest is planning, introducing yourself, and a willingness to drink and stay up all night.
In return you will meet more useful people in a week than you might in a year. You will be pulled out of the London community, or Edinburgh or Letterkenny where I was the week before. The startups in that relatively remote part of Ireland are as good and ambitious as any Valley startup. But they are not in the Valley. They need to make those connections more than anyone.
If you aren’t in the technology community there is an SXSW in your world too. It might be the consumer electronics show, it might be the world book fair or the largest crafts show in the world. I can’t know which is your SXSW. But however small you are and even though the web permits you to be small and global, you need to be out in the world to see what’s going on and learn from it.
So go buy your ticket, go find a cheap room and the first Tecate and lime will be on me.
Tags: Austin Texas, doug richard, innovation, sxsw, Tech Conference, US
Was there last year, and my view is that if you’re a cash-starved startup you should only spend your precious resource on SXSW if you have a firm idea of what opportunities it offers and what you want to get out of it. Otherwise you just wind up drunk at various parties with nothing to show for it but a series of major hangovers, which I saw a lot of startups do last year. And you can do that in London or wherever you’re based without the £300 airfare.
Great write up Doug and good comment Mike.
I have never been myself but as a young entrepreneur I plan to head over at some point to see what it is all about. However I have always thought my US air fare would probably be better spent heading to industry / vertical specific events across the pond unitl now but I will see where our new product is and more importantly needs to be by this time next year before booking my ticket!
A great summary of the event Doug and as someone who perhaps didn’t prepare as much as I should I can attest that the networking is key. The panels are useful as openers or for identifying those panelists you need to reach out to. I was very fortunate to spend some time with you and your friends, getting more from that time than I did from any keynote!