Casey Neistat, YouTuber with over 1 billion views and entrepreneur, spoke about his career evolution in the film and tech industry today at SXSW Interactive.

He began his panel introducing the “Tarzan Method” which in short means; there is no magical straight path that will lead us into reaching our goals and aspirations in life. In order to meet these goals, you must navigate through the jungle first by keeping an open mind and swinging from vine to vine until you reach your destination. Because of Neistat’s success, most of his viewers believe he became one of YouTube’s biggest stars overnight, which he made very clear was not the case.

With dreams of becoming a filmmaker at a young age, Neistat decided to make the risky move to leave his hometown and move to New York City. He took on a job as a bike messenger to make money after his move to New York City, which he emphasized how badly he hated it during his panel.

Neistat got his foot in the door into videography with his brother, Van, and began a project of their own. Although it wasn’t a prominent platform in the early 2000’s, Neistat began to push his videos to the Internet.

Neistat’s first paid gig as a videographer was at a birthday party. Fast forward to today, Neistat now gets asked from big brands like Nike, Samsung and more to make promotional videos for their company.

The advice he gave to someone who wants to follow his path was to “do something that’s different and do something that is true to you.”

Neistat is now a successful YouTuber, filmmaker and entrepreneur who is co-founding a whole new company with CNN Worldwide.

Before making it inside Neistat’s panel, I waited a little over an hour behind a long tail of excited attendees. One attendee in particular, Eddie Seslowsky, Senior Vice President at Warner Bros., was extremely excited to hear some of Neistat’s inspiring words. He was also excited to be a part of SXSW Interactive for the first time after only attending the music panels previous years. Seslowsky graciously took the time to share his excitement for SXSW with the SXTXState team! Take a look at his video below.

Thank you to Eddie for stopping to chat with me!