All Aboard the Magic Buses to South by Southwest

Early in the morning on Tuesday, 25 strangers—all entrepreneurs—in Miami will crowd onto a sleek, big bus. They’ll bring their laptops and wild expectations.

The destination: the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. ETA: 48 hours.

There will be little sleep—if any. These self-proclaimed “buspreneurs” will arrive rested and ready to work. As they travel 60 miles per hour up Interstate 75 then over to Interstate 10, they’ll fuse their diverse abilities and ideas together under the dim lights, hoping to create the spark that will ignite the next Google or Facebook.

And they won’t be alone. The same scene will unfold in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Cleveland, and Chicago.

In all, about 150 buspreneurs will trek to Austin. The startup-rich city is known for having a resilient economy wrapped around an eclectic and envied social scene, but in mid-March the Texas capital blossoms even more with the annual South by Southwest Music, Film, and Interactive Festival.

Like its music and film counterparts that usually take center stage, the Interactive Festival, March 11 to 15, is one of the biggest draws for entrepreneurs across the world who want to mingle with bigwigs and peers alike. For startups, SXSW is a potential springboard to stardom. Just ask executives at Twitter.

The buspreneurs will take all that in, but while their music and film brethren are doing the obligatory bar crawl through Austin’s happening downtown, they’ll go on a startup crawl. It’ll be a whirlwind tour of 15 Austin startups to see how business gets done in the town dubbed by Entrepreneur.com as the nation’s most progressive and proactive entrepreneurial center.

“It’s really just about selling Austin to all the people coming to South by Southwest,” said Startup Crawl organizer Joshua Baer, the CEO of Austin-based OtherInbox Inc.

The event, which is being billed to feature “hot tech and cold beer,” is sponsored by the Capital Factory, a local tech startup incubator.

Elias Bizannes, an Australian national living in San Francisco, is the brain behind the startup buses. He did this last year, but only ran one bus from San Francisco.

“My life basically changed at that point,” he said, adding that the intense experience showed him “that this isn’t just a job. It’s something special here.”

The riders last year produced a handful of Web-based companies such as DormDorm, which enables colleges and universities to list available dormitory rooms for summer travelers.

The startup bus program costs Bizannes about $1,000 per person, but sponsors like the technology blog TechCrunch enable him to charge $200 per rider. Next year, he hopes to have even more buses.

“I still think it’s small,” he said. “This year is a test for next year. What we’re ultimately trying to do is create a community.

Christopher Calnan of the Austin Business Journal contributed to this report.

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Colin Pope is editor of the Austin Business Journal.