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

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. And sometimes, that's all it takes.