I grew up in Michigan and this makes sense to me. There's a long tradition of entrepreneurship to draw on. Grand Rapids was once known as "Furniture City" [1]; Steelcase and Herman Miller are still based in the area. Detroit's car companies produced a lot of small businesses across the state making auto parts; I spent a very sweaty summer running injection molding machines in a plant that made things like taillights and mirror rims.
For more tech-ish things, the University of Michigan has a number of solid programs, strong enough that half its students come from out of state. (Google's Larry Page did his undergrad there, for example, and he seems to have done ok.) I graduated before the Internet bubble, but even then there were a bunch of small tech companies in Ann Arbor staffed by people who liked the area enough to stay. And there's now a lot more explicit support for entrepreneurship, like Wayne State's TechTown: https://techtowndetroit.org/programs/
I'll be really interested to see how this goes now that the pandemic has broken a lot of traditional views about the need for tech companies to be within a stone's throw of Sand Hill Road money. I always suspected that was more about investors not wanting to travel than it was about practical necessity. If getting capital becomes easier, I expect to see a boom in the area.
For more tech-ish things, the University of Michigan has a number of solid programs, strong enough that half its students come from out of state. (Google's Larry Page did his undergrad there, for example, and he seems to have done ok.) I graduated before the Internet bubble, but even then there were a bunch of small tech companies in Ann Arbor staffed by people who liked the area enough to stay. And there's now a lot more explicit support for entrepreneurship, like Wayne State's TechTown: https://techtowndetroit.org/programs/
I'll be really interested to see how this goes now that the pandemic has broken a lot of traditional views about the need for tech companies to be within a stone's throw of Sand Hill Road money. I always suspected that was more about investors not wanting to travel than it was about practical necessity. If getting capital becomes easier, I expect to see a boom in the area.
[1] https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/michigan/articl...