Inside The M@dison, Downtown Detroit’s Tech Startup Hub [TCTV]


Downtown Detroit has sadly not been known in recent years for having a bustling business vibe, but the people at the M@dison Building are working overtime to turn that around.

Housed in a nearly 100 year old building that used to house Detroit’s first major movie theater, the M@dison is a 5-story, 50,000 square foot space dedicated to all things that go along with technology and digital startups: Entrepreneurs, developers, business people, and investors are all in the mix. Dan Gilbert (the billionaire businessman behind Quicken Loans) has led the charge in building out the M@dison, buying the building in early 2011 and spearheading a $12 million renovation of the space. After opening its doors in January of this year, the M@dison is now at 100 percent occupancy.

We were in Detroit earlier this month for the TechCrunch Northern Meetups and took an afternoon to check out the M@dison and talk to some of the folks there. In the video embedded above, you can get a bit of a look around and hear from the founders of M@dison-based startups including interior decorator Doodle Home, web CAPTCHA alternative Are You A Human, social plans sharing platform UpTo, and green energy freelance engineering network Greenlancer.

In the video embedded below, you can see our sit-down with Josh Linkner, the CEO and managing partner of Detroit Venture Partners, which is also based in the M@dison building. Linkner is a huge champion of all things Detroit tech, so it was a pleasure to talk with him in person about the city.

We also met with Ross Sanders, who heads up Bizdom, a Detroit- and Cleveland-focused non-profit startup accelerator that also calls the M@dison home. You can watch that conversation in this video: