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What did you do for the first two years when Dwolla wasn’t technically legal?
Well it was legal, we just couldn’t operate outside of Iowa. For the first two years we built out the platform. We did a sh*tload of testing on a small scale because legally we couldn’t launch Dwolla nationwide. We spent two years inside of Iowa fine-tuning Dwolla with the financial institutions, building out some of the initial models, and trying to figure out how to legally do what we do.
This interview with the founder of Dwolla is really inspiring. I especially like this point, where the gruesome inefficiencies of state-based regulation actually provided time and space to get the product ready to roll out nationally.
