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

[00:00:00] [00:01:00] Ilana Golan: 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. Now the founding and general partner in Untapped 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? Jessica Jackley: 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 I felt like it [00:02:00] 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, you know, as soon as I hit the real world [00:03:00] 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 the 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 non profit 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 [00:04:00] 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. 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 at crash 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. Muhammad Yunus speak. It was three years before he and his Grumman bank would win the Nobel Peace Prize for their pioneering work in modern microfinance. I heard him speak to a room of like 48 people, and it [00:05:00] 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 a hundred dollars to bootstrap out of poverty. 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 I 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 [00:06:00] 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 04, and we launched for real in 05. 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. Ilana Golan: Take me back in time, Jessica. Working or living the Stanford, California, comfortable life, finds herself flying to Kenya, Uganda. Jessica Jackley: I mean, the only thing I'll correct is, yes, of course, objectively speaking, of course. But I mean, I, [00:07:00] just right out of undergrad, I lived with, 11 other people in a three bedroom house on Santill Road. This was back when there's this little strip of houses that were on Santill. 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. 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. Ilana Golan: 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 [00:08:00] 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? Jessica Jackley: 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 and connected to Matt, who was back in [00:09:00] 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 a, 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 [00:10:00] 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, 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, on him and his work was, you too can be a microfinancier, 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 10 days or something. And I remember we actually, instead of having the usual drop down of 25, 50, 75, 100, all the options [00:11:00] up until the total need of the loan, whether it was 300 or 1, 000, 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. Because we needed. to slow it down. 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. Ilana Golan: how do you balance, Jessica, between sheer panic when the site goes down and actually asking the hard questions to move you forward instead of drowning in the anxiety or the sleepless nights? Jessica Jackley: I think there are categories. There's a category of questions that is sort of under the [00:12:00] heading, how do we feel? Like, how do we, 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, you, 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 my, 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 [00:13:00] exactly are we afraid of? So I, I don't know. I don't, I don't spend a lot of time in the panic, woe is me art, usually I do other things, but I do. I think I do in the things that are. Matter more like the kids stuff or relationship stuff or health stuff. Ilana Golan: and kids stuff is real and we'll talk about it Do you have four so right? Am I right? Jessica Jackley: Yeah, Ilana Golan: I just want to go for a second back to Kiva because you were able and yes, some of it is timing You 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? What do you feel your role as the marketing persona that made that happen? Jessica Jackley: 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 [00:14:00] 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. So I do remember in the early days talking to VCs about Kiva and saying, you know, it was a nonprofit, is a nonprofit, 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 Or speaking to, uh, nonprofit leaders. I remember speaking to somebody who did, ran like a child sponsorship program and saying, yeah, it's like that, but [00:15:00] 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. 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. And 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 [00:16:00] 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, you know, 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. 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 [00:17:00] 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 bar, 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, like, 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 U. S. and Canada lending to people in Sub Saharan Africa. It's flip. There's guys in Kenya lending to guys or women in Brooklyn that started a food truck. Or it's [00:18:00] Mexicans lending to other Mexicans. It's not always the same old narrative and it's not otherwise, just 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 Q had a lot of advantages. This is 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. Ilana Golan: And I think that also holds you when things are hard. So as a founder, you really need. something to lean on and I think these inspiring stories, which I would love to hear one, but really hold you. And I think you're also talking about respect, like it adds a layer of respect and making decisions from, or lending from hope and dreams versus, you know, Fear or doubt or I want to do you a favor. Can you share an inspiring story? Jessica Jackley: My book is named [00:19:00] after one story that represents so much of the good stuff I've heard over the years. It was a gentleman 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 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 them. These ribbons are very usable, ready to go. [00:20:00] Clay 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 day. I'll just. 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 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 [00:21:00] 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 Ilana Golan: incredible. Jessica Jackley: And again, having come from Silicon Valley where there was this speed and this pace of and also many resources to just go make stuff all the time and to fail fast and to all those things. And all those are beautiful ideas and so great. What a gift to get to be that kind of 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. And I found those were stories the world needed to hear. Ilana Golan: And you wrote that in your book, Claywater Brick, right? Which is basically based on this. Jessica Jackley: Yeah, that was the opening story. Spoiler. Ilana Golan: I [00:22:00] think you have a quote that I love about the heart of entrepreneurship is never about what we have. I think it's really, we're a part of, it's, it's about what we do. And, and you're saying it's so beautiful and you give all these examples. Thank you. so it becomes this big thing and then you have another startup. I would just rest, but you continue. Jessica Jackley: I didn't know that was a thing. Sounds good today. I just . No, I was so motivated. I realized I could be an entrepreneur. It took all that to convince me. But again, I was like, I'll just go be useful in an NGO somewhere. It'll be great . And then this happened and I thought, oh, that's more fun. I'm gonna do that. That's more me. Ilana Golan: and 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, right? Which is really, really rare. Can you share a hard moment where you had some doubt of, can I even [00:23:00] continue? Is it even for me? Is that even ever in your head? Jessica Jackley: 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 I've been 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 like, 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. But, you know. Ilana Golan: Very typical though. Very typical. Jessica Jackley: I'm not going to take air time on that one. We all 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.[00:24:00] That's the trick. That's the thing. And so 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 three to five years. And then I've made the call like, Oh, the world's changing or my life is changing. Um, I'm going to switch it or sell it or shut it down. And I, 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. 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 oh, by the way, there's like 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 [00:25:00] really impactful is the word I would use. It's not about just like size and growth at all costs and growth forever. Like, why do we do that? I think about the things I built and I feel grateful. If I reflect on 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? And 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. And I do believe there's aif you're working on The right things you're in your own way, kind of irreplaceable there too, but just a different category for me. So 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. And I recently [00:26:00] Shows to teach full time. And it's really a beautiful season. And so 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. And 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. Ilana Golan: based on everything you've done and everything you learned and everything you experienced, maybe now with that perspective, is there something that you wish you would say to your younger self? Jessica Jackley: 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 I was a pretty good dreamer and then I felt, I think like out of the gate. My professional [00:27:00] dreams, I realized I hadn't even been dreaming big enough. Yeah. I'm a pretty happy person, and I think I could be happy in a number of different versions of my life. And, um, Kiva was, it was hard to keep up, dream wise, as it grew. So that was such an exceptional experience. And I think in my personal life now, I mean, it's an embarrassment of riches with this crew. So I'm daily just fueled by gratitude. Ilana Golan: And I think gratitude is underrated. So that's a really important one. Anyway, Jessica, just hearing your story is extremely inspiring. I was, you know, I remember hearing about you as an entrepreneur, probably, I don't know, like 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 Leap, I love saying, it's not about what we make, it's what we make [00:28:00] possible. And what you guys made possible is exceptional. Thank you so much for coming to the show. Jessica Jackley: Oh, it's such a pleasure, and you know, 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, like I just usually talk to audiences that are already sort of sold on social impact, and 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 kind of 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. And 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, it's kind of basic. You're like, okay, that's interesting, but what's the meaning? What is, what are you doing? Like, I just, I feel sad when I've, as of an investor, I've heard a lot of pitches and so many times I think, oh [00:29:00] 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. So 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. And 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, 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. And it's so rich to solve for all those parts. I think it's, 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 just, I would like to [00:30:00] 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. are very real people in connection to what you're doing. Ilana Golan: And I think, you know, 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, it choose not to focus on the lack or the hurt or the poverty or the brokenness. And I think That we all know exists, but choose to see potential and possibilities. And I think everything you're 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. Jessica Jackley: Yeah. Thank you so much. Ilana Golan: Thank you, [00:31:00] Jessica. And just continue to shine your light. Jessica Jackley: Thank you, Lana. You too. It's great to be here with you today, and I appreciate the conversation