Jessica Jackley
speaker
84 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Jessica Jackley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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There's absolutely not a trade-off with doing good, doing well.
The strategy of most entrepreneurs
you
It's a pleasure to get to talk to you today. I grew up in a really loving, incredible, super close family. We had really strong core values together around generosity and compassion and love. I felt like it was always an obvious and straightforward thing. We have everything we need. Therefore, our job is to focus on giving and making sure other people have everything that they need. And so
I've always been primed to look for ways to help, to look for ways to serve. I did a ton of that growing up with my family. And so I went to college and in undergrad studied philosophy and poetry and political science, nothing related to entrepreneurship. I was not interested in business. In fact, I thought, why would you want to preoccupy yourself with
Thinking about how to sell stuff that maybe people don't even need and get someone else's money. It just felt focused on the wrong values. And so, again, my tune has changed over time, of course, 20 some years into my work. But in the beginning, I thought business is bad. What's the opposite of business? Nonprofits. That's where I should go. So my goal was to be of use in the social sector.
It was very obvious to me. That's where I wanted to be. I ended up, though, as soon as I hit the real world after college, I graduated with my philosophy and poetry degrees and did not know exactly how to be useful. I knew how to think. I knew how to write. I knew what I believed, and I didn't know what that meant for a job. So I ended up moving to California on a whim. I was in love with a boy.
This is not prescriptive. This is just what I did. And I ended up getting a job as a temp at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Now, I was, again, not interested at all in the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In fact, I thought, I better not corrupt my soul here. This is, I don't know. I don't know about this place.
Just to really hammer this home, I was so worried about how it might change who I was. And I was so convinced nobody there would be my people that I ended up getting a second job. I lived at this home for teen moms and I was a house mom there. And I would do that at night. I'd help the girls. It was a handful of teenage girls and their kids. in this nonprofit home in East Palo Alto.
And I would work with the girls, help them get the homework done, make dinner, make sure all the kids were in bed, et cetera, drive everyone to school and daycare in the morning, and then go to my real job as a program coordinator at Stanford Business School. But it just so happened in the business school
I happened to land in this place called the Center for Social Innovation, where everyday people were thinking about how to use business skills and entrepreneurial thinking to enact social change.
And I very, very quickly realized, oh, wait, these people are super passionate, value the same things I do, have their priorities straight, in my humble opinion, and are getting things done, like know how to move people and resources around to do stuff. So I thought, oh, This is where I want to be for a little while. So I ended up working there for three years.
I crashed classes, went to professor's office hours. And if no students were waiting, I'd be like, explain pricing to me. And one day I stayed late after work and heard this guy, Dr. Mohamed Younes, speak. It was three years before he and his Grumman Bank would win the Nobel Peace Prize for their pioneering work in modern microfinance. And I heard him speak to a room of like 40 people.
And it changed the trajectory of my life. I ended up quitting my job a few months later, moving to East Africa, begging my way into an unpaid internship and just immersed myself in an experience that taught me a lot about entrepreneurs who had used $100 to bootstrap out of really abject poverty. I mean, these weren't even micro loans. They were micro grants.
So we're talking very first rung of the economic ladder. And it was there that I started to ask the what-if questions that led to the creation of Kiva. What if they stayed in touch with these individuals, these amazing people that I was meeting all over rural Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania?
What if instead of donating money to an organization that then later might provide loans, the next step many of them wanted and needed was a loan, a tiny, tiny loan. And so I thought, well, what if individuals like myself back home could lend money directly to somebody, not even charge crazy interest rates or anything, but just here's a hundred bucks. Let me know when you're done. Pay it back.
wouldn't that be an interesting experience? And what if you could use technology that really we're right on the cusp of getting comfortable with? It sounds crazy, but it was 20 years ago, but people were just getting comfortable with the idea of using their credit card online, using PayPal, that kind of thing.
So we kind of put all these what-ifs together, myself and my co-founder, Matt, and we ended up launching Kiva in this. We did a pilot round of loans in the spring of 2004, and we launched For Real in 2005. And yeah, it was $3,000 for the pilot round. It was, oh my God, 500,000 the first year. It was 15 million next, 40, 100. And it's moving towards 3 billion now.
And it's this real platform for connection and empowerment in a way that is pretty stunning to watch. I feel super lucky I got to be a part of it in the early days.
But I mean, I was just right out of undergrad. I lived with 11 other people in a three-bedroom house on Sand Hill Road. This was back when there's this little strip of houses that were on Sand Hill. They've kind of built a barrier now. We were all recent grads with no money trying to figure out what we wanted to do with ourselves. We had a guy in a tent in the backyard.
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