Dude, give them some credit for moving $1M per day without even integrating with POS.
You CANNOT build a billion dollar company without breaking laws knowingly or unknowingly.
EDIT: Please don't take this as an insult, but you seem to have a negative attitude when it comes to competitors. I noticed this a few times. This makes you sound jealous (maybe you aren't, idk) and devalues your comments.
EDIT2: And they have done this with $1.3 M in funding, and 12 people. Hats Off. Hats Off.
Actually, I'm not surprised a company like this has started in Des Moines. Contrary to Milne's "location is just an excuse", location is everything for a start up.
Des Moines' little secret is that it's a major "back-office" financial-services center--banking, insurance, mortgages, annuities, etc. Wells Fargo, Aviva, Principal Financial and others have either their corporate or divisional HQ's there.
There's also a heavy marketing and publishing cluster there (including a couple of sizable companies owned by Hearst--which is also the parent of SFGate). But that's tangential...maybe.
Another reason is Des Moines is small and homogenous enough for people in the financial services community to know each other. And to influence/be more easily influenced.
These reasons--and others--are why I completely disagree with Milne's
statement that "location is just an excuse". It's not. Start ups need the proper environment to take root and grow--infrastructure, people (domain experts and technical), and "political" protection.
The fact of the matter is, Dwolla probably would not have survived this long in the Valley, Wall Street, Route 1/128, or Austin. It is a financial-services-oriented start up in a small, but highly concentrated, financial-services town where someone high up on the local totem pole liked what they saw.
Great points. I came to Omaha from Austin, and have found that it is orders of magnitudes easier to get noticed in Omaha. There is just less noise. As the industry evolves and grows here, that effect will begin to disappear. For now, it's a benefit that local startups need to appreciate and take advantage of.
No hate -I'm in Omaha. And coming from Austin, it is a whole 'nother world trying to find developers who are willing to accept the startup lifestyle. In Austin, they complained about how "easy" it is in the Valley. In Omaha, they complain about how "easy" it is in Austin. Bottom line is you gotta make it work no matter where you are, but I'm pretty impressed with Dwolla's progress given the state of the industry in the Midwest. Not a dig, just an assessment.
I got here a year or so ago, and I've been pleasantly surprised at the level of activity in the Midwest, but it's got a long way to go in terms of depth and breadth of skill available to draw upon.
You CANNOT build a billion dollar company without breaking laws knowingly or unknowingly.
EDIT: Please don't take this as an insult, but you seem to have a negative attitude when it comes to competitors. I noticed this a few times. This makes you sound jealous (maybe you aren't, idk) and devalues your comments.
EDIT2: And they have done this with $1.3 M in funding, and 12 people. Hats Off. Hats Off.