Action in Ann Arbor, MI

Late last year, my partner Jason Mendelson and I took a trip to Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan. Jason is an alum, I was merely an interloper. We each had an awesome time and wrote two posts about it – Entrepreneurship in Ann Arbor, Michigan and College Is Like A Sandbox.

Yesterday, our good friend Roger Ehrenberg, also a Michigan alum wrote a post titled Thoughts from Ann Arbor. He covered a bunch of stuff we saw, but also found a few new interesting things.

Regardless, it’s pretty clear that Ann Arbor is working hard at building out a robust startup community around the base of the University of Michigan. I’ve always had a mental model that Ann Arbor is a cool college town that had a lot of similarities to Boulder. It’s fun to see it really come alive on the startup front. And I loved the punch line from Roger’s post:

“While I’ll deal with my view of the next generation of data scientists in a subsequent post, I am incredibly interested in helping to build a dedicated program towards this end at Michigan. All the pieces are there. It just requires some cross-departmental cooperation in order to bring it to life. This is one of my missions for my alma mater: help to pull together a data science program that empowers student/practitioners to solve tomorrow’s problems today. It can be done. It must be done. It will be done.”

Can you name a few famous University of Michigan entrepreneurial alumni? I can. Some might surprise you.