Behind The Deal That Brought The Obamas To SXSW

To land the biggest keynote speaker ever for the South By Southwest festival, it took a tactic familiar to many business leaders and entrepreneurs: be persistent.

“I think we’ve invited President Obama every year since he got into office and maybe even before then. The same with the First Lady,” SXSW co-founder Roland Swenson told the Austin Chronicle. “We’ve been trying to get her for years and had numerous meetings at the White House about it over the last four or five years. Finally, the stars kind of aligned and we got both of them, which is surprising, but exciting.”

President Obama is set speak March 11 with Texas Tribune CEO Evan Smith about “civic engagement in the 21st century,” festival organizers said in an announcement. On March 16, First Lady Michelle Obama will deliver the first keynote of SXSW Music when she speaks about the Let Girls Learn initiative, which advocates for educating girls around the world.

“For the President to speak about entrepreneurship, technology and public service really fits what the Interactive event has become over the last 10 years,” Swenson said. “It’s really got a broad portfolio of curriculum that’s also focused around creative people coming up with new ideas. That’s certainly something the Obama administration has been pushing all along — an economy tuned to the 21st century.”

Some Austin Business Journal readers quickly reacted on social media with alarm to the news on Wednesday, worrying that the President’s presence could worsen the already snarled traffic situation caused by SXSW. Swenson confirmed that it will be a logistical challenge, telling the Chronicle that “there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff to happen for the President to appear somewhere, so if they tell us to jump, we’ll ask, ‘How high?’

“That’s our attitude, but they’ve been easy to work with,” he said. “There haven’t been any issues so far.”

Source: Austin Business Journal, Will Anderson
Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama are heading to Austin for South By Southwest, the first time a sitting U.S. President will attend the event. The Obamas are pictured during a state visit with Xi Jinping, China’s president, and Peng Liyuan, China’s first lady, at the White House in 2015. (Pete Marovich, Bloomberg)