Donald Robinson II remembers marveling at the pixelated graphics on his Atari 5200 game console back in the early 1980s.
In between playing games like Pac-Man and Berzerk, he developed an interest in computer programming. One day, he visited Detroit’s 25-story J.L. Hudson department store and picked out a how-to book on the BASIC programming language.
“It was the first era of graphic design,” Robinson, 56, recalled. “You could program things to do on the screen, like change colors and make shapes animate.”
He describes it as a life-altering experience.
“I taught myself that stuff, and as I got older and into high school, I took some computer classes, and then from there, I just started to like it.”
Robinson was convinced he’d major in computer science, but by the time he got into college in 1987, he found it difficult to stick with the highly technical subject. He pivoted to economics and stopped coding over the next three decades.
“I put the computer down as far as programming until 2011,” he says. “Then, some friends of mine and I were going to build a website, and in preparing for that, we came to a crossroads to decide whether to hire somebody to design it or build it ourselves. I took the initiative to learn HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, and a little bit of JavaScript, which just made me want to do more of that.”
The Big Idea: For much of Robinson’s life, Detroit, the U.S.’s largest Black-majority city, has sat on the outskirts of the tech industry, watching as cities like Seattle, New York, and Silicon Valley burst with talent and venture capital dollars.
Over the last few years, the Motor City has grown into one of the world’s fastest-growing startup ecosystems, buttressed by a decade of real estate investment into the city’s downtown by industry titans such as the Big Three automakers and Rocket Companies.
The city has seen an increase of about $175M in yearly venture capital investments since 2019, according to data from PitchBook, a Seattle-based global capital market database. In 2023, there was $467M in VC investments across metro Detroit, spread across 69 deals.
Meanwhile, an influx of nearly $1B from the Ford Motor Company revitalized the derelict Michigan Central train station and transformed the adjacent Detroit Public Schools Book Depository into a modern incubator for veteran and emerging tech startups.
But even as downtown Detroit welcomes thousands of new workers and dozens of new infrastructure projects, systemic barriers to middle-wage jobs for longtime Black residents threaten to stymie the city’s ambitious goals to become its version of Silicon Valley.
This is Part 1 of a three-part series exploring the Detroit’s tech ecosystem, focusing on the successes and challenges of its efforts to upskill and re-skill working adults and young Detroiters to enter tech-related fields across the region.
Getting In On The Ground Floor
In the middle of February, while a blanket of snow and ice rests over Detroit, a bevy of developers, company founders, and venture capitalists trek through the wintry weather and past the rotating doors of NewLab toward one of the most popular events in the city.
Black Tech Saturdays—once a small meetup of developers and programmers who convened at Detroit coffee shops and coworking spaces—has ballooned into a celebrated soiree of hundreds of tech enthusiasts, aided by community word of mouth, social media, and appearances at national conferences like Art Basel Miami and AfroTech in Houston.
It’s become a space where many of the region’s Black entrepreneurs can mingle and learn about the latest advancements in artificial intelligence and incorporate their findings into their businesses.
At a convention booth on NewLab’s first floor, local entrepreneur JC Price invites attendees to scan a QR code to access ScopeFocus, an AI-powered tool that matches users to other conference attendees with mutual interests and goals.
Price began to incorporate tech into his marketing career during the pandemic, after completing an industry certification in data analytics through the Google Coursera program.
“The energy around tech right now is exciting,” he says.
Much of the enthusiasm surrounding Black Tech Saturdays comes from its networking event and pitch competitions, offering Detroiters the chance to present their businesses or inventions to investors, industry leaders, and Fortune 500 executives.
To Price, the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence has created a prime opportunity for Detroit’s Black residents to get in on the ground floor. In the past, technological innovations such as Twitter and Vine profited off the ingenuity of Black users and content creators, while lacking racial diversity among their staff and workers.
“We build companies, but we don’t benefit from it,” says Price. “I don’t want that to happen again. I want us to have a real stake in tech. I want us to be a tech-enabled, AI-enabled people.”
Thirsty for Investment
For Detroit to become an innovation hub of the 21st century, residents and experts call for greater investment in the city’s workforce and education systems. Many Detroiters lack basic digital literacy or high-speed internet access, creating a significant barrier to economic mobility, education, and participation in the modern workforce.
The metro and the entire state are also facing tough migration trends. Michigan produces more STEM graduates than the national average, but about 45% of graduates leave the state within two years, especially for other tech hubs. The state has worked for years to reduce this “brain drain,” and it still is.
But state and metro leaders also are increasingly focused on boosting the education and employment prospects of working adults and the children of longtime Detroiters who are more likely to stay. Efforts like Michigan Reconnect and CSforDetroit in the public schools are working to align with high-demand jobs in industries like tech.
That need for Black residents in Detroit is particularly acute. In a metro area where about 21% of residents are Black—and 76% in the city proper—Black STEM workers make up only 11% of the roughly 103K tech workers across the metro, according to a 2024 McKinsey & Company survey of Michigan tech talent and CompTIA’s 2025 State of the Tech Workforce report.
To Robinson, the web developer, the future of Detroit’s tech ecosystem and the prospects of the city’s Black residents rest as much on ground-up efforts as they do on state investment. He’s watching how Black Tech Saturdays and NewLab continue to scale as more startups arrive in the city.
By the time Robinson returned to programming in the early 2010s, two of the Big Three automakers had declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and the city was still in its infancy as a destination for tech startups.
Over time, however, dozens of companies began to lease office space in Detroit’s downtown area, spearheaded by billionaire Dan Gilbert’s decision to relocate Rocket Mortgage’s headquarters within city limits.
Tech jobs now cut across multiple regional employers such as Henry Ford Health System and Rocket Companies, with positions focusing on high-demand fields including software development, cloud architecture, and cybersecurity.
In the past decade, tech bootcamps, such as Grand Circus and Apple Developer Academy, have become increasingly popular alternatives to postsecondary education, attracting thousands of Detroiters looking for a no-cost, short-term pathway into middle-wage jobs. It’s attractive in a city where less than one-fifth of residents possess a bachelor’s degree.
“People have been thirsty for this,” Robinson says. “We just didn’t know where the opportunities were, and now that they’re sprouting up, people are running with them and being very successful.”
Ethan Bakuli is a Detroit-based reporter and contributor to Work Shift. This piece and forthcoming ones in the series are the result of months of in-depth reporting supported by a Kapor Foundation Research Fellowship.