Diatribes by Joah

Notes from SXSW

SXSW 2017 notes: Don't schedule more than 2 meetings/commitments in a day to leave room for serendipity. Don't pitch investors during SXSW. If you're going to get an investment, they won't be so lazy as to require you meet during SXSW. Just have good conversations with warm intros...if they lead to raising money, that's great. Do get a wristband or badge. I've done SXSW every way and the best way is with, at least, some access to see shows or talks. Do meet up with friends from out of town. You won't see them all, but do your best to see as many as you can. These connections, however loose, can help down the road with relationships for work/life/love. Don't look at the SXSW Music schedule for known-acts/big names only. You can go to Coachella if you need to see a current star. Do break up with your significant other before SXSW if you think it's coming. You don't want to be that couple on the street outside a venue having a blow up argument. I saw this no fewer than a dozen times this past week. Don't party every day / night. Even if it's just 2-3 hours a day, leave room for time to chill at home, go see a movie, go for a walk, eat a meal at home, get some work done. It'll help with the SXSW aftermath that you don't feel a week behind on life. Susannah and I saw Logan one night and ate dinner at home. Another night, Larry, Gary and I went to see Get Out at Alamo Slaughter. Can't get further from SXSW.

Airport Protest

I almost broke into tears this afternoon when I arrived at the airport and joined the civil protest against Trump's anti-American, anti-Muslim and unconstitutional ban. Thankfully I held it together, saw a couple familiar faces and made myself heard even if only for a few moments as one of the hundreds of people repeating the words of the protest advocates and leaders holding the megaphones. I'm a black man and definitely didn't check many of the "have" boxes when I was growing up as a "have not", but I somehow made it to where I am in life thanks to the amazing mother and friends who cared for me along the way, yes, but also because of the unmatched values of this country which celebrate drive and work ethic and grit and determination and also fairness and difference and openness. My fiance is the daughter of an Iranian immigrant and I can't help but wonder what kind of world we'll bring children into someday not too far in the distance. I can't help but wonder if that world will be better than the world I was born into. I'm an optimist so I believe it will, but it's not going to happen because we're so focused on our own business/family/social lives/social feeds and our own way of life. The world is only going to be better - the kind of world that a child of African-American/Persian parents can thrive in - if people focus on ways to help the businesses/families/social lives and ways of life for others even if they come from different backgrounds/religions/ethnicities/sexual orientation/socio-economic strata. That's what today was about for me: demonstrating that I am fully cognizant of the fact that although Trump's ban isn't coming for me "directly", it's direct impact hinders American life for all of us. I'm worried that this Republican-led Congress will become a rubber stamp of approval for Trump's ill-conceived polices, but today was a day when I was reminded that the American people can demonstrate the necessary fortitude and initiative. As one of the protest leaders said, "We don't know what Trump will do. We don't know what Congress will do. We don't know what the courts will do. But we know what we can do." Small acts of love and empathy, channeled into action and advocacy, from the unified many can overcome the acts of fear and idiocy, channeled into political fallibility, from the powerful few.

Exactly where I want to be

On Wednesday, I gave a talk to 22 employees from Nike HQ who are having a team retreat in Austin. I did this with Chase for a different team at Nike about a year ago too.

These people can use Localeur to make decisions about where to eat and drink in Austin and today I'm in Portland about to use Localeur to determine where to have breakfast.

This is exactly the kind of business I always wanted to build. Something that doesn't have to be limited to the confines of one brick and mortar store (Sneak Attack) or one event during SXSW (Style X) or one client's desk (consulting).

I'm right where I need to be steadily pushing Localeur closer to where I want to be.

What I do during SXSW

If you want to know what I do during SXSW, here it is:

1) fundraising (All of last weekend during Interactive),

2) brand awareness (Interactive --> Music including our party),

3) storytelling (meeting with media and social influencers),

4) partnership development (all week, especially during Music),

5) have fun (table stakes to be effective at any of these activities), and

6) supporting my friends and the overall creative community (seeing shows and attending panels and events primarily); and

7) encouraging visitors to support the locally-owned and operated businesses here in Austin from Sunroom to El Chilito. These are the businesses that make Austin what it is.

If you treat SXSW like an obligation, you'll be stressed. If you treat SXSW like an opportunity, you'll feel blessed.

Especially if you're an early stage startup CEO and founder here in Austin with a product almost everyone can benefit from at some point during SXSW.

Austin competes with itself on diversity

There are so many potential symptoms for Austin's growing affordability problem, but I think the #1 factor is this:

Austin is competing with itself.

Case in point:

Go to just about any major tech company, and they're probably actively and aggressively hiring or they have plans to in the next 3 to 6 months.

To get into tech, you probably need one of three things:

1) a hard skill like engineering typically learned at a university or a specialized program,

2) a decent amount of experience (say in software sales or online marketing),

OR 3) connections who believe in you.

When you factor in #3, no matter how many token experiences everyone will surely point to, you end up leaving out a lot of women and ethnic minorities because to have connections to the tech industry means you have connections to an industry with a lot of highly-educated white males (the historical norm and the current reality, at least at the leadership levels).

So let's look at #1 and #2.

Do women and minorities have the ability to get those hard skills?

The answer is a resounding yes. Not only because of recently-established programs like Black Girls Code and Code2040, but also because of statistics. I pulled this from a recent Forbes article which read:

"It has been a commonly held belief that the gender gap in tech is primarily a pipeline issue; that there are simply not enough girls studying math and science. Recently updated information indicates an equal number of high school girls and boys participating in STEM electives, and at Stanford and Berkeley, 50% of the introductory computer science students are women. That may be the case, but the U.S. Census Bureau reported last year that twice as many men as women with the same qualifications were working in STEM fields.

A USA Today study discloses that top universities graduate black and Hispanic computer science and computer engineering students at twice the rate that leading technology companies hire them. Although these companies state they don’t have a qualified pool of applicants, the evidence does not support that claim."

So then we get to #2, the classic chicken-and-egg problem of experience.

How do women and minorities (or working class people without hard skills or connections) get experience without experience?

And here is where we run into the problem of Austin competing with itself a bit because while the city's population is growing to meet the demand of companies like Oracle creating more jobs in Austin seemingly in step so does the affordability gap, or at least the growing potential of one.

One group of people may see value in a vibrant, growing economy where new jobs are steadily created of which many of these jobs require some semblance of tech industry experience (which the City/Chamber surely sells is already here in the workforce to companies like Oracle).

Meanwhile another side of Austin sees a steady increase in the cost of living (musicians, working class folk, the Black community that we're seeing move further North/East, etc.).

So if you don't have a tech industry salary or tech industry connections or tech industry skills or tech industry experience, how do you keep pace with Austin's growing cost of living in which a significant source of its job growth - those jobs which will highly dictate the future quality of life standards - will come?

The tech companies most likely to need to hire employees with tech industry experience and connections are small, growing companies like Localeur, where our very survival is in question and experience and connections are paramount to success on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.

So what Austin may need is surprisingly but actually plenty more massively successful tech companies to create jobs here. We need more Oracles. We need more Rackspaces. We need more of these companies who can, to some degree, lower the barrier to entry on the experience front and invest in programs like Black Girls Code and Code2040 in order to allow more people in the doorway to an industry that is more adult unfriendly to newcomers than the city of Boston.

This kind of reminds me of that Medium post I saw the other day that said the best way to lose 125 pounds is to gain 175 pounds.

10 Thoughts/Observations from ACL Festival

10 Thoughts/Observations from ACL Festival:

1. I'm 32 and have been going to festivals for a decade now. Yes, that makes me feel old. What really makes me feel old is showing up at 5/6pm each day and still having sore feet the next day. Can't believe I used to be the guy getting there at noon, and I camped at Coachella twice! Never again.

2. Festivals are all about the experience, and the experience I like the most isn't actually backstage or side stage anymore. I prefer to be with the people. Listen to the kids, bro.

3. ACL Festival continues to be one of the best run, least-chaotic festivals in the business. What they lack in lineup effects (though not much this year) they more than make up for in the caliber of food they offer, the urban scenery (though not quite Lollapalooza level) and the all-ages atmosphere.

4. I write "all ages" but then I think about the nature of the lyrics by artists like Drake, A$AP Rocky and The Weeknd and I realize that family friendly in 2015 is a helluva lot different than family friendly in 1995 when I was a more impressionable young person.

5. My music highlight was Disclosure bringing out soulful singer Brendan Reilly to perform "Moving Mountains". A lot of people don't seem to be as into Disclosure's new album Caracal as they were into Settle, but I think that's a product of two things I'll touch on momentarily.

6. It's still all about the hits. People were walking away during both Disclosure and The Weeknd's performances, until massive hits "Latch" and "Can't Feel My Face" came on, then droves of teens and college kids started running up as if the show was about to begin.

7. You may not buy albums, but you should. Sure, you've been snake-bitten in the past when an album didn't live up to your expectations or you feel you shouldn't feel bad for downloading albums from a friend's personal catalog, but when a drone replaces your job or when art museums go the way of drive-in movie theatres, you'll have yourself to blame. Here's my recommendation: Make a list of your favorite 5 to 10 artists today and pledge to buy their next album and find one (just one) new artist each year to add to this list. My list of artists I buy everything they record includes: Local Natives, Disclosure, Kanye, Tame Impala, Flying Lotus, Kendrick Lamar, The Internet, Jill Scott, Radiohead and Q-Tip. (plus all the Austin artists I support, e.g. Emily Wolfe, Letting Up, Keeper, etc.)

8. As a sign of where music is today, the artist who had the most sing-alongs of the festival almost certainly had to be Drake. Drake is standing on the shoulders of Kanye West who stood on the shoulders of Jay-Z who stood on the shoulders of Notorious B.I.G. who stood on the shoulders of Brooklyn so that's pretty damn high up if you think about it.

9. There are so many amazing food options at ACL Fest, but Mighty Cone is still my personal favorite.

10. October has officially become my second favorite month in Austin, after April (my birthday month). The weather is warm but not too hot. The nights are cool. The music around town, not just the festival, is stellar. And OU still sucks.