Semi-sober notes from SxSW 2017

SEMI-SOBER NOTES FROM
GEORGEWANG89@GMAIL.COM
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/GEORGEWANG89
@GEORGEWANG89

TABLE OF
CONTENTS
➤ Crossing boundaries
➤ Artiﬁcial intelligence
➤ Virtual Reality
➤ Fintech
➤ Food
➤ Impacting society
➤ The future is already here
➤ Corporate innovation
➤ Know your customers
➤ The creative process
➤ Entrepreneurship
➤ Personal Development

CHEAT SHEET
➤ Official recordings: https://soundcloud.com/officialsxsw
➤ Official videos: https://www.sxsw.com/tag/video/
DISCLAIMER
➤ It was a fact that 38% of speakers sprinkled their sessions with S-words and F-
bombs. In instances where they appear in this summary, the goal was to convey the
true emotions and spirit of the festival. #jokingnotjoking
➤ This document was produced and released in the least amount of time possible. If
you encounter any errors, please kindly bring them to my attention.

A LITTLE ABOUT ME
Growing up, I’ve always been a little weird. But weird is a relative
concept. Put me in a room with other people who are equally
intoxicated on their own journey of discovery and creation, then I’d
still be weird. “Wait, what?” Were you expecting me to say I’ll ﬁt right
in? Like that — weird people always try to inject a little surprise into
the conversation. We love asking questions, experimenting with
perceptions, and above all, loosening the way people think about the
world and themselves.
George is the name I picked after immigrating to Canada. The intent
was to have the same name as the guy from the Titanic, but ended up
being called Curious George through most of school. I used to be
embarrassed by it, and now I wear it proudly. “Curiosity keeps leading
us down new paths,” said Walt Disney. It has certainly done so for me.
Today, I an INNOVATION STRATEGIST with a background in
Engineering and entrepreneurship who thrives on tearing down
walls and connecting people and ideas. Playing at the intersection of
culture, emerging technology, and commerce, I bringing people
together to envision and bring about new possibilities.
Everything I do is guided by three questions: How might we be useful?
how might we be inclusive? and how might we share well to ﬂourish? My
ultimate drug in life — creating situations where everybody wins.
Me
Kesha

‘SPRING BREAK FOR GEEKS’
technology, art, design, experiential futurism.

There were 700 attendees in 1987, the
first year of the conference. By 2016,
attendance had grown to 95,000
Twitter was launched  
at SxSW Interactive
Obama spoke at SxSW 2016

““Why is Citi here at SxSW, when you’d expect it
to be at conferences like banking 2020? SxSW is
about media and entertainment. This is the
perfect place to learn about how consumers
are going to live and play.”

WHAT’S THE CONTEXT OF THE FUTURE?
Everything new is an old idea in a new context.
➤ “Fintech started with the Abacus” @ygmp01
➤ “What is the SxSW trade show but a modern construction
show?” — Bruce Sterling @BruceS
➤ “Contemporary DIY is nothing but Popular Mechanics plus
modem.” — Bruce Sterling @BruceS
➤ “Inﬂuencer marketing has always been around. John Wayne
and Lucky Strike for example. It’s exploded because we
moved into the mobile world.” — Gary Vaynerchuk
@garyvee
➤ “Motives of misinformation is not new. What’s new is the
means.” — Yasmin Green @yasmind
“Is a lot of attention going to be somewhere? Where then
I have to ﬁgure out the context of that platform, so I can
be a creative on it to drive whatever the hell I want,
whether that’s getting donations for a cause or selling
something.” — Gary Vaynerchuk @garyvee

CROSSING BOUNDARIES
Where might we ﬁnd inspiration?

VIDEO GAMES AND WARFARE
Will Roper, the director of the newly unclassified division of the Pentagon —
the Strategic Capabilities Office — responsible for fostering innovation within
the Pentagon, found the military could learn more from video games like
Pokemon Go.
➤ On Pokemon Go: “I am fascinated with the video game world, and I want to find a
way to use it for military purposes. I think it’s true for a lot of traditional industries.
Pokemon Go is called a game, but I think they solve one of the toughest challenges for
warfare that’s been perceived for more than a century — How do we take an amazingly
complex information, and make it so integrated with the person who’s interacting with
it, that people sitting around the world can act as integrated teams, even though they’re
not together? I think that’s how the future of warfare plays out.”
➤ On AI: We’re going to have analytics and artificial intelligence sift through the data.
We’re going to have to display it in front of operators in a way that they understand,
that's intuitive. They don’t have to be a PhD in order to use it. It allows them to operate
with people who might not be right next to them, towards a common purpose.
➤ On Games that inspire war fighting: On Games are made today to emulate
warfare as best as they can. I will not be surprised if we start making warfare more like
games. Because if you watch people play video games — high level proficiency that
people develop; not just to control their local character. Many games explore the idea of
immersive control of multiple things. That’s one of the big thrusts across all areas
including the Strategic Capabilities Office. We love to allow a manned system to control
for expendable unmanned systems. How are we going to allow them to do that control?
———
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/PP93861

MACHINES AND CHARACTER
Audra Koklys, Head of AI Design @ Capital One,
has a background in character design from Disney.
At Capital One, her role is character development
for Eno.
Q: “How do you design UX for chatbot?” A:
“Character design.”
“A Chatbot feels like a psychopath if it doesn’t
have a personality.”
@akoklysplummer
———
Jeremy Wyatt — University of Birmingham
“AI won’t get much personality, but a little
personality can go a long way.”

GETTING OUTSIDE THE STUDIO
In a panel consisting of executives from Pixar, Disney, and
Star Wars, a number of examples were shown where
inspiration from outside studio walls were critical in making
the final products come to life.
➤ For Pixar’s movie Up, the team flew to Venezuela and
borrowed the dreamlike landscape — in particular the
rock formations — for the terrain in Up.
➤ When Star Wars was being produced, the lighting effects
was inspired by NASA’s photos of space.
➤ Monsters Inc., was the first film that involved hair. To
accurately model the movement of hair, the team dug into
the physics of how hair grows.
“Everyone knows how the physical world looks and works.
If we make it a little more believable, you would care more
about characters.” — Pixar
———
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2017/events/PP67537

BICYCLE-INSPIRED AIRPLANE
The best ideas come from from outside the walls of
your industry.
Brad Nunnally, in his talk on “Don’t Solve the
Problem. Solve for the Barriers,” revealed that the
Wright Brothers weren’t the only ones to have
successfully lifted their plane oﬀ the ground.
In fact, the biggest challenge at the time was how to
keep the planes from crashing down seconds later
due to imbalance. Having built bicycles all their life,
the Wright brothers borrowed the balancing
mechanism on their bicycles to use on their plane.
And history was made.
———
Brad Nunnally, @bnunnally

COLLISION OF EXPECTATIONS
➤ Amazon 1-click to banking: Yolande Piazza, head of Citi Fintech,
said what used most valuable thing to the bank is the vault. Today, we
are in a 1-click world, ushered in by Amazon, and banks need to
adapt.
➤ Digital world to museums: When visitors see a screen, their initial
reaction is to touch it. “People expect all screen to be touchscreens
now.”
“Museums are not expectation creators.. having wiﬁ & a place to charge. who’s
setting expectations? and how can museums meet those expectations with small
team and small budgets?”
➤ Living room to car design: Alex Casterllarnau, Head of Design at
NIO, explained: The NIO is positioned as an mobile living room. The
TV completes the living room, and you don’t expect to touch the TV.
So the screen we designed in the car is not a touchscreen.
———
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/nio-eve-concept-debuts-at-
sxsw-promises-production-version-by-2020/
@aacastellarnau

NIO 
BY NEXTEV
Positioning is especially important for emerging technologies given the challenge of ﬁtting them into people’s lives. While NIO runs fast, it’s not positioned
to compete in the sports car category. It is positioned for commuters who would rather make use of the 2 hours they are sitting in traﬃc to relax, be
productive, rather than gripping onto their steering wheels. It converts the dreaded commute into a living room. This positioning manifests in the interior
design, in the exhibit, and even in the decision to not make the screen a touchscreen. Why? because you wouldn’t touch the TV in your living room.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Control vs autonomy

AI IS THE FUTURE OF WARFARE
➤ Intelligent war fighting machines: I think the pentagon’s lack of
recognition that data is one of the primary tools, fuels, and weapons in the
future of warfare. We don’t treat data the same way as it does at Apple,
Google and Amazon. For us, data is like exhaust that comes out of our
system. It’s not the way people work in machine learning. They’re thinking
whomever has the most data is going to be able to train the most
intelligent machine. The government needs to be stockpiling all of its data,
from every flight, every mission, every exercise, ever event - needs to be
databased in a way that’s machine discoverable. What if in the future of the
military, all of our systems learn? What if the machine is better on day two
than day one? We’re fighting with systems that’s moved by people, that’s
effectively fixed. I fear us not moving in that direction.
➤ Device centric to data centric: Every system should be learning in the
future. We are great at logistics. When we integrate machine learning, we
almost always find 10% efficiency off the top. It’s not only that we fight
better. We also have a chance to save money. This is a culture shift. It’s a
tough thing for us — trying to take a Pentagon’s that’s device centric (fighter,
submarine) and shift it to being data centric — and merely thinking of these
systems as data producers, and that data is more important than the system
itself.
———
Will Roper, 
Director of Strategic Capabilities Office in the Department of Defence

BALANCE: FULLY AUTONOMOUS <> 100 JOYSTICKS
➤ Quarterbacking: In the future, a human soldier will
controls a set of expendable machines that execute
commands in the battlefield. Will Roper, Director of
Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities office, likens this
approach of controlling drones in the battlefield to
football quarterbacking, as the quarterback calls or
changes plays in the game.
➤ How much control: The question is, how much control
do we want to give the human soldier over the machines.
We don’t want machines to be fully autonomous, yet we
don't want the human to be overwhelmed with a hundred
joysticks.
———
Will Roper, 
Director of Strategic Capabilities Office in the
Department of Defence

BALANCE: RICH DISCUSSION <> RISK MITIGATION
Dr. Jeremy Wyatt, is a professor of AI at
University of Birmingham. Wyatt is skeptical that
AI will become what we imagine it to be any time
soon. The state of art for AI is choosing an
appropriate response among a massive bank of
pre-determined responses. While AI is great at
specialized tasks like these, it is bad at generating
rich, freeform, unscripted discussion.
Do we, after all, want AI to be fully autonomous
and being able to have rich discussions? In the
case where an AI represents a brand, the more
autonomy an AI has, the bigger the possibility
that it will do something that damages the brand.
———

BALANCE: AUTHORITATIVE <> SELF JUDGEMENT
FatMap is a AI-platform that integrates data from multiple sources
and determines the optimal trails for skiers. Matt Boyle, FatMap’s
GM for North America, cautioned “We have to be careful with at
what point does the persona become too authoritative?” In other
words, “how much do these people want to be empowered?”
In terms of determining the safeties of a run, “we stray away from
saying safe or not safe,” because people out on a run will know better
than a system. And it is impossible to guarentee that there will be
0% avalanche probability.
Safety also depends on human factors. For example, two skiers could
have the exact same ability. but when one is training for a race, while
other is on a casual ski trip with family, their appetite for risk is
diﬀerent.
“Rather than commenting on safety, we just provide people with
more information.”
———
https://fatmap.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/m4doyle

VIRTUAL REALITY
“Fiction is a form of invention. You invent these characters that people can relate to
emotionally.” — Ray Kurzweil

VIRTUAL REALITY’S COMING OF AGE
Single player VR, Multiplayer VR, VR
games, VR retail, VR museum exhibits.. you
name it, you can ﬁnd it at SxSW 2017.

OPPORTUNITY AREAS FOR FINTECH
Yolande (Director, Citi Fintech): Startups in Fintech typically
fall within one of these four categories:
➤ Blockchains
➤ AI
➤ Conversational chatbot
➤ Digital identity: Your relationship with your digital
identity will change. A few years from now, a ring would be
your identifier. What does it mean when everyone and
everything knows you, like in Minority Report?
Instead of making customers choose among a confusing set of
financial plans, can we allow customers to tell us what they
want to do in life — “I’m saving for a new mortgage, a new
car” — and let us help them create the profile that works for
them?
———
@peterschwartz2 // @ygmp01

FOOD
Trust: The currency of our generation

FOOD YOU CAN TRUST
Elon Musk’s brother Kimble Musk, a venture capitalist, a board
member of Tesla, SpaceX, and Chipotle, and founder of a
collection of restaurants centered around wholesome, farm-to-
table food like The Kitchen, shared his insights into the changing
landscape of food.
On impact-driven restaurants: The Kitchen is part of a growing
tide of impact-driven restaurants like EveryTable and Local
Burger that values transparency and fresh, locally grown food. At
The Kitchen, new food is delivered each day, and chefs ﬁgure out
how to cook them. The Kitchen announced total transparency in
supply chain veriﬁed by a third partying.
“Good farmers are sold out. people think restaurants is doing farmers a
favor. It’s actually the farmers who are actually doing restaurants a
favor.”
“Treat your employees well, and you will get more customers. Faceless
corporations cannot get away with it anymore. People are buying less
processed food.”
———
https://www.sxsw.com/speaker/kimbal-musk/

EDUCATION THROUGH FOOD
The Kitchen Community builds Learning Gardens in
schools around the country. Today, there are 262
Learning Gardens built since 2011. By 2020, Musk
aims to build 1000 Gardens.
Easily installed in any school yard, Learning Gardens
are dynamic outdoor classrooms. Students are not only
educated about healthy food, but can also learn other
subjects like arts, reading, math, nutrition, and science
in a more relevant and engaging way.
Teachers ﬁnd teaching to be more eﬀective in Learning
Gardens. Students participate more in them. And
families are more involved in their kids’ education as
three out of four students talk to their families about
their Learning Garden activities.
———

ENTREPRENEURSHIP THROUGH FOOD
Square Roots Ventures: a literal “business in a
box,” in which shipping containers are
converted into an indoor farms equivalent to 2
acres of production. The 10 containers at
Brooklyn freight farms received 500
applications from students. Over the course of
the year, each entrepreneur made 50-60k
setting up their own farming business, from a
farmers market, to a farm to table service.
“Kids are sold out because there’s change in
behaviour. There is little trust in system.”
———

IMPACTING SOCIETY
Nothing is going to change unless I do. — Cory Booker

TECHNOLOGY — FOR GOOD OR FOR WORSE?
The debate on whether technology is good or bad for society has been raging on
for centuries. Will the current wave of technology-induced societal shifts an
extension of what has happened in the past? or is it something that humanity
has never seen? Given the pro-technology orientation of SxSW, the sentiments
across different contexts echoed the same message:
➤ Intel on AI: AI will replace the repetitive tasks and make space for the human brain to
exercise its natural ability to approach problems creatively. AI will also enable
efficiencies that are not currently possible: “An area that AI can really find applications
in is parking. I would love to have my autonomous vehicle navigate to a parking spot in
the city.”
➤ Cory Booker (US Senator) on social media: While American citizens and Green Card
holders are being detained, people are showing up and protesting at the airport. In one
instance they cheered for Muslim people disembarking a plane. This happened because
of social media.
➤ Museum on digital technology in a contemplative space: We don’t want people to
be staring at their screens the entire time, and the app we developed allows visitors to
ask a professional about the piece they see right in front of them. The professional will
get the vision to study the art by asking questions like “what are you looking at to make
you say that?” . In this case, the app doesn’t take away from the contemplation, but
enhances it.
———
https://www.sxsw.com/news/2017/delivering-a-better-world-with-ai/
https://www.sxsw.com/news/2017/cory-booker-keynote-2017-sxsw-conference-video/
Images: http://schedule.sxsw.com/2017/events/PP96610 @Malcolm_M_Frank

HOW AMAZON IS CHANGING SOCIETY
➤ Over the last few years, Amazon has invested
heavily in automating its supply chain. Every item
is 3D scanned to determine its shape and size,
which is then used to determine the optimal
packaging.
➤ If you live in the United States, chances are the
most common job in your state is Truck Driver.
Being a sector that employs 3.5 million people, it
is outdated. Building on the success of
AmazonFlex (Uber for Amazon deliveries),
Amazon will introduce Uber for truck drivers.
➤ Amazon’s warehouse are now populated by robots
that move shelves of merchandize. These robots
accumulate mounds of data every second they are
in operation. Based on this data, the system learns
optimum layout and distribution patterns.

RESPONSIBLE REPORTING
➤ Freedom of information and society:
“Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. This is the job of the press.” —
Kara Swisher, co-founder of Recode @karaswisher
“Motives of misinformation is not new. What’s new is the means. The definition of
‘fake news’ has transformed from ‘fictional news’ to ‘something you don’t believe in.’”
— Yasmin Green, Director of Jigsaw (subsidiary of Alphabet)
➤ Social Media’s Emerging Effect on Mass Murder: National homicide rates
are going down. Number of mass murder incidents are going up. If there is a
mass murder, we are likely to see a copycat within 10 days, especially if our
tweets exceed 45 per million. Mass murder has tripled since 2011. It is the
year that marked the tipping point of social media. That’s when Facebook
became so many more platforms. When the rate of suicide was rising in the
80s, ABC News advocated for more responsible reporting, after which
suicide rates dramatically decreased. Now that we live in a world where
news spreads not through major outlets but through our social networks,
what does ‘responsible reporting’ look like? — Ignite talk by Dana Kelly
———
https://www.sxsw.com/interactive/2017/kara-swisher-inducted-2017-sxsw-
interactive-hall-fame/
https://www.sxsw.com/news/2017/interactive-keynote-yasmin-green-2017-
sxsw-conference-video/ @yasmind
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2017/events/PP96071 @danakellyLA

CORY BOOKER - NEW JERSEY SENATOR
➤ Love over tolerance: LOVE means I recognize your value, your worth, your
dignity. Love says ‘I see you.’ Tolerance holds fences between people; LOVE
brings them down. Tolerance says I don't need you; love says you are
essential to my well being.”
➤ On being challenged: It’s becoming even more convenient to have
confirmation bias. James Bevel and Dorthia Cotton challenged Martin Luther
King and convinced King to change his tactics. They understood the need to
create virality, so they convinced MLK to send kids to march against Bull
Connor and his dogs and firehoses. The media that wasn't paying attention
then swarmed. It even got attention from the Soviet Union. People were so
appalled by what was happening, that it tapped into their reservoirs of
creative empathy.
➤ On taking action: Why are the republicans doing this to us? They didn't do
this to us. We did it to ourselves. If we don't engage, we don't participate, we
are he source of problem, not that politician we didn't like.
➤ On corruption of the justice system: 98% of criminal are plea bargains. I
either take this plea, or go to trial in adult court and stay 20 years in prison.
If you have a non violent drug offence, you can't hired at Burger King.
———
https://www.sxsw.com/news/2017/cory-booker-keynote-2017-sxsw-
conference-video/
@CoryBooker

THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE
it's just not very evenly distributed. — William Gibson

DREAMS FOR SALE
There was a person who lost his sight in his late teens. So he was ﬁtted with a
bionic eye that allowed him to see the general outlines of his surroundings in
black and white. The bionic eye converts a video feed into signals for the optical
cortex.
If it’s possible to encode video for the optical cortex to understand, it’s also
possible to take brain signals and convert them into video. With the data you
have of brain signals matched to the objects being seen, you can train an
algorithm to identify the objects that were seen by reading signals from the
brain.
When you dream or think about something in a visual way, you activate the
visual cortex. The next step is to record your dreams. We know what’s in your
dream, where you are in your dream, and most importantly who you’re dreaming
about.
Eventually, somebody you’re dreaming will get a text on their phone. “Would
you like to buy John’s dream of you?”
———
Links for reference: http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-
reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity
Dino Burbidge @dinozoinks

PERSONAL COUNTERINTELLIGENCE
Say you’re sitting at home, eating dinner, watching a movie. No warning, the police pulls up
outside your house. Would you be aware of it? Would you like to be aware of it? How long have
they been there? How would you even know who they are? In today’s world of militarized police,
how could you tell the diﬀerence between a cop and soldier?
Their equipment emits radio signals, which are very easily to identify. You can build an app that
alerts in real time to the presence of the police helicopter and tell us where it is and how long it’s
been orbiting.
The aircraft’s beacons will tell you whether it’s a helicopter, airplane, commercial, government,
how long it’s been in the air, who’s operating it. You can use this location data to tell a drone to go
out, and send back live video. And now we’re running our own automated surveillance system.
And you can tell the drone to pepper spray everyone inside. If you bought the drone with cash and
didn’t register it, how would you know whom it belonged to? Real time alerting and automated
drone reconnaissance can be a lot of fun and real interesting. What about collecting data over a
long period of time.
Having access to WiFi user’s connection logs can help you identify who’s a local in your
neighbourhood and who isn’t. If you collect it long enough, you can . When a device sends a probe
request, it tells everyone. Sometimes, it’ll even tell the tae of the owner. That’s because, iPhones
for example, defaults and device name to user’s name. Every connection you made in the past is
visible to everyone. It’s really easy to see your neighbours coming, going, and where they’ve been.
In the old days, this information was limited to governments. Today, cheap hardware and free
software are becoming so powerful and everyone can run their own automated intelligence agency.
———
James Brown, @ibjhb // cointel.co

WORKING WITH REGULATORY BODIES
➤ Involve regulatory bodies early: Innovating in the ﬁnancial and
healthcare sectors are especially challenging because regulatory
bodies are involved. Citi Fintech learned to adapt innovation to
this challenging environment by working with regulatory bodies as
soon as talking to the customers begin. Singapore’s regulatory
bodies are pro-cloud and pro-salesforce. This is because they are
brought in early on in the process.
➤ Regulators are just people: Shift the attitude towards regulators
from being barriers to collaborators. Yolanda admitted that “the
job of regulators is not to create a great experience; their job is to
make sure banks don’t screw customers over. They are rightly
cautious. They are conservative but not stupid.”
➤ Invite regulatory bodies to the table: “We bring internal people
who understand the essence of banking and regulatory, people in
ﬁntech, and regulatory bodies together at the same time, to go
through all use cases to make sure everything meets regulatory
guidelines.
———

➤ Get the basics right first: “We started wanting to build the Uber
of banking. Customer told us that we need to build trust first — get
the basics right. Most companies are not ready for Uber-anything.”
➤ Closing doesn’t work anymore: “gone are the days when we think
we have to protect ourselves by building everything internally.
When we need a new capability, we ask can we build it? buy it? or
partner?
➤ Open up the API: Customers did not feel like they’re getting the
value out of points. So 1-800-flowers partnered with us, and used
our API to build on their site the ability to allow customers to pay
with points.
➤ Hackathons: If someone has a great idea, it used to take normally
months to get a meeting with a bank. Now we run hackathons to
expose our APIs. Great ideas are built and are exposed to the right
people over a few days.
———
Citi Developer Hub: developer.citi.com
GOALS AND MEANS OF INNOVATION

FIVE PRIVACY PERSONAS
Your privacy philosophy needs to be matched to their customers. Through interviews, talking
to experts, these five personas help make the concept of privacy tangible:
➤ Super Sharer: She’s always talking about the run she’s training for. she’s always sharing
information about political action she cares about or climate change. She doesn’t worry
about privacy because she wants to get her information out there. For her, the sharing is the
key part of what makes her interactions with companies valuable.
➤ I’ve got nothing to hide: “Hey NSA do your best, I have a nothing to hide” This is the
largest category of people. He’s really not happy about being forced to give up all of his
information in order to do stuff.
➤ Post no photos: Not as concerned about sharing a piece of generic information because she
thinks at least a few others must have the same information, but “my face is really unique
to me.” Cares about control. She wants to know where her data is going. Once it gets out
there, you don’t know whose hands it gets into.
➤ Misguided Warrior: All baby boomers. Knows all the bad things that happen on the
internet, so he’s figured it out. I’ll trust people not technology. If he needs to buy something
on the internet, he picks up the phone and tells his credit card number to a person.
➤ High tech protector: Someone who has looked all the privacy settings on Facebook. If they
ask for you to do a social login, she’s going to think about every piece of information she
shares with a company. Deliberate decision. She knows why she’s sharing with you, where
it’s going, and she’s choosing to do so.
Who are you? Who are your customers? partners? Are you making choices in your privacy
philosophy that meet the needs of your customers, or letting a lawyer dictate it in on a sheet
of paper that nobody reads. Make your philosophy deliberate.
———
Jenny Wanger @jennydove

GEN-Z VS HISPANIC GEN-Z
Generation Z - 13-17 year olds. Raised by Gen-X’ers. They are pragmatic, have an
open-minded attitude, and down to earth. They accept failure as a way to learn and
question information. They are also questioning the idea of “the linear path to
progress.” — get good grades, go to college, get a job, buy a house, raise a family. They
are deviating from that and exploring alternative paths to success.
Their Hispanic counterparts are brought up in a different way. Their parents, mostly
immigrants, came to this country in hopes of a better future, and made sure to enforce
strict rules and guidelines. They define success not around monetary or material value,
but around having choices and more opportunities than the previous generation.
➤ Perception towards education: Hispanic Gen-Z’ers see their parents’ commands
as their own initiative, and they see education as the only path to progress.
Decreasing high school drop out rates and increasing college enrolment and
completion rates tells us the linear path has never been straighter for Hispanics
Gen-Z. The next generation of Hispanics will be the most educated the US has seen
to date.
➤ View of the world: Unlike Gen-Z who are often criticized for being “blindly
optimistic,” the worldview of Hispanic Gen-Z is one of realistic hopefulness.
➤ Definition of success: Hispanic Gen-Z’ers not expecting to change the world. But
they do want to have a meaningful and micro difference in their own communities.
They also want to be the individual in their families to pave the way and set a
positive example.
———
@jzima26

THE CREATIVE PROCESS
“Art challenges technology, and technology inspires art” — John Lasseter

PIXAR
➤ Be ready to start all over again: the storyboard for Frozen was
redone from beginning to end six times over the course of two
years.
➤ Be ready to let go of your ideas: there is some truth to the saying,
“the ﬁrst idea is never the last.” Elsa started as a much older Snow
Queen. It was hard to care about the Snow Queen, so the creative
team made them into sisters and reduced their age gap.
➤ Get used to feedback: the team did “dailies” where everyone sees
your work everyday to share feedback. “you get used to not taking
feedback personally.”
➤ Collaboration is critical, but it takes time, especially in a large,
diverse team: Pixar had a “Story Trust” comprised of the entire
team that would gather in a windowless room for a few days
straight and discuss what worked and what didn’t.
➤ Trust is earned: When someone invites feedback early in the
process, “I know I’m not ready so don’t come here with all your
ammunition, but help me make it better.”
———
schedule.sxsw.com/2017/events/PP67537
@stephenfmay

STAR WARS
➤ On honouring legacy: When making Star Wars, the team was
careful to not deviate too much from the look and feel of the
original Star Wars Trilogy. The original Star Wars battleships
were put together using model car kits (called “kitmashing”).
The new Star Wars crew trace all the parts to their original kits,
which they bought on Ebay.
➤ On recreating the feeling rather than reality: When they
ﬁnished, they realized that “Reality wasn’t as grand as you
remembered. We wanted to recreate what’s in your mind’s eye.”
➤ On the unpredictability of the next great idea: Nearly
everyone who has seen Star Wars would guess that the
dogﬁghting scene taking place in the trenches on the Death Star
was along the equatorial trenches. One member of the crew
pointed out that it’s actually along the longitudinal direction,
based on a scene in the original Star Wars, noticed by a member
of the crew.
———
@vickschutz

VC’S WILL NOT INVEST IN YOU IF..
➤ You’re a copycat
➤ You lack conviction: If you come to a VC asking
for 2 million and you’re ok with half a million
when the VC says so, then you lack conviction.
➤ You can’t do this idea if you can’t raise
money: VCs don’t care about your idea. They
care about exciting growth story that’s going to
change the world. “VCs want to follow the
founder into battle — not the other way
around.”
…Practical advice shared by founders of Intuit
Scott Cook and Tom Proulx
——

GETTING PEOPLE’S ATTENTION
➤ On what people want: People don't want
commercials. They want content. The more you
can act as a media company, rather than an
advertiser, you'll always win.
➤ On priorities: “A lot of people are focused on
VR when they haven’t even ﬁgured out
Facebook Ad spend.”
➤ On TV: “Everybody thinks you graduate into
TV but I sh*t on TV.”
“If you feel good about who you actually are, you need to
be loud. If you don't, ﬁx your shit.”
———
Gary Vaynerchuk @garyvee

CRITIQUE ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP
➤ On the state of entrepreneurship: “Entrepreneurship has
become rockstar status. Right now everybody thinks it’s cool to
be an entrepreneur and founder. We created this world where
everybody wins; but the truth is hardly anybody wins. We have
lost people who came to this because of the pressure to succeed.
The real cool guy is #11 at Facebook. He’s got more money than
everybody in this room.”
➤ On college entrepreneurship programs: “I’m concerned that
we are funnelling people into entrepreneurship but there’s gotta
be a lot of pain. The market doesn’t give a f*ck. I’m passionate
about growing self awareness. Entrepreneurship is not the key.”
➤ On perception of entrepreneurship: “People 10 years ago built
products. Today, people build ﬁnancial arbitrage machines. You
are not a superstar entrepreneur if you’re losing money every
month.”
———
@garyvee

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
“The world you see outside of you is a reﬂection of what's inside of you”
— Cory Booker

GARY VAYNERCHUK
Gary Vaynerchuk, serial entrepreneur and early investor in Uber, Birchbox, Snapchat,
Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, shared some of his personal wisdom through a Q&A.
How Vaynerchuk describes himself: “I’m trying to become injection of audacity into
people who are held back from the pool they just want to jump in.”
➤ On creatives: “With all the math that is being pumped into the world, the creative
is still the variable of success”
➤ On self esteem: “There are so many people here who are sad. Self esteem is the
ultimate drug in life. There's a very ﬁne line between self esteem and delusion.
Insecurity leads to politics. Insecurity is a killer.”
➤ On getting loud on positivity: If you are positive, you are happy and optimistic.
You owe it to each other to get louder, because the only people that are loud are
the people that are upset. Right? Negativity is on ﬁre. And happy people are
clamming away from it. That’s how we stay happy. I went the other way. I’m going
right at it. Putting it out every single day.
➤ On success: Two things to make you successful:
1. Listen
2. Try things: “for everything I get credit for that I did well, there are other things
that I did not do well. But it doesn’t matter because it’s forgotten.”
➤ On patience: “I’m obsessed with patience”
——
@garyvee

CORY RICHARDS
Cory Richards is a NatGeo photographer who inspired the world through Snapchatting his climb up
Mt. Everest.
➤ Reaching the top: I was alone, i stayed there for a total three minutes. I didn’t have any
revelations at the time, except for that I was very very scared and I wanted to get down. And I also
thought a very funny thought, ‘this is the closest that I’m ever gonna get to space.’ This is it. I
reached up and I just touched it. That’s it. That’s the highest I can go. There’s some poetry in that
as well. I ran downhill as fast as I could. When we got down there. The lessons started to pile
onto me at that point:
➤ Running from or facing the truth: “I thought Everest was supposed to be some sort of cathartic
act. It would punctuate the darkness that I was in. It would solve the PTSD. I would somehow
vanquish my guilt. I thought it would be sort of Phoenix rising. What I found instead was I had
not only gone to the highest point on the planet, as far as I could go, to get away from myself, and
all my shit, all the truth. I couldn’t bury it anymore, I couldn’t. You think that’s a success story
and at that point it’s all good. It wasn’t. In fact, so much of it started happening just then. going
downhill was the point when I had to start doing all the real hard work. Everest is the point where
all else flows, right? At least that’s what I’m seeing. It’s from there that I started going downhill
and into all the things that I had to face.”
➤ Demand honesty: “The thing I’m certain of is we find solutions. We do that really really well. I
want to take this opportunity to ask the question: how do we stop creating the problems that need
those solutions? This isn’t my story. This is our story. It’s not about me; it’s about us. When we
start to show up honestly, we start to connect right? Our personal issues are inseparable from our
global issues. Who we are inside dictates who we show up as on the outside. And if we’re all tied
together in that way, how do we honour that bond? And for me it’s a very singular solution: It’s
Honesty. All we have to do is be honest. And we have to demand honesty of ourselves and
everybody around us. Truth fucking matters. We can’t just go “Hey, tell the truth.” Because it
starts with us. With honesty, we disarm our own judgments. We see how similar we really are.
Without judgment, we can finally be empathetic. With empathy, we foster connection. When we
find each other, we start to listen.”
———
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2017/events/PP93853 @coryrichardsNG

CASEY NEISTAT
➤ On persistence: “When you start, you have a
rusty lump of steel. And you hammer at that.
And eventually turns into a shining ex-calibre
sword.”
➤ Tarzan Method: You are Tarzan on one side of
the jungle. And you want to get to Jane on the
other side. But you can’t even see Jane, and
there’s no way for you to transport yourself.
Instead, you grab onto a vine, and it takes you a
little bit closer but somewhere you didn't
anticipate. And you grab onto another and get a
little closer.
———
@CaseyNeistat

TOP FIVE TAKEAWAYS
There is no singular path to
success, and you can’t even
imagine whom you will
become. Keep and open mind
and, to reference Casey’s
Tarzan Method, just keep
swinging. When you think
you’ve reached success, be
prepared to realize that it
marks a checkpoint, and not
the finish line.
The future is around the corner.
Even though we can only see
someone’s dreams in low resolution
today, things can change pretty fast.
Remember how long it took for the
Library of Congress to fit in your palm?
AI and VR are is the way forward.
The early you invest your efforts into
understanding and applying these
technologies, the more likely you can
reap the rewards of being a first mover.
We live in an expectations economy
where customers’ expectations change
based on their experiences in contexts
outside your own. You can either react
or proactively take advantage of those
expectations in designing your product.
Be a catalyst for change. You don’t
have to have all the answers. There is
plenty of potential energy trapped in
our socialeconomic system. Your job is
to find them and release them.

WHERE WILL WE SWING TO NEXT?
History that hasn’t happened yet

GET IN TOUCH
FOR MORE INFORMATION
TO SCHEDULE A PRESENTATION
OR TO RECEIVE FUTURE REPORTS
GEORGEWANG89@GMAIL.COM
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/GEORGEWANG89
@GEORGEWANG89

Semi-sober notes from SxSW 2017

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Semi-sober notes from SxSW 2017