Sxsw Quotes

Uber, a car service start-up founded by Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, has been giving out free rides during Austin’s SXSW conference for several years. During a single week, thousands of potential Uber customers—tech-obsessed, high-income young adults who cannot find a cab—are motivated to try out this service. One year Uber offered free rides. Another year, it offered BBQ delivery. Instead of spending millions on advertising or countless resources trying to reach these potential users in their respective cities, Uber just waited for the one week a year when they were all in one place and did something special. And Uber did this because a few years earlier they’d watched Twitter take SXSW by storm with a similar collaboration with the conference. This is thinking like a growth hacker—it’s how you get the most bang for your buck and how you get it from the right people.

It is, in a way, the telos of everything I have been describing so far. It is as though the enlightened youth of the Sixties had stepped straight from battling the pig in Chicago ’68 to a panel discussion on crowdfunding at this year’s South by Southwest, the annual festival in Austin, Texas, that has mutated from an indie-rock get-together into a tech-entrepreneur’s convention; a place where the hip share the streets with venture capitalists on the prowl. This combination might sound strange to you, but for a certain breed of Democratic politician it has become a natural habitat. At SXSW 2015, for example, Fetty Wap performed “Trap Queen,” the Zombies played hits from the ’60s, Snoop Dogg talked about his paintings—and Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker swore in the new director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Michelle Lee. In case you’re keeping track, that’s a former subprime lender swearing in a former Google executive, before an audience of hard-rocking entrepreneurship fans.

What’s most curious about Swisher’s role in the Valley is not whether her connections and conferences compromise her—beyond grumbling about her Google conflict, not even her rivals can name a big story she’s pulled up short on, and she’s broken more big stories in the industry than anyone else—but how she’s managed to elevate herself into Silicon Valley royalty by writing about Silicon Valley royalty, often acerbically.” He was dead right—while I had not become them, I was part of the scene in a way that was starting to feel uncomfortable. I had been a camera, at times an eviscerating one, but it was long past time to use all that knowledge I had gained to finally tell people what that photo actually showed. And while I was hardly an amanuensis, I had already started thinking my role needed to change much earlier, in fact. I said so at a SXSW panel that year, which the article quoted: “More and more, as I’ve thought about our new endeavor, at some point, we’re going to have to start pissing people off more. And I think about that a lot. Sometimes I see people and I think: ‘Soon, I’m going to screw you.’ I do, I think that a lot more…. Things are going