By Anmol Narula, student in the M.S. in Technology Management program
Global tech entrepreneurship has never been more accessible, but geography still significantly influences its trajectory. While ideas can originate anywhere, they mature in specific places with the right combination of capital, talent, and institutional support. New York City represents one of these rare convergence points, and Columbia sits in the center of it.
Columbia’s M.S. in Technology Management (TMGT) program introduced me to New York’s tech scene through events and networking opportunities. This year, with encouragement from the TMGT program, I had the opportunity to expose myself to innovative ideas from other parts of the world at the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas.
SXSW began as a music festival but has evolved into something more complex: an annual meeting of technology, media, and culture. When I found out SXSW offered student pricing, I saw it as more than convenient access. It was an opportunity to map how innovation networks actually function across cities and continents. What I discovered wasn’t just a conference. It was a powerful example of global tech entrepreneurship in motion.
Here are a few takeaways from my experience at SXSW.
Institutional Advantage
Columbia’s TMGT program provides something subtle but crucial in environments like SXSW: interpretive frameworks. I used the knowledge I’ve developed in the program to make sense of everything I was seeing. While others were collecting business cards and attending panels, I found myself spotting patterns across industries and ideas. The program doesn’t just teach you about technology; it helps you see differently.
That’s important because innovation often happens where fields overlap. The most exciting companies aren’t focused on just one thing. They bring together ideas from different areas. Being able to move between these worlds and understand their different “languages” is a real advantage.
The Columbia affiliation also functions as a qualification in rooms where credibility determines access. But more importantly, it provides analytical tools for making sense of what you encounter once you’re inside.
The Convergence Point
SXSW is a rare kind of event in the digital age — a place where people from many different corners of the tech, media, and creative worlds come together in person. Despite all the talk of remote work and decentralization, physical proximity still creates irreplaceable value. New York City also embodies this concept. Ideas spread differently when people share the same space and energy. SXSW’s dense gatherings often lead to partnerships and investments that flow back to hubs like New York, whose unmatched mix of finance, media, tech, and culture continues to anchor global innovation.
At SXSW, New York arrives with urgency, from founders developing pitches to investors closing deals over breakfast tacos. San Francisco brings frontier tech, with AI researchers and Web3 builders sharing bold visions. Los Angeles contributes its entertainment power, blending storytelling, gaming, and content creation into new immersive experiences.
The presence of voices from Lagos, Bangalore, São Paulo, and Berlin also added to these discussions. These weren’t peripheral participants observing American innovation; they were core contributors to a conversation that has long since transcended geography.
Exploring New and Evolving Ideas: Takeaways from Five Fascinating Events
(l to r): John Maeda, VP of engineering and head of computational design, Microsoft; Marques Brownlee, YouTuber, podcaster; Scott Galloway, New York University professor, podcaster, entrepreneur.
Scott Galloway’s analysis cut through the noise of tech valuations to reveal underlying structural shifts. His prediction that Meta will dominate the AI landscape in 2025, backed by the company’s access to more unique human language data than Google, Reddit, and Wikipedia combined, wasn’t speculation but rather pattern recognition applied to platform dynamics already in motion. He cautioned that tech consolidation is already happening, and it's not just a future projection.
John Maeda’s 2025 Design in Tech report identified a fundamental paradigm shift: the evolution from user experience (UX) to agent experience (AX). Maeda explained that the future isn’t about designing interfaces for humans to use AI but about designing systems for AI agents to interact with one another directly.
Digital and traditional media converged during Marques Brownlee’s live Waveform podcast taping. Brownlee’s first-ever live show covered Apple Intelligence delays and addressed audience questions about AI and health tech, demonstrating how YouTube’s most influential tech voices now command audiences that rival those of traditional media. The platform’s evolution in the past 20 years has transformed creators into media moguls building entertainment empires that directly compete with legacy studios. The message was clear: YouTube is no longer an alternative media platform but has become the primary destination where global audiences gather for both entertainment and information.
(l to r): Ben Stiller, actor and producer, with Eddy Cue, SVP of services, Apple; actor Joe Manganiello interviewing Colossal Labs CEO Ben Lamm.
A conversation between Eddy Cue, Apple’s SVP of services, and Ben Stiller, executive producer and director of the TV show Severance, also revealed how completely tech and entertainment have merged. Stiller openly acknowledged the parallels between the show’s fictional corporation and Apple itself, including the circular architecture, reverence for the founder, and corporate mystique.
Ben Lamm’s presentation on colossal biosciences highlighted how genetic engineering has transitioned from theory to practice. The company has successfully brought back the dire wolf, which was extinct for more than 10,000 years, using DNA from ancient teeth and skulls. His assertion that humanity has a “moral obligation” to pursue de-extinction technology positioned biotechnology not as science fiction but as a conservation imperative. The $10.2 billion valuation suggests investors agree.
Lessons from Austin
SXSW offered a preview of an increasingly networked future where innovation emerges from the collision of previously separate domains. But it also confirmed something more fundamental: Successful participation in global tech entrepreneurship requires strategic positioning within systems larger than any single city or conference.
The TMGT program teaches students to decode these complex systems and access them in a meaningful way while also welcoming and immersing them in the great tech hub of New York City. In a world where the most interesting problems span disciplines and geographies, the ability to translate between domains becomes a key form of leverage.
The real insight from Austin wasn’t about Austin at all: It was about understanding how to position yourself at the intersection of global flows and local advantages. From Columbia’s perch in Manhattan, the world’s innovation networks become not just observable but actionable.
About the Program
Columbia University’s Master of Science in Technology Management is a hands-on technology leadership development program designed to train professionals for equal fluency in tech fundamentals, business operations, and ethical leadership.
The program is available for part-time or full-time enrollment. Learn more about the program here.
