Editor’s note: Olin Kealoha Lagon will be writing bi-weekly for Civil Beat on a variety of topics, typically about the intersections of technology and culture. Born in Hawaiʻi and raised in public housing here, he became a serial entrepreneur and inventor.

I love telling other people’s stories. I have spent years collecting them for “The Innovation Archipelago,” a book I am finishing with Tim Dick. Weʻve documented more than a hundred innovations born or catalyzed in Hawaiʻi that have changed the world. But for this inaugural column I want to do something less comfortable. I want to tell one of my own. Not because it is the best story I have collected. Because I know this one from the inside, doubts and dumb luck included, and if I am going to ask hard questions of the place I love, I should go first.

This story carries the two truths I want this space to hold. Real hope about what we can build here, and real honesty about what gets in our way. This column will often be rooted in technology and always about Hawaiʻi. And I will keep chasing the connections we do not usually make, looking at familiar things from unfamiliar angles, especially the way things grow and wither exponentially.

When our first son was born, my office mates passed around a congratulations card. It arrived late but full of love, stuffed with gift cards and warm notes. Because they apologized for it being late, an idea bubbled up that there was no simple way for a group of people to pool money online toward anything at all. I searched and found nothing general purpose. DonorsChoose funded classrooms. ArtistShare let fans back musicians. This idea was different, an organizer rallying a crowd toward any financial goal.

So I called some friends.

I sketched this diagram while eating dim sum downtown with Carnet Williams, Shawn Santos and Song Choi. Kevin Hughes joined us days later, and we launched ChipIn, the first general-purpose online crowdfunding platform. The word crowdfunding did not exist yet. We coined the term social commerce in our patent filings. The idea was embarrassingly simple. Take the social web. Add a secure money bucket with a clear goal and a live total. Offer tools like widgets to embed the campaign anywhere.

For our first campaign we chose Hōkūleʻa. The campaign raised about $15,000, and we knew we were on to something.

Growth was steady, and then our first viral campaign hit in 2007. Students at BYU did not want Vice President Dick Cheney as their commencement speaker, so they started a tongue-in-cheek ChipIn for an alternative ceremony. They expected Taco Bell money. They raised $11,000 in the first four hours. By the time they shut it off days later, the total passed $20,000. They booked Ralph Nader and held their own graduation.

Institutions came calling for this Hawaiʻi innovation. UC Berkeley made Big Ideas the first college program to put crowdfunding behind its student innovators. The Case Foundation became the first foundation to fold crowdfunding into a grant challenge. Dell became the first company to attach it to a product, letting an entire family chip in on one laptop for one student. All of it was engineered from our tiny Mānoa office. Even Obama’s 2008 campaign became one of the first to leverage modern crowdfunding.

Then came the campaign that changed what I thought we had built. In October 2009, The Huffington Post used our platform to launch its Impact section around Monique Zimmerman-Stein, a Florida mother with Stickler syndrome, a collagen disorder that can take your sight. Insurance stopped covering the injections protecting her eyes, and two of her three daughters were showing symptoms. She gave up her own treatment to pay for theirs, and she lost her sight. Readers stepped in and covered about $30,000 for the family. As far as we knew, it was the first time online crowdfunding paid a family’s medical costs. Today it happens so constantly we forget it ever needed inventing.

By the time the company was acquired, about $100 million had moved through our platform to fund causes around the world.

Here is the part I have never put in writing before.

Before any of this could happen, we needed a banking partner to process the funds. We went to a few local banks but never made it past the first meeting. I grew up watching one bank turn Yes into one of the most famous advertising campaigns in Hawaiʻi history. Instead we heard a whole bunch of other words.

One night I flipped my credit card over and noticed the address. Sioux Falls, South Dakota. South Dakota? I checked another card. South Dakota again. Hmmmm. When you notice a pattern, dig deeper.

I dug. In 1978 the Supreme Court ruled that a national bank could charge whatever interest its home state allowed, no matter where its customers lived. South Dakota, desperate after a farm crisis, wiped out its caps in 1980 and invited the banks in. New York capped rates at 12%, so Citibank moved to Sioux Falls the next year. Others followed. You can thank South Dakota for your credit card interest rates.

I figured banks there were open to out-of-state partners, so I went online, found one with a cool website, and called. My very first call turned into a pitch to a banking officer about letting strangers send money to strangers toward any goal. Thirty minutes into the call he said sure, let’s give it a go. Two months later we processed our first payouts. The yes existed. It just was not here. And I never needed to set foot in South Dakota.

Ideas showcases stories, opinion and analysis about Hawaiʻi, from the state’s sharpest thinkers, to stretch our collective thinking about a problem or an issue. Email news@civilbeat.org to submit an idea or an essay.

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I want to be very careful, because the easy version of this story is unfair. The people in those first meetings were not villains. They were doing their jobs inside a culture that errs on the side of caution, and I love our culture. It has served Hawaiʻi well. Our banks stayed solid through crashes that gutted others. When you live 2,500 miles from the nearest continent, protecting what you have is survival.

But the math has changed. Playing it safe wins when change is linear. It loses when change is exponential. The millions that moved through ChipIn never touched a Hawaiʻi bank. The fees, the jobs, the know-how, and the next hundred deals compounded elsewhere.

And we are standing at the base of the steepest curve of my lifetime. Artificial Intelligence is not arriving on a linear schedule. Its capabilities are compounding the way ChipIn’s dollars did, doubling and doubling again. In an exponential era the middle stops being the safe place.

Here is why I have immense hope. Like so many innovations, the idea came from here. Four of us in a small office in Mānoa built something that let strangers anywhere on earth carry one another. Kevin had put Hawaiʻi’s first web server online back in 1993 and invented things we all use, like the image maps that made the web more clickable. Talent was never the problem. Rising boldly to meet what comes next is what we need to work on.

Which brings me back to Hōkūleʻa. I am glad we chose the beloved canoe for our first campaign, because it is not a story about caution. Our ancestors crossed the largest ocean on earth on purpose, in double-hulled canoes, reading swells and stars. They were not reckless. They trained, they prepared, they managed enormous risk instead of avoiding it. Somewhere along the way we started believing that being careful is who we are. It is not the heritage of this ʻāina. It is only who we have been lately.

Somewhere in these islands right now, a kid is sketching the next ChipIn on a napkin. I hope we make sure that she does not have to call South Dakota.