Another amazing year in Austin, last year had a profound impact on me, this year I had the honor to be a panelists (on a very well received panel, as covered by Wired), had my joke turned realty of a shirt line get mentioned in a Keynote, covered in CNet, pitch a famous VC (and as I remember it the first person to really get me excited about entrepreneurship). I met a hero, actually, met everyone I have been reading for so many years. It is a blur.
A fantastic blur.
SXSWi has a huge place in my heart, here are my winners:
Big Winners from SXSW
Friends from Around the World
It was great meeting everyone, I have a stack of 300+ cards to get though. I could start linking, but wouldn’t do it justice.
Party Sponsors
You rocked my week and I am looking for professional help with the amount of drinking I did because of you. Friendly, fun, functional, I met hundreds of great folks waiting to get in and then drinking on your dollar.
SXSW Team
The folks putting on the event did an absolutely amazing job. I have nothing but amazing things to say.
Big Walls With Arrows
Bloxes rock, and we got to see them all weekend with huge arrows pointing our way around the panels. But the things do so much more, such as act as table structures. The look damn cool, I want 50.
SocialThing
Largely a great launch, great job to all the hard work of Brian, Ben, Matt, Wade, Josh and others.
Twitter
You didn’t crash, and I thank you.
Colorado Companies
The Colorado Interactive Party (sponsored by PocketFuzz and Lijit) was one of the hottest parties of the weekend (with a line to get in of over 500). The mountainous state is really blowing up in the tech scene with the emergence of Foundry Group, TechStars, Lijit, SocialThing, VCWear, Startup Weekend, PocketFuzz, SurveyMonkey, and many many others. I called two of my companies out there, and kinda feel weird about doing that.
The Unicorn
Matt showed up to my panel wearing a unicorn suit. We invited him onstage and he rocked it. He even acted like a rock star. Brilliant. It was talked about quite a bit during the week. Stunt gone big.
Big Losers
FaceBook
Hand picking an interviewer to lob softball questions to your CEO is a good idea to who at your company? Sorry Lacy, but you seemed more awkward than Mark, who gets a free pass by being a developer. If you don’t want to answer the hard questions on your company in a public forum, don’t take the keynote, or do something fun and creative there. By this I mean do a demo, bring some light to some of the creative reasons, talk about scaling, features, challenges and media coverage. The folks watching left with a much worse impression of who is running FaceBook, and what they are doing with all that data. Losing your users trust is your base crumbling.
TechCrunch
Combine blown coverage of a huge keynote (with no personal coverage at the event?) with random stabs at the bloggers, designers, developers and musicians that came. Michael, you know you wanted to be here.
Micah Baldwin
The man had to walk over a mile to get his tattoo. With this much walking, he (being a douchebag) must have had a few pound weight loss.
In all, that was an amazing week. Now back to reality.
Samantha Murphy and I after the Jonathan Coulton show
Spinto Band at Austin City Limits
View from my panel
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