Seattle24x7: Korby, your concept for THE TECH SHOW is a radical redesign of the high-tech meetup in multimedia form, and one of the flagship events of Technosaurus Events, your event production company. How did you get started in this domain?
Korby: My background is concentrated around music, audio and animation for video games as well as advertising and video production. Once upon a time, a group of Seattle composers in the space founded something called “Seattle School.” It was a place to put a bunch of ideas we had about music but we didn’t know what to do with it at the time.
Seattle24x7: Sounds very info-taining?
Korby: A lot of the ideas involved physicality. For instance, we did a show where there was competitive karaoke involving three different people singing separate songs simultaneously while a guy in the back was shooting paint balls at them.
Seattle24x7: That’s hilarious!
Korby: The rules were not disclosed to the performers, so when they violated them, we would shoot them. The show got a lot of critical attention. It was quickly labeled “Performance Art.” We thought, we don’t see ourselves that way, but okay.
Seattle24x7:How DID you see yourselves?
Korby: We thought of ourselves as composers. These were concerts, just with a lot of other things happening at the same time. Eventually those “things” began to branch out into what were becoming large scale events.
Seattle24x7: Which ones?
Korby: The biggest thing we did was called “Iron Composer” which ran for two years in Seattle. It was a songwriting competition that began with a five minute interview with an audience member at the top of the show. Two well-known composers would listen to it and they would have 45 minutes to write a song. That’s the basis of the show, something remembered by a very few because all this other stuff happened.
We actually captured POWs that were musicians and actually forced them to write music for entertainment. Every 7 minutes you had to have a shot of whiskey, and then there were “The Turmoils.” We had a Buddy Holly paper airplane turmoil where the audience would thrown paper airplanes at the composers.
We broke a bunch of bar records and eventually played at the Showbox and EMP. We actually sold that show to Sony for their game show network to be televised as a series. Sadly, it never was produced. They sat on it for a year, but ended up switching CEO’s.
Seattle24x7: We like the over-the-top attitude!
Korby: I was born and raised in Texas and never really taught modesty or how to do things small. So whenever I do anything, it’s “let’s do the biggest three-ring circus we can.” THE TECH SHOW is going to be like this. One of our goals is for people to go to meetups and say, “Well, damn, this show isn’t like The Tech Show with Sasha Pasulka.”
Seattle24x7: How did you pivot into Meetups?
Korby: Meetups are the life blood of the tech and startup worlds. One reason is that a lot of techies are not at a job for very long. So the social meet up is the place to go in order to know what’s going on. In Seattle, there are several meetups every night of the week helping people to connect with each other, find out what jobs are out there, and hear people with voices of authority say some things you might not know about.
I looked at Meetups as a producer of large scale events and wondered why no one was thinking of the format of a meetup? How are people introduced? Where are the audiences for these events hanging out? And there were other questions: How come there’s no audio? No theme songs? Why are there are no serious introductions for people?
Meetups in San Francisco are just as boring as they are in Seattle. As far as format is concerned, they get done what they’re trying to get done which is just trying to connect people and share expertise.
It’s actually really beautiful that an industry has understood that a good idea can come from anywhere. Let’s get everyone together because who knows where the good stuff will happen?
My complaint is from the format point of view. People whose job it is to get other people’s attention, which just described the entire tech industry, ought to have a sense of entertainment, of presentation, one ought to assume. It’s interesting how that’s not always the case. You can have people with revolutionary ideas that have no idea how to give a Powerpoint presentation. At one level, that’s hard to understand.
Seattle24x7: Daring to question the conventional wisdom! How did the answers arrive to your poignant questions?
Korby: It seemed to me there are some very simple things that could be done that would make it seem more like a show. For one, we’re talking games, software, mobile development, IP, venture capital — this is the world’s economy right now. It’s funny because its origins are here in Seattle and San Francisco. And in both places the startup model is symbolized by a familiar but very old world icon — the garage. The garage is where people figure things out?
Sure, it has this nostalgic feel of modesty, of jeans and t-shirts, that people in the industry can keep. But I would offer up the opposite idea. You have now matured. You are now a vibrant economy on the world stage. You deserve something that is on the same level of importance of the work you are doing. Let’s do a show, not a meetup, but a show. If the “Ratpack” worked in the tech world, this would be the biggest show they would hang out at.
I think you need that. You may know you need that yet. But if you saw the show, you’d realize you actually did!
Seattle24x7: Technosaurus Events has a line-up of other events planned for the 2013 season?
Korby: We just started producing things last summer. The first show is going to be THE TECH SHOW w/Sasha Pasulka. That will occur every month, and be the backbone. In the Spring, I’m going to host a show every other month, which is Mobile A Go-Go, another game show. Then there will also be Art and Tech Speed Dating that will alternate every other month. Once a quarter we’re going to have this main event. There’s a lot of ideas we’re bouncing around.
Seattle24x7: Tell us about THE TECH SHOW’s host Sasha Pasulka?
Sasha knows the tech world well. She actually has a degree in computer science. And she has no problem speaking her mind. She’s also very funny. There’s something about this woman that just needs to be on a stage. In fact, she did a pilot for VH1, where she was going to be the host. She actually said that she really finds recorded shows to be frustrating to produce. She loves live events, so she liked that our show was taking that direction. It was the perfect fit all the way around. She just seemed like a natural fit. [24×7]
Find Technosaurus Events at http://technosaurusevents.com/
Catch our What’s Brewing Column on THE TECH SHOW.
