Where can you drive a boat to work and build a rocket? The Upper Peninsula.
Some of the state’s – and the nation’s – most innovative technology is being developed along the rugged shoreline of Lake Superior.
In one year, tech companies across the U.P. generated $105.9 million in sales, according to data collected by Michigan SmartZones, a technology business accelerator funded by the state.
From space to electric vehicles to streamlining industries like hospitality, manufacturing and logging, tech companies in Michigan’s far north are capitalizing on a Midwest work ethic and the technical prowess of public research universities.
Being rural, remote and cold are no longer deterrents in the age of remote work, said David Rowe, CEO of MTEC SmartZone in Houghton.
From October 2021 to September 2022, entrepreneurs formed 34 new tech companies, creating 294 new jobs in the U.P. Additionally, 1,076 people there kept working tech jobs.
“We tend not to make excuses for location any longer. We sell it as a feature,” Rowe said.
Yoopers are peeling away their “aw shucks” humility and rebranding themselves as the lucky ones who live and work where the rest of the population vacations. Investors and innovators alike have taken note and are willing to invest.
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When Tom Dolaskie returned to Munising in 2008 it felt like the city was stuck in time. The paper mill, the prison, the cruise ships – not much had changed since he left in 1997.
Dolaskie, 43, went from high school to the Air Force and then used his electrical engineering background to create DeployedTech or DTech, a technology general contractor for hotel openings, with Darrin Hubbard, his Dallas based business partner.
He carved a career path in hospitality in Florida and California. Then a family emergency brought him home a decade later.
Setting up shop in Munising during a recession was not the planned trajectory for his growing tech business. Dolaskie may have been one of the Upper Peninsula’s first remote tech workers as he continued to foster relationships from the Caribbean to Miami to Manhattan to Chicago.
When DTech picked up steam Dolaskie was traveling 300 days out of the year, he said. Traveling in and out of a small regional airport with changing schedules became untenable and Dolaskie moved to Manhattan for a year.
While New York offered convenience, Michigan had infrastructure to build a foundation and grow. In 2013, Dolaskie returned and bought a vacant building to house DTech’s Munising office. Still, he describes the economic development at that time as static.
“There were just a lot of things that weren’t happening that I felt should have been happening,” he said. “So we just did it. We put our money where our mouth was.”
Fast forward 10 years and Dolaskie’s company has invested more than $12 million into the community. On the tech side, DTech has three offices, including in Munising, and employs 18 people full-time.
On the development side, Deployed Capital owns and operates nine businesses ranging from a gas station convenience store to a coffee roastery and concert space.
“We managed to build experiences for the workforce that increased the value proposition of downtown being seen as a place to work,” Dolaskie said.
When Dolaskie was building his team of design engineers he wasn’t zeroing in on degrees or past internships. He wanted the right personalities.
“I can always teach [skills], so I found the people who were in love with the U.P., who truly wanted to be here and we built our talent pool around that mentality,” he said.
Brain power has never been a problem for Orbion Space Technology in Houghton, CEO Brad King said. And it’s not just because King has been a professor of space systems engineering at Michigan Technological University for 23 years – although that certainly helps.
“There’s kind of this perception if you have a startup company and it’s in technology, you should be in Silicon Valley. You can’t compete with the Silicon Valley companies. I completely reject that,” King said.
“We have an advantage that our lifestyle is so pleasant in Michigan and northern Michigan that we don’t have any problems with employee turnovers,” he said.
In six years, Orbion has skyrocketed out of startup territory with $30 million invested into the company’s development and manufacturing of plasma propulsion systems for small satellites.
At first there was a stigma to break, King said. Investors from Boston to San Francisco weren’t convinced here would be a large enough talent pool in the U.P. much less a line of career engineers eager to uproot to a remote, rural location.
But that’s exactly what happened.
Engineers left careers at NASA, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and aerospace industry giants in California and Florida. King estimates half of the 50 engineers on his team are Michigan Tech alum.
The remoteness of the U.P. is no longer something to fear – a sentiment King, 51, has seen change over his lifetime as a native of tiny Calumet on the Keweenaw Peninsula.
“Growing up the geographic isolation was always seen as an impediment,” he said. “Over the past 30 years, it’s evolved to that’s what we feature. That’s what we brag about, and that’s our identity. And now people come here because of that.”
Orbion staff have an informal competition for coolest commute: canoes in the summer and snowmobiling in the winter.
“We always joke where can you take your boat to work and build rockets,” King said.
By the time Jeff Halonen, 29, was looking for investors for his Calumet-based software company in 2022 the secret of the U.P.’s growing tech hub was out.
“Zero times did I ever have to explain for or apologize or say, ‘I know we’re in the Midwest but.’ There was none of that,” he said.
Growth at Halonen’s company Steelhead Technologies has been swift since its founding in 2021. Last year, they raised $2.5 million in investment and expanded their team to 20.
Halonen, a Michigan Tech alum with a degree in mechanical engineering, graduated with a General Motors job offer in 2016. Four years later he, his cousin and uncle pivoted to go-to-market technology business ventures, working as contractors to launch products or services.
It was through this line of work that they diagnosed a problem plaguing small job shops: there was too much paperwork to track each step. And so, Steelhead, a plant operating system, was born.
The U.P.’s low cost of living coupled with resources at Michigan Tech have kept the headquarters firmly planted up north for the technical team even as the sales team spreads out across Michigan and the Great Lakes region.
The last secret ingredient? Midwest grit.
“People from the Midwest, they just show up and get the job done,” Halonen said. “There’s not a ton of drama. It’s been working out extremely well for us,”
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