writing checks until the bubble burst.
In many ways, Michigan, and the Midwest in general, is the anti-Silicon Valley. While Michigan entrepreneurs are certainly smart and hardworking, they lack one crucial instinct engrained in West Coast tech culture, Cross says: collaboration.
In Silicon Valley, it’s not uncommon to see teams of engineers and developers from rival startups brainstorming ideas and working on code in coffee shops. In Michigan, entrepreneurs operate in “silos,” Cross says, and often hoard ideas like they were rare baseball cards.
In the movie, Parker learns of Facebook from a Stanford student. Intrigued, he flies across the country to talk shop with Zuckerberg, whom he never met before.
Cross didn’t exactly say this, but my sense is Michigan could use a Sean Parker or two, spontaneous and slightly crazy visionaries who seduce people with big ideas and drive investors nuts with their arrogance and disdain for traditional power structures.
Midwesterners, in my experience, are generally hardworking but cautious individuals whose outward friendliness belies an aversion to risk and confrontation. Sharing your ideas with a potential rival is certainly risky, but the results could ultimately benefit everyone.
So imagine if we could combine the hardworking pragmatism of the Midwest with the energy, creativity, and craziness of Silicon Valley. What we would we get?
A Sean Parker that might actually care about business models for one thing. But also a collaborative approach to disruptive innovation that not only tolerates risk but revels in it.
