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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So I do remember in the early days talking to VCs about Kiva and saying, you know, it was a non-profit is a non-profit. but helping them understand by virtue of starting where they were. You meet people where they are. So this is like the investments you make, but blah, blah, blah, blah. Or speaking to nonprofit leaders.
I remember speaking to somebody who ran like a child sponsorship program and saying, yeah, yeah, it's like that, but it's different in these ways. I find it really a fun challenge to build relationships deep empathy with someone and try to understand who they are, what makes them tick, what their journey is, and then connect. So there's always something you can connect on.
That's part of what I just personally love. And so individual to individual, that's a joy for me. In terms of the message and the broader story that Kiva tells and told in the brand, I felt like it was such an unlock for me to go from two decades growing up hearing stories of
Sadness and suffering and desperation and hopelessness and all the things that make you panic and that have a sense of urgency built into them. By the way, rightfully so, there's some incredibly difficult issues in the world that many, many people are burdened by. And so, of course, there is urgency.
But so much of the strategy of most nonprofits and NGOs and other well-intentioned organizations up until Kiva for me was,
took the same tactic of get the attention of the person by making them really feel the pain and focus on sort of the guilt and the shame of their own relative position of advantage and get them to throw their change in the jar and then they feel a little bit better about themselves, whether they actually believe or not that's going to make a really meaningful, impactful, lasting change.
But you feel it as you hear those particularly painful, well-crafted, intentional stories. And then They get what they want out of you, which is a transaction. And I felt like Kiva was all the opposites of that. It was about focusing on the story of strength and entrepreneurship and creativity and all of these incredibly...
brilliant people that given other circumstances would be our bosses, just incredible talent all over. So focusing on that and focusing on a different ask, don't donate so that you create this, what can become a very strange donor beneficiary imbalanced relationship, but instead create a partnership built on equality. Here's my money. Use it. Do your thing. You got me back. Great. We're even.
I mean, Creating that partnership connection was a really big deal. And then again, the excitement of using technology very, very early on. I think it was just the permutations that you could have so many different stories of all the borrowers and every possible lender, many of them connecting to a borrower. The human interest stories write themselves.
So it was this treasure trove of beautiful connections of the mom in Seattle that found the mom in Senegal and the CEO in... Houston that found the CEO of wherever. And then as the network grew, the platform grew, the unexpected pieces that are so humbling for us to be surprised by, you know, it's not just people in...
The North, people in the US and Canada lending to people in Sub-Saharan Africa. It's flipped. There's guys in Kenya lending to guys or women in Brooklyn that started a food truck or Mexicans lending to other Mexicans. It's not always the same old narrative and it's not otherized.
It's a big old mix of people who, you know, one day you might be a lender, maybe one day you'll be a borrower or vice versa. And that's beautiful. That's the thing. So Kiva had a lot of advantages. It's a very long answer, but I think about what made Kiva spread. And it was that everyone, I think, could find a reflection of themselves somewhere at some time in the stories that they saw.
And they were not fake. They're not made up, like... case study stuff or again, poster child stuff.
My book is named after one story that represents so much of the good stuff that I've heard over the years. It was a gentleman named named Patrick in Uganda. He had fled the northern area of the country after his village was attacked by the LRA. And he lost his family, everyone except one brother. Everything that they owned had been stolen or burned. All the animals killed. So he fled on foot.
And they found, after days and days, they found distant cousins in a little border town. outside of Tarora, Uganda, and he had nothing, was starting over. All that he had was a place to sleep in this mud hut structure and the ground beneath his feet. And amazingly, he figured out something really useful to do just with that. As he told his story to me years ago, he talked about sitting there
his back against the hut where he had slept and watching the sun come up. And he sort of looks down and realizes in the ground beneath his feet, it's so poetic, there were clay deposits. So you can dig and find these ribbons of very usable, ready to go clay. And, and he,
dug those up and kind of mixed them with water and made them the right consistency to form bricks and at first those bricks were very rough and misshapen and they cracked and crumbled but he got really good at it pretty quickly and so day after day brick after brick the guy creates this product that he's able to sell for the equivalent of fractions of a penny and he does it again and again and again every damn day just and eventually is able to buy some pieces of wood to make a brick mold and
Which sounds like, okay. But then his production increased. It sped up so much and he had higher quality products. It was firmer. It didn't break as much. Then as that went well, he was able to save up over time to buy some implements, shovel, trowel, whatever. Then he was able to save up to go to a local village and learn how to build one of these self-contained kilns.
So stacking all the beautiful bricks around a fire in the belly of the thing. Because of course you can sell those bricks for more. And so the guy had built this business, had several employees, had hired his brother, and he was able to point around in the area where he lived and say, I built that, I built that, I built that. So he had built all these like structures
with his team, with this business that literally began with nothing. I mean, the ground beneath his feet. And so this idea that there's never nothing, there's never absolutely nothing. I found those stories just- Incredible. Inspiring. And again, having come from Silicon Valley where there was this speed and this pace of so many resources.
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