For the past five days, startups and innovators from around the world have been soaking up knowledge at SXSW’s Interactive week. It’s no surprise that many Bostonians book it down to Austin when the festival rolls around. Throughout the years, Boston startups have had their seeds planted and their pitches presented to much acclaim at the event.
With all the learning and like-minded, talented people in one space, the festival sounds like a perfect place to debut a new project.
Well, sort of.
This also means that standing out in the crowd is far from easy. Pitch competitions pepper the SXSW Interactive schedule; sessions focused on idea exchanges encourage spin-off projects. Find a mentor, a co-founder or a new job, sure. But try to build around a startup in a sea of, well, other startups? That’s tough.
Nevertheless, companies hailing from our Northeastern corner have prevailed, and found their way into the spotlight. Take, for example, Boston-based Garage Social. This year, the company, which offers a social media platform for car enthusiasts, made the trip to Austin after being selected as one of 10 startups to participate in pitch contest with Bessemer Ventures and Intel Capital VCs — a contest that took place in the backseat of a BMW i3. French Co-founder and Northeastern graduate Maxime Rassi told BostInno that SXSW exposed the company to a whole slew of new potential viewers and potential press:
SXSW is a massive event attracting people from all corners of the world and with a huge variety of potential users. This is in sharp contrast to our last trade show at SEMA in Las Vegas which was much more focused on the hard core auto enthusiast and had limited numbers of regular consumers. On March 7th, we were one of the featured startup taking part in Startup Spotlight and had a chance to get an early taste on the type people roaming around SXSW.
In the span of two hours, we met, regular consumers, car collectors, film producers, journalists, entrepreneurs and investors. It’s a positive environment where everyone is excited about new products and technology. With journalists, investors and all types of users all there in one place in front of you, it’s a perfect place to launch a product.
Garage Social is just one of the many startups from the Hub that have found their start at SXSW. We gathered quite a few – but not all – others from Boston that have come into being at the annual Austin festival.
Image via Mashable
