It's in San Francisco. Or Palo Alto. Or Austin. Or New York City. Or wherever this week's demo day is. Founders pitch from a stage to investors who will see fifty more pitches that day. The energy is electric. The deal flow is real. The terms can move fast enough to make your head spin.

I always thought we could build from Detroit. So did my co-founders at UpTo. So did my team when we built what became StockX.

So we did.

We built our companies overlooking the Detroit River and along Woodward Avenue where the world changing Model T first ran freely.

That's not to say we didn't spend any time on the coasts though. We did walk Sand Hill Road for UpTo but most of our money came directly from Detroit and Midwest-based venture firms. StockX raised its initial capital because those same investors believed in us. StockX has since raised money globally. These investments in both us and the products we built confirmed what I already knew. Detroit has its own grit; we build from where we're at.

Steve Case puts it well: "It's stunning to me what kind of an impact even one person can have if they have the right passion, perspective and are able to align the interest of a great team."

This is what actually builds companies. The pitch circuit doesn't.

That's true on Sand Hill Road, and it's true at the founder pitch contests right here in Detroit — the local circuit has the same gravity, just at smaller scale. Pitch culture rewards vanity metrics: users, growth rate, total addressable market (TAM), "engagement." A customer telling you they wish your product did one specific thing is information. An investor or a judge telling you your TAM looks small is information too, but it's a different kind. None of that is what actually makes a company. Customer discovery does. Getting customers to pay for something that saves them time, money, or energy — that does.

Solve the customer's problem and they will give you money. That's the whole loop. Everything else is performance.

I've coached a lot of founders at this point. The ones I see making the most damaging decisions are usually the ones who build product without talking to customers or who are closest to capital. Not because capital is bad. Because the room rewires you. You start optimizing for the next round instead of the next customer. You start telling the story your investors want to hear, and then — because human beings are bad at holding two stories in their heads — you start believing it. By the time the story breaks, you're well past the point where a smaller, harder pivot would have saved you.

So when a founder in Detroit asks me whether they should move, the honest answer is usually no. Not unless they already have product-market fit and they're tapping into the coasts to scale a thing that's already working. If they're going there to find their business, they'll find an enthusiastic ecosystem that will help them build a great pitch deck for a business that doesn't exist yet. They will be building in a sea of companies that will drown out their voice.

The room I'm not in has a lot to offer. I don't want to romanticize being away from it. There are deals I haven't been in, people I haven't met, momentum I haven't ridden. There is more and quicker access to capital to build and scale faster. That's all real.

But there's also a kind of clarity that comes from building in a place that is rooting you on. That is excited for you and encourages the grit you are fighting with. It isn't watching you build for investors, it's watching you build to change the world, and to solve a problem you care deeply about for the customer you are fighting for. It doesn't have the other noise, it lets you find and focus on your customers directly. The actual market. The thing the company is supposed to be for.

I get to hear them. They get to be heard.

That trade is fine with me.