Where a Young Business Can Survive.
Crain's Detroit Business - July 2007 - By Mary Kramer
Brian Balasia was an engineering student when he and some pals pooled the money they earned from internships and started their own company.

Digerati Solutions Inc. is now thriving, and Balasia and his partners want their alma mater, the University of Michigan, to create a structure to offer financial support so more engineering students can do the same. Balasia expects to hear later this month whether a portion of a U.S. Department of Labor grant will be applied to the new program.

“It’s the best time to start a company,” he says. “You’ve got lab space and professors who can advise. And the risks are low. The worst thing that can happen is you go back to being a student.”

Balasia is also lobbying hard for a new kind of job fair at UM’s College of Engineering, one that doesn’t focus on Fortune 1,000 companies.

Instead, Balasia wants to bring only the most exciting small companies to campus for this job event, companies that have no more than 500 employees at most.

“There are jobs for graduates,” he says. “But smaller companies don’t have the relationships with the university.”

As the job fair takes shape, Balasia will tap the relationships he’s made before the ripe age of 24. He started by volunteering for the human-resources committee at Automation Alley, followed by the small-business committee at the Detroit Regional Chamber.

We wrote about Balasia’s ideas on June 4.

Now it seems that his ideas are being embraced by people who can help make them happen.

Balasia is a success story and proof of one of the recurring themes our twentysomethings told us in March: One of the great attributes of our region for a young person is its low barrier to entry. A young person with a great idea can hit a home run, but in some large cities, they might never get to first base.