The SXSW Journey with Hugh Forrest
Playing the (albeit unwitting) host to some of the tech industry’s greatest startup launches, securing a keynote on civic engagement from President Obama and subsequently being invited to hold a spin-off event in the backyard of the White House would, as standalone cases, be career coups to last a lifetime. For Hugh Forrest, however, the aforementioned are just some of the most recent highlights that have made up a success-riddled, 22-year tenure as Director of South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive.
Starting out in 1987, Forrest’s description of SXSW’s inceptive years is reminiscent of a scene at a high school disco: “it was the geeks on one side of the room, the cool people on the other and it seemed like never the twain shall meet, you know?”
Fast forward 30 years though, and the atmosphere at SXSW Interactive today is one that ignites creative collisions between people from across every discipline, from across every creative industry and from across the entire globe – no matter their ‘cool’ credentials.
Forrest likens the event’s transition to that of Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs: a flip switch from traditional tech geek to mainstream cultural icon.
For years, SXSW Interactive’s journey was plighted by failings and future-defining forks in the road, as it struggled to find a niche that would unite industries seemingly so culturally distant. But as the dynamic shifted, and geeks were suddenly considered the rockstars du jour, the dividing walls came tumbling down, encouraging an osmosis of ideas between those operating across the music, film, tech and interactive sectors.
Interactive itself shot from being a relative unknown speck on the festival calendar, to, in its latter years, being unanimously declared one of the world’s most influential events for the new media industry.
Now a five-day gathering of digital creatives that occurs in Austin, Texas, every March, SXSW Interactive draws crowds in their tens of thousands, with the 2017 event expected to tip 35,000.
In an open discussion with Forrest, we discuss what the next pitstop is on the SXSW journey and its directive for greater diversity.
fluoro. Now, it’s been months since the last edition of SXSW and people are still talking about the highlights – the Obamas, the major keynotes, the focus on VR. What were some highlights for you of that edition?
Hugh Forrest. Certainly having The President, as well as The First Lady, involved was phenomenal. There was a big push in 2016, even more than we anticipated, for VR and we also saw a lot momentum around, autonomous vehicles. As always at SXSW, there was a strong push for startups. We were also recently part of an event in Washington DC, South By South Lawn (SXSL). This was an extension of what happens in Austin each spring. Seeing the SXSW brand expanded to the White House was pretty neat.
f. That’s awesome. Now with South by South Lawn, why did you decide to have this in October? Was it just to keep the momentum going and keep that extension?
HF. The SXSL event was largely organised by the White House. A lot of the timeframe for this event depended on the availability of when you could get the South Lawn — and October worked well for all parties.
f. What are some major issues that you feel that we need to address now, and that SXSW can help with addressing and bringing to life?
HF. Well, in the context of Obama speaking at SXSW last March and carrying on through to what we did in Washington DC in October 2016, the President’s big push was for digital innovators to get more involved in the 21st Century community. Yes, creating fun, new startups is wonderful, but there are also lots of real world problems that need to be addressed. President Obama talked a lot about this in March 2016 and this will continue to be a big point of focus in March 2017.
Some of the other things discussed during the SXSL included diversity in the tech industry, how to be more civil online, what future societies will eat, making your city a hub for startup innovation and how to move forward when fighting for social change. So, in many instances, these topics from the SXSL event reflected some of the most important ongoing themes at SXSW in Austin in March.
f. Absolutely. Now, you mention one of the four words that really resonates with me when I think of SXSW – you said diversity. Another is collaboration, invention and humanity, they’re kind of four words that are-are always in my mind when I think of SXSW. Can you talk me through the aspect of diversity across SXSW and how its retained year after year?
HF. I still think we have a long, long way to go in terms of diversity, it’s a goal we’re constantly aware of, and I think that, compared to a lot of tech events, we have a slightly better track record, but there’s much more left to do.
We’re strongly focused on getting more women involved in the event, getting more people of colour involved in the event, getting more geographic diversity, getting people of all kinds of sexual orientations involved with the event.
This is not simply because of political correctness, it’s more that hard data says that startups that incorporate diversity tend to be more successful than startups where everyone thinks alike.
f. Absolutely – it’s human nature, isn’t it?
HF. Yeah, it’s easy to preach about – it’s much more difficult to implement.
f. Obviously Biz Stone spoke about combining humanity and technology this year with his startup, Jelly, in this SXSW edition. Not everyone has the backing or the experience that Stone has when they’re working on a startup. What are some factors that you’ve noticed, beside the diversity aspect, that could potentially be a success for a future startup? Is it resilience, is it persistence, is it research?
HF. Going off personal experience, I think that persistence and resilience are extremely important in the startup world, as well as in all endeavors.
Now the flipside is knowing when to “pivot”. With almost any pursuit in life, the longer you do it, the more you do it, the better you get at it, and you increase your chances of success.
Certainly with SXSW it’s taken us a long, long time to get to where we are, we still have a long, long way to go in terms of improvement, but our processes are a lot better now, just given the overall experience we’ve had in running an event of its scale.
f. Absolutely. It took 10 years for Interactive to really kick off – why do you think it took that length of time?
HF. Many reasons really. One, because I was leading it and I take a long time to learn things! It took us a long time to find our voice. I also think that when we started, the name was Multimedia and we were a little bit ahead of our time at that point.
It wasn’t until 10 years later when all the content in music and in films started to go digital.
f. In your opinion, failures – are they inevitable? Or does it just hit the unlucky?
HF. At this point in my life, I’ve very much bought into the startup mantra that failures get you that much closer to success. We’ve failed many, many times and at many, many things at SXSW but the brand is strong enough that we’ve been able to recover from most of those failures and, in fact, get better
It’s not so much making those mistakes; it’s how you learn and recover from those mistakes that is the most important thing.
f. Of course. You’ve obviously been with SXSW for decades now. How have you evolved, and how has SXSW evolved?
HF. I’ve just gotten a lot more comfortable in my role and gotten more comfortable in a lot of things. I’m still pretty socially awkward, but 10 or 15 years ago, or even 5 years ago, I was deathly scared of speaking in public, but I’ve gotten a lot better, enough so that I kind of miss being scared because it was just such an adrenaline rush.
f. In terms of the evolution of SXSW, obviously the attendance when it first started was a lot lower than what it is now and the aspect of user experience is something that needs to always be considered. How do you and your team factor that in to each edition and each production?
HF. I think that user experience is actually probably one of the things we need the most improvement on!
The scale that the event has grown to, that’s neat, but I also think that quality is always much much more important than quantity – numbers are a trap. What you’re trying to do with any event is create a space where people can connect, and by connecting they can achieve more value. That can happen with 30 people, 300 people, 30,000 people, so size is, I think, in many ways irrelevant.
The larger an event grows, the harder it is to create and retain a really optimal user experience for your customers. You’re gonna have longer lines to queue up for something, you’re gonna have a little less customer ability to impact people on a one-on-one basis, so again, there is always that tension and that challenge.
But if there is any silver lining to that it’s that you have new people every year at the event. The fact that there is a lot of audience churn makes it interesting; you’ve got new people, with new energies, with new ideas and it’s ever evolving, which I think is one of the values of an event like SXSW, but it’s certainly not restricted to SXSW, it’s something that all events share.
f. Well, looking to the 2017 edition, we’ve got a few months to go. Is there anything in your mind that has the potential to break out in the 2017 edition, like the Twitter or like the Foursquare?
HF. What breaks out or what has broken out in the past, to a degree, comes down to luck and timing. I do think that, in terms of actual technologies, certainly what we’re seeing in the US is this huge huge push for chatbots. 70 to 80 percent of our programming is from the Panel Picker and you can determine trends from that – we had something like 35 proposals focused on bots or chatbots, whereas for the 2016 Panel Picker we had zero.
Chatbots are kind one of the first real, mainstream applications of AI technology. It’s trending like crazy here and it’s still in its infancy.
To what you referenced before, VR I’m sure will be huge again; it’s likely that VR is gonna be one of the huge trends in all of society over the next 3, 5, 7, 10 years.
We’re also seeing a lot more focus than in previous years on privacy, cyber security, how to protect your data, whether you’re the government, a private individual or a company. It ties back to two years ago when Edward Snowden spoke.
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A fitting topic given he will be Skyping in from the other side of the world, Pause 2017 will see Hugh Forrest dissect whether the digital trends gathering pace in the U.S. transcend geographical distance. Whether they mirror those present in Australia, Asia and other regions, uniting us as a truly global digital community, or whether they’re evidence of a drastic racial contrast in how technology is unfolding the world over.
fluoro is an official media partner of the premier creative, tech and business festival in Australasia, Pause, where Forrest will feature as part of the 2017 edition. To celebrate the partnership, we have created a special edition Pause Magazine 2017 by fluoro. Each feature within the magazine has been curated to offer an exclusive insight into the game changers from the Pause 2017 program, including the likes of Forrest, SXSW, Lucasfilm, The Mill, Pixar, Google, Etsy and frog.
Click here for a complimentary copy of this special edition magazine.
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