Twitter's new office brings national prestige to M@dison Building

Dan Gilbert's entrepreneurial empire likes to relentlessly brand its section of the lower Woodward corridor between Campus Martius and Grand Circus Park as a Silicon Valley-style tech hub of the Midwest. Now it's making some real inroads to cementing that idea.

Twitter, one of the social media poster children of Silicon Valley-based start-ups, is opening up an office in the M@dison Building. The 5-story office building adjacent to the Broderick Tower has become a entrepreneurial hub for tech and creative firms since it opened last fall. It's home to a number of promising new economy-based start-ups and venture capital firms, including Detroit Venture Partners.

"This is a huge win for us," says Bruce Schwartz, the Detroit relocation administrator for Bedrock Management, the real-estate development arm for Gilbert's family of companies. "It just goes to show that Detroit is becoming the place to be for up-and-coming tech start-ups."

Twitter's Detroit office will house a team of employees whose primary focus will be helping marketers and advertising agencies in Detroit leverage Twitter’s Promoted Products suite of advertising products. Twitter expects to hire a handful of folks at first (a Quicken Loans spokesperson says an exact number hasn't been released) and add more employees over time as it grows its Detroit presence.

"It's proof in the pudding that this is a hot spot," Schwartz says.

Gilbert's family of companies is also making a bid to recruit some of the 2,000 employees Yahoo laid off last week with its ValleytoDetroit.com website. A number of Gilbert-owned companies, such as Detroit Venture Partners and Fathead, are interested in hiring these tech and marketing professionals formerly employed by Yahoo.

The ValleytoDetroit.com will allow these workers to upload their resumes and facilitate interviews. Gilbert's companies are willing to fly final candidates to Detroit to introduce them to the wide-range of established and start-up companies in the WebWard tech hub in downtown Detroit.

Source: Bruce Schwartz, the Detroit relocation administrator for Bedrock Real Estate Services
Writer: Jon Zemke

Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.