The one-liner: I’m no longer a day-to-day member of the Dwolla team.

It has been one heck of a roller coaster ride over the last (almost) 4 years. What started as a project in my town home basement in the night time hours after my full time job, turned into a force that consumed my every waking hour. I went from being the lone developer, to having a technical team of 4 working on the project with me.

While we managed decently with me trying to run the team from a remote location, it got to the point where I felt it was time to step aside. The culture at Dwolla is best suited for someone in the office working directly with the team. As much as Dwolla is like a second child to me, moving to Iowa and away from my family is not the right decision for our family.

I’m extremely proud of being a founder of something as revolutionary as Dwolla. And I will always look forward to another trip down to Iowa to visit the community that made Dwolla what it is (I have random Fongs cravings…).

Moving on from Dwolla, I’ve kept the start-up passion alive. Not only that, but I’m doing my best to get others in my area (MN/ND border) to share that same passion. You’ll see me talking about a cool Fargo,ND based start-up called BreadVault as I help them get to launch. I have also started working on a couple projects of my own. I’m looking forward to sharing more about those in the coming months.

shaneneuerburg [at] gmail if you want to chat more!

I haven’t worked in non-home office in over two years. As most telecommuters will agree, the situation is a mixed bag. With working on my project, I’m a 9 hour drive away from our main office building. Learning to work remotely by yourself is a challenge. Learning to manage employees is a endeavor that is impossible to appreciate until you’ve done it. Not tooting my own horn, just reflecting on the task it has been.

What I’ve learned about working remotely:

• Have your own dedicated office space. Working from the couch in your living room where the kids play just isn’t productive. Thankfully I’m not a couch-working type of guy.
• Try to dress the part. While working remotely is stereotyped as working in your boxers, I wouldn’t advise it. When you dress lazy, you tend to work the same way.
• Get a good webcam and decent internet connection. You’ll want to video conference at least once a day to stay in the loop.
• If your main office doesn’t proactively try to support you working remotely, you’ll be the most miserable person in the group. I cannot emphasis this enough. Finding out about new hires, big features and news releases the day of isn’t enjoyable.

One of the reasons I haven’t posted on here in a while has simply been because I’m swamped with everything else in life. The last few years have been some of the most exciting, stressful, and obnoxiously busy years of my life.

Three years ago a friend of mine approached me with a simple question: would I want to help him solve his $55k/year problem? He was paying interchange fees that he’d rather keep, rightfully so. So we spent a few months going over what the ideal solution would be whenever we chatted.

Once we knew the general direction we were going, Ben took charge over the business, legal and PR side, and I was tasked with making a system capable of moving millions, or billions, of dollars in my spare time. At this point in my life, I had a one year old son, was paying wayyyy too much money on a rental house, worked at a job that didn’t pay enough to make ends meet, and had student loan repayments kicking in. Not the most opportune time for a project of this magnitude, but it was a challenge I wanted to take head on.

For the next two years, I would work 8-10 hours at my normal day job and go home. I’d sit down for a quick dinner, and then head downstairs where I’d spend the next 6-8 hours cramming away on this Dwolla project. Somehow I managed to never pass out at my day job (I actually did a pretty good job there as well. Though, looking back, I had lots to learn…) and my wife never divorced me. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she did.

While right in the midst of all of this, I bought a house that had pipes burst two days before closing. We spent the next 6-9 months in a construction zone, where I moved my makeshift office around to wherever was the least dusty.

As far as Dwolla goes, the first year I pretty much spent in proof-of-concept mode. I scrapped several different components along the way and rewrote them after finding a better way to do it. Financial service products were new to me, and I definitely had lots to learn.

One of our more interesting days was when we first moved money from A to B through the network I made. Ben’s response?

Another one was when I first set up sending money to Facebook and Twitter contacts. It was one of those ‘doh’ moments. I recall the first meetup I was able to attend in person, which was when we announced this feature. I sat in the corner of Mars Cafe glued to my laptop monitoring performance of the contact sync service. We ran into some issues earlier that day, so I was terribly nervous that the fixes I had put in place earlier in the day weren’t going to cut it. Thankfully all worked well and I was able to enjoy the rest of the night. It would have been nice to be able to announce the feature myself, but someone had to make sure things didn’t break

I’ve passed the three year mark this summer, which I’ll write about in another post. Hopefully less scatterbrained than this one.

We are selling our house.

Why?

• We don’t want to raise our kids in the city
• We want to knock out some debt
• Other than needing a new garage, we’ve done pretty much everything we wanted to on this house

The sign is going up this week, most likely. We spent the last weekend in a whirlwind of last minute touch-ups.

This blog likely won’t go anywhere, and the previous posts will show up again eventually.

Back to the grind…

I’ll skip the “Where has time gone? We meant to post a long time ago!” spiel and just get to the meat and bones of the post.

Our house has been used more as a home recently than a place to swing a hammer and wield a crowbar. Maybe it is because we have decided to take it easy? Maybe to sit back and enjoy a cold one? I don’t know. It surely couldn’t be the 8lb baby in the bassinet that has made us rearrange our lives.

We welcomed Adley into the world mid-June. She was 7lb 9.9oz, 20.5in, and came with healthy vocal cords pre-installed. Casey has been doing her best to get Adley into tip-top (as in, “topping the scales”) since she was born. Brendan was a chunky-monkey when born, so we figured Adley may as well follow in his footsteps .

It is amazing how things change when you go from one child to two. You would think the work load would be about double, but I swear it is quadruple what it is with one child. Casey asked me the other night who I thought Adley looked more like. I realized then that I haven’t even had enough time alone with Adley to actually really look her over and figure out important things like that .

One of the first things we have to do in order to be able to finish our basement is install a sub-floor. We plan to carpet the basement in order to have a rec. room that kids can rumble and tumble in. Since the walls (non-load bearing) will rest on top of the sub-floor, it has to be the first thing installed.

We live in a pretty wet area. Wet, as in, almost once a year a river a few blocks away is higher than the road in front of our house. Since our water table is that high, I have to assume every surface of our basement will be moist once a year. Not much, but enough to rot out wood if it were directly against it over time. With this in mind, the entire sub-floor is elevated using a molded plastic material that is sold under the name Platon at our local hardware store. It is dimpled, allowing any moisture to find its way to the drain, as well as away from the surfaces above it. As a bonus, it acts as a vapor barrier. The product comes in a roll that is close to four feet wide with one side having a 4″ strip without dimples to overlap the previous run. The instructions say to seal the two together with the same type of material you’d use to seal a roof. I used house wrap tape as it is easier and I had it already.

My method was to lay down two runs of the Platon before putting the next sub-floor layer down, which I used OSB for. Considering how unlevel our concrete floor is, I should have used tongue and grove plywood to prevent the seams from being uneven. However, after hauling down some twenty 4×8 sheets of 1/2 OSB down our narrow basement stairs, I was using them regardless. Any unlevelness that occurs should be hidden with the carpet.

Here is the majority of the basement subfloor down:

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The spot on the right

I’ll be flying down to Des Moines at the end of the month. The company I helped found will be doing a Meetup on 12/1/2010. I normally don’t talk much about work on here (do I talk on here at all?), but this one has me excited. I’ve been working on this project for a couple years now, and we’ve got some good stuff to share.

http://www.meetup.com/dwolla/34577

So if you are in the Des Moines area, or anywhere in the world and really want to meet me, stop by. No one likes free stuff, but we’ll be giving away ridiculously comfy t-shirts if you don’t want to meet me or hear about Dwolla.

You know you want to.

Some Turkish nerds hacked our site (likely through another domain on the server). After a clean WordPress install, we are back online. That is what you get for leaving a WordPress site unattended for too long…

Good excuse to clean the server!

Now, back to our (ir)regular scheduled programming.

*Sorry for typos, format etc. I am writing this in the car!

Considering how long it has been since I posted last and how much house stuff we’ve been working on, I’m not even sure where to start! My last post was about us taking on the big task of flipping the stairs. My in-laws came over Easter and completed the actual physical flip. I would say that all went pretty smooth. The only thing I worked on was sanding, staining, and applying poly to the skirting. If you can recall (it’s been a long time), I went after the skirting with the heat gun the same time I did the upstairs hallway, which was over a year ago. My how time flies and projects pile up!

Taking the stairs down.

Putting the stairs back up in the other direction!

Now that the stairs face the other way we have a list of “projects” that need to be done in order for the main stair project to be completed. The walls going upstairs need dry wall in spots as the plaster is missing, the floor needs to be extended out by Brendan’s bedroom door, the old “kitchen” walls need mudd after taking down the rest of the wallpaper (I HATE taking down wallpaper btw), then comes texture and paint on all the walls, the wood floor needs to be refinished,  and last but not least a new railing and two newel posts. Whew! Did I miss any thing? I’m sure I did. In fact, I can already remember a few other things. That just means I’ll have to write another post or two!

Out of that list I would say Shane has accomplished quite a bit. I spent a Saturday afternoon taking off the last of the wallpaper so Shane could get working on the walls. My mother-in-law gave me the trick of using the back of a light switch cover to scrape off the paper after you sprayed it with vinegar water. This worked so much better than an actual scraper or some other tool. (Thanks Lori!)

Take note of the ceiling behind me. We are ripping it out and redoing the entire ceiling with stained beadboard.

As of right now Shane has almost all the dry wall patched in on the walls and most of it has had the final sanding. The area by the windows needs the last coat of mudd and sanding. Once that is done we will have our neighbor come texture. He is the one who did Brendan’s room. Have I mentioned that he is absolutely awesome?! He is!

Looking down from the top of the stairs.

Shane also has the floor extended out by Brendan’s room. This was of course a top priority, along with creating a temporary railing.

Speaking of the railing, it really is a bummer that the original pieces are garbage. There is just really no way to keep what is already there. The height of the newel post and railing are very low and not acceptable with kids living here. Shane and I have been exploring our options. We checked out the local hardware stores (yuck), searched ebay, and have called a guy for estimates who works with the old wood. I am really hoping to go with this guy as I have heard great things and seen his work (beautiful)…not to mention we would get the old douglas fir. What it will come down to is cost. I am not willing to put out a fortune since we don’t want to live here forever.

Brendan wanted to be in the picture.

Along with staying busy on this project we have also been getting ready for  Baby N. The nursery will be in the second bedroom upstairs, across from Brendan’s. This is the only room that still has the cracks, missing texture spots, etc. I swear I was fine with just touching up the room with new paint, but I decided to try my hand at mudding! I managed to get one wall done in double to triple the time it takes for Shane to get one coat done. Not only that, but my layer was way too thick (I thought it looked good)! So this last weekend we decided to skip skim coating the entire wall. Instead we are going to have our neighbor texture this room when he does the other areas upstairs. The room of course won’t look as great as Brendan’s, but we figure it will at least match up with the rest of the house’s heavier texture. Now I have to add, that our texture isn’t really that heavy. The painter, Andy, who did it claimed it was the finest he could do, an orange peel. Well when we had the awesome neighbor do Brendan’s he said he could go finer than that. His turned out to be what we were after.

The white wall behind the crib is the one that we put mudd on.

It sounds like we have been working non-stop on our house, but the truth is we really haven’t! We tend to go in spurts; especially with the weather here in ND being gorgeous the last couple weeks. With that in mind, we started many projects outside, but I’ll do a separate post on those! We’ve also been able to visit family. Here is a picture of Brendan having fun in the lake at my in-laws.

Yes, it was that warm out to play in the lake!

Some other random house stuff I’ve accomplished is refinishing Brendan’s bedroom and closet doors. We cheated and had both dipped. I can’t even tell you how nice this was versus stripping them ourselves. All I can say is that I have no desire to ever strip any thing myself again! Along with getting his doors done I had to get the hardware cleaned up. Pretty easy task using the boiling method. This last weekend I also boiled the window hardware for Brendan’s room. It now sits on the windows waiting for Shane to install it.

Brendan's bedroom door.