SouthStart remains Australia’s most stubbornly itself tech conference
Adelaide’s homegrown tech conference delivered its usual mix of AI hype, unlikely guests and deliberate weirdness.
There is a particular kind of conference that resists the gravitational pull of Sydney and Melbourne, that insists on its own character, that somehow makes a virtue of its constraints.
SouthStart is that conference — and the fact that it managed to coax Derek Sivers out of a lengthy public retirement to deliver its closing remarks this year is, in its own way, proof of that.
But some of the audience members were a little divided on whether that was such a good idea when Sivers made some rather on-the-nose comments comparing parents who sold their daughters to the sale of one’s own company.
The founder of CD Baby and author of Hell Yeah or No and Useful Not True hadn’t made a public appearance in six years — 257 podcast appearances notwithstanding.
