Detroit Free Press staff

Name: Andy Didorosi

Age: 29

Occupation: Detroit Bus Co. founder

Current residence: Corktown

Family: Girlfriend

When you’re a serial entrepreneur, you forget how many companies you’ve started.

That’s what happened when Andy Didorosi, who’s currently helming the 5-year-old Detroit Bus Co., listed the businesses he’s launched. He skipped over Constant Velocity, a small-business and art incubator he opened in Hamtramck in 2013.

He did remember Team Deluxe (a small race car shop in Ferndale, founded in 2008), Paper Street (a small-business incubator in Ferndale, founded in 2010), Thunderdrome (a racing series in Detroit, founded in 2010), Buildingminder (a property management and maintenance company in Detroit, founded 2011) and Motopow (a vintage motorcycle shop in Ferndale, founded in 2014).

“I just followed opportunity and where my heart goes,” Didorosi said, explaining why he’s an entrepreneur, unlike his grandparents who each worked for General Motors and Detroit Diesel their whole lives. He said his parents “have no entrepreneurial drive (and are) very, very much employees.”

He went to college for a bit and then said good-bye to higher education.

“I figured out two years in that getting a degree is working for someone and that just wasn’t for me or whoever my future employee is,” Didorosi recalled.

His latest venture added a big community-outreach component earlier this year; for every Detroit Bus Co. tour ride purchased, one will be provided to a child for free to get to school or an after-school program. Didorosi said he wants to make sure Detroit kids have safe transportation.

Activism plus entrepreneurship makes him a quintessential millennial.

“It’s an authority complex mixed with being a product of my environment, meaning the city of Detroit is such a rule breaker of a town and so I just saw working for a company was a path to failure for me. Because you can’t rely upon the job market to provide for you any longer. There’s no stability there any longer. The only stability is what you can create for yourself,” he said. “I’m in the class of ‘Screw it. Let’s do it.’”

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