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" Pizza made me who I am. In the summer of 1998, I dropped out of college and started a pizza restaurant called Growlies in my hometown in rural Canada. My seed money: a credit card with a $20,000 limit. "

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" If you catch me lying, it's probably because I'm about to surprise someone for their birthday, or hide away the specific details about a company getaway to a strange but amazing place. "

Ryan Holmes

Surprise

Details

" The reality is that SXSW is packed with brilliant entrepreneurs, investors and partners. They're everywhere, zipping back and forth like thousands of atoms. Your chances of colliding with one actually improve just by standing still. "

Ryan Holmes

Reality

Standing

" As social is where consumers' eyeballs are, businesses must take ownership of their online company profiles. By providing their customers with a place to share content, social media managers can monitor and track content which directly relates to their brand. "

" Anyone with an inbox knows what I'm talking about. A dozen emails to set up a meeting time. Documents attached and edited and reedited until no one knows which version is current. Urgent messages drowning in forwards and cc's and spam. "

Ryan Holmes

Talking

Spam

" Everybody getting a significant exit creates a legacy and creates something that you can pay forward and bootstrap an industry in a substantial way. "

" LinkedIn and Flickr, among other sites, have already proven freemium can generate revenue in the social media context. "

" The growing role of enterprise social media, plus the growing budgets and authority of CMOs entrusted with choosing the best platforms, translates into an exciting future for apps that harness social potential for large companies. "

" I'd love to build a brand, a legacy. "

" I think that Vancouver as well as Canada needs a boot camp for young entrepreneurs. We have already seen tens if not hundreds of people put their names forward to be involved in the program, and we just think this is an amazing way to accelerate what they're doing. "

" Social media is the future, with employers recognizing they need to start hiring people with the right skills. "

" As an entrepreneur, the pressures of a startup can be enormous, but it's rarely life or death. "

" Social media teams tend to be decentralized - a motley mix of in-house experts, off-site consultants and international partners. The result: Confusion, rogue tweets, and off-message posts are almost inevitable. The worst gaffes live on in social media infamy. "

" Amongst high unemployment rates, a competitive job market and a shrinking global economy, the emerging social media industry only continues to grow. "

" An exit is only a success if you set an exit as your primary goal. My primary goal was to build a globally influential tool, to build something from the ground up that could literally change how we communicated in business and individually. "

" Landing a million-dollar investment for your startup is exhilarating. But as big as that number sounds, it doesn't go far. Many startups just getting off the ground won't have a CFO to monitor finances. It doesn't take much for spending to spiral out of control. "

Ryan Holmes

Ground

Investment

" Entrepreneurs, by disposition, are built to think big. When a role no longer affords those opportunities, it might be best to leave it in capable hands and move on. "

" Working with lots of old media clients, I've had a front-row seat on the ascension of new social players and the decline of traditional news outlets. And it's clear to me that old media has an awful lot to learn from social media, in particular in five key areas: relevance, distribution, velocity, monetization, and user experience. "

" From its humble origins in college dorm rooms, social media has quietly crept into the boardroom. "

" The basic idea of email has remained essentially unchanged since the first networked message was sent in 1971. And while email is great for one-on-one, formal correspondence, there are far better tools for collaboration. "

" Payfirma has revolutionized the payment process, consolidating mobile, e-commerce and in-store payments under a single solution, much like HootSuite did for social media. "

" Every day I'd come home after school, pop the hood of my mom's car, put alligator clips on the battery, and wire into the house and go play on my computer. If I used it for too long, I'd wear down the car battery, and my mom would be all mad at me the next day. "

Ryan Holmes

School

Day

" One of the ironies of a conference dedicated to all things digital and virtual is that the best ways to connect with people are surprisingly old-school. Social media tools can improve the odds of a serendipitous encounter at SXSW, but old-fashioned hustle, palm-pressing and - above all - creativity go a long way. "

" South America's most populous country, Brazil, is also emerging as one of the region's most social-media savvy. "

" Social media listening tools make it easy to track brand references and mentions, and these functions can still be handled ably by a small, dedicated team. "

" Social media is the most disruptive form of communication humankind has seen since the last disruptive form of communications, email. "

" Hammer down product fundamentals first. Make sure you've got something that works before doubling down on promotion and marketing. Create a groundswell of organic support, and only then leverage PR and advertising to spread the word. "

" Facebook, Twitter and Google have all opened offices in Brazil, recognizing the importance of localizing their products and customer service efforts. "

" A critical question to ask when bringing in a new CEO to take the reins of a company you started is: Do you want someone who will maintain company culture or reinvent it? "

" Social media has given companies access to unprecedented amounts of information on client behavior and preferences - so-called Big Data. But making sense of it all and turning it into actionable policy has been elusive. "

" As an entrepreneur, one of the biggest challenges you will face will be building your brand. The ultimate goal is to set your company and your brand apart from the crowd. If you form a strategy without doing the research, your brand will barely float - and at the speed industries move at today, brands sink fast. "