Netizen: Kiva

Showing posts with label Kiva. Show all posts

Sunday, September 08, 2013

Zady Makes Me Think Of 3D Printing Somehow

I came across Zady across various social media platforms and streams I peruse regularly when it first hit the "airwaves." Today I looked it up on Google News. It is an interesting twist. Clothitarian? This is like Mark Zuckerberg killing his own meat. What's the source? You want to know the source. It is kind of like blogging. The best bloggers are not professional bloggers but people who are extremely knowledgeable in their domain. They are the source. You should link to them, not just quote them up. Fast food, fast clothing. Fast fashion. Kiva and Etsy.

I kept thinking 3D printing. In that in an era when connectivity is plentiful, information is plentiful, the least you should be able to know is who sewed it up, right? I think it is interesting, I hope it is scalable.

Looks like Soraya Darabi's hibernation is over. She had half a million followers on Twitter. And you thought that was a fluke. And Google Plus launched and she had half a million followers there as well and pretty fast too. How does that work?

And who knew Zady was available as a name! I thought all two syllable names were long gone.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Kiva Is In Nepal

I have been looking for that first country to go into with my microfinance startup, and it is amazing how I have gone all over the world. And now I am thinking Nepal, the country where I grew up.

Having Kenya And Chinatown Thoughts

Getting To Meet Mark Suster In Person

So I got to meet Mark. Suster. In person. It was a great feeling. I had read enough of his blog posts that I really wanted to meet in person and make it real.

Mark is the most visible VC in Los Angeles. One time years ago I happened to be in downtown Los Angeles. I made a point to go see the bank where the bank robbery scene in the movie Heat was shot. Heat is one of my favorite movies.

Five Books

Image via WikipediaAutobiography
Me: Author

I have talked about writing a 50-100 page autobiography, and I am going to do it, I have already started work on it. But I have come to realize I would not want that to be my first book to go public.

Instead I have decided on putting out five volumes of Topics In Tech based on my posts at this blog. Going to Amazon Kindle Self Publishing. Price $2.99. I think I get two bucks, Amazon keeps the other buck.

This is tempting. I already got the material ready.

This is tempting. The question you find asking yourself is, will the books sell? If they do, I could take bootstrapping to a whole new level.

Very Much Would Like To Go Into Bihar

A schematic map of the Indian Railway network

Image via WikipediaI just sent an email to my top microfinance contact in India asking her to look into the "license to transact debt capital cross border" thing that Matt Flannery, one of the founders of Kiva, has raised in a Quora thread.

This is someone I am going to get onto my team. She will telecommute. She has four plus years of experience in microfinance in India in the Chennai region. This has been a good catch.

It is not like I am never going into India. And so if I am eventually going into India, how would I do that? And if I will do those things then, why will I not do those same things now?

I'd be very willing to lobby top politicians in Patna and Delhi as necessary. The Indian government just put tens of millions into microfinance. My message is, take that money and build schools, hospitals, roads. Let someone like me bring money from outside to put into microfinance.

Image via WikipediaDoing a tech startup is a lot like walking and running. You put one foot after another. And you can't do that unless you have a very good idea of where you are at a given point in time and where it is you want to go. Both those angles are important.

If you are just starting out, you can't act like you are in a position to hire 10 people. I have gone to events and met amazing people and I have told them I'd love to hire them. True, I'd love to, but right now I can't afford those 10 amazing people.

So the right thing to do would be to not look for amazing people to hire, right? Wrong. I could hire those 10 amazing people in my round two, which might happen in as much as six months, eight months, a year, or as little as four months after the first round of money is raised.

The right people will understand the language. I have talked to two major social media talents about my round two possibilities. And both of them took me seriously. The talk is informal, private, off the record, there is no concrete offer. But it's real.

The Kiva Story

Image representing Premal Shah as depicted in ...

Image via CrunchBase

Image representing Kiva as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBaseMatt Flannery: 2007: Kiva And The Birth Of Person-To-Person Microfinance: started Kiva in 2005 ..... a growing network of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in more than thirty countries ..... MFI partners post the profiles of their loan applicants to the website ..... small loans via PayPal ..... e businesses pay the lenders back over a period of about a year ..... the human connections we build between lenders and borrowers have brought new lenders ..... One night, she invited me to come hear a guest speaker on the topic of microfinance, Dr. Mohammed Yunus. ...... my first exposure to the topic ..... the page in our workbook that asked: “What are your Career Goals? Matt ‘s Answer: “I want to live in the Bay Area and be an entrepreneur.” Jessica’s Answer: “I want to go to Africa and do microfinance. ...... “Spend as much time together as you can during the first year of marriage.” ....... Her task was to locate as many VEF businesses as possible and measure impact. She asked questions like “Do you take sugar with your tea?” and “Do you sleep on a mattress?” ...... Instead of poverty, we could focus on progress ..... I followed Jessica with my camera through Kenya and Tanzania ...... Using a set of culturally specific questions, Jessica worked to ascertain the quality of life of those she interviewed ...... the painful decisions familiar to anyone who has lived in poverty—whether to pay school fees, put food on the table, or buy medicine for a child suffering from a curable sickness ...... The $500 needed to buy an initial inventory and start a store was too great a barrier. So everyone walked. ...... a self-regulating lending marketplace where microfinance institutions could raise loan capital online to fund projects ...... business plan software ..... forced us to think about costs, revenue,

Image via Wikipedia and, most importantly, our plan for growth. ...... Jessica is an extrovert and very good at developing a web
of connections. ....... a ten-page “feasibility plan” document printed from our business plan software. It was for an organization we called “Kesho.org.” In Swahili, Kesho means “tomorrow.” ...... It’s eerie reading the plan after all that has happened since then ...... During the period of a loan agreement, investors will receive frequent, real-time updates on the progress of SMEs working to pay back the loan. ...... a beta round involving fifty friends ..... $5,000 in capital for operational costs for the first year, and how we hoped to raise $150K in our first year of business in loans to the poor ....... an historical tension between the donor/lender desire to “know where my money goes” and the recipient organization’s need for efficiency ...... whether it was better to be seen as a charity or as a business ...... breaking existing mental models proved harder than it looked. ...... started to go to microfinance events and conferences ...... the UNDP Global Year in Microcredit Summit at the U.N. headquarters in New York ...... If microfinance is going to have a significant impact on world poverty, the argument goes, then MFIs will need to be integrated into the global economy and tap into the capital markets ...... 50 percent of our users would not lend on the site if Kiva adopted the for-profit model. ...... the vast majority of MFIs don’t qualify for commercial grade investment ...... We began to see person-to-person debt capital as a bridge for MFIs on a journey from donor dependence to tapping into the capital markets ...... almost every U.S.- based microfinance institution was incorporated in this country as a nonprofit. ...... Scalability and commercialization were big questions ..... A cloud of legal uncertainty began to hover over our idea ..... Whenever money is being exchanged between two people, someone in some government somewhere will begin to take notice ...... whether or not you are issuing an investment product to the public. If you are, things can become complicated ...... The SEC maintains a definition for what is and what is not a security. If the SEC rules that you are issuing securities, they require that such securities meet a long list of requirements. ....... a legal minefield ..... the topic of organizational type as it relates to raising money from the public ...... When we were at the end of our rope, the phone rang ..... A third issue was the U.S. Patriot Act ...... One of the first MFIs we were thinking of connecting with operated in Gaza, another in India ........ the process of asking for permission had taken a toll on us. We had reached a point where we didn’t live and breathe this concept anymore. It was no longer rewarding and we had lost touch with the reason we had started at all ....... it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get much traction on the business unless we figured out a way to just start ...... we resolved to “just start” ..... Money and organizations are secondary, people are primary. ...... lending money is all about information exchange. In a sense, money is a type of information ....... Every time you load our website, it should be different ..... a dynamic where philanthropy can actually become addictive ...... We appeal to people's interests, not their compassion. ...... Whenever it is possible to collect data from the field, we collect it. Over time, we will display as much information about our partners, lenders, and borrowers as possible and let the users decide where money flows ...... the lender assumes the default risk. ..... Create loans between people, not necessarily organizations, where Kiva acts as a platform and MFIs act as distributors ..... The SEC seemed to me like a gigantic black box ....... One day, I just decided to cold call the SEC ...... even large scary organizations are made up of normal people and there is a lot to gain by simply reaching out to them in a transparent way ...... if we return interest to users on the Internet, we run the risk of being seen as a securities issuer ....... if we remove the interest rates from the service, the SEC would be unlikely to take notice and consider these loans as securities .... We would have to launch without interest rates on the site. ....... a short, memorable brand can be incredibly important in launching a company ..... I was able to buy it from the squatter for a clean $600. That was perhaps the best $600 I ever spent. ...... my electric guitar for a logo. We had a logo a week later. That was perhaps the best use I ever got out of that guitar ..... Moses Onyango is a pastor in Tororo, Uganda ...... Moses was ready to post and administer the loans of seven entrepreneurs in his community. ....... We emailed about 300 people, and all seven businesses were funded in a weekend. That was April 2005, and we raised $3,500 in a few days. We were blown away; everything worked. It was better than we expected. ....... Moses blogged his heart out, chronicling the intimate business challenges and successes ....... a sustained mental and emotional connection ..... These tiny, interpersonal loans were creating a consciousness that didn’t exist before. ....... At that point, I knew every user in the database. Then a stranger showed up: Premal Shah from PayPal. ...... Jessica and I were confessional, careful, thorough, strategic, and technical. Premal was passionate, charismatic, brilliant, wildly enthusiastic, and reckless ...... Premal continued to focus primarily on building support within both Ebay and PayPal for a corporate microfinance effort. ...... We told Moses to find fifty qualified entrepreneurs in Tororo by October ..... I had received nearly a thousand emails to my Kiva address. I checked the database logs and saw that we had raised about $10K that morning and that all the loans on the site were sold out. Why? We had been featured on the home page of DailyKos, one of the world’s largest blogs. Over a million people had read about Kiva that day and hundreds were actively discussing it online. ...... many of the emails were from MFIs all around the world ...... I heard from MFIs in Bulgaria, Rwanda, Nicaragua, and Gaza. ..... an overwhelming feeling: pain. ..... how much it actually hurt to not fully pursue a passion .... I quit my TiVo job the next Monday. Every day since has seemed more colorful. ..... Pretty soon I was surrounded by a tight group of true believers and my previous pain of distance was leavened by the blessing of community ...... Ebay supported Premal’s decision and to this day supports Kiva by donating to us free payment processing ..... Just a few months into our full commitment to this project, we had assembled an energetic nucleus of people ready to build something big. We hunkered down in Premal’s house and worked there, unpaid, for the first six months ..... The most pressing challenge we faced was to get more businesses on the site ....... creating a partnership program whereby microfinance institutions could use our site as a platform to attract low-cost debt capital—one borrower at a time ....... Signing up partners onto our system presented a significant challenge. We were facing the broken record of criticism that “it won’t scale.” ...... In response to the question, "What is your greatest need?" he overwhelming answer was, "Money for peanut seeds." ...... Fay learned of Kiva through an Internet blog in early 2006. He contacted Kiva ...... Tier 1 MFIs, the largest and most established, account for just 200 of the approximately 10,000 MFIs in existence ...... Many of the 9,800 MFIs are extremely small, opaque, unsustainable, and often impossible to contact internationally. We call this the “long tail” of MFIs ..... Our ability to take risks and dip into the long tail is what differentiates us from the microfinance investment funds ..... no previous credit history or formal, traceable identity .... they use reputational collateral and a hope for future access to funds in order to enforce repayment. ..... It took three months after the DailyKos event to get our first set of MFI partners on the site. By the fall, we had around twenty. As of April 2007, we have nearly forty ...... Sometimes, though, reality surprises you and the picture becomes more colorful than your wildest imagination ...... we needed to quickly expand our partnership base and work with well-vetted, growing, and transparent institutions ...... Africa currently represents only 10.4 percent of microfinance world-wide; the greatest areas of concentration lie in Southeast Asia and Central and South America ..... Microfinance has scaled best in places where crowds of people live in close quarters. Dense populations bring down the transaction costs ...... We came to see ourselves as a technology platform for microfinance institutions alleviating poverty anywhere ...... fascinating to see the similarities and differences in microbusiness across disparate geographies ...... Lenders showed unambiguous preferences according to region, gender, and business type: Africans first, women first, and agriculture first. A female African fruit seller? Funded in hours. Nicaraguan retail stand? Funded in days. A Bulgarian Taxi Driver? Funded in weeks ...... We had completed our 501(c)(3) application in late 2005. By the summer of 2006, we were still waiting. .... For nearly a year, our application was stuck in a pile of papers somewhere in Cincinnati ..... seven out of ten users choose to donate 10 percent on top of their loan to Kiva. For instance, after making a loan of $100, the typical user chooses to pay $10 on top of the loanbringing the total to $110 ..... Float refers to the revenue from the interest accruing in one's bank account ..... Eighty percent of our users re-loan their funds after being repaid ...... Kiva is managing a fund that will grow at well over a factor of two every year for the near future. Kiva earns about 4.5 percent interest in its bank account ..... That summer, however, Kiva was crawling along at $1000-$2000 in loans and 25 new users a day. ..... Running out of options, I ran the idea of becoming a for-profit by the board, but they shot it down unanimously. ...... filming for Frontline World on PBS. ..... The 15-minute piece ....... Like being in DailyKos a year earlier, the Frontline event was a gamechanging moment for the organization ...... Overnight, our loan volume went from approximately $3K per day to approximately $30K per day ..... Our lender base before the piece was around 6K. Today, it is around 60K. Before the show, we had processed $500K total in loan volume. By April 2007 we had processed around $5.5M cumulative and have a goal of being at $12M cumulative by the end of 2007. The Frontline piece was fundamental in making this happen. ....... e took our nonprofit from a point of financial crisis to a relatively healthy state ...... PayPal donates free transaction processing to us, which means we aren’t charged the usual 3% of every transaction ...... single mindedness unlocked a potential I never knew existed ..... what people can achieve when they lay their egos at the alter of something greater than themselves ...... recipients resent benefactors even as they consume the aid. ...... A benefactor assumes that the poor need your help to escape. A colonizer assumes the poor cannot escape. However, both share a common assumption—the poor are helpless ....... interest rates, which turn a charitable relationship into a business relationship, empower the poor by making them business partners ...... a deeper integration between daily decisions and core values. ...... the mobile devices loan officers carry as information retrieval tools ...... A data-rich system is inherently more transparent. Transparency allows more accurate risk assessments ....... In many places, the Kiva website is serving as the first ever public record of a particular person’s existence ...... the Internet is a promising platform for housing portable credit ratings. One day a borrower moving from one MFI to another, or one country to another, will be able to point to a Kiva profile as a reference point for creditworthiness. ..... Although microfinance can be an amazing tool to fight poverty, it can also be quite harmful when placed in the wrong hands. Predatory lending, fraud, and mismanagement are commonly cited in cases of MFIs that get it wrong ....... extensive offline monitoring ..... an international auditing and visitation program .... This will help us communicate to our users the financial health of our partners, the truthfulness of the information posted on the site, and the extent to which we are fulfilling our mission of alleviating poverty ...... This model thrives on information, not marketing ...... default and delinquency rates will fluctuate ..... Crises in a particular region—political, economic, or natural disaster– will cause temporary drops in repayment rates that will eventually stabilize ..... I firmly believe that repayment rates will stabilize at well over 90 percent .... Kiva is different from the typical international development organization in that the platform will deliberately show the negative as well as the positive stories. Thus, in cases where things go bad, our lenders will know.

Indian Hurdle

Image via WikipediaKiva has not been able to enter India. That is sad. (Source: Quora)

Bihar, Darbhanga
Incredible India
Advantage India, Disadvantage India
Having Kenya And Chinatown Thoughts

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Not Going Into Any Accelerator Program

Image via WikipediaThere is no accelerator program anywhere that will help me tackle the last mile in microfinance, the most important mile in my line of work. I have a FinTech startup, but it does not revolve around coding, it revolves around the last mile of microfinance.

Also, I can't think of one iconic tech company that came out of some accelerator program. You could argue accelerator programs are a new phenomenon, they have not had the time to spit out iconic companies yet, but accelerator programs are more for purely web tech companies. Mine is not one.

Kiva And My Outfit: Three Major Departure Points

Image via CrunchBaseI am a huge fan of Kiva. They went from raising $5 million five years ago to raising over $100 million last year and are projected to raise close to a billion dollars in five years. But that would still be a drop in the ocean. Global poverty is no small challenge.

There are more than 10,000 MFIs - microfinance institutions - in the world today. But global poverty is as big as ever. It looks like a virgin terrain to me. There is so much work to do.

Microfinance: Cutting Edge Like Clean Tech, Bio Tech, Nano Tech

Image via WikipediaMicrofinance: A Zero Trillion Dollar Industry
Microfinance, Nanotech, Biotech, Software/Hardware/Connectivity
Vinod Khosla's Green Tech Sweep

I put microfinance in the same league as the sectors touted as the next big things: clean tech, bio tech, nano tech. People in the industry keep referring to the challenges in the last mile. When it is time to dole out the money, it gets complicated.

Web tech is relevant to all these emerging sectors. You are going to need specific kinds of software for specific tasks in nano tech, for example, although many generic web tech stuff will do just fine. The big minds in nano tech will still be on Facebook and Twitter, will they not?

Microfinance: A Zero Trillion Dollar Industry

Microfinance: The Next Big Thing?

Image via CrunchBase

TechCrunch: Kiva President On The Next 5 Years And Why Zynga Is Their Biggest Rival (TCTV): a never-ending fight for eyeballs and discretionary income. .... If building a real farm on Kiva can be as compelling as building a virtual farm on Facebook ..... the integration of game mechanics, social tools, mobile and new philanthropic verticals like green and water loans ...... Kiva will raise $1 billion in microloans by 2015..... loans to US citizens ..... Kiva is currently raising $1 million every six days. .... Shah and co-founder Matthew Flannery ..... making sure that the feedback loop between the person that they’re trying to help is really strong and broad

What was after search? Social. What was after social? Social gaming. What's after social gaming? I'd love that next big thing to be microfinance. You should not have to wait for white guys like Bill Gates and Bill Clinton to retire before the next big problem in the Global South can be tackled. The problems in the Global South have to tackled with Kiva ferocity, with GroupOn ferocity. Crowd sourcing is where it is at.

Racism caused the Great Recession. There was all this surplus capital. And instead of pumping all that into global microfinance and global infrastructure projects for certain 10% annual returns, the wise guys on Wall Street pumped it into existing houses in America through nefarious schemes, and the whole

Image representing Zynga as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBaseeconomy collapsed. It was only a matter of time. They did not create wealth. They built a huge, big house of cards.

The beauty of crowd sourcing is there is no one person, or one committee responsible. Everyone is in. There is no center. Once the basic message is clear, there is a riot.

Microfinance needs to be packaged better. It has to be parceled out in to small chunks at both ends. It is not just about the small businessperson at the other end. It also has to be about the small investor at this end. People should be able to invest $100, or $1000 at a time, preferably $100. You walk in to a store like you might walk in to buy a lottery ticket, or you might step in for a Western Union money transfer. For $100 you also get to receive emails about the person at the other end who received the loan. You get emails from Kiva.

Kiva, I think, is in a trillion dollar industry. The biggest thing Kiva could do is morph from being a non profit organization to being a for profit company with IPO ambitions. That is the only way it could beat Zynga. Could it beat Zynga? I think it could. Sure thing. Make micro lending fun. I never spent a dime on Farmville. But I would love to put $100 into some farm in Uganda if the experience had Farmville like fun.

Image via WikipediaOnly a for profit company could deliver that. You hire top talent by becoming a for profit company with IPO ambitions.

There is room for 100 Zynga size companies in this space.

Micro lending is not just for the Global South. It is also what needs to be pumped into the inner cities in America. The challenge for Kiva is to enrich the feedback loop.

Image representing Matthew Flannery as depicte...

Image via CrunchBase

Friday, July 10, 2009

Blog Carnival: Microfinance

July: Netizen Blog Carnival Month

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Pages

Sunday, September 08, 2013

Zady Makes Me Think Of 3D Printing Somehow

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Kiva Is In Nepal

Wednesday, April 06, 2011

Getting To Meet Mark Suster In Person

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Five Books

Saturday, March 05, 2011

Very Much Would Like To Go Into Bihar

Walking/Running: Putting One Foot After The Other

Wednesday, March 02, 2011

The Kiva Story

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Indian Hurdle

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Not Going Into Any Accelerator Program

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Kiva And My Outfit: Three Major Departure Points

Friday, December 17, 2010

Microfinance: Cutting Edge Like Clean Tech, Bio Tech, Nano Tech

Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Microfinance: A Zero Trillion Dollar Industry

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Microfinance: The Next Big Thing?

Friday, July 10, 2009

Blog Carnival: Microfinance

Pages

Sunday, September 08, 2013

Related articles

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Wednesday, April 06, 2011

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Saturday, March 05, 2011

Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Friday, December 17, 2010

Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Related articles

Friday, July 10, 2009