What SXSW taught me about pitching.

Yee haa! I’m in the great state of Texas and just popped my cherry on my first SXSW. Thank God I found this hack before I went.  There’s just so much on it is virtually unfathomable, even with its amazing app. If Cannes is Davos then SXSW is the Burning Man of commercial creative. Not because of the music, comedy, and other interesting creative doings (though there are multiple offerings on at all times) but because there is so much going on simultaneously. It’s a colossal tapas of brain food, and there’s no way you can much through it all. However, through a combination of luck and some last-minute planning in the taxi (there’s no Uber in Austin – don’t get me started), I did get to fill up on delicious dose of creative chaos.  Happily in the elitist 1%, I decided up for the Platinum Badge as this year that badge gets more SXSW programming than ever before in the history of mankind. Pro tip: it’s very useful to take full advantage of the cross-industry opportunities by jumping hedging attendance last minute to see where the numbers are. Eject an intern and make way for His Ghostliness!!!

The kick off was pretty excellent, what with Michael Fassbender and Ryan Gosling gracing the Paramount for the Film Festival’s opening night world premiere and Senator Cory Booker lighting up Twitter with his quotable self. He was way inspirational. Day 2 turned out to be consistently spectacular as well, with a mind boggling breadth and depth of offerings on the schedule. I left a session early and came across a line for Gary Vaynerchuk  which was insane and immediately the platinum push past power came in super handy. Then I dropped into the Dell house where they were doing mimosas and VR but I ended up hitting the Fast Company grill for lunch. They know how put the V into VIP treatment.

If I could, I’d book for next year now. If you’re in the creative industries, there’s sure to be something to spark your imagination and set you down the path to new discovery. I schmoosed hard around the VIP areas and took in a pretty wonderful lineup at the Facebook Live studio and love love loved the Film Keynote, Jill Soloway and autonomous car expert Padmasree Warrior but missed the live broadcast from the red carpet at the Baby Driver world premiere. (Edgar Wright’s new movie folks!) 

 Next I hit a panel on ‘The Future of Intelligence’ which posits that the big issue on the horizon (big like racial discrimination, gender equality, reproductive health rights) is ‘evolution rights’. There was a lot of high minded stuff on neural interfaces and other ways to make your brain faster and smarter. But not everyone will think ‘upgrading’ is a good thing. Thanks goodness, I’m already running Paulie version 10.7 so I’m sweet. Back to the el ranch, a nice little gated community in South Austin but who needs sleep, though, when you can take a meditation walk through the Austin Convention Center at 11am with the monastics of Walk With Me. 

Next on the menu was some high grade inspiration from designer Marc Jacobs and WWE star, actor, and philanthropist John Cena, who really is a top shelf human being (though someone needs to shoot his tailor – navy and yellow window pane suit!?!)


 Then the Music Festival  got underway and all hope of sleep was vanquished. That meant well over 500 international artists arrived to perform. Not all not made it into the country. One South Korean act who was detained, but ultimately made it through. After showing their documentation and playing the band’s record for the agent, they were cleared. They texted SXSW saying, “The music saved us.”

Probably one of the highlights of the festival was  Buzz Aldrin who delivered the arguably best sound bite thus far: “We explore or we expire. That’s about it.” #truthbomb. From exploration of future worlds and back to earth, what will I discover today? One big takeaway I got from SXSW is that we all experience some real moments of interconnectedness. Humans are not so different from one another, living disparate lives while dreaming different dreams. People want to create, give back, find happiness, and find love. If we can all just stop for a minute and remember that we’re not separate at all, we can do amazing things. We are doing amazing things. And absolutely amazing was the ‘Intelligent Machines Will Eat Their Young and Then Us’ panel which was way more light-hearted than expected. It turns out AI (maybe the festival’s single most popular topic) is way, way off being able to send androids back in time to kill the mother of the human resistance leader. The more immediate danger comes from AI exhibiting phenomena like ‘reward hacking’. This happens when instrumental goals are set for machines without consideration of human values (e.g. Self-driving car is tasked to find quickest route to destination. Self-driving car works out that it can take a shortcut through a shopping mall). A quote from machine learning expert Andrew Ng neatly summed it up, ‘There could be a race of killer robots in the far future, but I don’t work on not turning AI evil today for the same reason I don’t worry about the problem of overpopulation on the planet Mars.’ 


Then from tech to art and everything in between. Rolling along the weekend saw the thrilling denouement of the year’s event with a big, stellar, amazing day full of programming, including the final opportunities to check out the Art Program, conference programming, and Film Festival. The Closing Night Film, Life, brings some out-of-this-world talent to the ATX. (Out of this world… get it? Ha.) 

I was too shagged to see Garth Brooks perform and frankly I regret it! Gonna catch some action at the Continental Club and C-boys tonight to make up for it.

Being an acolyte of the dark arts, I was amped to see Dr Robert Cialdini talk on his new book, PRESUASION and the practice of arranging for recipients to be sympathetic to a message before hearing it. I’ve always called that framing but essentially it means to focus on an image or a word consisting of the elemental message – we channel the intention. It’s really the cherry on the top as persuasion is more important but PRESUASION is an accelerator. (You see what I did there Robert?) He was compelling and convincing, though I spent the whole time thinking I may have been presuaded into believing him.

Those were just a few of the big thinkers that I spent time with in Austin. Just being in the presence of these great minds is massively stimulating. We might not be designing Mars robots, building neural interfaces or creating new philosophies, but knowing that there is this huge intellectual space to stretch into, between the everyday and the genius, it’s inspiring. It makes me braver, more ambitious, and yes… more creative. The other two big lessons that it confirmed is that networking is day drinking and that ultimately, we respond more to energy than to peoples words or actions.

Anyways, must go. I’m off to write an investor deck that will RESHAPE HISTORY.