ror-timeline5On June 24, the interns of Styleshack were fortunate enough to go to a Fireside chat hosted by Up Global that featured the renowned entrepreneurs, Steve Case and Dan Gilbert.  Although Detroit and Denver were constantly mixed up – by the end it became a running joke – both men offered their own words of wisdom on Detroit and its startup culture.

The talk was truly inspiring.  The crowd, consisting of startup founders and workers, got to see real life examples of startups that made it big.  Most people don’t realize that AOL and Quicken Loans both started as small startups, each grew slowly and worked hard to expand.  Everyone uses Facebook and Twitter as the poster children for today’s tech startups, but both Dan and Steve agree, they are the exception to the norm.  Most do not grow that fast!

The entire crowd was graced with the life stories of each company.  According to both men, the key to success is failure.  Living in an industrious city, we have the predisposition that failure is bad.  If you failed in the auto industry and were fired, it was the end of the world.  Yet with startups, failure is good.  When you fail, you learn from it, you grow, and you make sure you avoid that in the future; failure means that you are pushing yourself to your limits.  Detroit has failed and just like a startup, we need to realize failure is only the beginning.

The take-away from everything they said was that Detroit has perseverance.  We fight, we fail and we fall, but despite everything we get back up and we persevere.  Dan knows it, Steve knows it and now the world knows it.  As word of Detroit on the rise continues to come out, more people are being attracted back to the Midwest.  Startups are the now the backbone of our recovery, creating jobs, innovation and, most importantly, community.  So if you work in a startup, founded a startup or want to start one, do it and love what you do! Passion is all we need to continue to pick Detroit up by its bootstraps and put us back on the map.- Connor Yee1979891_10201756674300407_404690224_n