 I'm very pleased to announce this morning's keynote. Hugh Forrest serves as the director of the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival. This event brings together more than 30,000 digital creatives from across the United States and around the world. These digital creatives are inspired by five days of panels, presentations, brainstorming, networking, deal-making, socializing, creating, innovating, and fun. Hugh was named Austinite of the Year in February 2012 by the Austin Chamber of Commerce, along with fellow South by Southwest directors, Roland Swenson, Lewis Black, and Nick Barbero. In addition to his work at South by Southwest, he is part of the National Advisory Board for the Pointer Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. Please help me give a very warm welcome to Hugh Forrest. So good morning, and thank you, Josh, for the nice introduction. Remember that Jerrens are your friend always. My name is Hugh Forrest. I'm the director of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Today I'm going to talk to you about how geeks are the new rock stars and what that exalted status means for you guys. But before we go there, explore those issues. Let me invoke my position as someone who's lived in Austin for most of his life and welcome all of our out of town visitors to our fair city. Austin is a place that is extremely proud of our musical heritage. In fact, there is so much music here that we tend to call ourselves the live music capital of the world, or we call ourselves the live music capital of the world. This is a billboard that's at the corner of 6th Street and I-35 right at the heart of the 6th Street district, where there's so much of the music goes on in that area. Another poster proclaiming our position at the top of live music heap, and yet another billboard from 6th Street. Why do we call ourselves the live music capital of the world? Because of people such as Janice Chaplin, who got her start here in the 60s. Steve Ray Vaughn, who was a major player here in the 80s. This is the Steve Ray Vaughn statue that is at Auditorium Shores. It's about a half mile walk from here. Auditorium Shores is a little bit under construction, but I think you can still see the statue. More currently, Willie Nelson, still a big part of the Austin scene, still plays a lot around town. This is a gentleman named Alejandro Escobedo, who was in band in the 80s called The True Believers. He also now plays in a band called the Alejandro Escobedo Orchestra. They are great. One of my favorite female vocalists, Shawn Colvin, she is an Austin resident. Getting a little bit younger, Spoon got their start in Austin. I think they now call themselves the Chicago band, but again, got their start here. Gary Clark Jr. has been playing in Austin for years and years and years, now beginning to get national and international buzz. That's great. And this is a woman named Kat Edmondson who got her start here. I believe she now lives in New York. It's great to hear that we had her on the music that was playing before the keynote. She is a great vocalist, has a great voice, and great stage presence. So a lot of these acts have come to national and international prominence by the Austin City Limits television show, which is filmed here. You're probably also aware that Austin City Limits is now affiliated with a music festival, which occurs in the fall here, brings hundreds of bands around the world to Austin as well as thousands and thousands of music fans. So again, that's a very, very quick overview of the Austin music scene, which is so much a part of the city's identity now and moving forward. Thanks again for coming to this morning's keynote. I know it's Thursday morning. You guys are tired. Really appreciate coming out early. I am extremely honored to be invited to talk to you guys. And as a representative of the Austin tech community, we are thrilled that your community is part of our community this week. So again, great that you guys are here. I'll also say I'm impressed at the entertainment you brought in, X games that had to be a hard get, but props to you guys for that. So pre-keynote disclaimer, I am the least technical person in this room today. We'll be lucky if we get through this prezzie without some kind of breakdown. As always, I can learn more from talking to you guys than you guys can from talking to me or hearing me, but we'll pretend otherwise for the next 45 minutes or so. What I do know about, a little bit about, is about South by Southwest. So let's start there. This is a brave young guitar player in a club, Circa South by Southwest 2011 or so, and is a good start for our journey. South by Southwest started as a music event in 1987. At that point, it had about 200 bands as context. The 2004 South by Southwest had something like 2,000 bands. I joined onto the team in 1989. Why did I join on the team? Because I had a Mac Plus computer and they did not. So I was hired because I had a computer. Very good lesson and the importance of having the right hardware at the right time. Excuse me, why it happens in Austin in March. South by Southwest was patterned after an event in New York called the New Music Seminar. At one point, the organizers of the New Music Seminar were going to come to Austin and organize this event. That didn't end up happening, so the idea was to do it ourselves here. We went to the clubs in Austin. They said, great idea, come back in a few years and we'll help you with this. Kept going back to the clubs, couldn't get any kind of traction there. Finally, the opening was Spring Break Week. Worst week of the year for clubs because you've got 50,000 UT students leaving town. So we were able to get an opening to do South by Southwest in that week. Turned around 10 years, 15 years, 20 years later that Spring Break week is now the best week for most clubs. They sometimes do 20, 30, 40% of their revenue for the entire year in that week. The point of that story is whatever you do, turn a weakness into a strength. Over the last 25 years, South by Southwest has been fortunate enough to grow a lot. The economic impact for the city is now pretty significant. 2013, by our figures, the economic impact for South by Southwest was 218 million. That means cab fares, hotels, meals bought, trinkets bought, t-shirts bought. We don't have the figures for 2014 yet. I believe that we're bigger, putting that 218 million into context. That is about a third of a Super Bowl. So again, it's a pretty big deal. Above and beyond that dollar figure, what South by Southwest does is shines a very bright light on the city's creativity and innovation. South by Southwest has helped create this Austin brand, which is gaining more and more national and international recognition. Drilling down a little bit deeper, South by Southwest week, which is actually longer than week, now consists of four different elements. South by Southwest EDU, which is our education focused event that starts off the week. We have interactive, we have music, we have film. I, again, work on, manage, direct, however you want to phrase that, the interactive event. Let me tell you a little bit more about that. We have now, as Josh shed in his introduction, about 30,000 total registrants. We have a four day trade show with close to 300 exhibitors. We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 900 total sessions. We use this building. We use this room. We also use eight other hotels in the downtown area to spread out. Our 2014 speakers ranged from Chelsea Clinton to Edward Snowden and about a thousand more, who I will not name at this particular time, topics ranged from code to content, from food to fashion, from everything in between. Drace has spoken numerous times, including 2014. We have dozens and dozens and dozens of incredible networking events along with daytime stuff. South by Southwest interactive in our best days is a great place to preview what's going to be hot in two years. Again, talking about Drace involvement. This was what Acrea did in 2014. Great to have them involved. But I will also say that our growth is a relatively new phenomenon. We initially started out called South by Southwest Multimedia. We changed our name to Interactive around 2000. We were traditionally the smallest portion of the South by Southwest family of events. We would not have survived some very, very lean years if we didn't have South by Southwest music paying the bills. I always say that or mention that as a lesson that if you're doing your startup, don't quit your day job because you need something to pay the bills. Again, we had lots and lots of struggles for a long time. I was amazed that we didn't pull the plug on the thing. I would have pulled the plug on the thing if it was my decision. Our growth spurt started about 10 years ago. It coincided to some extent with our push into social media. We had Jonathan Abrams who was the CEO of Friendster talking in 2004. That was a big thing for us. We were able to get Mark Zuckerberg here in 2008. Foursquare launched at South by Southwest 2009. More recently Elon Musk in 2013. So again, social media and startups were a big part in sparking our growth. I also think and much more in line with the focus of my talk today that the growth of South by Southwest interactive reflects an overall change in pop culture. We have the mystification of people like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. When Steve Jobs died, his funeral was covered like John Lennon's funeral. When Mark Zuckerberg got married, his marriage was covered in people. We have Elon Musk as the Henry Ford of our generation and inspiration for Tony Stark and Iron Man. We have Mark Cuban as the actor. Mark Cuban also as the court jester on the shark tank. We're talking about basketball. Steve Bomber has now bought the Clippers and is repairing race relations in Los Angeles. I cannot think of anyone any more geeky than Steve Bomber who is all of a sudden cool. The end result is that geeks are cool. This wasn't the case. Did you clap? Great. This was not the case 10 or 12 years ago, 15 years ago. I remember when South by Southwest was struggling and I was completely frustrated. I used to complain to my friends, my colleagues, my parents, whoever would listen that, hey, we can't even get coverage within the city of Austin. We've got all these great bands coming to town. We've got all these great film stars coming to town. All we've got is geeks. Who cares about geeks? No one even cares about this stuff. And again, in the space of 10 years, that equation has completely flipped. We, I think, South by Southwest has helped a small part in that, but even more so, we have been the beneficiary of that flip. So social media plus startups plus changes in pop culture equals very sharp rise in attendance for South by Southwest Interactive. That is the scary growth chart. I say scary and I don't like to look at it very much because it conflates that growth is always good, which is another speech that's not always good, but it shows how much we've changed over the course of 10 years. Context of this growth, South by Southwest Interactive is now bigger than South by Southwest Film, South by Southwest Interactive is now bigger than South by Southwest Music. In fact, Interactive is bigger than Music and Film combined. Context of this growth, part two, the event now skews much more to technology than music. We have become a tech event with the music portion of it, as opposed to vice versa. This is not so much a takeover, as I would argue it is a transition. Context of this growth, part three, March is when all the rock stars come to Austin, March is still when all the rock stars come to Austin, but the real rock stars at this point are you guys, the geeks. This is not just in South by Southwest, geeks are the rock stars everywhere now. I for one think this transition is pretty, pretty cool. You guys are at the top of the food chain, congratulations. Now you can clap. Great. So what does it mean to be a rock star? It means you have the power to achieve whatever you want. It means you have the power to influence countless others. It means you have the power to create your own set of rules. And most importantly, it also means you have the power to go short lists on airplanes. This is Led Zeppelin circa about 1973. I was going to include a kiss slide here, but I think Led Zeppelin is somehow more appropriate. Robert Plant actually moved to Austin for a couple of years. I read online this morning that he's now relocated, but became part of the Austin tribe also. So there you go. Led Zeppelin, you guys are the Led Zeppelin of this generation. But rock star status demands rock star responsibilities. So for the last part of my talk for the next 30 minutes, I want to talk about 10 specific directives that I think rock stars should embrace. Most of these are directives that are in some way tied to my experience at South by Southwest, but that's not necessarily they can be tied to various, various things. So here we go on our 10 commandments, our 10 directives for you, the rock star geek community. Directive number one, rock stars think big, but act small. This is my personal favorite rock star, Bruce Springsteen, keynote speaker here from music in 2013. I actually got to take a picture with him. So that was pretty cool. This is Bruce shaking hands with fans somewhere in New Jersey. So what do I mean by rock stars think big, but act small? My urge there is to envision the big picture by working the small picture. Do you as a person, do you as a company, do you as an industry have a one-year plan, have a three-year plan, have a five-year plan? This is incredibly difficult stuff to do. I know from my work at South by Southwest, we struggle with this stuff all the time, but I know that a key to success is again, thinking in the big, big picture. I showed you the slide, a few slides back, there you go, that showed the growth of South by Southwest and said that that was very attributable to startups and social media. What's not part of that equation, but is Bear's referencing in this conversation, summer of 2004, 10 years ago, I had a bit of a personal crisis. I left Austin, moved to LA for four months, took a leave of absence for South by Southwest and read a ton of self-help books, learned how to meditate. Did that somehow contribute to the growth of South by Southwest? Maybe so, maybe it's completely coincidental, but I think learning how to calm your mind, think of the big picture is something we all need to do, all need to think about. And when I talk about acts small, I think always small connections inform this big picture. Small connections means reaching out to everybody. What is so great about an event like this or about any other event you attend is one-on-one connections. And I've had several conversations this morning saying, well, DrupalCon is great, but it's certainly not as big as what you guys do. Well, who cares about size? What is important about any event is one-on-one connections. You can make great connections at an event with 10 people, with 100 people, with 1,000 people. It's all about the one-on-one connections. Those will help your career. So for the time you have remaining, again, pay particular attention to making one-on-one connections. Those will pay off in spades. Directive number two, rock stars aren't daunted by minor setbacks. This rock star is Av Williams. I include him because, as you probably know, he is the co-founder of Twitter. And if there's anything that is instrumental to the success of South by Southwest, it is Twitter which, in 2007, did not launch at South by Southwest but got their first big push at South by Southwest. That mythology, leveraging that, has been incredibly, has been an incredible part of our growth. Everyone wants to be the next Twitter. Everyone wants to discover the next Twitter. That's created a huge amount of growth. What the backstory on Twitter has launched in 2007 is, is as follows. Ev had been coming to South by Southwest for four or five years. He was involved with Blogger before. He was involved with IDEO. These were marginally successful but not anyway anything on the scale of what happened with Twitter. But the guy kept on working it. He kept on working it, finally hit with Twitter. What he's doing now is also great medium. If you haven't checked it out, be sure to go there. But I think the point here is that rock stars, again, keep going and keep going and keep going. If there is any key to our success at South by Southwest, it's persistence. We didn't quit as much as we wanted to. When it was tough, we kept going and we finally found our mark. And my counsel to you is that if you keep going through the tough times, you will eventually find your audience, find what you're doing, find your mark, find the success you want. So again, minor setbacks simply paved the way for major victories. Point number three, rock stars own their own mistakes, which is in some ways similar to point number two. The person who doesn't make mistakes is unlikely to make anything. If you're not making mistakes, you're probably playing it too safe. Mistakes don't define you. I say that as someone who at South by Southwest, we have made every mistake twice, three times, four times. We've learned from it. We've gotten better. We still have a ton of way to go. But again, mistakes don't define you. Mistakes can and will make you better, but only if you admit these mistakes and learn from them for innovators. Mistakes are absolutely part of the creative process. And I don't have it on this slide, but I love this quote from Neil Gaiman, who this is part of his commencement speech from the, his 2013 commencement speech at the School of Visual Arts in Philadelphia. I'm also proud that Neil Gaiman was a speaker at South by Southwest in 2013. What he said was make new mistakes, make glorious mistakes, make mistakes that no one has ever made before. Again, mistakes are part of the process. Learn from those mistakes, move on, but don't be afraid of making mistakes. You're rock stars, you can do this. Directive number four, and I think this is particularly applicable to this group, and particularly apropos to what I heard in the introduction, rock stars aren't one-dimensional. At South by Southwest, again, we have 800, 900, 1,000 total panels. One of our counsel, or one of the things we always try to get out to attendees is go see sessions that are not in your field of expertise. That's a hard message to get out. This year we tried doing that via poster, explore, stretch your boundaries at South by Southwest Interactive. Again, the concept being go out, see things you're not familiar with, expand your boundaries, expand your knowledge, expand your ideas. Remember that the more information you have, the more power you have. It is great that we can find whatever niche we want by the interwebs. That's great, but there's always the danger of getting too stuck in that niche. It is great to be an expert in your field, but remember, you can always learn so much from other experts in other fields. Again, with South by Southwest, one of the great things I think we offer is we bring together musicians, we bring together filmmakers, we bring together tech people. These are people who don't always get together, and invariably we hear the comment that, hey, it was great attending this panel on blank blank, but I learned the most by interacting with a filmmaker who gave me information I hadn't heard before or gave me ideas for how to take a particular craft to my field, and I learned a lot from that. So again, rock stars aren't one-dimensional. Always, always, always be expanding your boundaries. Directive number five, rock stars embrace gender diversity. I am pleased to hear that this was much of the focus for yesterday's keynote. The slides here are from Radium One, and Evan Spiegel from Snapchat. Look, we as an industry have a problem with a culture that somehow thinks it's right to be completely male dominated to not empower women. I believe misogyny is wrong. I believe gender diversity is the right thing to do. That's my political and social belief. Maybe you don't agree with me. That's fine. But from a purely, purely, purely analytical standpoint, I believe that gender diversity strengthens our industry. Different kinds of people, whether men, women, West Coast, East Coast, North America, South America, we think differently. And the more different kinds of thoughts you have, the stronger you are. Groupthink is always the enemy of innovation. Again, groupthink is the enemy of innovation. The more different kinds of perspectives, the more people challenging your ideas, the stronger you're going to be, the more you're going to grow. So again, let's speak out against this lack of gender diversity. Let's try to solve this problem. This has gone on too long. It has been viewed as acceptable in this industry. It is not acceptable. We need to continue to try to change this. I know that you guys are committed to this. Please get the word out there. Let's all commit to this. Thank you. Rockstars cultivate a global reach. There's our globe. In today's virtual world, not telling you anything you don't know, international boundaries are less and less relevant. We have seen this significantly at Southwest Interactive in the last few years. In 2013, we had representatives from 62 countries at the event. In 2014, that number increased to 84. I expect that number to increase even more in 2015 now that Austin has a direct to London flight. Again, we're seeing more and more internationals at the event. Tech connections transcend borders. Likewise, the startup market, which is so crucial to South by Southwest, at this point, is an international market. There are people doing great things in Austin. There are people doing great things in Sao Paulo. There are people doing great things in London, in Moscow, all around the world. My question there, and it's more a question than a statement, will the common interests of these geeks around the world lead to a more peaceful tomorrow? To that end, can Drupal succeed where diplomacy fails? I don't know, but I think it's a good thing to think about. And in case you think I'm a little bit too hippie-dippy on this, my next slide. Rock stars fight for immigration reform. I say hippie-dippy because we've gone from global perspective to merely thinking about the USA here. This is the problem. You guys are the answer. The U.S. must fix antiquated laws that push away top tech talent. If we want to retain so much innovation in this country, we've got to make significant changes here. The system in the U.S. is severely broken. The politicians talk about it. They talk about fixing it. We have panels and panels and panels galore at South by Southwest. How this stuff is going to get fixed, it doesn't get fixed yet. It handicaps the ability of the U.S. to remain competitive. It has got to change. Fix this problem by making our happiness clear to Congress. There are many, many sites on the Internet that can help you do this. One site that I like, forward.us. Again, we have got to fix this immigration stuff. And you guys can help do this. You guys are the rock stars. Directive number eight. Rock stars are concerned about protecting privacy. This is a picture of our friend, Edward Snowden, who was one of the biggest rock stars at South by Southwest 2014. Big, very flattered that we were able to get him to speak at the event. I'll be it by tape from Moscow. But very cool to have him involved. There are lots and lots and lots of different perspectives on the privacy debate. Many people agreed with our decision to have Edward Snowden at South by Southwest. Many people disagreed with our decision to have him at the event. I think we can all agree, however, that the NSA doesn't need to be reading all of our conversations. Doesn't need to be reading all of our emails. What was fantastic about Snowden's talk at South by Southwest is that ultimately, beyond the fanfare of having him at the event, virtually, was it right, was it wrong? His message was very, very, very simple. His message was, you guys at South by Southwest or the Geeks, you guys can fix this. Build better encryption. Build better encryption. Build better encryption. That's what Snowden said 10, 15, 20 times at South by Southwest. It is, again, a simple, simple message, but certainly has much more power coming from someone who is in the basement of some building God knows where in Moscow. It was great to have him at the event. And I, again, challenge you guys to carry forth with that message and that idea. Build better encryption. Geeks can do this. Geeks can fix this. Directive number nine. Rock stars demand that net neutrality not be negated. Net neutrality, the threats to net neutrality threaten everything that we do everywhere. We are potentially seeing a very, very different world. We love the internet because it allows one person to have a voice that is on the same power, same level of power, same level of access as big corporations. That can all change. The system that has created so much value over the last five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years is under attack. That can all change. Why we want to change a system that has created so much value I don't understand. The system that has created so much equality is under attack. If these attacks succeed, all of our lives will change dramatically. This is the issue of our time for this group for the next month. Make your voice known to the FCC. The public input phase ends, I believe, July 15th. You can find more information on what you can do various places on the internet. Save the internet.com. Certainly an easy one to remember. But again, net neutrality is central to everything we do. We need to fight that this system continue. Last but not least, and I initially had this slide first, but I thought for this audience, it is much better to put this last, rock stars understand and cultivate community. Taking it back to music for a second. Community power always, always, always trumps individual power. I know this from reading self-help books for four months in LA, but I also know it from my experience with South by Southwest. As much as we've grown because of social media and because of startups, the system that we implemented in about 2005, 2006, called the South by Southwest panel picker, has been a huge, huge push to our success. What the panel picker did was leverage the power of the community. It is an open system where anyone can contribute a speaking idea. The community then votes on these ideas and the community comments on these ideas. It's been a great way to leverage the expertise of the community. The first year we did the panel picker, we had something like 700 entries. Last year we had 3,500 entries. Every year the number of entries in the panel picker has grown and that growth in the panel picker has fueled the growth of Interactive. It is quite simply the most effective thing we've done to engage the community. During the event, again, as I've mentioned, South by Southwest has 800, 900 panels. We have tons of things going on, but again, the core of the event is one-on-one connections. Meeting people in the community, connecting with the community, that's what we're all about here. That's what powers South by Southwest. And then after the event, the thing that we do, which I think is also pretty successful, is each person on my staff is in charge with reaching out to 20 or 30 registrants who submitted feedback after the event, particularly registrants who did not have a great experience. The concept is that when you engage someone via email or via conversation, you can often turn your worst critic into your biggest cheerleader. So again, that engagement process is huge to South by Southwest. And again, I think that that engagement process, that process of community is certainly huge to what Drupal is all about. It is why I'm so excited and flattered and honored to be able to speak to you today. It's why I say I can learn more from you guys than you guys can from me, because you guys have certainly done a lot more in the open source community world than I have. It is why I hope that we have a continued strong Drupal presence at South by Southwest 2015 and moving forward. I will also say I'm very impressed with the Drupal initiatives on accessibility. Great to see various accessibility-related sessions at this year's event. This attention to inclusiveness is the hallmark of a strong community. I love this slide. Community is what Drupal is all about. If you're sharing your best practices and ideas, then rock on. If you aren't, then you're absolutely missing the beat. So again, thank you for inviting me here today. It's been an honor to talk and speak to you guys. You can always contact me at hueatsxsw.com. I will mention that for the event we do, South by Southwest, we start accepting panel ideas, speaking ideas on July 1st. Would love to see more of you here in Austin next spring. But better still, would love to see you guys embrace your rock star status year-round. The 10 directives I mentioned, plus many, many other things. Again, the power to change is in this room. Take hold of that power. Change the world. You guys can do it. Remember the best rock stars, the rock stars who do change the world. I challenge you to make the rest of your time in Austin absolutely incredible. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Hugh. First of all, thank you for telling us what we already know that we're smarter and better than everybody else. Appreciate that. I don't know much about public speaking, but I do know if you flatter the audience that that often helps, right? We weren't thinking that at all, so don't worry about that at all. All right. So I enjoyed the 10 directives. I think that, let me just preface this, that you used the phrase rock stars a lot, and I know that you're referring to us as a community. Within the Drupal community, there's been some debate about that phrase, rock stars, where I'm going to be careful here, but traditionally it's been for people who commit a lot of code and do a lot of things. Sure. So I just wanted to kind of make sure, because we've had some comments about that, so I just want to kind of define that, so that when we're talking about rock stars, we're talking about... I'm talking about a collective rock star, yes. Yes. Okay. I first want to, and maybe it's just me, but you mentioned rock stars fight for immigration reform. You said the system is broken, and I'm not sure if everybody understands what's broken about the system, so can you go into that a little bit more? The system at present, we have lots of people from around the world coming to the U.S. to be educated in our university systems. They are gaining undergraduate degrees. They are gaining master's degrees. They are gaining PhDs, and they want to stay in the U.S., be involved with tech companies here, with startups, with whatever endeavors. However, our immigration laws, which were mainly put together 30 and 40 years ago, are essentially pushing this top talent back to the countries they came from. This is very different than some other forward-thinking countries that are simply creating startup visas, entrepreneurial visas, ways to draw this talent in. Again, these are people who want to stay in the U.S., but the bureaucracy and the system is not allowing them to do that. These are the next generation of talent. You think about the talent that is powering some of the top tech companies in the U.S. at this point, the number of immigrants that are involved in that. You think of the story of Grace, who is a immigrant to the U.S., and how this all changes, could all change if we don't improve these laws in the future. So what can we do? Should we be acting individually to do something about this, or collectively, or both? Yes, yes. I think that on the one hand, Congress is well aware of this issue. Congress, the thing has been debated many, many times. There's few senators or congressmen who will not say that they want to change these laws, and yet the laws have not changed. There is a difficult issue politically, because particularly in a state like Texas, changing immigration laws creates lots of worries that you're opening the borders, and whatever you think of that, that's a different discussion. But again, the more noise that we as geeks and rock stars make to our Congress, our congressional leaders, the more likely this will finally get changed in 2015 or 2016. All right, so another one of your 10 rock stars are concerned about protecting privacy. Now, we've heard a lot about the future of the web is personalization, and I feel like that enters a gray area with privacy. And so on one hand, we should be protecting privacy, but on the other hand, in order to grow our community and our project, on some levels, we have to embrace it and to grow our market sharing. So how do we rectify that? It looks like we're heading towards a gray area where we have to be very careful. No, you are absolutely right. And one of the ironies of Snowden's appearance at South by Southwest is it was this huge deal, it filled exhibit hall five down there, and then three overflow rooms. And we had it webcast, and down with the NSA, don't read our emails, yada, yada, yada. And yet in 10 other rooms at that very time, we had sessions going on about how big data is powering the future of the internet and how private companies should be, can and should mine this information for what they do. So what Snowden brings up is certainly only half at best of the general challenge here. I think that his presence overall over the last year, his presence as South by Southwest, the fact that he was on NBC two weeks ago has helped spark that national debate with regard to the NSA. I think we also have to have a national debate or a debate at least within the tech geek community about what is acceptable for private companies to be doing. And do I have an answer there? No, but I know that that is a problem and a challenge. All right, fair enough. So you've been organizing South by for 25 years, and I think it's fair to say the relevancy of that event has continued to grow. So how do we as a community stay relevant as we grow? What lessons have you learned so that you're always becoming more relevant? Well, I'm going to throw your question back to you or answer your question the same way is the way you remain relevant is listing to your community. Again, what we've done with this panel picker interface has allowed us to understand trends before most people are understanding them has allowed us to get some of the best up and coming voices to the event. It's allowed us to understand again what's going on and the panel picker functions on many levels, one of which is simply a barometer of what the internet industry is concerned about now. It was fascinating that in 2007 and 2008 when the US economy was completely tanking, we had the biggest number of proposals in the panel picker about entrepreneurism and startups, which showed that or was evidence to us that this sector of the economy is completely immune or completely separated from the more general section. So again, I think that you remain relevant by listing, by interfacing, by connecting with your community, listening to what the community wants. In many ways, your community knows more about your event, your organization, your idea, your startup than you do. I always say that the growth of Interactive has been a long process of understanding, better understanding how to let that community kind of pull us as opposed to us trying to push that community. In my head, I'm trying to make an analogy between, it probably shouldn't be in my head, probably should be out, but between South by Southwest, the organization and the vision for each year South by and the Drupal project. So it sounds like you don't go into like next year South by with a roadmap about here's what's going to be hot, here's what we're going to, we have to talk about. It's more, is it completely based on the panel picker or do you guys as organizers have an idea of where it's going? And then I'll make the other half the analogy. You know, it's somewhere in the middle. We start the panel picker process, the entry process in July, and which is fairly soon. In June, we're having meetings saying, well, look, it looks like autonomous self-driving cars are going to be big. We should probably think about doing more about that at the 2015 event. Maybe that will not be reflected with panel picker entries that will see no entries on that. We certainly think that privacy, well, it's interesting and reflective to think about a year ago. The Snowden revelations first came out in early June, and we saw a big spike in privacy-related panel ideas, speaker ideas in the panel picker in July. So again, panel picker shapes a lot of what we do. We do have some kind of oversight in terms of general things that we want to cover. But again, try to be as agile and reactive to the community as we can be. Right. So we're you're on a yearly schedule. You know, the Drupal project, you know, Drupal 7 is about three, a little over three years old. So we're on three four-year schedule. Generally, in the past, there hasn't been a Drupal road map about what features are going to be in the next version of Drupal. It's been a little bit more based on what the community wants. Sure. Is that a detriment for us to not have a road map like that? Great question. Because yours is an event with people, ours is a software project that people will be using for years to come. I think you've got to have some kind of basic road map and structure. But again, I think you also want to be as agile, reactive, as pivotable as possible when you hear and get the input from the community, which is what we try to do. I will also say that, you know, we've been fortunate, very fortunate to grow a lot at South by Southwest over the last 10 years. Growth is great in many ways. It's fun to have the reach where Nedward Snowden wants to speak at the event. But the consequence of growth is that it is much harder to be agile, to pivot as opposed to when we were much smaller and younger. I mean, it was only five or six years ago that the organizing group for Interactive was four or five people. We could go into a meeting, talk about what the community had said, make a decision, go out, change things. Now we're much bigger than that for many reasons. It takes numerous meetings. It takes numerous directives. These are first world problems to have. But my point is that, you know, as much as you can react and pivot and change, that is a huge, huge strength. And I think that's what you always want to do. It's fun to have a bunch of other questions, but I think you've answered most of them in a couple of answers. So I think we're down to two or three questions left here. So this is from Twitter. Do rock stars look at what the giants are doing? Google, Amazon, Apple? And follow, lead, take cues from, I mean, for us as a community, I mean, how much should we be looking at what everybody else is doing versus what we think we should be doing? Wow, that's a great question. I think that you've got to have a vision of what you want to do and follow that vision and not worry too much about what others are doing or what others are thinking about you. Certainly what Google does or what Apple does to a degree influences what we do as South by Southwest. But, again, having something like the panel picker, the idea was that we would level a playing field and someone from Google would have as much chance of speaking as someone who's in graduate school. That was a great idea. And again, I think that the value of independence, of community, of grassroots is being able to thumb your nose a little bit at those big guys and do what you think is right, whether that's what they agree with or not. Alright, so last question. Last question, if there's one piece of advice you could give a start-up, what would it be? Again, the biggest advice I would give to a start-up is persistence. It is an incredibly hard road and I say that because I often view our journey at South by Southwest as a journey of a start-up. You've heard of this Valley of Death. It is real. It is working long, long hours. The success of South by Southwest and the success of many, many start-ups is really directly attributable to how much you're willing to grind. Are you willing to get up early and answer emails or do whatever you need to do? Are you willing to stay up late? Are you willing to just grind harder than the next person? And I'm fortunate that on my staff I have a lot of grinders and we do that pretty well. But again, my best piece of advice for the start-up community is persistence, patience, just keep pushing away and eventually you'll find your mark. And a lot of these 10 items that you listed, own your mistakes, I think most of those are probably valid as well. I hope so. For start-ups. Alright, well thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Again, great honor to be with you guys today. Enjoy your time in Austin and we hope to see you back.