Rocket Fiber is a fiber-optic internet service that offers gigabit speeds. It's "a story of not waiting for it to happen, not waiting for someone else to come here and hope they build it," according to founder and CEO Marc Hudson. "It's really a story of a Detroit, Michigan-based organization doing it on their own." Hudson pitched the idea via the Cheese Factory in Jan. 2013 after reading how Google Fiber was attracting tech companies to Kansas City. After graduating from Michigan State University, he worked on his own web development startup and fell in love with downtown Detroit before working at Quicken Loans as a user interface engineer.

After the initial pitch Hudson got in contact with Gilbert directly, formed a team and began working on Rocket Fiber on nights and weekends before getting enough internal support to make it his full-time job. After a "long, two-hour meeting," pitching the financial model and viability to Gilbert and his quasi Shark Tank, he got the green light.

The 1Gb service launched in May 2014 for $70 per month, with no service agreements or equipment-rental fees. Ten Gb service is $299 per month. The idea is that in its admittedly smaller service area, customers will be happy enough with their connection that they don't need a contract to stick around. Comcast charges $139.95 per month without a contract or $70 per month with a three-year service agreement for speeds of up to 1Gbps.

Hudson wouldn't go into specifics about subscriber numbers, but as of July he said that there were "several thousands" across 200 commercial and residential buildings downtown. Rocket Fiber is dubbed Detroit's technology partner on billboards around the city. It's providing internet service to the QLine streetcars and WiFi for the 65,000-capacity Ford Field, and it installed 10Gb service at the revamped Cobo Center convention hall. The latter is a bid to draw esports events and virtual reality exhibitions to the convention center, according to Crain's Detroit Business.

"We want to fundamentally change this industry and make it more scalable and more automated so that companies like Rocket Fiber can compete with the larger entrenched companies," Hudson said.

"It's cool to say we're not some company from out of state, from another city."

He said that the idea was to be a "moonshot for Detroit" and that there was never an idea of going to another city. For him and his team, comprised of CTO Randy Foster and COO Edi Demaj, there wasn't any interest in doing this anywhere outside the D. "It was always about taking care of our hometown and doing something really cool and fun here," he said. "It's cool to say we're not some company from out of state, from another city. We're a Detroit-headquartered company creating jobs in the city, employing Detroiters and building an internet infrastructure that exists in few other places."

All of Rocket Fiber's team members live in the metro area, and a "good number" of the company's contractors do as well. Hudson has even managed to get local senior-level talent who had moved to Silicon Valley to come back home. Outside network engineers, designers and biz-dev folks poached from competitors, most of Hudson's employees don't have a background in telecommunications and are trained on the job.

Hudson described a new hire who'd never touched an Ethernet cable in his life but had a great attitude and was a good fit for Rocket Fiber's culture. "Put me to work and I'll learn," the new hire told Hudson. He had started as an apprentice, shadowing experienced residential installers during his first week on the job. "They've been teaching him, and he's just been soaking it up like a sponge," Hudson said. Now he's doing service installations.

For Hudson, it's about creating opportunity, something the Motor City hasn't always done. That doesn't mean Rocket Fiber will open its doors and invite thousands of the city's displaced automotive workers to start installing internet service; the company isn't ready for that yet. But it can help on a smaller scale. "[We're] trying to play a small part in creating opportunity here, because when opportunity is not equal, it leads to issues that I think Detroit is a pretty good case study of," he said.

Jacques Panis, president of luxury watchmaker Shinola, agreed. For someone with no prior skills, it takes between two and four weeks to go from the first application to being an entry-level Shinola employee. One employee was a security guard in a past life. Now he's leading the company's movement-assembly team.

"The walks of life here are something that are absolutely incredible and really speak to what we have and why we have it," he said. "It's not just about you coming in here and having a specific skill set. It's about you coming in here and having the ability to work with people and be a part of a team at a bigger picture and aligning with everyone here."