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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Appearances
I kid you not, this is real. And so it's not like I was living it up in Silicon Valley. I was young and I was fine. I mean, I was not raking it in. I was figuring out what was next. And being in that environment, though, was... the real wealth, the real abundance, being in a place where people were asking those what if questions, imagining the future and then going and doing it. It was magic.
It was magic to be in a place like that.
I remember thinking about the real environments, the tactile, actual, physical places that we were connecting. We were in remote villages where there was no electricity. They were off the grid. Sometimes, well, almost always no running water. And the way that it worked is I'd have a really slow, not very nice, which was good.
I wanted low quality because it took so long to upload pictures otherwise. But I had this like old digital camera and I'd walk or get like a bike taxi into the hub of the village, the trading center area. And there was one internet cafe with a dial-up connection and you'd have to wait for the stars to align. Like the electricity was on, the internet was going to work.
Anyway, I just think about that connected to Silicon Valley, connected to Matt, who was back in San Francisco coding the site, working right in the center of it all. And I felt like it was hitching up, I don't even know what the right, like someone on foot or like riding a horse or something to a rocket. It was a really interesting balance.
It was the marrying of many different worlds, but at the beginning, it felt like this spectrum of two worlds, one quite on... either end polarized. And we were connecting them together and it was so beautiful and so interesting, but definitely it was a learning curve that I had never experienced before.
But luckily, the main thing you got to know as an entrepreneur is to know what you don't know and then find smart people who can help you. I was really good at that. I think we were clearly that's one thing we were good at. But I also am very aware that most things are affected more than anyone ever wants to admit by timing. by a ton of stuff that you don't control.
So yeah, show up every day, work your ass off, try to make great decisions, try to have good judgment, try to Use all the things you have learned up until that moment in time to navigate uncertainty. But at the end of the day, a lot of it is the world agreeing with you or not that that thing should exist.
So it just so happened that, like I said, three years after I'd heard Dr. Yunus speak and I was intrigued by this whole idea, he did win the Nobel Peace Prize. And I remember some of the articles, apropos of nothing, we'd just launched. So it was announcing the Nobel Peace Prize winner. And then at the end of this beautiful pieces on him and his work was, you too can be a microfinance.
Go to Kiva.org. You know, my role technically in the beginning as co-founder, but was chief marketing officer. And mostly what I did was try to slow down the traffic to the site because we kept running out of loads. So I remember once after we were on Oprah with President Clinton, the site crashed instantly. So hard for like...
And I remember we actually, instead of having the usual dropdown of 25, 50, 75, 100, all the options up until the total need of the loan, whether it was 300 or a thousand, we recoded the site to just show the 25 so that if you really wanted to participate, you'd have to lend, check out, log out, come back, log back in, and then go through checkout again because we needed to slow it down. Yeah.
So anyway, it was a lot of funny lessons, a lot of counterintuitive stuff. And I guess the main thing is you got to get comfortable continuing always to learn because the game is always changing. It's like each next level in a video game where like as soon as you, your reward for getting through one phase is like a whole different set of challenges in the next phase. So you just got to love that.
I think there are categories. There's the category of questions that is sort of under the heading, how do we feel? I don't know, I'm a big feeler. Like, how do we process this? Oh, do we feel surprised? Are we terrified? Are we skeptical? Do we understand like what's going on here? Process, process. And then it's just the, what do we do?
It's almost like the qualitative, quantitative, soft stuff versus the data-driven decisions. So I don't know, every moment, every decision is different, but I am not really a panicker. So I move pretty quickly, sometimes to my detriment, from accepting what's happening and then picking a path. So it's not careless.
I'm pretty touchy-feely about this stuff, but I honestly think it's just, I have such privilege in terms of the love that I'm surrounded by in my life from my family of origin and now the family I've built. And I feel safe and I feel like, what's the worst that can happen? If I'm well-intentioned, I think I'm pretty smart. I definitely can find smarter people around me.
If we work our best to make decisions as things come, what exactly are we afraid of? So I don't know. I don't spend a lot of time in the panic, woe is me art, usually. I do in other things, but I think I do in the things that are matter more, like the kid stuff or relationship stuff or health stuff.
I do.
Forgive me if I'm just too saccharine here, but it's genuinely how I feel. I think probably my biggest advantage in a lot of ways is... I genuinely enjoy and love people and their stories. Like I kind of don't get tired of it. I don't know which personality tests.
I know I've taken some of them at some point, but I think I do remember Myers-Briggs coming back like 26 or however many categories points there are, like 26 to zero extrovert. Like I love, love. I can sit and listen to people's stories forever.
And I mean, that was foundational for Kiva, listening and honoring each individual story versus having like an example or a poster child and raising money around that. Singular story, getting excited about sharing and translating story to whoever you're speaking with, whoever you're is on the other side listening at the moment.
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