conference room. “You look at other startup ecosystems—we studied Boulder, we studied Boston, we studied Silicon Valley—they all have these accelerators that are doing the real heavy lifting. Detroit didn’t have an accelerator, so we’ve lost a lot of great talent to these other cities.”
The short-term goal, he explains, is to help entrepreneurs get their ideas off the ground and start generating revenue, thereby creating jobs and eventually contributing some legitimate economic growth for the city.
At Bizdom, this is being done through a nonprofit model that includes a lot of hands-on business training and mentorship. Many of the entrepreneurs that enter the Bizdom program—six potential companies are accepted into the program per session, Sanders says, with three sessions per year—come with little more than a good idea and a business plan. These aren’t experienced entrepreneurs. Bizdom kicks in up to $25,000 in seed funding and, with the support of Gilbert’s family of companies, helps the entrepreneurs get their companies set up and running. They come from all over the country—two founders even recently came to town from Silicon Valley, Sanders says proudly—and are required to keep their company headquartered in Detroit once they complete the program.
“Most people know Dan Gilbert because he’s the majority owner of the Cavs; he’s the founder of Quicken Loans,” Sanders says. “But most people don’t know he also has this network of sixty businesses that he’s associated with. So we heavily leverage this network. So not only do we have full-time trainers out here to work with the businesses, but we pull in experts from this family of companies. For example, the woman who does SEO over at Quicken Loans does a whole thing on SEO [for our companies]. Josh Linkner over at DVP does a whole thing on how to pitch to investors. Rock Ventures, which is Dan’s private equity firm, does a whole thing on business valuation.”
In exchange for all this support and training, Bizdom takes an 8 percent stake in each business. All proceeds from its various startups are then funneled back into the nonprofit fund for use in other business funding efforts, and as of 2013, two Bizdom companies were making payments back into the fund. Sanders expects the program to be self-sustaining in this way within the next several years.
“If you can go and produce a startup and create a couple of jobs, you’re a hero in my opinion, because that’s pretty hard to do,” he says. “And if you can make a great business out of it, that’s even better; that’s a huge accomplishment. But if you can do that in Detroit? I think the appeal of Detroit for some startups is that in Detroit you get to affect the outcome. We truly believe that the next five to ten years is going to be a period that historians will write about, about how Detroit came out of this whole tailspin with manufacturing. And there will be certain businesses that they write about that are going to be startups.”
Go to Silicon Valley and start a business; that’s great and more power to you. But doing the same thing in southeastern Michigan is about more than just your own startup and your own personal goals. “Here you’re really affecting a whole city and a region. With Detroit’s success goes the region’s success,” says Sanders.
DVP’s Ted Serbinski agrees, singing the Madison’s praises and calling the building one of the best locations in Detroit for what he and the others are trying to achieve.
“The startup ecosystem was very fragmented in Michigan,” he says. “There was a lot of stuff going on around Ann Arbor, some stuff in Birmingham, which is one of the nicer suburbs. But Detroit was really in disarray. Dan Gilbert’s whole premise is what he calls the ‘big bang theory.’ It’s that we need everything at once. We need high-tech jobs, we need residential units, and we need commercial spaces. And the impetus for a lot of that is the fact that startups create the most change. We have to build a brain economy, and we need tech jobs.”
It’s all about connectivity, between companies, between entrepreneurs, and between investors. The physical space of the Madison and the community it has nurtured has, many in the city believe, raised the probability that this will all pay off in the end.
Most of Downtown Detroit still consists of vintage steel and concrete office towers—including a collection of beautiful gothic skyscrapers—and a handful of parking garages. Street-level activity is all but nonexistent (though I’m told it is quite a bit better now than it was just a few years ago), and unless you’re walking to a Red Wings or Tigers game, it’s unlikely you’ll spend much time on the sidewalks, especially after dark. This is a block-by-block city. Near Comerica Park or the General Motors headquarters at Renaissance Center you might as well be in Chicago or New York, but stray too far off the beaten path and things get rough. Quick. There are few restaurants and bars, or anything else that would draw people downtown in the evenings, and it has been that way for years.
The blocks around the Madison, however, are strikingly different.
Coming up the block to the building, located directly across the street from the half-moon-shaped Grand Circus Park, the “differentness” of the Madison is obvious. There’s a small plates-style restaurant a few doors down, complete with New York–style sidewalk seating, and an organic bakery on the corner. It’s different, and it’s a welcome change compared to the gritty urban canyons that surround it, but it’s just the start of what Gilbert has in mind for Detroit.
Gilbert’s end goal is to overhaul the entire downtown core, updating existing buildings, improving retail and restaurant spaces, and even adding new residential units between Grand Circus and the Detroit River.
It’s a huge project. It’s at least seven blocks of Woodward Avenue—nicknamed “Webward Avenue” due to all of the tech startups moving into the area—much of which is currently all but abandoned, and capital investment in the millions to bring these buildings not only up to code but also up to modern-day standards of desirability. Most of these buildings, which Gilbert is admittedly picking up for pennies on the dollar, need wiring and electrical updates, but they also need structural improvements, new ceilings, new paint, and all sorts of other renovations.
But it appears to be working, if slowly, and the neighborhood is already visibly changing.
In order to get a better view of this entire project, I caught up with Eric Randolph, a manager with Gilbert’s real estate firm, Bedrock Management, for a tour of the “new” Downtown Detroit. Starting at the Madison, Gilbert’s companies have bought more than a dozen existing structures in the immediate area, all the way down Woodward Avenue to the river, with plans to pick up additional properties to the east and west as the project progresses.
It starts at Grand Circus, which is immediately adjacent to the Madison. The thirty-five-floor Broderick Tower is one of Detroit’s iconic skyscrapers and, until recently, was one of the better-known emblems of the city’s decline. Completed in 1928, the Broderick was at one time the second-tallest building in Michigan and, until renovations began in 2010, had fallen into disrepair and sat empty for years. Now it, and the 1997-era humpback whale mural that’s painted on its side, is one of the hottest residential addresses in the city, with some 125 apartments on the upper floors, many of which are occupied by Madison-related tenants. In fact, it’s becoming something of a “dorm” for Detroit’s young entrepreneurs.
Detroit Labs cofounder Dan Ward, whom I met while touring the Madison, lived downtown for about two years prior to this most recent overhaul and says urban life in the city is definitely doable, despite what many outside the area might think.
“You miss out on some things, service things like groceries and laundry,” he says, “but it’s getting fixed. You adapt how you live a little bit, but it’s a city, so you’re going to do that anyway. But it’s great. You can go out, walk around. It’s a city like any other.”
Back on our tour, Randolph and I stop at 1527 Woodward Avenue, the future home of Bizdom.
