Rob Goodlatte

I attended far fewer panels than I had planned thanks to my inability to wake up before 11 AM over spring break. Thankfully I can now recover these lost panels due to the SXSW podcast, but I did manage to physically attend quite a few. There was a big emphasis on business rather than tech, but thankfully both ends of the business approach were thoroughly covered. The opening conversation between Coudal and Fried of Coudal Partners/ 37 Signals preached the anti-VC, small, lean, self-funded message, but of course the other side was represented with plenty of talk about buyouts, VC valuations, and marketing buzzwords.

One message I heard loud and clear from the panels was ‘be passionate‘. Good products, services, designs, and businesses come from passionate people - not from those looking for quick money. It’s painfully obvious to me why the dot-com bubble burst when looking back in hindsight. Business goals got ahead of themselves, businessmen flung bullshit around, and the technology got lost in the financial noise. These web companies need passionate technologists behind them if they are to succeed, not bloated financial wet-dreams and guys in suits. Looking at the present environment of the web, I see a stark contrast. Namely, technologists are at the helm of these small web businesses, not businessmen.

People like Jeff Veen, Shaun Inman, Mike Davidson, and other designers/ programmers are building products and services without allowing the financials or funding to take priority over the products.

Aside from the panels, I met a lot of people. I hung out with Mike Davidson and Calvin Tang, got photography advice from Andy Budd, was amazed when I found out that Dave Shea had seen my site on CSS Beauty, bumped into Zeldman in the hallway, and collected countless business cards. On the first day, I had planned to get every designer featured in The Zen of CSS Design to sign their designs in the book. The first person I approached to score a signature, Shaun Inman, surprised me at how down-to-earth he was. I approached him as a fan, but he sincerely treated me as his equal. We ended up having a conversation about Mint and swapped business cards.

After that first conversation, I realized that I was going about SXSW in entirely the wrong way. Rather than trying to get autographs from designers I’d placed on pedestals, I began trying to meet as many people as I could and learn as much as I could. I could either walk away from this show with a book full of signatures or a fist full of business cards and a head full of insight. I chose the latter.