David Graff of Hudl wrote this post about his experience Friday, when he traveled from Lincoln to Austin, Texas for South By Southwest Interactive. For more about Graff and SXSnippets, see the note following this post.
David Graff and several other members of the Hudl team are among the crowds at the Austin Convention Center (above) for South By Southwest Interactive.
4:45 a.m. – Wake up. This is one of those rare trips where I am flying out of Lincoln, so wake up is only 1 hr. 15 min. before my flight.
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7 – 9 a.m. – Layover in Minneapolis. Nothing like heading north before you fly south, but I’ve gotten used to the routine. Last year, I flew over 130K miles on Delta Airlines. The airport is buzzing this morning – every Austin flight is booked tight, and they are begging for volunteers to take a later flight. No one appears to be jumping at the $400 voucher option.
12:20 p.m. – Land in Austin. Our VP of Business Development, Matt Mueller, flew down last night and was waiting to pick me up when I landed. Matt was my roommate in college, and we both got our undergrad degrees and MBAs from the Raikes School at UNL. After graduating, Matt took a job with National Instruments and moved down to Austin with his wife, Andrea. Less than one year later, we had him back in Lincoln working with us. His Austin experience makes him a great tour guide (and food guide) whenever we’re in town.
12:45 p.m. – Lunch. Matt drove me by one of my Austin favorites – Juan in a Million, home of the best breakfast tacos and restauranteur handshakes in the business. I got two handshakes from the legendary owner and a Don Juan original breakfast taco to go. Total time: 3 minutes. (Left: A sampling of Juan in a Million’s offerings.)
1:15 p.m. – Wait in Line. Last year (our first time at SXSW) we arrived Thursday night, got to registration as soon as it opened and still waited 30 minutes. We commented at the time that the process was awful and figured it would lead to really long waits for those who showed up later in the day. This year, we were those latecomers that were stuck spending about 90 minutes in line.
3:30 p.m. – Teaching Touch: Tapworthy Touchscreen Design. We were glad to get our passes in time for this session on mobile-friendly design. Me, Matt, John Wirtz (our Chief Product Officer), Ella Wirtz (Swanson Russell), Kyle Murphy (our VP – User Experience), and Courtney Murphy (Kenexa) all attended. One of our key themes for 2012 is to weave mobile into everything we do so that session carried a lot of relevance. We’ve seen our mobile app usage skyrocket over the past year – last month, over 10 percent of our video views on Hudl occurred on mobile devices. During the New England Patriots playoff run in January, they watched over 106K video clips on Hudl, 101K of which were on iOS devices.
5 p.m. – How Start-Ups Do Deals with Industry Titans. Our crew split up for the next round, with Ella and Courtney heading to the Sheraton for a session, Kyle joining up with Melissa Fabina and Jason McClanathan from our quality assurance team for an Alan Cooper/Robert Scoble session, and John met up with Kim Burnham and Brett Kunz from our internal sales team for the Dave Morin session on “Why Happiness in the New Currency”. Matt and I went over to the Hilton for a session on “David/Goliath-type deals”. The panel featured the CMO of Olark (an in-app chat service we are trying out) and a product manager from Google. We picked up a few solid tips in the session, but overall were reminded of how much deeper an individual speaker can get on a topic than a crew of panelists.
7:15 p.m. – Dinner at Old School Bar & Grill. After spending 20 minutes trying to get a cab to take us to Chuy’s (one of my favorite Tex-Mex Restaurants in Austin), we gave up and walked to Sixth Street. We ended up landing at Old School Bar & Grill, the first spot we could find that would accommodate 10 people. Erik Person (one of our lead developers and my host for the weekend) came down and met us.
8:45 p.m. – Drinks at The Library. Since most of us had early wake ups to fly down, we stayed away from the lines at the parties and just posted up on the top floor of The Library on Sixth Street (left). $2.50 wells and plenty of room to spread out and recap the day was a perfect end to the evening. One of our former Hudlies, Kiley Story, came down and met us with some of her classmates at the Boulder Design Works at CU.
12:15 a.m. – Bus to Erik’s place. For the second SXSW in a row, I brought an inflatable mattress so I could crash on the floor at Erik’s house. This year, his roommates were nice enough to put up with five of us staying there. People frequently ask when a company is no longer a startup. In my mind, being a startup is a mentality – it’s about being smart with your expenses and always hustling (and sometimes sleeping on the floor). It is not defined by number of employees, revenue figures, or age of the company.
Overall, it was a great first day at SXSW. I was glad to be joined here by so many Hudlies this year. We offer everyone at the company $1,500/year to spend at the conference or conference of their choice through a program we call “Hudl Works Smarter”. We’ll have people at a lot of the big tech conferences (WWDC, Google IO, PDC) as well as good number of entrepreneurship/innovation conferences (including 15 or so at Big Omaha). We’re looking forward to seeing more people from the Silicon Prairie over the next few days – if you’re here and we haven’t met yet, make sure to grab anyone that you see walking around in a Hudl shirt.
Credits: Photo of Austin Convention Center by Danny Schreiber. Photo of Juan and a Million meal from Juan in a Million on Facebook. Sixth Street photo by Kevin H. on Flickr.
About the author: David Graff is the CEO of Lincoln-based Hudl, a company Graff co-founded in 2006 that makes web-based video and analysis tools for sports and is dedicated to helping coaches at all levels win.
About SXSnippets: SXSnippets are posts from residents of the Silicon Prairie chronicling 24 hours of their experience at South By Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas.
