Guitars and documentaries and robots, oh my

Imagine Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory – except instead of candy, it's full of all the weirdest new tech, film, music, and comedy that you can’t get anywhere else.

That, in a nutshell, is the ten-day South by Southwest festival (SXSW), which kicks off today in Austin, Texas. Except instead of Wonka's tests of moral character, everyone just has to wait in lines. Loooong lines. And there's queso. So much queso.

🎤 Background: Founded in 1987, SXSW began as an alternative-minded music festival with 700 attendees. After years of steady growth, the festival, which is held every year in Austin, branched out into three areas in 1994: Music, Film, and Interactive (also in 1994, three long-haired boys with the last name Hanson were discovered at the fest; the rest is MMMBop history).

From there, SXSW has grown into an incubator at the vanguard of creative pursuit.

• For example: In 2007, an unknown startup named Twitter became the talk of the festival, as the tech-obsessed crowd used the app to share updates with one another. Over the course of the festival, the app’s daily tweet count tripled from 20,000 to 60,000 (for context: the app averaged 500 million tweets/day last year).

📸 Big picture: If the early days of the festival felt like a secret hipster spot in deep Brooklyn, today’s fest feels a bit more like Times Square. Last year, SXSW drew a total of ~280,000 in-person and online attendees, over 3,500 conference speakers, 1,500 musical acts, and 215 world premiere films.

This year’s festival – which is expected to attract 300,000 people – will feature a secret screening of John Wick 4, Dr. Deepak Chopra speaking on the future of psychedelic therapy, and a keynote with NASA about the James Webb telescope.