The Shape of Progress

Written by Randy Stolp

 

We celebrate beginnings.

A new idea. A bold vision. The excitement of possibility.

 

We celebrate endings. The product launch. The funding announcement. The ribbon cutting. The success story.

What we rarely celebrate is everything in between. The conversations that change your thinking. The questions you didn’t anticipate. The pivots that make the idea stronger. The long stretches where progress is happening, even when it doesn’t always feel obvious.

That’s the part we rarely talk about.

As I reflect on my first six months with LoanNFT, I’ve realized something that surprised me.

I’ve come to love it.

After spending much of my career helping established organizations grow and evolve, I found myself drawn to something different. Not because that work wasn’t meaningful—it absolutely was—but because I had an opportunity to help strengthen the credit union movement from an entirely different angle.

For decades, credit unions have collaborated to better serve their members. Loan participations are one example of that cooperation. I also knew firsthand how cumbersome that process had become. Here was an opportunity to help build infrastructure that could make collaboration faster, simpler, and more transparent while preserving the cooperative principles that make our industry unique.

I knew it would be challenging. I just didn’t know how much I would enjoy the challenge itself.

One of the biggest adjustments has been redefining what a productive day looks like. Earlier in my career, productivity often meant calendars packed from morning until evening, dozens of decisions, and an inbox that never quite reached zero. Those things still matter, but startups measure progress differently. Sometimes the most valuable thing I accomplish all day is a single conversation.

An investor asks a question that sharpens our story. A credit union leader describes a pain point we hadn’t fully appreciated. A partner offers a perspective that changes how we explain the product.

Early on, I realized I had to stop measuring startup life by how much we accomplished in a day. Efficiency asks, How do we get there faster? Effectiveness asks, Are we getting to the right place?

The conversation that changes your product direction may look inefficient on a calendar. In reality, it may be the most effective work you do all week. It’s reminded me of something I’ve believed for years.

Innovation isn’t efficient. It’s effective.

From the outside, innovation often looks like a straight path: idea, plan, execution, success. The reality looks much different. You refine. You learn. You circle back when new questions emerge. The story improves. The product improves. Then you do it all again. To someone watching from the outside, it can look messy. From the inside, it’s exactly what progress looks like.

One surprise during these first six months has been just how consistently credit union leaders have validated the problem we’re trying to solve. I knew loan participations were more manual and inefficient than they should be. I didn’t realize how many people felt the same way.

Far more often than convincing someone the problem exists, we’ve found ourselves discussing how quickly they could use a better solution. That’s both encouraging and humbling. It reinforces that innovation isn’t about inventing problems to solve. It’s about listening carefully enough to solve problems that already exist.

 

That realization changed something for me:

We’re not building LoanNFT for credit unions. We’re building it with them.

 

Every conversation, every demonstration, every question, every challenge makes the platform better. Our roadmap isn’t shaped in isolation. It’s being refined by the very people we’re building it to serve.

Over the past six months, I’ve realized this isn’t just how startups work. It’s how the credit union movement has always worked.

The best ideas in our movement weren’t developed in isolation. They were shaped through collaboration, refined through conversation, and strengthened by trust. Shared branching. Corporate credit unions. CUSOs. Loan participations. None of these became part of our movement because someone disappeared into a room and emerged with a perfect solution. They happened because people identified a shared challenge, listened to one another, challenged assumptions, built trust, and kept improving the idea until it became something worth adopting.

The other lesson has been more personal. There is something deeply satisfying about building.

• About getting your hands dirty.
• About wearing different hats before lunch.
• About working with a small team where ideas are challenged, refined, and improved in real time.
• About ending the day not because every task is complete, but because the company is a little stronger than it was when the day began.

That may be the greatest surprise of all. I didn’t just miss building. I missed the messy middle.

Innovation requires patience because meaningful things are rarely finished before they’re visible. Funding takes longer than expected. Partnerships develop through trust. Products mature through feedback. Momentum builds one relationship at a time.

That’s not a flaw in the process. It is the process.

Credit unions have always understood that. Our movement exists because people were willing to work together, tackle difficult problems, and trust a process before the outcome was certain. Maybe that’s why this season at LoanNFT has felt so rewarding. We’re not simply building technology. We’re participating in the next chapter of a movement that has always believed cooperation can solve problems no one institution can solve alone.

Every meaningful innovation our movement has embraced has had a messy middle. Maybe that’s where the best work has always happened. And maybe that’s the point.

Because you can’t steer a parked car.