kj1210

As I mentioned in the posts comments, one thing the valley has that many cities don't is a completely different perspective on failure. In the valley, if you don't have a successful exit on your startup, no one jumps on you in a bad way. Everyone understands the challenge and knows you learned from it. First thing people say are, "So, what's next?".

This allows people to try things more and take risk. Something that our Michigan and Detroit culture don't have built into our makeup. It's definitely changing and sites like GrowDetroit and their community are making big strides in changing this mentality.

Silicon Valley encompasses many cities in a "region". Here in Detroit, we don't have a name (yet?) to describe the region so we use Detroit to encompass the whole area. Ann Arbor falls within that area. It's roughly a 45 minute drive from Ann Arbor to Detroit...or 35 minutes for me ;)

The Detroit "region" or sometimes known as "Detroit Urban Area" or "Metro Detroit", is actually quite large and has many beautiful communities with in it. This wikipedia page sums it up well. The "region" is actually the 9th most populated urban area in the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Detroit

People also forget how large the actual city of Detroit is. If you look at the map linked below, you'll see that Boston, San Fran, and Manhattan all can fit within the city limits of Detroit.

http://markmaynard.com/?p=56