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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me

All my sins remembered: Playing accordion at SxSW 2008

Joey deVilla plays accordion onstage in front of a panel at South by Southwest Interactive 2008 while Rannie Turingan looks on. You can see Tim Ferriss' name card (but not Tim himself).
Still one of the best photos of me playing. Tap the photo at full size.

I’ve had many great first weeks on the job, but this first week on the job had a particularly unfair advantage: I was working at b5media, and the timing was such that my first week on the job was the same week the company went to the South by Southwest Interactive Festival 2008 — that’s the one where Airbnb launched and got only two bookings.

I arrived on Day 1 of the festival and was going to spend a long time in the registration line, when some friends — Min Jung Kim and Rannie Turingan — who were on the “How to Kick Ass at Your First SxSW” panel heard I’d arrived. They somehow used their panel host powers to fast-track me through registration, bring me up to their panel (which was full of big names), and then play accordion for the audience.

That’s what the photo above shows. The best part? I’m literally upstaging Tim Ferriss.

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