It’s Over – SXSW Interactive Day 5
Mar 15 2011
Today was the last day and apparently this was the highest attended SXSW Interactive ever with 19,364 attendees up from 14,251 last year. I made it for Reid Hoffman‘s keynote. Reid is the founder of LinkedIn. He had a lot to say and I wish he a few slides for us to look at because it was hard to keep up, but here are my notes. I missed the first two “rules for entrepreneurs,” but here they are:
1. Zoned out, was checking email or twitter. UPDATE from Jeffrey in comments below: Pay attention to your customers.
2. Zoned out, was checking email or twitter. UPDATE from Jeffrey in comments below: Stay focused.
3. Aim big. It’s the same effort to do a small businesses as it is a big business so it’s better to try to change the world.
4. Plan for good luck.
5. Maintain flexible persistence.
6. Launch early enough that you are embarrassed by your 1.0 product release.
7. Always keep your aspirations and aim high but dont drink your own kool-aid.
8. Having great product important but good distribution more important.
9. Pay attention to the culture and how you hire from the beginning.
10. These rules are not laws of nature. You can break them.
Then I headed to the Austin Technology Incubator’s Entrepreneur’s Lounge for some networking and then to the Game Salad (an ATI company that is doing very well) party, which I left a bit early from. I’m too old for loud music and late nights. And so concludes another SXSW Interactive, but wait, I still have one more post to do about SWAG that I’ll hopefully have time to write later.
Good bye tens of thousands of out of town visitors. We love having you here each year, but we don’t want you to all move here and clog up our roads anymore than they are! 🙂
Author: Aruni | Filed under: austin technology incubator, conferences, entrepreneurship, twitter | Tags: ATI, entrepreneur's lounge, game salad, linkedin, reid hoffman, sxsw interactive | 4 Comments »
Point #6 is really interesting. I’m not a perfectionist, but I’ve very thorough, so it would be frustrating to release something before I’ve covered all the bases. It makes a lot of sense, though!
I think the first was pay attention to your customers and the second one was stay focused….
Love tip #7, aim high but don’t drink your own kool aid. It’s great to have high goals and aspirations — at the same time, be modest & open.
The guy (or gal) sitting next to you at lunch might be wearing 10 year old jeans and a torn up t-shirt, but he might be your next angel investor. It is always surprising to see many C-level people dress casual in public — great opportunity to build real relationships.
@Hannah – In the world of software releasing something before it’s fully ready can give you insight into the things you can change/add to make it even better. It is a hard concept because I, too, like something to be as good as possible before releasing it.
@Jeffrey – thanks for the additions. I’ll add them to the post.
@Charles – Yes, you never know who or what someone is made of. Personally, I don’t care if they are the janitor or the CEO, they all have something valuable to contribute. As an entrepreneur, it’s hard not to drink your own kool-aid!