This year’s festival drew upward of 30,000 people from more than eighty countries. SXSW Interactive slowly became established as a must-attend conference for techies, then charged to fame in 2007, when Twitter used the event as a launchpad for its new service. “It felt like we were yelling into a dark room and no one was listening,” Forrest said. “And because of how quickly the event grew, it didn’t matter how many people we added - we were always creating more work for ourselves.” “To keep it going was quite a struggle,” remembered Shawn O’Keefe, who worked at Interactive from 2000 to 2014. The staff consisted of Forrest and a couple of others, holed up in a group of houses that served as offices for the SXSW organization. In its early days, Interactive was just a small presence at SXSW, overshadowed by the main moneymaker, the music component. He has put the ramen lifestyle behind him, transforming SXSW Interactive from an intimate conference with hundreds of participants into a sprawling festival attracting tens of thousands and worldwide attention. “We were living off ramen and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and South by Southwest was the regular paycheck, so as I was getting a little bit older, that was alluring,” Forrest said. In 1994, after a few years of splitting his time between SXSW and various Austin newspapers, Forrest went all-in on his current job, leading SXSW Interactive and branching out from the music festival. Forrest, who knew the organizers through his journalism experience, offered to lend his machine. The festival organizers were searching for someone who had a computer they could use. In 1989, the year Forrest became involved with the earliest incarnation of SXSW - just a music festival at the time - personal computers were a rarity only 15 percent of households had them. We were living off ramen and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and South by Southwest was the regular paycheck, so as I was getting a little bit older, that was alluring." With the help of his father, Forrest bought the computer to avoid high typesetting costs. After graduating from Kenyon, he moved back to Austin and started an alternative publication, the Austin Challenger. In fact, it was a Mac Plus Laser Writer that first got Forrest the gig at SXSW. “My tech expertise ended at about the Mac Plus era,” Forrest, an Austin native, said. In addition to tracking his schedule on a piece of paper, he prefers to send emails with his worn Macbook rather than tapping them out on his iPhone. Presiding over this meeting of the minds of the world’s elite tech talent, Forrest insists that he himself isn’t particularly tech-savvy. Forrest has run the event, held in Austin, Texas, every March since its founding in 1994. That’s the method Hugh Forrest ’84 uses in his job as director of SXSW Interactive, an annual celebration of all things entrepreneurial, creative, and tech. How will he keep track of all these responsibilities? On a crumpled sheet of 8.5-by-11-inch printer paper. He’s responsible for organizing more than 2,500 speakers in more than a thousand panels at almost a dozen venues, and top news outlets from around the globe will send reporters to cover what happens in those rooms. His event is credited with bringing fame to Twitter and launching the social network Foursquare. He’s in charge of a major conference known for introducing technology and must-have apps to the world.
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