Aaron Mason (LinkedIn photo)
Aaron Mason, 36, of San Francisco, isn't exactly a household name.
But he's known among techies, having helped launch four companies, NPR reports. He also has 70,000 Twitter followers. "I'm passionate about using technology to bring people together, and I'm working to bridge the digital divide," he writes on his LinkedIn page.
Now, he's talking up the benefits of a move to Detroit.
"Having a yard, having a garden, starting a family, those kinds of things," Mason tells NPR of the benefits of fleeing California for the mountainless Motown. It's not just the lifestyle possibilities intriguing him about Michigan — he thinks it might be easier to launch company number five in Detroit.
"Coming from a place like San Francisco, real estate here is really expensive. And so to go to a place like Detroit and see that you have fairly cheap space, and an infrastructure that is already in place, it's a very exciting place to be," Mason says.
NPR reports that Mason has been speaking with Ned Staebler, the CEO of TechTown Detroit, a nonprofit business incubator located in Midtown.
But NPR asks if he has any hesitations moving here, and Mason says:
"The winters."
Understandable.
Professor Jerry Davis has a start-up class at the University of Michigan, and he tells young folks to forget the Bay area, according to the NPR report. He speaks with some authority, having lived the Silicon Valley and gotten a Ph.D. from Stanford University.
"You spend a whole lot of your time on freeways. It's expensive, it's annoying. The weather is beautiful, but basically the Bay Area has turned into Los Angeles," Davis tells NPR. "All the things that people hate about LA are now true of the Bay Area."
