This painting that I spotted on the side of a food truck serves as scientific proof that Austin is ridiculously cool. Yes, it's an octopus with a mustache, riding a bike and talking about vegetarian food.
Last week I hung out with tens of thousands of tech folks at SXSW in Austin, Texas. It was my first time at South by, but definitely not the last. Surrounding myself with such a concentrated pool of geeks made me feel like a kid in a candy store. The people who show up in Austin not only believe in the power of technology to move society forward—they are actively engaged in building the world they want to see.
There’s no way that I can describe all of the awesomeness of last week in a single post, so I thought I’d share a few quotes from some of the keynote presentations and panel discussions that I attended. If you have the time, I recommend listening to some of the talks. That said, here are ten SXSW quotes that I scribbled in my notebook:
“Ideas are cheap, but acting on them is very expensive.”
— Ash Maurya, Running Lean
“Sometimes the insight is in the outliers.”
—Steve Blank, Startup Owner’s Manual, on testing hypotheses and gathering user feedback
“Our value is making your life less predictable.”
—Ben Carey, Situationist, Engineering Location-Based Serendipity
“The sharing economy is a big idea that’s going to evolve over the next 20 years.”
—Steve Case, AOL cofounder, Tapping America’s Secret Sauce: Entrepreneurs
“Most of the mistakes that I have made have been around not making hard decisions…fast enough.”
—Tim O’Shaughnessy, Living Social, Tapping America’s Secret Sauce: Entrepreneurs
“It’s not technology that’s holding us back…we need to find a way to make it work.”
—Dean Kamen, on the economic challenges of bringing water filtration systems to the developing world
“I didn’t really think about the recession; I thought about the opportunity.”
—Chris Guillebeau, explaining the thought process of a single mother who chose to open a yarn shop
“Be firm in your destination but flexible in your path”
—Erik Qualman, Socialnomics
“We are a human-machine civilization. Everybody has been enhanced with computer technology….[Computers] will make their way into our bodies and brains, but I think that’s an arbitrary distinction.”
—Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, Expanding Our Intelligence Without Limit
“Let me give you a formal definition of cyborg. It’s an organism to which exogenous components have been added for the purpose of adapting to new ambient spaces….We’re this very strange species that likes to do that.”
—Amber Case, Cyborg Anthropoligist, Ambient Location and the Future of the Interface
