Team
Board of Directors
Reid Hoffman | CEO, LinkedIn
Named one of the "Top 50 People Who Matter" by CNN Money, (Reid was #22, Bill Gates was #21, Oprah was #37) Reid is currently CEO and co-founder of LinkedIn. In addition, Reid has invested or provided Board level insight into several of the most successful 'Web 2.0' companies, including Mozilla, FaceBook, Technorati and Six Apart. Prior to LinkedIn, Reid was Executive Vice President of PayPal. At PayPal, Reid was in charge of business development, corporate development, international, government relations, and banking/payments infrastructure. Reid graduated with distinction from Stanford University with a B.S. in Cognitive Science and from Oxford University with a M.A. in Philosophy.
Geoff Davis | President and CEO, Unitus
Geoff Davis is President and CEO of Unitus, a social venture capital investor for the microfinance industry. Geoff has worked with microfinance programs worldwide since 1995, beginning with a program he founded in central Mexico. He was an early employee at Grameen Foundation USA, a global microfinance leader. Geoff has spoken widely on microfinance at the International Monetary Fund, Harvard, Stanford and conferences in Chile, Switzerland, Bangladesh and elsewhere. A social entrepreneur, Geoff formed several companies earlier in his career and has worked at numerous startups. He was named the 2006 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the Pacific Northwest region and was named one of Puget Sound Business Journal's "40 under 40". Geoff holds a B.A. in international relations from Brigham Young University and a master's degree in development economics and public policy from Harvard University.
Jessica Jackley | Co-Founder
Jessica Jackley is a co-founder of Kiva, and the spirit behind the organization. Jessica first saw the power and beauty of microfinance while working in rural Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda with Village Enterprise Fund and Project Baobab on impact evaluation and program development. Jessica has worked in the Stanford Center for Social Innovation to launch the inaugural Global Philanthropy Forum, and at Amazon.com, Potentia Media, the International Foundation and World Vision. Jessica has spoken widely on microfinance and social entrepreneurship, and has seen microfinance at work in a variety of communities in more than 30 countries. Jessica serves on a number of non-profit boards, including Opportunity International. Jessica holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business with Certificates in Global Management and Public Management, and a BA in Philosophy and Political Science from Bucknell University.
Jenny Shilling Stein | Executive Director, Draper Richards Foundation
Jenny Shilling Stein is the Executive Director of the Draper Richards Foundation, a foundation that funds the most promising social entrepreneurs and their start up nonprofit ventures. In the style of a venture capital firm, Draper Richards chooses a small portfolio of fast-growth, high-leverage organizations and works closely with them in their early years. Shilling Stein's experience includes the business and non-profit sectors. Prior to joining Draper Richards, Jenny was Director of Business Development & Strategic Partnerships at RealNames Corporation where her primary responsibility was the company's relationship with Microsoft. She has worked at Schwab Foundation for Learning and served as a Board Intern at Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network. Shilling Stein graduated magna cum laude in English and Psychology from Amherst College. She received both her Master of Business Administration and her Master of Education from Stanford University.Tabreez Verjee | Founding Partner, Global Asset Capital
Tabreez is an accomplished investor and repeat entrepreneur having founded and funded a number of successful companies. He is currently a founding partner of Global Asset Capital, a firm managing over $500 million in assets. As an entrepreneur, he co-headed one of the first and most popular internet music software start-ups and negotiated its sale for more than a two-hundred times return for investors. He also co-founded an investment bank focused on complex asset securitizations and raised over $150 million in debt capital for ground breaking transactions such as investment grade music royalty bonds. Tabreez started his career as a strategy consultant at Bain & Company and received his B.S. in Environmental Engineering from UC Berkeley.Alex Edelstein | CEO, CloudCrowd
Alex Edelstein is the CEO of CloudCrowd, a leader in the Internet crowdsourcing space. Previously, Alex ran Gemstone Capital, which successfully invested in the private stages of Shopping.com, Tellme Networks, and Google. Before that, Alex worked at Netscape, where he managed the Netscape Navigator 2.0 and 3.0 products, and Microsoft, where he was on the design team for Microsoft Exchange and what would become Microsoft Outlook.Leslie R. Crutchfield | Managing Director, Ashoka Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship
Leslie Crutchfield is managing director of the Ashoka Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship, and is co-author of FORCES FOR GOOD: THE SIX PRACTICES OF HIGH-IMPACT NONPROFITS (Wiley 2008). Ashoka is the world’s oldest and largest organization supporting social entrepreneurs; the Global Academy program features the field’s “global greats” such as Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank. For the past decade, Leslie has advised a range of foundations and she currently serves as philanthropic advisor to the Goldhirsh Foundation. In the 1990s, she co-founded and ran Who Cares: The Tool Kit for Social Change, a national magazine for young activists (circulation 50,000). Leslie is a frequent public speaker and university lecturer, and has been featured as one of America’s top leaders under 40 by Newsweek. She volunteered with Crossroads Africa in the Gambia, and serves on the boards of the SEED Foundation, Kiva, and Little Kids Rock. Leslie holds an MBA and an AB from Harvard University, and resides in the Washington, D.C. area with her family.Julie Hanna Farris
Julie has been an entrepreneur, CEO, board member, advisor and investor in a number of consumer internet and enterprise software startups, helping guide them from obscurity to prominence and resulting in several successful acquisitions. Among them Portola (acquired by Netscape), onebox.com (acquired by OpenWave), Healtheon (now WebMD), and Scalix, a global leader in open source email software. She has spent her career anticipating market trends and exploiting disruptive technologies, most notably in the areas of the internet/web, open source, messaging, collaboration and social software.Note: Matt Flannery, Co-founder and CEO; and Premal Shah, President also serve on the Board of Directors
Microfinance Advisory Board
Mary Ellen Iskenderian | President and CEO, Women's World Banking
Ms. Iskenderian is President and CEO of Women's World Banking (WWB), a global not-for-profit financial institution whose network includes over 50 microfinance institutions and banks providing financial services to over 23 million low income women and men in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, North America and the Middle East. Prior to WWB Ms. Iskenderian held numerous leadership positions at the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group (IFC) including Director of Partnership Development, Director of Global Financial Markets Portfolio and Director of the South Asia Regional Department. She also sits on the boards of directors of the National Bank of Commerce in Tanzania and ShoreCap International, an important equity and loan fund for microfinance. She has also held corporate directorship positions with Banco Caja Social, Confisura S.A. and the Infrastructure Development Finance Corporation. Ms. Iskenderian holds an MBA degree from the Yale School of Organization And Management and a BS in International Economics from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.Sam Daley-Haris | Director, Microcredit Summit Campaign
Sam Daley-Haris is Director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign, the result of the Microcredit Summit, which brings together microcredit practitioners, advocates, educational institutions, donor agencies, international financial institutions, non-governmental organizations and others involved with microcredit to promote best practices in the field, to learn from each other, and to work towards reaching the goal of 100 million of the world's poorest by the end of 2005. Mr. Daley-Harris is President and Founder of RESULTS Educational Fund, an organization dedicated to mass educational strategies to generate the will to end world hunger. RESULTS Educational Fund organized the February 1997 Microcredit Summit held in Washington, D.C. The Summit was attended by more than 2,900 participants from 137 countries and launched a nine-year campaign to reach 100 million of the world's poorest families with credit for self-employment and other financial and business services by the end of 2005.John Hatch | Founder, FINCA International
John Hatch is the founder of FINCA, one of the world's leading microcredit institutions with programs in 23 countries and over one million low-income families assisted since its inception in 1984. John is also known as the father of "village banking", a group loan methodology now replicated by over 800 micro-credit programs in 60 countries. John's economic development career spans 44 years, during which time he was a Peace Corps volunteer and staff member (1962-67) Fulbright scholar, (PhD, Univ. Wisconsin, 1973), economist, and a consultant to small farmer development projects in some 50 countries (1973-83). John currently directs FINCA's global mission support department, which features action research by summer interns armed with Palm Pilots who interview some 3,000 clients per year to document their poverty levels, business profitability, and rising living standards. John is a co-founder and executive committee member of the Microcredit Summit global campaign to reach 100 million of the world's poorest mothers with self-employment loans by the year 2006. He has given microcredit workshops at universities at home and abroad, while also teaching microcredit at George Washington University and Johns Hopkins SAIS.Janine Firpo | Founder, SEMBA Consulting
Janine is currently the founder of SEMBA Consulting and Chair of Sevak Solutions, a direct outgrowth of her previous position at Hewlett-Packard where she was responsible for developing technology to lower the administrative cost of microfinance delivery. Previous to HP, Janine worked with the World Bank, the US Government and a range of non-profit organizations that were interesting in integrating computers into education, business, and government facilities in developing countries. She has also served as Director of New Media for Random House, VP of Product Development at A.D.A.M. Software and Higher Education Evangelist for Apple Computer.Bob Graham | Founder, Katalysis Microfinance Network
A veteran of microfinance, Bob Graham is the founder of the Katalysis Microfinance Network of Central America -- a regional nonprofit of 13 intermediary credit providers serving more than 180,000 borrowers with over $60 million in loan capital in four countries. Bob is currently Executive Director of NamasteDirect, an organization that links donors to low income borrowers in Central America. Bob is also a successful businessman, philanthropist, CPA and author. He has extensive international development experience in Central America, and in India with the Tibetan Government in Exile.Robert King
Robert is one of the first Venture Capitalists on Sand Hill Road and is an active venture investor in U.S. and international companies through his firm, Peninsula Capital. He also has served on the Board of Village Enterprise Fund, an organization established to help create micro enterprises in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Bob holds a BA in Economics from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Stanford University.Brian Lehnen | Executive Director and Co-Founder, Village Enterprise Fund
A long time micro-enterprise development practitioner, Brian Lehnen is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Village Enterprise Fund (VEF). Since 1987, VEF has funded over 10,000 low income self employed entrepreneurs, primarily in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. In addition to seed funding, VEF also provide training and mentorship to each micro-enterprise. Of the 10,000 businesses VEF has started, over 88% continue past year 1. Over 75% continue for 4 years or longer, and one third launch a second venture. Brian was instrumental in developing the Kiva concept, launching the first pilot round and continues to be an invaluable supporter as Kiva scales.David Mulligan
David, who holds an MBA from Cornell and is 25 year veteran of the health care/insurance industry, joined the Kiva team in November 2006. David is the co-founder and retired CEO of First Commonwealth, a venture financed insurer which was twice named to the Inc 500 fastest growing company list and recognized as one of the top performing small cap companies by Forbes magazine . As an inductee into the Illinois Entrepreneur Hall of Fame, David brings his extensive business and start up experience to Kiva to help scale the organization's growth, particularly in the area of its global partnerships. David's been involved in the microfinance industry for over 3 years as an active investor and donor, a participant in industry forums such as the Microcredit Summit Campaign, a member of the YPO microfinance forum, and founder of the global youth microcredit initiative, a program designed for teens to learn about and invest in microcredit.David Auerbach
David Auerbach manages international expansion and strategic growth projects at Endeavor Global , a New York-based not-for-profit that catalyzes the growth of high-impact entrepreneurs in emerging markets. Endeavor has pioneered a new model for development that engages the private sector in mentoring and advising over 380 of the most promising and innovative entrepreneurs in Latin America, Egypt, India, Turkey, and South Africa. David has also served as Deputy Chair for Poverty Alleviation at the Clinton Global Initiative, former President Clinton's effort to engage the private sector in solving some of the world's most pressing problems. Before these roles, David taught English at Yali Middle School and studied Mandarin for two years in Changsha, China. He has also researched foreign policy issues at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC. He holds a BA from Yale University.Social Performance Advisory Board
Anton Simanowitz
Anton Simanowitz is a researcher at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. His work focuses on the measurement and management of social performance in microfinance and social enterprise. He is Director of the Imp-Act Consortium an international Consortium that supports and promotes the management of social performance in microfinance, providing practical lessons for practice and for public policy. This developed from a 5-year global action-research programme that worked to support the development of practical systems to understand and improve impact and social performance in microfinance. Prior to this Anton headed the R&D department of a leading microfinance organisation in South Africa, was head of the evaluation unit for a development PVO, and was desk officer for a major international development PVO in the UK.Cécile Lapenu
Cécile Lapenu, a citizen of France, is the executive director of CERISE (Comité d’Echange, de Réflexion et d’Information sur les Systèmes d’Epargne - crédit). CERISE is a platform of France-based, leading MicroFinance support organizations (CIDR, CIRAD, GRET, IRAM and IRC-SupAgro). CERISE was started in 1998, and since then it has organized various studies and seminars on the following themes : financing of agriculture, governance, social performances and impact, MFIs in remote rural areas, etc.Before joining CERISE in January 2001, Cécile Lapenu was a post-doctoral fellow at IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington DC, USA) working on the Rural Finance Team in the Food Consumption and Nutrition Division. From 1993 to 1997, she worked on the development of rural financial system as a researcher at the Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement. She received a Ph.D in agricultural economics from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure Agronomique de Montpellier.
Laura Foose
Laura Foose has fifteen years of experience in policy design and advocacy promoting private sector development and poverty alleviation in developing and transitional countries. Ms. Foose has experience formulating microfinance policies for the international donor community. She has also designed microfinance projects and conducted evaluations of MFIs. For five years, Ms. Foose was a working group facilitator for the SEEP Network, the MF industry association, working extensively in the areas of poverty assessment/outreach. She currently chairs the international Social Performance Task Force, a group of over 350 donors, practitioners, social investors, microfinance networks and raters advancing social performance assessment and management.Ms. Foose is a professor of microfinance at Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University. She is a founder of Woman Advancing Microfinance, and is on the board of the Alliance of Students Against Poverty (ASAP), a public awareness campaign aimed to address extreme poverty by mobilizing the idealism and talents of students.
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