Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Empowering 5 Million Entrepreneurs: Making Business a Force for Global Good | Jessica Jackley | E64
Tue, 24 Dec 2024
Jessica Jackley grew up with values of generosity and compassion, which inspired her passion for helping others. Initially uninterested in business, she had a life-changing moment after hearing Dr. Muhammad Yunus speak about microfinance. This led her to East Africa, where she saw firsthand how small loans helped entrepreneurs escape poverty. In 2005, Jessica co-founded Kiva, a groundbreaking platform that enables individuals to lend small amounts directly to entrepreneurs worldwide. In this episode, Jessica talks to Ilana about how Kiva redefines the way people think about giving and social impact, the challenges of growing a social impact platform, and the importance of living a purposeful life focused on creating lasting change. Jessica Jackley is a social entrepreneur and investor dedicated to empowering entrepreneurs with the resources they need to succeed. As co-founder of Kiva, the world’s first microfinance crowdfunding platform, she has helped facilitate over $2B in loans since 2005, redefining traditional charity through partnerships built on equality. In this episode, Ilana and Jessica will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:44) Early Childhood and Core Values (02:18) From Poetry Student to Landing a Temp Job at Stanford (04:04) Discovering Social Entrepreneurship (05:22) The “What If” Questions That Led to the Birth of Kiva (08:03) Navigating Kiva’s Startup Struggles (11:39) Jessica’s Approach to Decision-Making (13:20) How Kiva Builds Partnerships with Real Stories, Not Guilt (18:56) Patrick’s Inspiring Story of Resilience (22:00) Building a Life of Purpose, Impact, and Growth (26:34) How Jessica Learned to Dream Beyond Limits (28:08) The Real Value of Impact in Every Decision Jessica Jackley is a social entrepreneur and investor dedicated to empowering entrepreneurs with the resources they need to succeed. As co-founder of Kiva, the world’s first microfinance crowdfunding platform, she has helped facilitate over $2B in loans since 2005, redefining traditional charity through partnerships built on equality. A venture capitalist, educator, and advocate for impact-driven entrepreneurship, Jessica inspires others to create meaningful solutions. She is the author of Clay Water Brick, a TIME "100 Most Influential People" honoree, and currently serves as a Professor of Entrepreneurship at USC’s Marshall School of Business. Connect with Jessica: Jessica’s Website: https://www.jessicajackley.com/ Jessica’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jessicajackley/ Resources Mentioned: Kiva Website: https://www.kiva.org/ Jessica’s Book, Clay Water Brick: Finding Inspiration from Entrepreneurs Who Do the Most with the Least: https://www.amazon.com/Clay-Water-Brick-Inspiration-Entrepreneurs/dp/0679643761 Leap Academy: Ready to make the LEAP in your career? There is a NEW way for professionals to Advance Their Careers & Make 5-6 figures of EXTRA INCOME in Record Time. Check out our free training today at leapacademy.com/training
Chapter 1: What inspired Jessica Jackley to start Kiva?
Jessica Jackley, one of the most incredible social impact entrepreneurs and investors, she co-founded Kiva.org, first peer-to-peer micro-lending platform, and since 2005 has raised over $2 billion in loans, reaching over 5 million people in 84 countries.
The strategy of most entrepreneurs
you
Jessica Jackley, one of the most incredible social impact entrepreneurs and investors. She co-founded Kiva.org, first peer-to-peer micro-lending platform. I don't know how you got into this. We'll talk about it. And since 2005, has raised over $2 billion in loans, reaching over 5 million people in 84 countries.
Chapter 2: How did Jessica's childhood values influence her career?
Now the founding and general partner in Untap Capital and so much more things that you're doing, Jessica. I don't even know how you're doing it. But get us started. How did you grow up that made you decide to start Kiva? Well, thank you for having me.
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
Chapter 3: What challenges did Kiva face during its startup?
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.
Chapter 4: How does Kiva redefine social impact and giving?
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?
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Chapter 5: What lessons did Jessica learn from her experience in East Africa?
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.
Take me back in time, Jessica. Someone working or living the Stanford, California, comfortable life forever. finds herself flying to Kenya, Uganda. I mean, the only thing I'll correct is, yes, of course, objectively speaking, of course.
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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Chapter 6: How does Jessica approach decision-making in her entrepreneurial journey?
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.
And I want to take you there because you're starting this sort of like experiment, right? Can we help these people? And suddenly you're finding yourself dealing with millions of dollars. I'm sure that that takes also your personal growth to start adjusting to this kind of magnitude, if you will. Can you talk a little bit about the beginning, Jessica?
Like what were some of the hurdles or what were some of the fears that come with this magnitude?
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.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of storytelling in Kiva’s mission?
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.
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Chapter 8: How does Jessica balance personal growth with the challenges of entrepreneurship?
How do you balance, Jessica, between sheer panic when the side goes down and actually asking the hard questions to move you forward instead of drowning in the anxiety or the sleepless night?
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.
And kid stuff is real. And we'll talk about it. You have four, so, right? Am I right?
I do.
I just want to go for a second back to Kiva because you were able, and yes, some of it is timing, but you also need to create your own luck, right? And you somehow managed to get in to talk to some really significant people. You just mentioned opera, et cetera, right? Yeah. What do you feel your role as the marketing persona that made that happen?
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.
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