Neighborly

TL;DR

Neighborly let people invest in the public projects and places they cared about through municipal bonds. I was a software engineer there from 2015 to 2018, shipping features from requirements through release and helping hire as the company grew. The platform brought tens of city and state governments online and transacted more than $120 million in securities with individual investors.

About Neighborly

Municipal bonds fund schools, bridges, parks, and other public infrastructure, but the market is hard for residents to understand or access. Neighborly built an online platform connecting public issuers with individual investors. Some cities offered minibonds in $1,000 denominations so residents could invest directly in local improvements. Three examples:

• Cambridge, Massachusetts. A $2 million resident-only sale funded school renovations, municipal facilities, and Complete Streets. The city’s 2017 annual report records that it sold out in six days.
• Burlington, Vermont. More than $5 million in public-improvement bonds went to local investors, documented in Burlington’s 2017 annual report.
• Lawrence, Kansas. A $654,000 minibond sale in $1,000 denominations funded a new fire engine, described in the Fire Medical Department’s annual report.

My role

Shipping product. I shipped production software and owned features beyond the code: shaping requirements and leading sprints from definition through release. The users ranged from financial institutions to city governments to individual investors.

Building for regulated finance. Neighborly Securities was a registered broker-dealer, so every flow had to handle customer verification, suitability, fraud prevention, and record-keeping. Integrating with banks and clearing brokers meant poorly documented APIs and opaque legacy systems.

Helping grow the company. I ran dozens of interviews across engineering, product, and design as Neighborly grew from around 10 to more than 40 people.

We also built a blockchain-bond proof of concept on Stellar with the city of Berkeley. The WIRED case study captures both the ambition and the skepticism. The pilot fell through for political reasons, a reminder that the institutional work mattered as much as the software.

Reflections

Neighborly got me pilled on two things: open source and Ethereum. It was my first professional encounter with public systems and large financial institutions. Behind a simple investment flow were SOAP APIs, black-box infrastructure, and aging codebases maintained by a shrinking pool of specialists. Seeing how few people could inspect, change, or explain that machinery made the case for open, auditable infrastructure hard to ignore.

That was when Ethereum’s “world computer” idea clicked. The municipal-bond market ran on phone calls, faxes, and layers of intermediaries, each keeping its own records. The SEC’s 2012 municipal-market report described retail investors’ limited access to pricing and the higher markups on small trades. Blockchains offered concrete alternatives: a shared ledger, investor-controlled custody, and atomic settlement, where cash and securities move together or not at all.

I came away convinced that infrastructure this important should be open, verifiable, and maintainable. Rebuilding it on open blockchains felt like a practical response to problems I’d worked on firsthand, and Ethereum was the rabbit hole I wanted to follow. I took those questions into Fetch, then ethereum.org.