I try to travel to entrepreneurial hotspots as often as I can to keep my motivation and skill set high. The run is usually between the east coast (usually nyc) and Silicon Valley. This year, as business tends to be slow in January anyway and I have no real interest in winter, I headed off to Mountain View, CA for several weeks to immerse myself in meetups and demos. I love places like Mountain View. Normally when you go to a bar and sit down on a stool, the lateral chatter you unintentionally field has to do with sports, alimony or the mundanities of whatever job the chatterer is tired of. When you sit down at a Mountain View bar, even a rowdy one like Molly McGees on Castro, all the conversations around you things like “…it sounds really interesting, but how is he going to monetize…” or “…they got seeded by YC and they’re working on closing their second round with Sequoia…”.

The place is literally a buzz with the fire of proactive entrepreneurialism.

A drive down the street will show you a perfect mix of 2010 Audi R8s and 1987 Toyota Corollas, and the owners of each are sitting next to each other in the same restaurants, talking about the same things. It’s well accepted that at any given moment, the owner of that Toyota could trade up to the Audi. Current status does not denote future possibility in an entrepreneurial hotspot.

My central destination in Mountain View was the recently opened Hacker Dojo (http://www.hackerdojo.com), a communal brain trust for programmers and startups that acted as an extended dorm room and business incubator in line with tech heavies like Noise Bridge in San Francisco. Opened in October of 2009, the facility was fairly new, though it already had a list of startup success stories, national press coverage and several major venture capital firms watching the Dojo’s denizens like hawks. I planned on doing the trip on the cheap, as I had little money and needed a vehicle while out there. I didn’t know anyone in Mountain View and didn’t exactly know if the Dojo was what I hoped it was, but regardless, in early January I climbed into my Jeep, set my GPS for 140 South Whisman Road and started the 2500 mile drive across flyover country.

After about 5 Robert Kiyosaki audio books, a glorious vehicle shutdown in the mountains of Wyoming and 2 freezing nights on an air mattress in the back of my car, I arrived at Hacker Dojo. In true silicon valley style, I was met by a handful of techies, playing with a frisbee and talking about memory management methods for distributed cloud computing… I was home.

While saving the details of the facility’s general wickedness for another article (complete with accompanying video), the place is incredible. There are at any given time five to 20 startups developing in the various rooms of the Dojo. The largest and most interactive area being the center of the top floor, where two long tables turn the space into a hacker’s high school lunch room. Each table has programmers lining either side, with each of their laptops backed up to the person across the row from them. Everyone is working on a different company or project. At random times throughout the day, the group alternates between verbal chiding and impromptu tutorial sessions. They train one another on developing technologies as they are learned, collectively raising the skill set of the entire group.

I ended up meeting and befriending many people during my several week stay. I learned incredible amounts across many topics, in a way that could only happen by total immersion into a place like Hacker Dojo and as I climbed into my Jeep at the end of my geek sabbatical, the only thing that rang in my head is “why doesn’t this exist in Detroit?”

During my 40 hour drive home, the main thing that bounced around in my mind was the benefit it would have on the entrepreneurial community in Michigan to have a resource like Hacker Dojo. Some places offered the promise of a place like the Dojo, but didn’t really deliver. Concepts like Automation Alley and Tech Town are strong, but they are largely networking opportunities, not communities or facilities like the Hacker Dojo. Smaller communities like i3detroit also exist, but they cater more to the creative and artistic sectors versus the outright entrepreneurial.

They also aren’t tied directly to the center of Silicon Valley.

I spoke with some of the people I befriended at the Dojo and was informed that the founders were very interested in “fight clubbing” out the franchise. They had the intention of spreading Dojos across the map. I eventually got the opportunity to speak with David Weekly, one of the founders, over email. He confirmed that they were quite interested in cloning the Dojo in other places and it was a major goal for the coming year.

One of the biggest benefits of setting up a Hacker Dojo in Southeast Michigan would be the crossover communication between high tech developers in Silicon Valley with the mass of mechanical engineers and embedded systems guys in Michigan. There is a startling lack of communication between these two very influential and innovative communities that I consider a travesty. The result of enabling dialogue and entrepreneurial interrelation between these two groups could have tremendous ramifications. From robotics to computer integration within the auto industry, there literally are no limits to what the innovators on the edge of these industries could develop.

The Hacker Dojo is a non-profit organization. As such, were a company to donate the rental of an unused industrial facility to the cause of Hacker Dojo Michigan, there would be tax advantages for them that could outweigh the costs that would be incurred by leaving the unsellable facility closed and vacant. The same could go for machine shops that had equipment that was not in use. They may not be able to sell the equipment for capital, but they could get tax benefits for donating it to the Hacker Dojo Michigan.

The result could be a facility that fostered the growth of an entrepreneurial community in Southeast Michigan. A place that out of work engineers with an idea could go, for a low monthly membership fee (Hacker Dojo Mountain View charges $100 a month for unlimited use of their space), to flesh out their concept, machine out prototypes and band together with like minds willing to forge out on the path to startup.

Another huge concept that I witnessed at the Hacker Dojo was the “Reverse Job Fair”. For one night, the large warehouse floor of the Dojo was converted to a trade show floor, though instead of each booth being staffed by recruiters and the crowd being filled with job seekers clutching resumes on linen paper, the opposite was true. Each booth was manned by a job hunter, with an oversized poster board of their capabilities behind them, presenting to a small gathering of potential employers and head hunters. The event was a big success, with many job seekers driving home with a week of interviews to be fielded and recruiters thanking Dojo staff for a great event. This too, is a concept that Michigan could benefit from. In the best case, some people would land work and in the worst case, the empowering breath of entrepreneurialism may be born in the job seekers who realize again they have control over their own ship, though they might not be leaving that night with work.

Almost every night there was a different class or meetup that would happen at the Dojo. The facility wasn’t driven by profit potential, it was driven by a community sensibility. Volunteers staffed the place day and night, often lasting deep into the night until 3 or 4am. Investors swarmed around the place like a hive. Nearly everyone there knew the first name of almost every venture capitalist in the Valley. This mindframe is what makes Silicon Valley a hub for entrepreneurship. If we want to rebirth that attitude in Michigan, creating a place for those startups to flourish is a key factor in the equation.

In summary, to enrich the entrepreneurial community in southeast Michigan, we need to create vibrant communities. Giving those vibrant communities a place to meet and develop each other could be the central step in ushering in a new era of entrepreneurial expansion in the region… it’s not like we have a shortage of empty industrial space.

What do you think? Does southeast Michigan have the community to support such a facility?