Alex's Tech Thoughts

In life you will encounter challenges. Some of them will have easy fixes, others will be very difficult. I haven’t been alive for very long (only a quarter of a century), but I’ve noticed that nothing that is worthwhile is ever easy.

I joined Dwolla about 9 months ago. There are many reasons I joined, but one of the biggest was that I saw Dwolla as a huge challenge. Building a payment network virtually from scratch. What an opportunity!

Before accepting the job, I sat down with Chris Paik from Thrive (he originally introduced me to Ben Milne, CEO of Dwolla). I distinctly remember Chris saying that I should be aware before I joined that Dwolla was going to be a roller-coaster. There would be ups and downs and it was not going to be easy. We’d have a lot of incumbents and they’d be protecting their war-chests by any means possible.

This conversation stuck with me, and Chris has been 100% right. There are days that seem like we are poised for world domination. There are also days where it seems like we are climbing a hill that keeps growing and there are people throwing arrows down to block our path.

All in all, life is good and while I experience daily challenges, I remind myself that nothing worthwhile is easy.