South By Southwest 2012: Day One

The introvert in me was at work on the first day of the conference. No, I wasn’t being shy. I was hesitant to go at all!

Considering the pretty penny I spent to get a ticket, that was crazy to even think, but true. I felt a little overwhelmed by the amount of people that were potentially going to be in town for the week- newspapers reported 250,000- and I was wondering how I was going to get there and back home, because I imagined gridlock on the roads and no parking spaces and I was not about to get stressed looking for a spot to park my Chevette. (Just kidding)

Then I looked at the schedule and saw the number of sessions that were available to me. Ahh! I wanted to be many places at once, because there were over 20-30 great topics all happening at the same time and in different hotels!

And here’s another big factor…

I was set to go solo.

Now THAT takes some courage. I always have the faith that I am going to meet kindred spirits and like-minded people, but this was my first time to the conference and I am pretty new to Austin, so it’s not like I had an entourage of friends with me.

So I went and I’m happy to report that I made a wise decision.

REMINDER: Don’t give in to fear that comes from inside your head.- that one’s fake. The fear that’s felt in your body…listen to that one. That one’s instinct.

I was taking in the sights: gals wearing skirts with vintage cowboy boots, funny t-shirts (saw a guy with a shirt that said “You’re not punk, you’re just dirty.”), eclectic eyewear, food trucks and tattoos galore.

I made my way to all the events I wanted to attend starting with a panel of five women discussing Everyone’s a Bloody Entrepreneur! Or Are they? .

It was a fantastic example of women entrepreneurs in diverse positions and industries, sharing knowledge across the board about what is needed to truly be able to call yourself the E word.

Next, I headed over to the session For Better or For Worse: Married to an Entrepreneur. The description?

How does someone who is obsessed live peacefully with someone who isn’t? That question—posed by an entrepreneur—elegantly summarizes the quandary faced by company founders and their spouses.

Gary and Meg Hirshberg, owners of Stonyfield Yogurt, the world’s largest organic yogurt makers came together, to stand as the couple that is still standing after creating a behemoth company to talk about the struggles that couples go through when one or both spouses are an entrepreneur.

This is a topic that certainly hit home for me and many others in the crowd, because creating your own business and trying to get your loved one to get on board and feel as passionate about the idea as you are, to be involved and have a presence in the journey that you face as an entrepreneur is never easy.

Meg Hirshberg wrote the book For Better or For Work, which covers the struggles her couple faced while building Stonyfield Yogurt along with numerous other equally obsessed entrepreneurs and how they made it, in every sense of the word. This is yet another book on my buying list.

I also got to meet and interact with co-founders, William E. Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudur of Mental Floss Magazine as they discussed how they took their publishing idea From The Dorm Room to the Boardroom. They’re very funny guys, which means they represent their magazine’s brand well.

Here’s magazine editor-in-chief, Mangesh Hattikudur in speaker mode