When Brady Harris started searching for the next step in his career, moving his family to Greater Des Moines wasn’t even on the road map. Yet as the new CEO of fintech payments startup Dwolla, the team’s dedication to the Des Moines metro area became a standout hallmark. 

“This idea of enriching the community, partnering with the community and providing employment opportunities for the community is the forefront of everybody’s mind, and I thought that was a really cool feature of the company,” Harris said. 

Harris is the former president of Payscape, a fintech platform where he recently oversaw the merger with Payroc. Before Payscape, Harris spent 16 years at Eliot Management Group, working up from a sales representative in Oregon to spending three years as president and CEO of the company, with nearly 400 employees across 30 regional branch offices. 

Harris was publicly named by Dwolla on March 29 as the new CEO, but he will remain working remotely from his current home in Atlanta until early summer, when his family will make the move to Ankeny. 

“When Dwolla made itself available, it was a natural progression for me professionally to get what I thought was a really great niche in the payment and fintech landscape, with a lot of growth opportunity,” Harris said.

What drew you to Dwolla?
A lot of merchant acquisitions and payment companies have tried to find new and innovative ways to differentiate themselves in the payments landscape. Most of those products, in their rush to innovate and kind of stand out from the competition, they all kind of rushed to the same products and so they just found themselves back where they started. … When I first heard of Dwolla, it immediately struck me as having some real industry-disruptive technologies. It could really do something unique in the broader payment landscape in the sense that it was using what we call the ACH rails versus credit card rails. It’s this really fun, progressive, very flexible and programmable technology that can facilitate these ACH transactions in both sending and receiving, but it does it at a fraction of the cost of what traditionally the credit card payments would cost, and it does it much faster. 

Dwolla founder and former CEO Ben Milne is staying with the company. How will you manage the transition to a new CEO?
He’s going to be very much used strategically as an executive on the senior leadership team — we need to further define what long-term role he’ll play at Dwolla, but he’s very much serving in a consulting capacity. He’s mentoring and supporting me day in and day out, helping me learn the landscape and navigate new relationships. 

I’d describe the relationship between me and Ben as it relates to Dwolla as kind of a sunrise, sunset versus walking in a dark room and flipping on a light switch. I’ll very gradually be taking more and more responsibilities in terms of the day-to-day from Ben [as he] will be relinquishing those duties. Eventually we hope to focus in on a part of the business where he can continue to bring value, but he’s going to be an important part of the team moving forward. 

What’s the best piece of advice or feedback you’ve received?
Taking advantage of growth and taking on more responsibility is a convergence of a couple of things. You have to have an incredible work ethic, you’re willing to outwork those around you. You have to have some talent and ability, which I believe can be learned; that doesn’t have to be innate. Most importantly, you have to put yourself in an environment where that work ethic, that talent is rewarded with opportunities to grow. 

I’ve been so fortunate, lucky, to have been in organizations [where] there was room for me to express and experiment with my ambition. … There’s a lot of people, truthfully, that are far more talented and work harder than I do, but they were not in that environment or that space where they can really grow and take advantage of those things. So work ethic, some talent and natural ability, and putting yourself in a place where you can really flourish and grow I think are the three critical components if someone wants to grow professionally. 

What are your priorities for your first year at Dwolla?
I’m kind of a pick-up-your-stuff-and-go type of personality, so I have to be really deliberate around not trying to step into a new environment and start executing. … The first 90 days [at] Dwolla is trying to be very thoughtful around understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the organization. 

We’re going to be conducting a very comprehensive … [strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats] analysis of the business. We’ll be thinking through things like our core product, our target markets and defining what our go-to-market strategy needs to be to accomplish some of the scale and growth goals that we have.  

Some of our big plans are going to be growth-oriented. Dwolla has historically been a very product-first led company, and we really plan on becoming more growth-and-revenue-focused, to really throw some gas on that growth engine. 

What have you been reading/watching/listening to lately?
“Blitzscaling” [by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh] is a growth strategy that I’ve used over the years. It’s largely adopted from Silicon Valley, but it’s got a lot of growth fundamentals around how in growing and scaling a business, speed to market is more important than efficiency. So that is a general framework that I am excited to apply to Dwolla, where our goal is going to be quickly scaling the company and putting some operational pieces in place that facilitate that growth. … They have all the ingredients to do something really special and very industry-disruptive.