The real reason I went to SXSW was to accompany my son and webmaster, Jake, as his aide and chauffeur. I was along for the ride. When Henry Copeland invited me to join his panel, I hesitated and then he pulled an unfair move: He told me that I should bring Jake and if I didn’t, I would be a really bad dad. Henry was right. So off to SXSW we went. Watching Jake in his element was, of course, the highlight of the weekend. People knew him from his Facebook programming. And he got to meet and hear some of his idols, the rock stars of the creation generation: Kevin Rose, Matt Mullenweg, Mark Zuckerberg, Ev Williams, Gary Vaynerchuk, Andrew Baron, Jim Louderback, and more folks from Twitter, Pownce, Digg, Revision3. And Robert Scoble, too. And they were all wonderfully gracious to us. He had fun. I was proud.
One of the highlights was Sarah Meyers’ interview with Jake for Pop17, in which she got another of her many scoops, this one about the sale of his Facebook app:
And here are father and son, resplendent in convention badges (thanks to Tony Pierce):
We ate out with my teammates from Daylife and with Lionel Menchaca from Dell; we had the good sense not to get into the line for the Google party; we saw a few premiere movies; we got t-shirts and schwag. A perfect weekend, I’d say.