I’m not sure if anyone’s given more SXSWi keynote speeches than Dallas Mavericks owner, tech/movie billionaire guy, and all-around loudmouth Mark Cuban.
Isn’t that embarrassing?
Cuban has been an overexposed magnate for more than a decade. I’m just not sure why he keeps coming back here. I mean, what does he want out of it? (Though admittedly he is more entertaining than both Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Williams combined, any day of the week.)
Sure the conference has had many successes – helping popularize Twitter, Foursquare and Ashton Kutcher – but I’ve often questioned its entrepreneurial spirit.
Not this year, though.
SXSWi is going full throttle for its start-up audience. “Start-up mania,” as SXSW Interactive director Hugh Forrest calls it. There is the Start-Up Village, the Accelerator, and throngs of panels on managing your start-up. It’s as if the festival was geared exclusively to small businesses and entrepreneurs.
But of course SXSWi is so big there is a panel for everything. In the past two years alone, the festival grew leaps and bounds. In 2009, my first year here, there were 11,000 register attendees. Last year, that number was north of 20,000.
And where there are people, there is money, and where there is money, there is marketing, corporations, and everything that SXSWi strives not to be.
So this year there are no Mark Cubans or Mark Zuckerbergs. There is a focus on small. There is less tech idol worship and more how-to. (Though Sean Parker, one of the famous early Facebookers and the character played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network, is here. But his focus is small now too.)
SXSWi putting its weight behind the start-up industry will never be a sure-fire success. Picking successful entrepreneurs to speak today is probably as hard as it was 10 years ago. And already, some of the start-up stuff is proving tiring. Reddit founder and start-up guy Alexis Ohanian, for instance, is everywhere. I think I had seen and heard enough of him before I even landed in Austin.
But with a strategy aimed at on smaller, under-the-radar business, at least it shows the festival maturing, and hopefully coping with success and the corporatization that comes with it.
