RANDOM-ACCESS MEMORY (SMALL EXTRACT)

"In 2014, I was pitching the future at SXSW. Not long after in New York, I was running from a man with a box cutter. What happened in between changed everything." Chapter 1: RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY : EMPIRE STATE OF MIND It all kicked off in 2014. Life was finally moving. We’d just launched at SXSW Interactive—and what a launch. VIP access, thanks to the other Australian directors and the startup. Pandora Music’s venue was ours all week. Damon Albarn played a rooftop set in a bloody parking garage. Tried to catch Timbuktu—no show. G-Love and Special Sauce played a hotel foyer with the same loose charisma I’d seen from him years earlier at Bluesfest Byron. These weren’t just gigs. They were moments. Signals that we were playing in the right spaces. We had a music product, so SXSW was the perfect launchpad—cutting-edge tech with a physical twist, right in the beating heart of music and innovation. I was there with our Americas Key Account Manager and some of the other directors, p...