Ego Spy Report: Dwolla Meetup

Another EGO SPY REPORT on local events of interest to the Iowa creative community. This report was provided by a volunteer anonymous Egotist spy who attended the event. If you are interested in joining our EGO SPY NETWORK, learn more here.

I didn’t really know much about Dwolla until yesterday. I had seen people wearing shirts that say “I Dwolla in Des Moines” but I thought that sounded more like something you didn’t want your mom to know you did in college. It always seemed like some clique on twitter where people just sent each other $1 every couple of days. Then, someone sent me a dollar. I felt like I had finally joined the crowd and Brenda and Dylan were going to ask me to meet them at the Peach Pit after school.

After frantically setting up my account, I went to go send my dollar to someone else. I was having a hard time figuring out how to do that, even after reading the help section. Luckily someone helped me out and off my dollar went to the next unsuspecting person. Then I started reading everything I could find about Dwolla, which wasn’t hard to do yesterday since it was all over the place.

Ben Milne, creator of Dwolla, had arranged a meet-up at Mars Café to announce that Dwolla had gone national and to showcase the technology. The crowd was like the who’s who of the Des Moines networking community. I spotted big hitters like Amedeo Rossi, Katie Ketelsen, and even Mr. Ad Mavericks himself, Josh Fleming. After a brief speech by Ben, which showed that he was truly stunned and humbled by the support, he wowed the crowd by purchasing a soy latte from his phone using Dwolla.

Now the world knows, or at least everyone in Des Moines, who the face behind Dwolla is, and that he is a force to be reckoned with. Congratulations Ben, you have made us proud. You are a big fish in this small pond. And now that I know Dwolla is not a dirty word, I would proudly sport an “I Dwolla in Des Moines” t-shirt. That is, if I ever get one…