Transcript of Empowering 5 Million Entrepreneurs: Making Business a Force for Global Good | Jessica Jackley

There's absolutely not a trade-off with doing good, doing well.

Jessica Jackley, one of the most incredible social impact entrepreneurs and investors. She co-founded kiva. Org, first peer-to-peer microlending platform, and since 2005, has raised over 2 billion in loans, reaching over 5 million people in 84 countries.

The strategy of most nonprofits and NGOs and other well-intentioned organizations up until Kiva, for me, I took the same tactic of get the attention of the person by making them really feel the pain, get them to throw their change in the jar, and then they feel a little bit better about themselves. As an investor, I've heard a lot of pitches, and so many times I think, Oh, man, this is your one wild and precious life. That's what you want to build.

Is it something that you wish you would say to your younger self?

It would be a version of Jessica Jackley, one of the most incredible social impact entrepreneurs and investors.

She co-founded kiva. Org, first peer-to-peer microlending platform. I don't know how you got into this. We'll talk about it. Since 2005, has raised over 2 billion in loans, reaching over 5 million people in 84 countries, now the founding a general partner in on TAP 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. I felt like it 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. 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. I went to college, and in an 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 reoccupy 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. 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. 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 to my soul here. 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. 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. I would work with the girls, help them get the homework done, make dinner, make sure all the kids were bed, etc. 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. 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. Know how to move people and resources around to do stuff. I thought, oh, this is where I want to be for a little while. I ended up working there for three years. I crashed classes, went to professors' office hours, and if no students were waiting, I'd be like, explain pricing to me. One day, I stayed late after work and heard this guy, Dr. Mohamed Younes, speak.

It was three years before he and his Grummin Bank win the Nobel Peace Prize for their pioneering work in modern microfinance. I heard him speak to a room of 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 microloans, they were microgrants. We're talking very first rung of the economic ladder. 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 raising 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. I thought, 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 100 bucks.

Let me know when you're done. Pay it back. Wouldn't that be an interesting experience? 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 thing. We 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 '04, and we launched for real in '05. Yeah, it was $3,000 for the pilot round. It was, oh my God, $500,000 the first year. It was $15 million next, $400, and it's moving towards 3 billion now. 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, finds herself flying to Kenya, Uganda.

The only thing I'll correct is, yes, of course. Objectively speaking, of course. But 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 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. I kid you not, this is real. It's not like I was living it up in Silicon Valley. I was young and I was fine. I was not raking it in. I was figuring out what was next. 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 want to take you there because you're starting this experiment, right? Can we help these people? 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 magnitude, if you will. Can you talk a little bit about the beginning, Jessica? 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 old digital camera, and I'd walk or get a bike taxi into the hub of the The Trading Center area. There was one internet cafe with a dial-up connection, and you'd have to wait for the stars to align. 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, coating the site, working right in the center of it all. 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.

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. It just so happened that, like I said, three years after I'd heard Dr. Younes speak, and I was intrigued by this whole idea. He did win the Nobel Peace Prize, and I remember some of the articles, apropos nothing, we'd just launched.

So it was announcing the Nobel Peace Prize winner. And then at the end of this, beautiful piece on him and his work was, You, too, can be a microfinancier. Go to kiva. Org. My role technically in the beginning, I was a 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 I remember once after we were on Oprah with President Clinton, the site crashed instantly. So hard for like days or something. I remember we actually, instead of having the usual drop-down 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 check out again as we needed to slow down. Anyway, it was a lot of funny lessons, a lot of counterintuitive stuff. 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 game where as soon as you, your reward for getting through one phase is a whole different set of challenges in the next phase. You just got to love that.

How do you balance, Jessica, between sheer panic when the sight goes down and actually asking the hard questions to move you forward instead of drowning in the anxiety or the soupless night?

I think there are categories. There's a category of questions that is under the getting, how do we feel? I don't know, I'm a big feeler. How do we process this? Oh, do we feel surprised? Are we terrified? Are we skeptical? Do we understand? What's going on here? Process, process. Then it's just the, what do we do? It's almost like the qualitative, quantitative, soft stuff versus the data-driven decisions. I don't know. Every moment, every decision is different. But I am not really a panicker. I move pretty quickly, sometimes to my detriment, from accepting what's happening and then picking a path. 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 the family I've built. I feel safe and I feel like, what's the worst that can happen? If I'm well intention, 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? 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 matter more, like the kid stuff or relationship stuff or health stuff.

The kids' stuff is real, and we'll talk about it. You have four, 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? You somehow managed to get in to talk to some really significant people. You just mentioned opera, et cetera, right? What do you feel your role as the marketing persona that made that happen?

Forgive me if I'm just too sacre in 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, I don't get tired of it. I don't know which personality test. I know I've taken some of them at some point, but I think I do remember Myers-Briggs coming back, 26 or however many categories points there are, 26 to zero, extra for it. I Love. I can sit and listen to people's stories forever. I mean, that was foundational for Kiva, listening and honoring each individual's story versus having an example or a poster child and raising money around that singular story. Getting excited about sharing and a condolating story to whoever you're speaking with, whoever is on the other side listening at the moment. I do remember in the early days talking to VCs about Kiva and saying, no, it was a nonprofit. It was a nonprofit. But helping them understand by virtue of starting where they were, you meet people where they are. This is like the investments you make, blah, blah, blah, blah, It's different in these ways. I find it really a fun challenge to build deep empathy with someone and try to understand who they are, what makes them tick, what their journey is, and then connect.

There's always something you can connect on. That's part of what I just personally love. 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, took the same of get the attention of the person by making them really feel the pain and focus on 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. I felt 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 is. 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. Creating that partnership connection was a really big deal. Then again, the excitement of using technology 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. It was this treasure trove of beautiful connections of the mom in Seattle that found the in Senegal and the CEO in Houston that found the CEO of wherever.

Then as the platform grew, the unexpected pieces that are so humbling for us to be surprised by, it's not just people in the north, people in the US and Canada lending to people in sub-Saran 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 otherwise. It's just a big old mix of people who one day you might be a lender, maybe one day you'll be a borrower or vice versa. That's beautiful. That's the thing. So Kiva had a lot of advantages. It was a very long answer, but I think about what made Kiva spread. It was that everyone, I think, could find a reflection of themselves somewhere at some time in the stories that they saw. They were not fake. They're not made up case study stuff or, again, poster child stuff.

I think that also holds you when things are hard. As a founder, you really need something to lean on. I think these inspiring stories, which I would love to hear one, but really hold you. I think you're also talking about respect. It adds a layer of respect and making decisions or lending from hope and dreams versus fear or doubt or I want to do you a favor. Can you share an inspiring story?

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 Patrick in Uganda. He had flood 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. 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 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, play, and he dug those up and mixed them with water and made them the right consistency to form bricks.

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, and eventually is able to buy some pieces of wood to make a brick mold, which sounds like okay. But then his production increased. It sped up so much and he had higher quality product. 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 the fire in the belly of the thing. Because, of course, you can sell those bricks for more. 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 I built that, I built that, I built that.

He had built all these structures with his team, with this business that literally began with nothing, the ground beneath his feet. So this idea that there's never nothing. There's never absolutely nothing. I found those stories just-Incredible. Inspiring. Again, having come from Silicon Valley where there was this speed and this pace of so many resources to just go make stuff all the time and to fail fast. And all those. All those are beautiful ideas and so great. What a gift to get to be that entrepreneur. Many of the entrepreneurs through Kiva, obviously, are survival entrepreneurs. They're doing what they can do, and they don't have a ton of options, certainly not a ton of resources. I found those were stories the world needed to hear.

You wrote that in your book, Claywater Brick, which is basically based on this. Yeah, that was an opening story.

Spoiler.

I I think you have a quote that I love about the heart of entrepreneurship is never about what we have. I think it's really where we're part of it. It's about what we do. You're saying it's so beautiful and you give all these examples.

Thank you.

It becomes this big thing, and then you have another startup. I would just rest, but you continue.

I didn't know that was a thing. Sounds good today. No, I was so motivated. I realized I could be an entrepreneur. It took that to convince me. But again, I was like, I'll just go be useful in an NGO somewhere. It'll be great. Then this happened and I thought, Oh, that's more fun. I'm going to do that. That's more me.

Based on everything you went through, just a couple more questions, Jessica, because you just did so much and your name is really connected with a brilliant entrepreneur that also manages to do good, which is really, really rare. Can you share a hard moment where you had some doubt of, Can I even continue? You? Is it even for me? Is that even ever in your head?

It's interesting. I've been doing a lot of reflection and writing just for myself lately. It might become a new thing, I'm not sure, but I'm thinking a lot about the different versions of that over time. In the beginning, I had doubts that were more about, Am I enough? Am I good enough to try new things, to try again? Even Eskiva was taking off. I was like, Well, but I don't know. I mean, how much of that was because of me? It was a lot of imposter syndrome, pretty classic. Not that interesting.

Very typical, though. Very typical.

I'm not going to take air time on that one. We I don't know what that is. But then I feel like one of the wonderful, beautiful pieces of continuing to take shots on goal is you just realize how much just sticking with it and trying again and again and again That's the trick. That's the thing. I noticed that I've tried some things that have worked a little, some things that haven't worked so much, some things that worked for 3-5 years. Then I've made the call like, Oh, the world's changing or my life is changing. I'm going to switch it or sell it or shut it down. I feel wonderful about my life. I feel wonderful about the things that I've built or tried to build. I don't feel like I need to apologize to anyone, even, to be totally honest. I have chosen. I've been so lucky. It's ridiculous. But I've had investors that I feel like, We all agree. Here's the bet. Here's the bet we're going to place. Here are the assumptions we're testing out. Let's go run some experiments, and we'll all learn together. Maybe we'll learn in a way that allows us to keep building on top of the things that we started.

Maybe we'll learn in a different direction. But that's how I'm thinking about this. What do you say? And by the way, there's potential to be big because that's nice to build. I think it's boring if you're not trying to do something that could be really impactful is the word I would use. It's not about just size and growth at all costs and growth forever. Why do we do that? I think about the things I built and I feel grateful. If I reflect on these recent moments when I'm like, it's not I can't, it's what am I choosing? What is the combination of things that I'm going to work on and spend my working, waking hours on? Every minute away from my family better be for something pretty good because I'm essential and I'm irreplaceable to my kids and my husband. I do believe if you're working on the right things, you're in your own way, you're replaceable there too. But it's just a different category for me. I think for me, to answer your question, talk about a hard time. I've been thinking a lot lately about the fact that except for a few times when I've been in EIR or I worked at a startup bank.

Otherwise, I've only worked at my own stuff that I've made up in my own heart and head. I recently to teach full-time, and it's really a beautiful season. I'm experiencing that right now. I'm teaching at the USC Marshall School of Business. I teach impact entrepreneurship and design thinking stuff. There's new courses every semester, but those are what I'm focused on this semester. I'm really enjoying it. I feel like it's such a breath of fresh air for me to be able to have space to think and to write and to be really creative, and also to have a built-in community of wonderful students to learn from and with.

Based on everything you've done and everything you learned and everything you experienced, maybe now with that perspective, is this something that you wish you would say to your younger self?

It would be a version of, it's going to be more than you can imagine. It's going to be so good. I always thought it was a pretty good dreamer, and then I felt, I think, out of the gate. My professional dream I realized I hadn't even been dreaming big enough. I'm a pretty happy person, and I think I could be happy in a number of different versions of my life. It was hard to keep up dream-wise as it grew. That was such an exceptional experience. I think in my personal life now, it's an embarrassment of riches with this crew. I'm daily just fueled by gratitude.

I think My attitude is underrated, so that's a really important one. Anyway, Jessica, just hearing your story is extremely inspiring. I remember hearing about you as an entrepreneur, probably, I don't know, almost a decade ago, right? And I think just seeing that journey is incredible. And like you say, it was hard to keep up with the dream because the dream was just becoming bigger and bigger. In Leep, I love saying, it's not about what we make, it's what we make possible. And what you guys made possible is exceptional. Thank you so much for coming to this show.

Oh, it's such a pleasure. It's occurring to me, I don't want to be rude or pushy, but I wanted to say one other piece that's jumping for me. I just usually talk to audiences that are already sold on social impact. I guess I'd just say this. I think there's a myth of neutrality around impact out there. Every organization, every company, every person has some impact. So don't be asleep at the wheel. It's the most wonderful holistic, I think, way to look at risk and opportunity with the widest possible lens. There's so much that you can do that's intentional and beautiful in the world. It doesn't just have to be solving for one factor, solving for how much money can we make, how quickly. That's honestly basic. You're like, Okay, that's interesting. But what's the meaning? What are you doing? I feel sad when as an investor, I've heard a lot of pitches, and so many times I think, Oh, Oh, man. This is your one wild and precious life. That's what you want to build? Okay. That is not what I feel is worth spending time on. But okay. God bless you. I think there's so much that we can do that is all the things, that checks all the boxes.

I guess if anyone's listening to this and thinking about the thing they're building, the thing they want to build next, there's not a trade-off. There's absolutely not a trade-off with doing good, doing well. I think everyone will be asked in the near future Those who do not think proactively about what the meaning, what the impact is, what the goodness is about, again, risk and responsibility. Those who do not think about it now will not win at whatever the thing is you're trying to do anyway. It's so rich to solve for all those parts. I think there's intellectual laziness and there's just a myopic mindset if you are not thinking about those things. I know that sounds judgmental. I don't mean for it to. I would like to challenge anyone hearing this to push yourself, push your team, push your mission and your vision to consider the giant world that we live in and all of the factors that matter and all of the stakeholders that are very real people in connection to what you're doing.

I think if I may just tap into that for a second, because in claywater brick, I think you have a quote, and I might be butchering it a little bit, but it was something along the line of something we talked a little bit. Choose not to focus on the lack or the hurt or the poverty or the brokenness that we all know exists, but choose to see potential and possibilities. I think everything you were saying is about creating that impact, but creating the impact from the possibilities from what is available, what is the dream, and just creating a better society, better world for everybody, which I love how you're just seeing this.

Yeah. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Jessica. And just continue to shine your light.

Thank you, Lana. You, too. It's great to be here with you today, and I appreciate the conversation..