Every year, some of the greatest tech minds in the world descend into Austin for the SXSW Interactive conference and we have the privilege of seeing them speak or perform in a 5-day action-packed schedule! Our Director Luke Goetting recaps his experience at SXSW 2018 in the video below.

Whew! SXSW 2018 delivered plenty of excitement as always and that was before the unannounced special guests we’re added to the mix. Here are some of my highlights from SXSW Interactive March 9-13 here in Austin, Texas:

• CNN’s Jake Tapper in Conversation with Bernie Sanders
  • #FeeltheBern! Bernie was animated as ever and got into some interesting topics ranging from Stormy Daniels to North Korea. Like previous years, SXSW leveraged Sli.do to facilitate audience questions – bringing an exciting element of audience participation to the event.

• The Texas Startup Manifesto powered by UNION
  • Josh Baer of Capital Factory talked about the exciting work his company is doing connecting startup communities in Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio as well as the new office they are opening in Dallas!

• SXSW Accelerator Competition 
  • As a presentation enthusiast, I can’t afford to miss the excitement and drama of the SXSW Accelerator Pitch competitions as the startup finalists get only 2-minutes to pitch their companies to the judges!
  • Fun fact: we designed presentations for SXSW Accelerator winners Tinitell in 2015 and PopUp Play in 2016!

• Elon Musk Answers Your Questions!
  • This event wasn’t on the official SXSW schedule but was a last-minute, 12-hours-before-the-event addition! Luckily I was browsing Twitter in the morning and was able to get tickets to see Elon talk SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company and more at the beautiful Moody Theater. My favorite quote of his was something along the lines of “I don’t get too worried about non-species threatening issues.” How does that make you feel about your day-to-day schedule haha?

• Designers Who Broke the Internet
  • This exciting session featured three great design leads at companies we all know and use daily: John Couch at Hulu, Tina Koyama at Twitter and Jill Nussbaum at Instagram. The discussions centered largely on design’s relationship with tech / engineering and all three offered interesting insights on how they react to passionate user feedback on new UI designs – both positive and negative.

• By Design at Ignite SXSW
  • If you’ve never heard of the Ignite series, I highly recommend checking it out! With a tagline “Enlighten us, but make it quick”, Ignite features 5-minute presentations with 20 slides…all setup on an auto-progression timer of 15 seconds per slide. The result is an action-packed, well-rehearsed, highly-visual presentation experience where the audience gets to hear from a handful of amazing presenters all in one session.

• Convergence Keynote: whurley
  • Part of the SXSW experience is checking out ideas, speakers and topics you wouldn’t encounter in your day-to-day business, and this session by William Hurley on quantum computing was definitely in that category for me!  While I was undoubtedly out of my league as far as the content material went, whurley proved to be an entertaining speaker who did a great job of breaking down complex concepts into understandable pieces.

I shared photos and more insights in the video above, so check it out!

Coming to Austin for SXSW 2019? Make sure to connect with me!

Want to see our presentations in action? Check out our PORTFOLIO page!

Want help creating your own engaging presentation? Connect with us!