SXSW24 Day two and day three. These are a few of my favourite things.

It’s almost 5pm on Sunday in Austin. I’m looking out of my hotel window as the Rainey Street crowd starts to build for what’s sure to be another boisterous evening. The whole strip is ‘mid-gentrification’, transitioning from a collection of quaint, single-level weatherboard shacks to one of modern apartment complexes and multilevel carparks.?

Rainey is the unofficial heart of the SXSW party scene (ignoring ‘Dirty Sixth’ of course). It’s a place where each year, cashed up brands spend (read: invest) millions on immersive installations, high tech activations and celebrity filled parties at a scale that’s grand enough to impress Southby’s ultra discerning crowd. I knew all of this coming in, and for some reason still decided that it would be a good idea to switch things up and stay here this year. When I checked in late on Thursday evening, I barely noticed the earplugs and white noise machines that come standard in every room. Three nights later, 42 year old me understands.?

The last two days have been every bit as blurry as I’ve come to expect; lots of sessions, not much eating, too much drinking, plenty of random encounters, a mandatory trip to Pete’s Duelling Piano Bar and a hip hop karaoke event that I may or may not have enthusiastically participated in.

Before they completely disappear into the recesses of my memory, I’ve captured some of the most interesting perspectives from some of my favourite sessions so far this year. Enjoy.

Amy Webb’s 2024 Emerging Tech Trend Report??

Lining up early for Amy Webb is as good a Southby tradition as any. At 8am the line started forming, a full two hours before the session’s scheduled start time. By 9 it snaked around the corner, out the door and down many many flights of stairs. At 10, a capacity crowd of three thousand odd people were seated, ready to learn about the biggest trends ahead and the possibilities (and risks) these trends would bring.?

Amy started her presentation with an introduction and short history of ‘General Purpose Technologies’ (GPTs). GPTs are technologies that have a wide range of applications across different industries and sectors. Historical GPTs include electricity, the steam engine and the internet. Amy posits that we’re now entering a technology supercycle, where we have not one but three interconnected GPTs hitting at the same time. The growth of AI, our connected system of ‘things’ and advances in biotech are forming their own ‘supercycle’ fly wheel, pushing everything forward at breakneck speed.?

1. Artificial Intelligence.

AI is the foundation of the tech supecycle and has seen unprecedented growth in just the last 12 months. As it scales, we’re seeing more risks and more opportunities than ever. Accountability is a growing problem. We talk a lot about handling biases (some are good, some are bad, some are dangerous, some are nascent, some are noticeable, some are invisible) but we don't talk much about market incentives which favour speed and scale over accuracy and safety.

When it comes to opportunities, we’re seeing a move from ‘concept to concrete’. In other words, we’re entering an environment where instead of needing specific prompts for what you want (think Google search), you’ll be able to have broad brainstorms with the technology that will actively help you take ideas from fuzzy and abstract to well defined and concrete.??

2. Connected ecosystem of things?

At some point, AI will have run out of internet to read and watch (it will have ingested everything!). To keep learning, we don't just need more data to feed it, we need more types of data to feed it. To fill this void, companies are inventing new devices to sell us that also provide them with rich user data (think home sensor devices, face computers like the Vision Pro, wearable fitness trackers etc).? All of this new data will see us move from having LLMs (large language models that predict what to say next) to LAMs (large action models that predict what to do next).??

3. Bioengineering

The growth in AI and the explosion of data from connected devices have spurred on major advances in bioengineering too. Just last week a brand new tool called Evo launched, which uses its ‘knowledge’ of DNA, RNA and proteins to predict and design new organisms based on novel combinations we otherwise may never have considered. In the same way we’ve developed generative AI, we can expect to see a wave of generative biology, in which we discover new materials that help us manage our bodies and our environment.

Streaming into the Future with Bill Gurley (celebrated VC) and Anthony Wood (Founder and CEO of Roku)

Bill Gurley is one of the most respected names in VC, and for good reason. As a general partner at Benchmark, he’s orchestrated some of the biggest tech deals of the last 20 years including Uber, GrubHub and Open Table. In this session, he sat down with Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood.

For those unfamiliar, Roku is a maker of TVs and also a streaming service that aggregates all of your other streaming services into a single interface. Roku has been the number one selling TV brand in America for the last five years. Today, over 80 million households use the service and the business is valued at over $9 billion.?

The whole hour was captivating, but what I found most interesting was Wood’s talk about focus. Core to the Roku business is the operating system and user experience. When they entered the market, Amazon, Apple and Google (Android) were all playing in the space and had all developed their own operating systems (and interfaces) for watching smart TVs. They all sucked.?

What Roku bet on were the ideas that an outstanding operating system for TVs needed to be designed from the ground up, and that to be done well, it needed to be a company’s first priority. Where most would have seen three of the biggest companies in the world slugging it out, Wood saw an opportunity: “Google’s best people are working on Search, not Android TV”.?

The Roku business has gone exponential and along the way, reinvented our relationship with streaming, the remote control (completely redesigned and now includes a microphone) and the way TV companies get paid.

Brene Brown and Esther Perel

Individually, Brené Brown and Esther Perel are two of my all time favourite SXSW presenters so seeing them together was a must. The one hour conversation was never going to be enough but even in the short window, they turned up plenty of gold.?

Brene opened with a question about whether we’re living ‘beyond human scale’. Whether all of the information we were taking in, all of the connections we’re trying to maintain, all of the world events we’re trying to hold space for are stretching us beyond what we’re wired to be able to handle.?

From here, the two covered:

Artificial Intimacy (the other AI)

Artificial Intimacy is the term that describes the situation where one person is sharing something important and the other is half on their phone responding with ‘uh huh’. It should feel intimate because one party is being open and vulnerable but it’s artificial because the other is not present. Dating apps and other forms of social media also brig us copious amounts of Artificial Intimacy.

Ambiguous Loss

Ambiguous Loss is the feeling of grief when we expect to be feeling connection. It occurs because something is missing. In some cases, the person is physically present but emotionally absent (eg dementia, depression, distraction). In other cases, they feel emotionally present but are physically absent (eg extended travel, missing persons). As a side note, this is exactly the term I was looking for to describe the mood in Israel in January. There was grief, but grief didn’t accurately capture the feelings about the hostages (134 of whom are still being held in Hamas tunnels). The mood was one of ambiguous loss.

Seeking

For a long time we lived in tribes and communities that were very different to how we live in the modern, Western world. In these earlier settings, the rules mainly came from religion and the big questions that kept us up at night were all answered:

• What do we do with what we can not understand?
• What do we do when we suffer?
• What can we do about the things we cannot control?

In these communities, there wasn’t a lot of room for self expression, but there was plenty of certainty.

Our modern society is based on individuality, but the individual needs to find the answers to these hard questions themselves. This puts a burden on the self that creates tremendous amounts of stress and uncertainty. We don't want to give up the freedom but the result is that we’ve become more anxious and more isolated than ever.

Modern Loneliness

Modern loneliness masks as hyperconnectivity. We’ve never been more connected or more alone. We can have a thousand virtual friends but nobody to feed our cat or pick up our prescription from the pharmacy. Instead, we have a thousand people we don't know giving us likes upon which we build and base our self esteem.

Everyone has their eyes down all the time. Where is flirting, spontaneity, happenstance, serendipity? In this sense, the phone is a real vulnerability shield, not just personally but at a societal level. We’ve stopped small talk while waiting in line but this small talk is where we learn to interact and build connections.

Collective effervescence

Collective effervescence is the term for when people come together in a way where they abandon their individual emotions to join social emotions (eg church, community, music, dance). What is it that makes people sing together at concerts and why do we love it so much? In our screen first world, we’ve lost so many of these collective effervescence experiences and we need them more than ever.

Sue Bird & Jessica Robertson in Conversation About the Investment and Growth of Women’s Sports

Sue Bird (WNBA legend) and Jessica Robertson (co-founder of TOGETHXR) charted the slow burn then rapid rise of women’s professional sport. Together, they’re working to break the reverse flywheel of 'the business of female sport': No female athlete stories get told, so audiences don't turn up, so advertisers don't invest.?

Historically, in the US only 4% of sports coverage has been womens sport. Today it’s up to 16% and rising. In what’s been a watershed year, we’ve seen dozens of attendance and viewership records broken across female collegiate (the Caitlin Clark effect), national (the rise of the WNBA) and international sports including the Women’s World Cup.

The pair discussed how female athletes haven’t been ‘dimensionalised’ like male athletes have. Their full stories haven't been told and so there’s no way for the public to appreciate them as not just incredible athletes, but also as activists, entrepreneurs, educators and more.?

Despite this, we’re at the start of a generational change where the viewership is growing, the media coverage is expanding, the social media commentary is infinitely less toxic (at times even positive) and the rights deals are starting to get interesting.

Oh and I saw Conan O'Brien interviewed by Nick Kroll which was beyond hilarious.

That’s all for now. The plan is to get an early night, squeeze in my annual Austin run tomorrow morning before cramming in another 8 hours of big ideas and inspiration.