Midway through reminiscing about Canva’s journey at SXSW Sydney, Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen shifted gears.
The man who convinced the Google mothership to open its Sydney engineering office, and who connected Canva with its technical co-founder, wanted to talk about his new project: a Greek tech festival he promised would “do for innovation what the Olympics did for sports”.
It was an awkward pitch to make from this particular stage.
SXSW Sydney exists because the NSW government paid a reported $12 million to import the brand of the original Austin festival. Meanwhile, Rasmussen’s Panathenea runs entirely on student volunteers with a 23-year-old CEO, following the grassroots model that made the original SXSW authentic.
Whether Rasmussen was aware of the irony is unclear, but the comparison was not subtle. His first-year Athens event had already drawn speakers from OpenAI and DeepMind — "well above the league of a first year conference in southeastern Europe," he noted.
