SxSW 2017 Wrap

I was lucky enough to get along to SxSW festival in Austin Texas USA last week. It was a timely does of inspiration and fear, new connections and old friends, order and chaos.

The People
One big difference is the participation. I’d say that more than half of my experience wasn’t sitting in the audience soaking up some content. It was hands on, one to one or small groups.

  • I met Ilene, a mid-twenties robotics engineer with Kumi who told me she’d originally started studying business because of the influence of her parents, but eventually switch to computer science. She agreed to help me find out more about getting young woman excited about tech.
  • I met Kwasi who is a part of Collision Conference New Orleans when he was being interviewed and mentioned that his best advice for entrepreneurs is to ‘Stay Focused’ – my mantra. I went straight up to him afterwards and spent twenty minutes chatting and ended up agreeing to work on something together.
  • I met three woman named Aimee, Joanne and May when I walked past a board game meet up and got pulled into an attempt to trek the Oregon Trail.
  • I met Bay McLaughlin from Brinc.io. Ex-Apple and theologizing about why everyone needs to get to China and start understanding it as the worlds biggest market. We met up the next day and will hopefully be sending a few muru-D companies to his events in Shenzhen.
  • I met Samantha and Heather the authors of Geek Girls Rising (coming out in May) who have captured dozens of stories of women in technology.
  • I met Michael Cheika, the Australian Rugby Union Coach, who taught me how they are using data to help players make better decisions and also how he’s battling millennial mindsets with toughness and openness.

THE TALKS

Cory Booker – New Jersey Senator
I was blown away by what a great speaker he was. A politician. Not reading from a canned speech. Sure he prepared a lot, but it was articulate, inspiring and open.

  • The world is a reflection of your view. If you can change it to love then the world will start to be uplifted.
  • Aim for service not celebrity, purpose not popularity.
  • He told a heart warming story of his mentor who’s life long words, and his last words were, “I see you, I love you” and he talked about how those two points are key to the world right now.
  • Before you show me your religion, let me see how you show it to other people.

Women Product Mavericks
Paraphrasing the panel:

  • How do you find a company that supports women? Look to the leadership – e.g. Stuart Butterfield – straight up feminist.
  • Push for transparent relationships
  • Women can’t come in as aggressive
  • You will get underestimated – you can use that to your advantage.
  • Confidence – you have to say what you don’t know, relentless questioner.
  • Women rarely believe they have more power than they do. They should know they have more power.
  • “Initially I relied on external ways of getting confidence. High heels and make up. I feel like I have to be completely put together all the time. As I got more confident, this stopped. I got pregnant, had to have bedrest for 5 months. I did video conferences lying down. Like Cleopatra but fat. Confidence should not be based on physical things. It is based on me being smart and working hard.
  • Study Cognitive Behavioural
    • Therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy
    • Biases – write down your obvious and probably biases.
    • Each month increase your companies exposure to different view points
    • Whole company support day – everyone does customer support.
    • Organise around goals not roles or products.

I asked question to the panel “As a dad of two daughters, how do I get them excited about technology?”

Ask lots of tough questions
Not treating soft.
Be a strong role model.
Exposure to tech.
See the world.
Consider it.
Variety – not just pure tech. Camping but building robots at same time.

Reddit Founder
Sucking is the first step to being sorta good.
Hijab emoji was started by a teenage girl with laptop.
Shittywatercolour – built a brand with focus and persistence

Talking to Computers

  • 47% of jobs automated in 20 years.
  • Computers composing symphony – Lamus
  • Prisma – neural networks to take photos
  • IBM Watson – deal with emotions, keywords.

Tech.co Mentoring Session and Pitch Judging
I did a mentoring session for Tech.Co, the team that runs CES. All five tech companies were early and all needed some focus. There was a restaurant booking app, a conference mapping app, a mobile browser and two tech/services businesses.

The pitch judging was fun. 24 companies with a two minute pitch. The winner was Wise Banyan, which seemed a bit more progressed than the other companies (raising $10m+) but maybe also they just pitched it that way.

Big thanks to Marita and Frank for inviting me along.

Tim Ferris and Cheryl Strayed (Author of Wild)
When I fly I say would I be happy to die? Am I focusing on the right things? And it usually results in me saying no to more things.

China Market with Bay McLauglin from Brinc.io

  • Bet long. Really long. Make sure everything is in support of long term trends. More connected or less connected.
  • Go to China.
  • Be flexible.
  • Learn to negotiate. You will get demolished if you are not prepared.
  • You can only move money out once a year. Book most revenue out and cover costs internal.

Australian Companies

Eora 3D – Scan a 3d object with their tool and an iPhone. $300 per object and competition is $18k to $100k. My advice: Increase your price

THE EVENT

Despite wanting to go for the past ten years, this was my first SxSW, or South By as they call it for short. The closest thing I could equate it too was the Olympics of conferences. Fifty different sports, hundreds of gifted performances, dozens of support acts, countless volunteers and 50,000 passionate fans.

The event is very well run, even handling thousands of people trying to get into multiple rooms at once. I did miss out of a few events due to being too late to get in line so not getting a seat. Apparently fire wardens had said that once a room is closed off, people can’t come in, even if someone leaves. This seemed excessive and left a few people grumpy. For big talks, they put them on TV’s outside so you could have a coffee and still watch, though the magic of conferences is seeing the people.

Austin does a great job of managing it. Even without Uber and Lyft, there were plenty of travel options and I was rarely stuck anywhere for long.

As Arnie says, “I’ll be back”