Avoid the Hype and Skip SXSW Interactive

I made my debut at SXSW 2018, the famed South by Southwest festival in Austin TX, where I sported the $1,650 Platinum Pass.

For years I’d heard how magical SXSW is: incredible leaders, startups, and artists showing up from around the world, delivering thoughtful speeches and participating in great spontaneous Q&A. What could be better?

Here’s the good news if you wanted to attend SXSW Interactive and couldn’t make it or regret missing it because you heard Elon Musk showed up.

You didn’t miss nuttin.’

Why skip SXSW?

You Won’t Get into The Big Sessions

The big sessions – the “Interactive” track - are the draw for company owners, entrepreneurs and techies, claiming an abundance of learning opportunities and great speakers. The problem is the big sessions were pretty much impossible to get into. Or at least your odds of getting in are so incredibly low, when total bodies at SXSW are 400,000+ over ten days and there are 50,000+ badge holders. Your average ballroom at the various Austin venues, whether it’s the Convention Center, Hilton, Four Seasons and Fairmont, only seat three thousand or so people.

If you are okay standing in line for a really, really long time, you’ll get into some things but miss a lot more while waiting next to thousands of hopeful attendees. I figured the Platinum Pass, the highest level and most costly, would get me into premier events, but not so. I think SXSW organizers missed the whole notion of customers paying more for superior access.

Self-Curation Equals No Curation

At SXSW you have to do a lot of work just to navigate through the endless list of sessions in order to figure out where to go, and when. At any given hour you face 20 or 30 sessions or events. Most session titles offer no clue as to the speakers or their credentials without diving in much deeper. Repeat this for a week or more and with no ability to reserve your spot in a session to strategically design your track, each day you just cross your fingers, pick, hope you can get in, and hope it’s worth it.

We are all used to attending professional events, where you pay for the producer’s expertise in curating the best program they can put on, attracting great speakers, and making sure attendees can partake. At SXSW the quantity is so vast and uneven as to be essentially uncurated. And so the choice is entirely on you. If you’re in one room and Elon Musk shows up in another room, tough luck.

It is easy to see the appeal of SXSW hosting Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ethan Hawke, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. But when you can’t get into that auditorium, you’ve got many more choices at the exact same time, most of which feature speakers you’ve never heard of (for good reason) or corporate executives not well versed in delivering compelling, inspiring, actionable ideas. It’s such a crapshoot and it’s not just FOMO, its real: a mega-thinker like Ta-Nehisi is really worth it. The also-ran speakers – well they’re also-rans usually for good reason, dressed up by SXSW as a comparable offering with a sexy title. There were lots of social media and digital marketing sessions with great titles, for example, but listening to the VP of marketing from a manufacturing company isn’t the same thing as getting to hear from a Seth Godin or Gary Vaynerchuck talking about best online marketing strategies, how to gain attention and traction, or how a creative person can deliver their own branded, compelling content.

For SXSW to have integrity, they need to offer up Elon in a stadium where it’s not just 5% of paid badge holders who have a shot to get in. To fulfill the organizer’s promise, you have to offer up a venue where everyone who has paid you can attend. Each year in May, the Woodstock of capitalism takes place in Omaha, otherwise known as the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. It’s no surprise Warren Buffett hosts his shareholders in an arena holding 17,000 eager capitalists.

At SXSW we’re all cattle. I know we’re in Texas, but still. If there’s one thing you can bank on about ambitious company owners, investors, and entrepreneurs, it is that we hate seeing our products and services commoditized. Commoditization at SXSW is much more personal.

How did SXSW get it so wrong?

SXSW organizers got three things fundamentally wrong.

First: curation of tech experts and thought leaders – deciding who to host on a very big stage - is not a long tail exercise. The Internet is the perfect example of the long tail: once you get past the thousand largest websites, you’ve still got one billion more to go. Books are a long tail: there are 130 million books. Long tails mean that no matter what your interest, you can find something, somewhere tailored to your desire.

Music is also a long tail, which is why it works so well for a festival like SXSW Music, which offered 250 venues. If you don’t like country, head down the street for rock. Don’t like major celebrities? No problem, you’ve got vast choice of local musicians who are gifted even if not famous.

Technology leadership and thought leadership – truly brilliant thinkers and speakers – are not a vast or infinite pool like the Internet or books or music. I ended up in some sessions that were easy to get in, and so lame. Speakers who somehow got put into the same program as heavy hitters. Note to SXSW: just because someone pays you money as a sponsor, or works in middle management for a well-known company – that doesn’t mean they’re a true authority on the subject or have any training as a public speaker. This is the fundamental problem at SXSW.

The second failing of SXSW organizers is even worse and harder to fix: there’s no valid mission. This may sound too MBA-ish, but stay with me. Every great undertaking, whether it’s a successful company, nonprofit, campaign, movement, leader – at their core there’s an unshakeable mission that resonates with the team, stakeholders, customers and community.

SXSW says “Our mission is to help creative people achieve their goals.” I’ll grant you those are all words in English and they form a complete sentence, but when you think about it, and in light of how they actually operate, it’s a pile of meaningless mush.

Let’s compare that to a couple other missions. Teslas’s mission is to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible. Not much ambiguity there. You can take that mission to the bank. Amazon’s mission is to be earth's most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online. If those are too hardboiled, consider Starbucks’ mission: to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.

The third and final failing of SXSW is sticking to its current program while charging exorbitant fees. You can’t sustain a model of premium pricing while underdelivering on services and results.

There are great opportunities for creative people to achieve moonshots and accomplish great goals. Start with Seth Godin’s free blog, slew of books, including the brilliant and visual What to Do When it's Your Turn (and it's Always Your Turn), and move on to his AltMBA program. From there, creatives who are part of young and growing companies can look to operate their business within the EOS methodology which lends itself to inspiration and new genius.

When a creative person has graduated to owning their own company, its time for the Strategic Coach program, which gives endless new material for entrepreneurs aiming to get to the next level. And when their company is humming along, they’ve graduated to attending Peter Diamandis’ Abundance360 event, in person or less expensively online, which draws together the biggest innovators around the globe. Peter’s mission in life is empowering moonshots, starting with his creation of the X Prizes. SXSW offers you a small chance to get in a big room. Peter offers up $10M prize money to help change the world. You can start your own moonshot thinking and brainstorming just by reading Abundance and Bold.

That’s a recipe for helping creatives achieve their goals.