Being paid in joy and fun was almost enough for the co-founder of Kiva.org, an organization that utilizes microlending to finance entrepreneurs and their start-ups in developing countries.
Jessica Jackley shared her experiences of being an entrepreneur and her founding of Kiva, as well as some of her other projects. Her presentation took place Monday evening in Pruis Hall as part of the Excellence in Leadership speaker series.
Jackley said the mission of Kiva is to “connect to people through lending to alleviate poverty.” The project is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that connects microfinance institutions to lenders who can then lend as little as $25 to a borrower on the other side of the globe. It has lent out more than 400 million loans as of Monday.
However, Jackley had not always had this plan in mind. She graduated from Bucknell University with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and political science where she said she “never had any interest in [business] at all.”
Before she created Kiva, she worked as a temporary assistant at the Stanford School of Business in the Center for Social Innovation.
“It sort of hit me all at once as I was sitting there one day. I looked around and suddenly saw that I was around a lot of people that resonated with me and that I considered my heroes,” Jackley said.
Three years passed before Jackley decided to quit her job and jump into the world of microlending.
“I begged my way into an internship that gave me an excuse to go talk to 150-or-so entrepreneurs that got $100 grants to start their businesses,” Jackley said.
The people she talked to were taking grants and not loans, which is a process that does not fall into the microlending category. Jackley said that it was “close enough.”
“If you’re aiming for a dream job and you get something close, sometimes that can be all you need,” she said.
Sticking to that dream and what is most personally rewarding is one goal that Jackley said seems to be most important in her experience.
“A lot of people make bets on how they spend their time or how they choose their careers based on either what they know can work and not on what is enjoyable or what is rewarding,” Jackley said. “I think the people that do that are a lot happier and are showing out a lot more creatively.”
Jackley’s decision to create Kiva was a risk and unchartered territory, but it was rewarding for her personally, she said.
“Find a real stretch for you,” she said. “Something that’s in another sector. Some of the most prime ideas come from these weird translations from one sector to the another.”
Diversity is also a characteristic that has striated Jackley’s experience. She has done work at Amazon, World Vision, the Village Enterprise Fund and has even dabbled in coding, which is a skill she encouraged attendees at Monday’s event to learn.
“Each one of us has enough [potential] to start, today, the greatest work of our lives,” Jackley said. “So let’s start that together and change the world.”
