Four For You, One For Me #SXSW

Now that Larry Chiang has been at SXSW for a few days, he has some mid-conference words of wisdom. A few people have told me that it’s hard to understand what Larry is saying. His thinking is about 3 steps ahead of the rest of us, and he’s always looking at everything with thoughts about how to hack it. For those of you with issues, I’ve decided to translate (in bold). I hope it helps.

This SXSW is for me and the entity that I control: Duck9.

It’s my four-for-you-and-one-for-me theme here at SXSW.

Enclosed are answers to frequently asked questions, confessions and live action business case studies. There are also patterns to recognize so you can pattern iterate and pattern replicate.

Programmers study design patterns. Entrepreneurs should study patterns too. Larry is telling you to recognize the successful patterns, add your own twist on them to improve them, and then keep doing them again and again. Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

I started coming to SXSW right as Duck9 was peaking. It was 2008. I met Hugh Forrest at a sf mixer for SXSW and flew out for 24 hours to catch (and blog) the Mark Zuckerberg Sarah Lacy interview.

SXSW didn’t grant me a press pass, but Duck9 was blowing and going, so what did I care about spending 2k to blog SXSW for GigaOm. It was the same year that Twitter exploded.

SXSW Rising. Duck9 Falling.

I spent $55k one year. It was 2010. That was a great SXSW.

Duck9 wasn’t so great. A bill had passed US Congress’ lower house that initially was going to kill the credit card lead generation industry. The dems had control of both houses and the executive branch. I had Obama’s cell so I was able to beg, cajole, man-charm in a last-minute addendum to this credit card industry killer bill called the Card Act.
http://whattheydontteachyouatstanfordbusinessschool.com/blog/2011/05/13/how-to-get-a-law-passed-to-kill-your-competition-dead-for-under-17k/

Larry details his ability to persuade government officials to make changes to the law that favored his business. Knowing Larry, he probably found people who were already well on the road to doing this, and he jumped on the bandwagon using his unique knowledge of how to amplify their position using technology, crashing parties, and hacking life in general.

My addendum to the Card Act was
-1- FICO score
-2- Income
-3- age agnostic if you had a high enough FICO

According to my calculations, I had just gone from hero to zero.

Back to hero.

This law essentially gave me a monopoly.

No other credit company was being run by an engineer with a background in credit card sales. Good news right?!

Wrong.

All lending of any type stopped in America.

Duck9 was dead in the water.

Using the momentum I had built up at SXSW, I pivoted to venture capital.

After all, the VC is an industry that relies on lead generation. And it was pretty broken long before I started to disrupt it.

I got my initial momentum from SXSW when I moderated the VC Secrets panel. That massive uptick in personal brand allowed me to get over 1,000 cell phone numbers of [Computer Science] majors. It also helped me to start #reverseVC franchise.

Enter Stanford University

When hobbies collide… The third triumvirate is Stanford. I’m now teaching my third summer there. I head up the Summer Program on Getting Engineers Street Smart. It’s part of ENGR 145.

Teaching at Stanford let me pivot Duck9 to a venture firm.

I use a credit card with a Reverse Annaul fee as my vc lead gen product. It’s a product with a launch party at SXSW.

And come to my Jay Z party. (You don’t think I thought you cared about me do you?! But as a thanks for reading all the way to the bottom…

See Jay Z #AmexDuck9 #sxsw show Monday night at 7pm
http://whattheydontteachyouatstanfordbusinessschool.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/see-jay-z-live-at-sxsw-with-amex-duck9/

Apologies that this didn’t go to press in time. Larry, please link in the comments to the MVBP’s that won people tickets!

Thanks to SXSW, it revitalized my company, Duck9

Here’s my schedule
http://bit.ly/vc0310-1111

It’s the same one I sell for $189

Oh, my perpetual promotion machine is no longer a secret. Here is how I did it.
http://bit.ly/vc0310z

To wrap up, Larry is giving you a free gift of his personal calendar during SXSW. One that he apparently sells. He likes find you deals, dear Austinites. When he talks about the “perpetual promotion machine” he’s trying to teach you how to take an anchor event like SXSW, The Oscars, TechCrunch Disrupt, or whatever event is important in your industry, and creating satellite events with your brand leveraging off the anchor brand. With a little creativity (and no cash) you can even get brand name famous people to come to your events, thus legitimizing them. I don’t think he’s that cryptic, but there you have it. My secret decoder ring for Larry Chiang guest blog posts.