By the time my plane touched down in Texas the first half of this story was already written.

By the time I left town I had thrown out about five drafts and was pretty sure this story would never see the page.

Why was I in Texas? I was going to SXSW, which is basically what would happen if you took the web tech industry, spun it around in a mixing bowl and poured it out into the streets of Austin. To the extent that there are panels and events, it’s a conference, but I am sure some people say the same thing about Burning Man.

Back to my story.

I was going to write about startups, entrepreneurs, creative-types the people who shuffle out of their basement offices once a year to show off their shiny new ideas to the throngs of press, money-people and enthusiasts who fill the conference halls.

I picked this topic for a good reason, maybe the best reason. Last year what I saw was nothing short of a carnival, with everything from rapid fire pitches complete with samples of organic food-stuffs in the after-party line to one company that showered $5 bills with business cards attached on the heads of unsuspecting conference goers. Armed with these memories, I was ready to hunt down the weirdest, wackiest and most hilarious of these bits of human ingenuity and sum them up in a 1000 words or so to justify my press credentials.

Then things changed.

I don’t know when I started to feel it, but as I sat through the panels and chatted with the always awesome folks who came out, I could tell something was different. In years past you couldn’t walk ten steps without tripping over someone’s new calendar app; this year you certainly had products but many of them were well established, more complex and otherwise felt less like the basement startups of old and more like real, viable businesses.

What else did you have that was different? Grown ups.

The conference hall was filled with representatives from agencies, corporate employees and business owners all in search of some fundamental understanding of what the web has to offer. These people were there expressly for the purpose of finding ways to transform the things that we play around with into cash for their businesses, many of which represent broad cross-sections of the Forbes 100.

It was downright odd, and it left me spending far more time than I should have sitting around Value Place at 5AM trying to put my head around what had happened.

What did I come up with? It’s hard to say really, though here are a few guesses.

Let’s start with the startups.

The industry of pulling ideas out of your imagination and building companies around them is heavily fueled by venture dollars. You need someone, somewhere to believe in you enough to decide to throw large sums of money behind your musings. Last year those dollars stopped flowing. Recession economics caused many VCs to pull out of speculation and focus their shrinking war chests on making their existing projects profitable. This type of squeeze does two things — the first is that it acts as a filter, rationing dollars to ideas that seem most likely to turn into cash. The second is that it forces entrepreneurs to be more thoughtful about the ideas that they pitch. Both of these factors translate into fewer, stronger companies showing up to pitch because everyone else will have been priced out of the market.

Darwin would be proud of that particular bit of reasoning but that still doesn’t explain why SXSW nearly doubled in attendance this year. If the entrepreneurs are being priced out, who is filling their seats?

The real world.

Well, as close to the real world as you get in this industry.

It was the Marketers, PR folks, agencies and web design firms who over the last year have heard the preaching about “new media” and were finally in the position to fly someone out to Austin to bring back the good word. You also have the agencies who have been working in this field, whose corporate clients have asked them to attend to manage campaigns or speak. In short, The eyes and ears of big companies were in attendance, watching our little dance and listening for nuggets of wisdom to bring back to their bosses and integrate into next seasons campaigns.

All of these small shifts came together to create a different kind of culture — one that represents a different kind of web industry. If two years ago was about web celebrity and last year was the age of the startup, this year the most novel thing you would see when you wandered the halls was just how many large companies were paying attention, how many startups were actually thinking about their business models, and how much more focus (at least outside the panels) was being put on the fundamentals of a changing industry instead of the hype.

It was refreshing, scary, amazing, uncomfortable change and it happened because we changed. Every aspect of it is a reflection of what we’ve spent the last 365 days working on, and whether you think that’s the greatest thing in the world or a tragedy of the highest order, at the end of the day you’re responsible for it, I’m responsible for it and so is the industry as a whole.

Short list of people who helped inspire this piece in a variety of subtle but important ways –

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