I love a good parable and recently I've been thinking a lot about the parable of the monk and the scorpion. If you don't know, it basically goes that these two monks are under long pilgrimage and they come across this river, and in the river is a scorpion that's drowning. The older, wiser monk goes to, to scoop it up, to save it. And the younger monkey yells, I dunno, don't, don't, don't do that. It's gonna sting you. Older monk just smiles and he still scoops it up. Sure enough, the scorpion stings him a whole bunch of times. The older monk scoops it up and, and puts it on land and saves the scorpion and the younger man seeing all of this ass, why would you do that? He knew it was gonna sting you. You knew it was gonna hurt. And the older monk says, you see, it's in the scorpion's nature to sting me, and it's in my nature to help the scorpion. The reason I've been thinking about the story a lot recently is because like a lot of people, I've felt a sense of dread about the way the world's headed. And it's easy for that dread to turn into resentment. And in those moments, I like to remind myself of this story because if the misdeeds of others change your core nature, how core was it to begin with? How different are you really from the people that have betrayed you? This is also why I wanted to have Matt Flannery on. Matt is the founder of Kiva and of Branch. Matt is one of the most important people in the world of microfinancing. Matt has helped fund hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs for billions of dollars in the developing world. Matt's work, I don't think this is an exaggeration to say, Matt's work has uplifted entire communities of people around the world in so many different countries, but in this long 20 year journey, Matt has been betrayed by just about everyone. You can imagine. His board that he hired and paid, fired him from the company that he started. The people he was trying to help stole almost$10 million from him. But through all of this, Matt remained undeterred in his mission to help people. Matt is like that. Monk. I was so shocked by the openness and honesty with which he talked about these betrayals. And I was even more inspired by how much he didn't let those betrayals change him. I could not be more proud to have Matt Flannery on. And with that, I bring you Matt Flannery from wefunder's office on Mission Street in San Francisco. This is warm intro. Matt, thanks for being on the podcast, man. It's always weird to, to all of a sudden'cause we were having a conversation. And to all of a sudden pause Yeah. And be like, Hey, thanks for being, it feels very artificial. Yeah. Let's get through it. But dude, I'm gonna make a, a hard write all of a sudden. Okay. Formality. Yeah. I'll start with my experience of your work, right. Which is that I was growing up as I was telling you, I was growing up in India and Kiva was talked about a lot. It's amazing. Yeah. And I don't even know how much you guys were aware of this, but it was what you all did. What you all have done for a lot of young Indian people, that was the best possible type of enterprise. It was like, no, this is how the world will get saved. People really believe that. Yeah. And I was always curious about like, the people that were running it, the people that started it, if they had any notion that this is how their work was being talked about. So I wanna kind of pull this back to you. Tell me a little bit about the world that you grew up in and tell me actually about what kind of kid you were. Okay. This is so, therapeutic. So I grew up in Gig Harbor Washington. Mm-hmm. In Portland, Oregon. So the Pacific Northwest. My dad had grown up in India, ironically in South Africa. And he was always traveling all the time. And I think I grew up with fanciful notions of his life. Yeah. Both as a child and what he was doing then. And I was enamored by those stories of travel and so that always made me want to see the world travel, the world, have adventures. What was I like as a kid? I think I was I was very much in my head, so sort of caught up in my own thoughts and philosophical thoughts and, you know, I grew up very religious, right about evangelical family. And um, that led me to have a lot of big questions. So I'd always ask a lot of big philosophical questions. Hmm. Yeah. I was pensive. They would say, dude, I was accused of being a very pensive child by other people. And looking back, I'm not sure where it came from, but where do you think that came from for you? Why do you think you were so serious from such a young age? Um hmm. I think a lot of religion, I took it really seriously. Yeah. So I literally believed stuff, literally at a very young age. Things that adults would probably take with a grain of salt. And I stressed out about them and I couldn't sleep at insomnia and things like that. Worrying about these big existential questions like the idea of living forever. I got obsessed About the idea of eternity I think is first grade where I couldn't sleep for weeks and I had to go to psychotherapist and because the Bible says you're gonna live forever. And so that is a very stress if you really believe that, that that is quite an overwhelming thought to, I can relate because I saw a children's cartoon in the second grade about the Big Bang, and I got, I freaked out because I couldn't figure out what was before the Big Bang. Yeah.'cause I just couldn't imagine You really think it through. Yeah. Yeah. I just couldn't imagine something happening for nothing and it, it kept me up at night. Yeah. So I get, I can relate to that. You should talk. Yeah. I think I should go to your third. Yeah. I should go to third. My first grade psychotherapist. Yes. What were your parents like? Great. My dad is incredibly generous, wonderful human. Back at that time, he was a. Lumber executive. So he is running big timber companies and traveling all the time. And my mom is just like the most loving, warm person of all time that I've ever met. Is, is that the work that took your dad to India and all these other places? No, my dad grew up in India'cause his dad was an importer of American goods into Bombay, Mumbai. Wow. And my grandma as well, they got married in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Wow. I have a lot of fun stories about that. But no, he ended up going to Harvard Business School and being paper industry, timber industry executive, he's still alive, so I don't wanna talk about it. He'll probably listen to this and I'm just like, dude, I'm, I'm not talking about you as if you're Yeah. Yeah. I didn't, I realized that I kind of messed up the tense there. I I know your parents are still alive. Yeah. No, it's just, I started talking about him like that, so. Yeah. Well, tell me, tell me what you wanted to do at this point in your, in your childhood, your, your second, third grade, you're Staying up all night. Thinking about eternity. Your dad's a lumber executive. What did you think you wanted to do with your life? Did you just assume you would do something like your dad? Did you'd be a businessman? What, what were you thinking you were gonna do? I had no idea. I don't think I had a formulated idea. I used to call myself Farmer Matt, and may make my, everyone call me Farmer Matt. So maybe I wanted to be a farmer, but that was probably, I mean, we're talking first grade here, so, yeah. I don't know if you really got your plan together at that point. When did you get your plan together? I did not get my plan together. So this could be in depth. I mean, I went to Stanford. Mm-hmm. I got my master's in philosophy. I got my undergraduate in symbolic systems. Did a lot of coding. Yeah. Software engineering. After college I ended up being a software engineer. A cubicle in the South Bay. Mm-hmm. By the, one of the most depressing places in the world. Yeah. A cubicle in the South Bay Yeah. Is up there with prison cell and Alcatraz cubes of the South Bay. That was my post-college experience four years. And that it was like that movie office space. Yes. Which is a very greatest movie ever. Made a very important movie to me. I was trapped in that movie and I was depressed about it. Tell me about the give me actually like a play by play of how the very first concept of Kiva sort of pops into your head. That's great. I love this. You know, and I haven't really told this story in so long and I probably almost never told it, kind of it from a really raw perspective because. You know, for a long time I was the CEO of Kiva. So yeah, when you're CEO of the company, you gotta give a really polished account of what happened. Mm-hmm. But of course, things in reality weren't that polished. The first city of Kiva, so I think the year was 2003, 2004, I was living in Palo Alto. I was dating someone who, and ended up being my wife. Now she's my ex-wife. And I was having an idea of the day, so I was writing a journal of business ideas. So I still have hundreds of them, and I just still do this all the time. It's sort of my way of expressing myself. Do you hold onto the journals? It's digital now. Back then it was paper, and I'm sure I have it somewhere. And usually they're jokes or just like little mm-hmm. Brainstorms I had during the day for businesses. A lot of'em are so stupid, but they're, they're so sometimes funny. And so. My fiance declared the intention to move to Uganda to do volunteering at a church doing microfinance. And this was basically, she was gonna do it right after we got married, so we're gonna get married and then she's gonna move to Uganda, which sounds, which sounds crazy. And I was doing this is is a little crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was doing this idea the day, so she you know, she had her own ideas. So, you know, you could pass forward passing through a lot of time here. But we get married, we move to San Francisco a few months later. Sure enough, she moves to Uganda. Wait, so you guys were just understanding the logistics? Yeah. You guys were engaged. Yeah. And while you were stealing it, she alone moved to Uganda? No, she declared the intention. Oh, okay. Yeah. Or something like that around that time. Sure. And then she left okay. To go to Uganda to be an intern for this microfinance, church-based microfinance institution. And I also decided to be an intern for that program as well. It was called the Village Enterprise Fund of Uganda, which was based out of the Bay Area. Awesome. So she goes, and of course I have a job so I can take less time off. Had to pay the rent. Coding Java, making the Comcast DVR. Thank you. Which is a great piece of technology. Just really hard to make that one. That's what should have won the Nobel Prize, right? Yeah. Great. Well, just running Java on that piece of hardware is that alone is a no. Back then was really. An Unpowerful box. Yeah. So we were trying to squeeze our software onto the Comcast technology. Then I take off to go to Uganda. So I was only in Uganda for about a month and in Kenya and Tanzania is my first time in Africa volunteering for a microfinance institution. Actually right before I left, I had the idea for Kiva, just to answer your question, literally, because I was talking to her on the phone. It was right around here on the mission. I lived here. I was talking to her on the phone. So I'd go out with my friends, you know, we're in her twenties. Come home I would call her on my flip phone, was talking to her on my flip phone, and I had the idea for Kiva. That's actually how it happened. Why do you think,'cause you were coming up with ideas at a very rapid clip, right? You're coming up literally an idea day, sometimes more. Totally. Yeah. Why do you think this one stuck in your brain? Yeah. The main reason is'cause we could do it, like, we could do it under our own power. So I had no confidence to try to raise money. I didn't really have the idea of fundraising or venture capital. I was, you know, very much a quiet person, serious person. You know, never gave a presentation in my life, really. So my job was just coder. But we could make Kiva without much help. Yeah. For free. And so I had the idea, wrote it down basically because I was hearing all these stories about businesses and I thought that was really cool. I was a person, I think at that time I had decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Yeah. So I'd heard all these entrepreneurial stories in Uganda from her over the phone. So this is like at midnight in San Francisco, you know, it'd be the morning there. You'd hear a rooster in the background. And then she's like telling me, you know, I met this. A pharmacy person that wants to, needs to buy more medical supplies or whatever, and they just need$300 and stories like that. Or, you know, she's surveying people around their, their standard of living and then how transform transformational a business would be. And I had grown up sponsoring kids in Africa or south America. So in my church I had always, you know, been paying$9 a month or something. Mm-hmm. To a brother quote unquote in like Guatemala or something that, yeah. So I thought this would be a good way to sponsor a business instead of sponsoring a child. So that was basically the whole idea, you know, these ideas were like one-liners. So the idea was like, sponsor a business instead of sponsoring a child. That was the entry of that day. How much had you seen of the rest of the world at this point?'cause I know your dad of course. Grew up in these other parts of the world, and you always wanted to, but how much had you actually been able to get out? Well, I spent a lot of time in France. I spent a year in France studying during college. And I've been to Israel various vacations all over the world, but never the developing world really. And so it, there's actually to me something very powerful about thinking of people that you'd never met before. Do you think if you weren't raised religious that would've happened, do you think you would've been able to come up with Kiva or do you think it would've come up with Kiva if you weren't raised the way you were? Definitely not. No. The, the whole context is being a very religious person, the whole context, like, why were we going to Uganda in the first place? Yeah. To volunteer. Why am I quitting my job? The, the whole context was being part of a church growing up in the church. That. So my sister world works for World Vision at this point, so we're talking to her, you know, she's a development executive. Mm-hmm. So, yeah. How different at the top of this episode, I will have told people what Kiva is but the very first version of it, was it already the Kiva that we know now? Or what was the first original idea? It was pretty different. You can see, see that on the way back machine. So the first version, so I wasn't in Uganda. A few weeks later after having that idea, I went to Uganda and then had a lot of free time during nights. So on my laptop, started making the Kiva website. And it was basically just like listings of businesses with big, big pictures and the ability to invest in them and then get paid back. At that time it was with interest. So that was a major shift. We had to take the, the profit motive out of it. How well do you know the bible. How well do I know the Bible? I don't know. Not, not that great. Well, I bet you know it better than I, the, the concepts maybe, but I'm sorry if you're asking me to quote verses Oh, no, no, no. I would, yeah, if you could literally make anything up about the Bible and I would, you could fool me. That's great. But do you think that there are parts of the Bible or specific teaching of the Bible that really show up in how you think about Kiva? Because, I mean, I can think of a couple of ideas, but Yeah. I wanna sort of hear from you about this. Well, obviously the concepts of compassion and caring for the less fortunate and lowering yourself as a servant of others. I mean, that was the ba the basic premise, but I think at that point I maybe had become a little jaded by the idea of donating. Yeah. And. Child sponsorship and things like that, having MetLife experiences and got really excited about flipping that narrative into a business narrative and a, a dignified partnership. So I think that's also biblical concept, is treating others with respect. And so being, like taking the gesture of investing in a small business in rural Africa seemed to me a gesture of respect. That's for what it's worth. That's how I heard it in the developing world. Yeah. I can't, you know, I, I was very fortunate that the way that I grew up, but I, to me you remember that phrase. The George W. Bush had the soft bigotry flow expectations. Sounds familiar. I whatever you think of the man that's a great phrase. Yeah. I, I think about that a lot. And I think that there is a soft bigotry flow expectations when you just donate. Mm. And there is, you are respecting people for the wholeness of their individual. A person Right. When you understand them to be people with ambition and person, people with drive. Yeah. People with resourcefulness. People who are you know, if given the opportunity will invest in their own community. Yeah. So to me, I, I always loved that part of it. I still love that part of it. Yeah. I think that was the main thing. That was the whole thing is reframing the, the aid conversation around business. Yeah. And so I was excited to do that. What did it feel like going from cubicle in the South Bay to running your own thing? Slightly north of South Bay? Yeah. Headed north. How did that, how did that feel man, to be out doing your own thing? No, I think that was one of the best days of my life. So, on the way here, I walked most of the way I was thinking about that'cause I was thinking we were gonna talk about this story. So, I kept working at, at this company, for, I don't know, a year and a half after that while starting Kiva in parallel after the Kiva website was started. Yeah. And I was working on that project. I kept working on it in nights and weekends in this neighborhood actually at, usually at nights. So there's a lot of taquerias open in the mission. Mm-hmm. And so I would work at those like random taquerias that are the only places open until 2:00 AM Do you remember which ones? I know where they were, but I forget their names. Pretty, they're not the famous, it's not like Taqueria, Cancun, or El ate, but these are just like EL four, probably El Farro. Yeah. Happy Donut was a huge hub for us. Yeah. So that's also open really late. So, I would work at Happy Donut and I would stay up most of the night for months coding that thing because mm-hmm. It got kind of complicated. It was in PH and I had no aversion control. And this is the first web app I'd ever made. And during the day I was doing a completely different type of programming. And like this, the shit was breaking and I just but I had so much energy to do it. I, like, I had more energy at that time in my life than I probably ever had for like sustained for months. Yeah. Like just the joy of building something and then seeing people use it is such a magical experience. But why am I railing about this? So I had this job and then I go and drive down to the South Bay till Mill Pete at No Alviso, California. Yeah. And that was like an hour. And I was co coding up the Comcast DVR and one day I was doing all the customer service too. This is a lot of emails. I'm taking money, PayPal money, you know, at this point the site brings in. Hundreds of dollars a day. Mm-hmm. Like not brings in to, to send to Africa. Yeah. And then pretty much overnight, the biggest blog in the world and slash dot wrote about Kiva. Mm-hmm. And pretty much overnight we had thousands of users. It went from hundreds of thousands. And that day I just told my boss, engineering manager a lot like off space actually. I just told him I'm quitting. Wow. Yeah. Did you destroy the printer? Yeah, sort of. And, and then I just remember leaving and yeah, walking along Arastradero Preserve for some reason. That's where it went. This, the, the foothills around Palo Alto and just being like, I, it's the middle of the day and I'm hiking. Yeah, yeah. And just that freedom. And, you know, ever since that, that day, I've sort of been felt free of a job, which has been. Been amazing. Yeah. I escaped my cubicle. I wanna so I, I think what you're describing is something I, I think a lot of entrepreneurs will be able to relate to a couple of phases that I really wanna call out, especially to anyone that's listening that maybe thinking about starting something and Yeah. Hasn't done it those early months before it's, you know, enough of a product that people can really start using it and it's just your ideas and your code or just your laptop Yeah. At Happy Donut. Yeah. It's maybe the most magical period of anyone's professional life. It is, it is intoxicating man. Yeah. We'll never get that feeling again. Yeah. You just, all you wanna do is work. Yeah. And it's a beautiful, the feedback you get. Exactly. It's the constant feedback. You get positive feedback. Yeah. And you make a change in the sense of power, how that impacted thousands of people. I just pushed this, this code live. Yeah. And yeah, just the, the thrill of that is. Inescapable and it just, it also just felt like everything I cared about was coming together. Yeah. At this moment of just like, I don't know, complete alignment of purpose and of what I was doing and I felt like this is right. This is the first time in my life I know what I'm doing. I know the first time in my life I know where I'm going. Yeah. Yeah. It's my life makes sense. It's just driving to a cubicle and working there eight hours for me was like really, really depressing. Yeah. I was so depressed. Yeah. Did I think, I think you nailed it, that that's it's purpose I think really is what it is. Where when you feel it a after you felt it in those early days, it's really, really, really hard to go back to it. And I think it is, you start to realize not to make this too big of a commentary on the world.'cause I'm not smart enough to do that, but I, I really. You start to realize how kind of starved the world is for, for true purpose. Mm-hmm. And the, and really, I mean, I remember those early days of the company. It was unlike anything I'd ever felt before. It was as if there was, it was, there was a flavor I had never tasted before. But anyways, so you do, you go through that and then of course, then all of a sudden there's that moment when it becomes a real thing. And for you, that's of course, you know, when you quit Comcast and all of a sudden you're there. Do you remember? And then there's another, I think, really seminal moment, which is when it feels like it's going very poorly. Mm. Do you remember did you have nightmares about Kiva failing in those early days? Once after it becomes a real thing and now you're doing it full time? Let's see. Yeah. This is 20 years ago, 25 years ago. Did I have nightmares? I'm trying to remember what I was worried about at the time. I think it was mostly I. I was bad at coding and like the shit was crashing. So it was just like after that initial press, I think it was like a year of the site crashing and then me cobbling together with random people that would try to help me. My friend Jeremy you know, moved here from New York and his wife Fiona, they like drove across the country and they were living on my couch. These are a married couple with no money. Wow. And they're just,'cause they're working for free living on my couch. And he eventually got an apartment. Jeremy and Fiona eventually got an apartment in the mission. And I remember one day I left my house. I told my wife I was, I had to go work with Jeremy and I didn't come back for five days. I just remember, I just, I remember I came back five days later. And I probably never talked to my wife the whole time. And oh my God, they're, you know, we are not texting flip phones. Just trying to keep the website up and I really did not know how to scale anything. Were you afraid, were you running on fear at the time? Was I running on I think it was pretty terrible. I think it was a bad feeling. It's hard to remember how bad it felt, but just being under the gun, under a gun that you can't escape from. And if you go to sleep and you, you'll wake up under that pressure. Just'cause like people's money are, is at stake. People can't believe you can't keep the sight up. Incompetence is terrible. There was also another real, real bad crisis right after that that I just remembered. I remember what I was really worried about. Are you, do you want, are you okay real keeping this site up eventually worked. Yeah. I mean there was, this is before AWS we, yeah, there had, I forget the name of the hosting company, but just like the hosting company hated us that our software was so bad, it would call the, the homepage of Kiva would call the database like 300 times. Mm-hmm. Through some like for Loop that was like poorly written. There was no like model view container. It was just like one page that just called the database 800 times. Yeah. And so there, someone told me like, we had this like sing of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, like Yeah. Great engineers. And they were just like, started over because no computer, like no cluster, no NVIDIA cluster could keep our website going. Oh my god. God, this is so poorly written. Yeah. It would just crash if you sent it live. And then we were like on Oprah and just, just keeping the site up was, you're on Oprah's favorite things, right? I think so. I was on the show, Oprah. Oh my god. What's Oprah like? What's Oprah like? I mean, I, I was on the show for an hour, so I don't know what she's like really, but I remember she was quite distracted. More distracted than I thought. And I remember being surprised by how much editing they did to make the interview look good. Mm-hmm. And it was juxtaposed against Bill Clinton, who was also on the show with us on the same episode as you, the same show? No, we, because he wrote about Kiva. Oh my. And so we were on it. And he, they were interviewing us and Bill Clinton was so present. Yeah. He just seemed incredibly present, incredibly thoughtful. He knew a lot about me, which was wild. Yeah. And the president starts pulling up tidbits of your life and you're like, I can't believe you said that. That's insane. Yeah. That you said that. And he is not reading, he's just looking me in the eye and like telling me like, oh, you worked at World Vision, or, you know, stuff like that. That was a good impression. I cannot believe you said that. Yeah. Yeah. But Oprah was fairly. Let's just say, okay, see, this is a problem now because I can talk about Bill Clinton for truly an impossible amount of time. Really. It's good. I am fascinated by, I mean, just meeting him was over was amazing. I think he's the most amazing person I've ever looked met in, in terms of their presence. Yeah. Yeah. Because I, people and I, I wasn't expecting it. I didn't have like some big impression of Bill Clinton, but like shaking his hand and talking to him for five minutes was incredible. Have you I won't repeat it here, but I'll send it to you afterwards. Have you seen the John Mullany bit about Bill Clinton? No, it's based, I mean, I'll, I'll ruin it for you a little bit, but the, the crux of it is Bill Clinton's running, John Mullin's a kid, his mom went to school with Bill Clinton and wants to go see him. And before she goes, John Mullin's dad, who's more conservative is in, is in in love with this idea and just says, oh, it's not like he's gonna remember you. Yeah. And does she shows up and she walks in. Yeah. And this is, you know, probably 20, 30 years later. Yeah. Yeah. And first thing across the room, he goes, oh, hey Ellen. There's a lot of stories like that. Like Yeah. Of him just walking by someone and saying their name is just wild dude. He my favorite, I have a lot of favorite Bill Clinton moments. I'm not even saying I like the guy. I'm just saying he is impossible to look away from. Yeah. He's one of the most interesting people that's ever been present. Yeah. It's incredible. Yeah. But my favorite moment, which is probably the most talked about moment with him, right. One one of. The most talked about moments is that debate that he does with Ross Perot and Bush Senior. Right. Nice. And this woman gets up. You do you know the woman I'm talking about? No. I don't know. Bill Clinton moments. I, this is my favorite one. I I'll, we, we will get off of Bill Clinton in a second, but this woman gets up and it's like a town hall style debate, right? And this woman goes I would like to ask how the national debt has affected you personally and famously while she's asking this. The President Bush Sr. While she's asking looks at his watch, and this became a big controversy that he didn't have time for this woman, but he answers it like you would expect somebody that's been in politics forever. To answer it, Bush Senior does. Yeah. He goes, I, I don't you know, well, I have grandkids and I worry about them. And that's national debt. Yeah. And she's like, no, no, no. But how has it affected you personally? And he, you can see that he is getting a little annoyed. He doesn't really know what to say and then and so he kind of just sits down, not really able to answer. He's like, I don't really, what do you mean it's, it's affecting me personally. Bill Clinton being the guy that he is, has picked up on the fact that this woman's saying national debt, she doesn't mean national debt. She's talking about the national debt crisis of the national crisis of people having a lot of debt. Right. Consumer debt. Yeah. Of, of consumer debt. And Bill Clinton Springs out of his chair and he walks up to this woman, right. And it's this heavy contrast to the president looking at his wife. Yeah. He walks up to this woman, he goes let me ask you a question. How has the national debt affected you? And he just, and you see this woman kind of be like, oh, oh my God. And, and that is just one of a billion magical Bill Clinton moments. Yeah. He just has this kind of sense for people. Yeah. Yeah. And he's so focused and all so present. I mean, I think the, the, the ability to be fully present in a conversation is, takes work. Yeah. He seems to be good at that. I'm gonna go home and watch I'm gonna look up Best book Clinton Moments. I'll send you I bet there's a lot. I bet there's a lot. I probably, I I think I have a few stored, I'll, I'll, I'll send'em to you. Yeah. But let's, let's bring this back to you. So you at this point, you know, Kiva gets covered on the blog. You've, you've quit your job at Comcast. Kiva is now a proper functioning enterprise. Right. You're on Oprah. That brings in even more volume. At this point, what was your sort of sense of your career in Kiva? Did you think that you were gonna be doing this for the rest of your life? Yeah. Did you think a hundred percent? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. It was the intersection of what my purpose and what I was thought to be good at. Yeah, it was everything. Yeah. It was my whole identity, man. That's, that's, that's a powerful thing. Yeah. And I can imagine that when things weren't working, I mean, just going back to, to what we were talking about a second ago. It probably, I, I, I almost don't wanna imagine how bad it must have felt. Yeah. That things weren't working out.'cause it must have felt like not only are you letting yourself down, you're letting down these small businesses in Uganda and you're letting down these lenders in, in Idaho or whatever, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so I can imagine that that must have been very painful. Warm intro is brought to you by Wefunder. Wefunder created this thing called the Community Round that lets you raise money directly from your community. So instead of going to VCs and rich people, angel investors, you can go straight to your friends and your family and your customers. And, you know, this is not a traditional ad read. I used Wefunder for my company three times. We ran three rounds on Wefunder. We raised over a million dollars. And I found that it completely changed how everybody felt about our business. Our customers all of a sudden didn't feel like they were just customers. They felt like they were owners in the business. They shopped with us more. They told their friends about us. My team felt like what we were doing was important because our community had shown up to invest in us. I tell every founder I can find to go raise a we fund around round, especially for companies that care about community. There is nothing greater you can do than letting that community invest. Go to wefunder.com/join to check it out. Yeah. I, I think probably the worst one, there's a few crises of Kiva. There's a series of gates, we called them like Watergate, but we call it like funding gate or website gate or whatever. So we had this list of crises. I was CEO there for 10 years, so mm-hmm. In my years there, there's probably like four or five, like major crises. Probably the biggest one was right in that time. Realizing that a lot of the money had been stolen and so, oh my God. Trying to get it back, which is it tricky. Have you talked about this before? Yeah, yeah. I wrote a paper about it. Oh. And no one reads this shit, but yeah, I think it would be a good movie. This part would be if you made, if someone made a movie about this like year, it would be a really dramatic movie. Can you share how much money it was? Sure. Oh, okay. Alright, so it was, the project was, as I described, little grassroots project with a church in Uganda, then another church in Kenya, then another church in Tanzania. Then this one small nonprofit in Ghana, then this, something like that in Nigeria. So every country, we were slowly signing up some grassroots project and the idea was use the Kiva website, take, you know, you have beneficiaries. Post up pictures and stories about your beneficiaries. Ask for a certain amount of money, take a loan at 0% interest, and as they pay back with interest, you remit the principle back to the website and pay it back. Yeah. So that was the concept. By the time you're rushing to get more projects on the world, on the website,'cause we were probably raising millions of dollars a month and, you know, dispersing that$300 at a time. Wow. Takes a long time. So, let's see. How did it all come down? I think, okay, so you send money somewhere and it's supposed to be paid back in 12 months. You know, I'm going to the bank, Wells Fargo, like literally it's a arcane process, filling out a form, sending dollars to a bank in Uganda, in rural Uganda. The pastor of the church would go to that bank, take it out, disperse it$300 at a time to like 2100, 200 businesses in. TI Uganda or the doma Tanzania. And then of course it'll get paid back, like microfinance must work. But we had sent so much money so fast to people we had never met. And a lot of those people in the middle stole the money. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So how much money was it? It was millions of dollars, maybe eight millions of dollars. Yeah. Geez. Yeah. I really got myself into, into a jam. Yeah. So that was, yeah, like these memories. Do you remember these memories have blocked out. So, sorry to, sorry to make you No, no, just remembering the story. It's like, oh, that crisis. But then there was that other one that was really bad. That was bad. Yeah. Dude, we should do an episode just about Kiva crises, but I. What was the moment that you realized that the money had been stolen? I'm trying to remember how it unfolded. So there is stages of grief, I guess. It's, you are an optimistic person and you don't want to admit the worst has happened. Yeah. So you start to worry about it, then you start to get more worried and you start to email more people. You call more people, stay up really late, call'em on the phone. This pastor you're talking to in Tanzania, you know this, this guy in Ghana, in the rural Ghana. You know what's going on. This woman in the Messiah territory in rural Kenya, it dies. You know, the people are dying. Some people died. The money's not coming back. I had sent a fleet of. Management consultants to the developing world. So at the same time, this period, we have this outpouring of support and volunteer energy. This is after Oprah? Yeah. Yeah. And so we had a partnership with a consulting firm, Mercer Management Consulting. Great, great firm no longer exists. And so we have all these, you know, 20 something consultants taking time off. Yeah. And we're sending them to the field partners and go out in the field and live where the projects are and help the projects, help them do a lot with the IT side of things because there's not necessarily good internet. There's not necessarily people that know how to remit money on the internet and use technology in that way in the projects we're working with. So we'd sent these Americans out there and one of them was living with. One of them, Shelby Clark, who's went on to found Turo, who's an amazing guy was living in, in rural Uganda and uncovered a massive fraud, which was sort of like the moment that I admitted to myself that a lot of this was fraud. So, gosh I think the moment that he had discovered that everyone had fake names around him, he didn't know the, the true identities of anyone he, he was working with. There was no accounting for anything. So like him telling us that and then him feeling in danger was the moment I realized like, this is, this is real. Like if I have suspicions about a lot of things, all those suspicions are real. Like I've lost millions of dollars. Yeah. Oh my God, man, I wow. I think this is the first time in the however many episodes we've done. That I've genuinely started to feel anxious. The, the, the, the, the dread I felt during that period. The dread is the word. Yeah. So the utter dread. So, the, the, there, this story could be long or short, but talking to those people, there's like eight of them, eight projects millions of dollars. I'm not sure exactly how much. And talking to them one at a time and like realizing they were lying or that they were promising to send money back, but they never were going to. Coming to that, admitting that to myself. I remember once I was on a cruise. This is just one of the moments you remember of like the, the horrible moments of your life. I remember I was on a cruise, which I hate cruises. Cruises are the worst. Cruises are the worst. It's my least favorite thing in the world. I was on a cruise in Hawaii with my wife, who's no longer my wife. She wasn't my wife. Long after this. She said she was soon to be not my way. Yeah, it was a very short marriage. And this was all part of that wrapped up in that horrible period. But I just remember I was with her family on a cruise and I was using a satellite phone. I think it was like, must have been like$12 a minute. And the phone was like, oh my god. The size of, you know, a guitar, massive. And talking to you know, this one guy who ran this microfinance project'cause his wife died just suddenly just then. Right? And so then I was talking to the husband of the, the woman I knew who suddenly died. You know, just asking him to send the money back and he wouldn't, I mean, obviously he did not, it was stolen. And just realizing this was not just an isolated incident. This had happened all over, basically to every project I'd sent money to. Oof. Man, I'm, I guess I'll just say I'm sorry you went through that. It was 20 years ago. That's still, I'm glad it happened. Hard, man. Yeah. No, and it, it ended really well. Yeah, it did Well. So the story ended well. Yeah. So I wanna pivot to everything I was worried about did not materialize. Oh, interesting. Yeah. How so, how did it work out? Well, how did it work out? So, first of all, there was a couple year period of trying to get the money back. Yeah. So Shelby and I ended up working together a lot, going to a few of these projects and gathering a team of forensic accountants gathering a team of lawyers. Doing, like fully analyzing the situation. I felt like I owed that to everyone involved. Like a full accounting of all this money, documenting it, getting the principles, surprising people in random places in Africa interrogating them. Were you going in person? Yeah, me and Shelby. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So it this would be a good movie. Yeah. And us trying to run our own, like kangaroo court process runner would get$8 million back. A miscellaneous, you know, elder Africans who generally were in their fifties, generally religious confronting them as 20 something white guys and trying to get the money back. It was just a comedy, like, first of all, no one on the other side cared. Like they weren't intimidated by us. We weren't intimidating, we weren't trying to be intimidating, we were nice. But we were just, they were laughing at us for trying to sue them. So we took them to court and we had these court cases in like capital cities in Africa, taking, running these court cases, which just never worked. You know, just no one cares. Yeah. You're not getting the money back. There's no contracts. So like the crime I was accusing of them wasn't necessarily even a crime.'cause I had just sent them a lot of money and asked for it back. But it was informal. Yeah. So I think, yeah. Then there was like the second dread of just years of realizing you are not getting the money back was also a good lesson. Like once someone steals money from you, almost in every case, you're not getting that money back. Good lesson. Summarize it that way, but how did it work out at the end? How did it work out at the end? So, we were here, I just, I, I'm super locational based, so we're in this part of the mission San Francisco. We had a warehouse. Office on 18th and 20th and Brian. Yeah, I always remember where I was when something happened. Yeah. And we just announced it. So we announced that we lost millions of dollars. I forget exactly the amount to the entire user base over email and a blog entry. And we were really ready for this day. So we had prepared it for this day, for months. And then we also announced on that very day that we have covered your losses. So we had, this is in a period where we became quite famous. Money was pouring in. I can tell you why money was pouring in, which is a different story. Yeah. But millions of dollars was also pouring into us as a donation to help us. And we used that money that was generous, generously donated by our users to essentially cover the fraud. Wow. And we just documented, we were full transparency. You can read a report about it. Here's where every cent went. Here's what we did wrong. Here's how we not doing this again. Here's, and you congrats. You've lost no money. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Did way more of this became about the, the challenges you went through than I was initially intending. I do. I wanna ask you, and the, the last point that you said that you had so much money sent too generously. Why do you think Kiva worked? Why do you think it worked so well? Yeah. At this massive scale, it's really hard to imagine. So first of all, the amount of money coming into us was because the website was so bad it was crashing. Yeah. And every time it crashed, there was an all you all, the whole screen is a PayPal link that says Donate to get our servers back. And that link generated millions of dollars in random donations with no tax receipts from all over the internet. Yeah. So we just realized our users were so supportive. It was amazing. We had this energy behind us that even if we lost millions of dollars, it would still work. We had just had this love, almost like carrying us forward and it was a group of like five employees. And those five employees were Jeremy and Fiona, me Premel c Chelseaa, my friend from high school. That was basically it. Yeah. Wow. So it was fun. You know, imagine us in our twenties working in the mission, you know, eating burritos and drinking and coding all the time. Um hmm. Do you remember the main sort of criticisms of Kiva that were out there in the world when you guys were, you know, at your peak? Yeah. You'd have, well, yeah, you'd have, that's, you skipped several crises, but yes, that one is the least of my worries. But there, there is the New York Times, your money doesn't go where it's seems crisis. You could call that the. The donor illusion gate, I think is how we, how we call it. There's something beautiful about putting gate after every places. Yeah. I still do this in my new company. We have several gates. Yeah. Donor illusion gate. Just'cause you have these sagas that last months and then you have to name them and naming them almost feels a little relieving when it's a distance from you. We had the donor illusion gate, which is a blogger, David Rudman, wrote a piece that your money doesn't necessarily go where it seems. Mm-hmm. Because at this point, instead of Pastor Moses and all these pastors getting the money from the bank and giving it directly to a pharmacy or a business, we ended up partnering with real institutions that could absorb millions of dollars, who would then give it to their micro borrowers. But it was also, money is fungible. So these. Companies had bigger budgets, world Vision, Kenya or something like that. Mm-hmm. Save the children, Tanzania, you know, worked with all these bigger eight organizations, and so the money was less directly tied to the borrower. And in fact, the borrower got the money before the website sent them the money. So they would post up the story fund the borrower, wait for it to be backfilled. And so the timing mismatched, like the borrower is not literally waiting for the money anymore. I didn't think that was a scandal. It was all documented on our website, but the New York Times picked it up and there that was a big, like, I would say fall from Grace or our brand is no longer as perfect or our first experience of criticism. And I'm, because I was able, I can relate to parts of how you describe yourself a as a child. I'll, I'll make this about myself, but I'm curious if any of this, it's good. I, let's, I wanna interview you. No, it's, nobody wants to listen to that. But. I remember when, you know, I was my company started to get some press. Nice. You know, we would get some negative press and it was fine. I, I never cared too much about it. I remember like the first time Forbes wrote about us, wrote about me the first word was hubris question mark. 24-year-old wants to do X and Y. Yeah. Hubris. And I and I remember I just laughed at that because hubris was not anything, anyone, because you know, the criticism that is close to your heart is the one that, or the, maybe the one that you think there's a little bit of truth in is the one that actually sticks with you. Sure. The stuff that you know, you can call me a lot of things. Yeah. But to me that was, it just made no sense to me. It just wasn't sort of, in my world, it doesn't hit home. Yeah. It doesn't really pierce you. It's just so ridiculous. Yeah, exactly. And so hubris was not my problem, but then I remember when I found that, like, so I, I, I don't know how else to put this other than my need. To feel like a good boy. Right. Was like that I was doing good in the world and that I was a good person. And I remember anytime we would get a criticism around that and it was never, we've never got so big that the New York Times would write something like that about us, but it would be in comments and stuff. People would think that what we were doing wasn't good for the world at some level. And I remember that stuff would keep me up at night and it would really, really, really sort of bother me. Yeah. And I, it was through that that I learned that it was very important for me. I think it is for everyone, but I, I, I thought, or maybe disproportionately important for me to feel like a good boy that I was, and I think it's part of my religious upbringing too, but it to feel like, no, no, no. I was, you can call me whatever you want, but what no one can take away from me is that I am morally sound, that I'm on the, the right path. Yeah. Did you, was there any criticism that you got in that period that, that actually stung? Mm-hmm. Not, not just at the level of like, oh, this will hurt the, the work. Mm-hmm. But on the level of like, no, I, I kind of. I feel like maybe there's some truth to this. Mm. Yeah. Compared to, you know, my coworkers like Premel I was not really that affected personally by negative pr. Yeah. I was pretty fine with it and I can move on just fine. I think that things that really haunt me was being a bad CEO or a bad boss. So I was, went from, you know, coding, never presenting anything, never leading anything to leading this team. Hundreds of people, a lot of people around the world. And I think, yeah, I developed a super thin skin for criticism from my own employees that that was the worst, the hardest thing for me to absorb. You have a 360 whatever, of course I'm bad at this job. Like, and then you're in San Francisco with a lot of people that you know, have high expectations of a startup, CEO, whatever. And I'm not. Giving visionary speeches a lot, you know, sort of keeping to myself. Yeah. And so getting criticism from your employees, that is the thing that I couldn't handle that, that would keep me up for weeks or days if I, if I had a, like, an incident like that, I think it would cause days of anxiety. Wow. Does that still happen? No. But also our situation, I found it a lot easier to run a for-profit. What I realized was I was doing, running this chaotic growing nonprofit in downtown San Francisco with a lot of employees who have a lot of issues themselves. I just didn't realize like how hard of a management job that was. Looking back at it now, I'm a startup, CEO of a startup with 500 employees, and it's perfectly fine. Yeah. I have very little drama. So I wanted to, I wanted to, to linger on this for a second, so I, I haven't done, I haven't been involved in a nonprofit at the level of theor, but I was, I don't think I should name them. They're very well known, but I was, I was on the board of, I, I think I need to take this off my LinkedIn before this episode reflect, but I was on the board of a very large international nonprofit for a while. Amazing. And man, it really pissed me off. I really and it made me so happy to be at a, and I, it really sort of filled me with this I, I, I don't, I don't wanna say that this is like an intellectual, I, I don't, I haven't thought this through, but just a strong feeling Yeah. That if I really want to do, move something in the world it has to be through a for-profit. Mm-hmm. Enterprise for sure. Have you tell me about I mean, if you're willing to go to, otherwise we can cut this out too. Tell me about leaving Kiva. Yeah. And then we can sort of segue that into talking about starting branch. Yeah, that was a whole nother gate. That was one of the worst ones for sure. So wait, what, what gate did you name it? Exit Gate. God, I think it was called Flan, flan Gate by my friends, because I had lots of friends at Kiva and yeah, they were helping, they were very helpful during this process. But let's see. I had been the CEO for 10 years. I don't think I'm naturally a born CEO. I'm more of a founder type, big ideas, a lot of ideas, the day to day introverted. So I'm not necessarily thinking I was the best at my job. I had gotten really sidetracked by mobile lending. This is really what happened. I just remembering how did it work out? So I got really sidetracked with mobile lending. Actually a lot of the folks at Wefunder were helping me and we were interested in making the first purely digital loans. Maybe in the world, but certainly in Africa. So, we changed the Kiva model to go directly to people and lend directly to them on their phones. Hmm. So, and these are flip phones and they would end up in their n pace of wallet in Kenya, like digital wallet. So I had been really obsessed with this project, which was going nowhere. Yeah. And not generating any revenue when the CEO of Kiva should be fundraising all the time. Right. Yeah. So there, there was a, there was my personality getting into new ideas, and then there was the needs of the company need to fundraise. And our board was a bunch of Silicon Valley VCs and entrepreneurs were all 10 to 20 years older than me. And they, I just thought they knew what they were talking about a lot. But I think after 10 years I got a little rebellious and I started criticizing them. Yeah. And they weren't donating, in fact, we were paying them. Mm-hmm. So I looked up one day, I think I had this like. Radicalizing moment where I just like, who are these older people that I'm paying that are telling me what to do? Yeah. And I started just to resent them and I think I lashed out and in a board meeting or public. Yeah. I think I lashed out a lot. Yeah. And eventually I was fired and so that was a very sudden disturbing situation. Do you remember the moment you were told that you've been fired? Oh, yes. Oh yes. On a cruise in Hawaii. Oh. Deeply, deeply, deeply painful. This is one of the two most painful moments in my life, for sure. Did you get a phone call from the chairman? No. No. Do you want the story if you're willing to share? Sure. So, so promo my lifelong business partner and I always met with our board chair like on a Tuesday, once a month or something. So we did this every month. And I was paranoid about being fired'cause I, I knew that I was acting out and I knew that the company wasn't doing that well. And it was just sort of my worst fear of getting fired. And so he would joke with me and so we're on the way to this meeting and he's like, this is it. This is when you're gonna get fired, dude. And it's just like, picture two best friends. Joking about that. And then the meeting address changed. So it changed to the LinkedIn office building in San Francisco.'cause Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, was on our board. He wasn't the person we were paying, but the rest of the board members. And yeah, I show up, the security guard separates us, takes me into a separate room, and there's my board chair and another board member. And I remember she just said, Matt, this is going to be difficult. And I don't remember a lot after that moment. I don't remember a lot. Yeah. How did, how long did it take you to recover? Recover. So have you recovered? I don't know. I was by myself in San Francisco. They separated me from promo. I was, it was like 1:00 PM and I remember just walking around San Francisco in a daze and I went to some Irish pub and I just started drinking. And I called my family and they came and got me. And I just remember like the next few days were like a blur of them taking care of me. Super painful. I was just about to be married, so I've now been married 11 years and my wife is amazing. And yeah, they took care of me. When you think about that story, this is 2013, right? That was 2014. Yeah. Okay. So 11 years. And I got married in 2014, so right after that, A month later. Hey. Yeah. I do like the, how the story of your career overlaps with the story of your, your, your, your, you getting married. Yeah. Divorce, and then getting married. You always get married and then start a company. That's, that's what you do. But that's a great pattern, dude. When you think about this now, are you filled with are you able to just describe it like Tom Broka, just like, this is what happened. Does it fill you with rage? Does it fill you with regret? Mm. How do you feel about that? Getting fired? Yeah. I think I have a lot of resentment for those people. Like, I don't think it was justified. I think you know, there's been four Kiva CEOs since, and I just think all good people, you put five people together that have no skin in the game. I think the nonprofit structure is problematic because the board members don't have skin in the game. They often have strange, their own reasons for doing what? The vanity or Yes. Sense of impact or sense of meaning. And you're providing them some sense of meaning. And that can be very fickle, especially if there's no hard financial sort of metrics tied to it. Yeah. And if it's just people's opinions and you put five people in a room, eventually they convince themselves to do something crazy, none of them will own the decision. So it's sort of like group think can, can lead to, I don't know, crazy decisions. And how do you feel now about when you look back at the work that you did at Kiva are you mostly proud? Do you mostly have a feeling of I wish I'd done more. How do you think about your 10 year period at Kiva? I think it was amazing. I mean, I'm proud. I think if I. I think it, I'm so proud of it. I think it was an amazing experience with that group of people. The true, like Kiva founding team, the five or six ragtag people that joined, you know, those will just be friends for life. Those some of the best, the best times of my life for sure. I think if I went wrong in any way, it was listening to, and I think entrepreneurs always say this, listening to Silicon Valley executives being convinced to do things in a professional way, running it more like a business instead of a passion. I think if you look back, there was a sort of a fp and a ification spreadsheet. Yeah. Philosophy, especially tied to the PayPal Mafia and the eBay Mafia and Silicon Valley at the time, in the early two thousands, I think there's big emphasis on web metrics and the the Web3 0.0 playbook and the funnel. And thinking of your, your website, like a product. Which I just fundamentally, if I had to go over, just avoid that line of thinking at a nonprofit, especially avoid the line of thinking that it is a consumer experience.'cause that that overall dominating philosophy just led us on the wrong track that eventually led to this happening. Yeah. How did that experience lead to branch? Well, branch is essentially that project I was doing. So, that, that side project it basically, I just, I was like, I don't know what to do. I'm gonna do that side project. So how, how many months after roaming around San Francisco and gonna The Irish Pub? Yeah. To now you're working on branch? Six months. Two. That's insane. Far too short. That's amazing. Far too short. Yeah. Probably less actually. Honestly, that's, yeah. I mean, what are you gonna do? I'm by myself in San Francisco. Yeah. So I mean, six months is a long time to do nothing. Yeah. Yeah. Sitting there. Okay. I watched the World Cup. I remember that was the year the World Cup was on tv. I watched every World Cup game. And then right after that I did branch. And so you said that side project that was distracting you at Kiva Yeah. Became branch it is that side project is it still that, is it, how close is it now to its sort of original vision? Really close? Yeah, so I hired a lot of the people from Kiva that were on that side project. And we started making the branch website. I was just coding it myself, basically the same playbook as Kiva, you know, it's okay now it's just me. I know how to code. Let's build, let's try to lend to someone in Kenya. And so I literally started doing it months after being fired just by myself using like Bitcoin actually. So at this point I was buying thousands and thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoin, which if I had just. Bought the Bitcoin and never sold it. I'd be very wealthy versus starting this company if I just, yeah. I bought thousands of bitcoins. Yeah. I bought, but there were like a hundred dollars or something. What would it be worth today? I don't even know. I'm not, I'm not a crypto. I mean, a one Bitcoin is worth a hundred thousand dollars now. It was a hundred dollars. And I had a, I had bought thousands of them to send to African. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was buying these bitcoins. It's in spare money. You could have been Oprah by now. I could have been more rich than Oprah. Yeah. If I just didn't start the stupid cell phone lending project and just kept the Bitcoin. Right? Yeah. Yeah. But sorry, I I didn't mean to distract the Oprah. No, it is funny. It is a very dark realization. Yeah, yeah. No, it is. That, that there is, there's like a dark humor to them. Yeah. Yeah. But it's not about making money. So Yeah. But think branches well first of all, you raise VC for it. Andreessen, a couple other great folks. Yeah. Why did you decide to do that? I mean, I don't know what I was doing. I was doing the side project, so, some of the big changes are we moved to using smartphones. Smartphones were taking off in Kenya. So we made it an app. So I learned to make an app and I had a couple friends doing this with me. And then we're sending the Bitcoin to the people that we approve for loans over the phone. So in Kenya, people I'd never met just using advertising on Google, Google play advertising lending to random Kenyans I had never met, of course. Mm-hmm. And sending them, you know, hundreds of dollars each and just like seeing what happened. Why did I raise VC money?'cause I don't know. That's what I thought you were supposed to do. I'd probably look back, I wouldn't do it that way as much, but raise far too much money just'cause that's what I felt you should do when you're starting to come. Do you think that hurt the company? Raising too much. Yeah. Yeah. Raising too much, too too soon.'cause the company didn't really start being a good business until 2001. And this is in 2015. So this is six years of just losing money again. Yeah. How did COVID affect you guys? Yeah, COVID saved us because I laid off everyone, most people. How big was the shift from how many people to how many people? From like 70 people to 15 people. Wow. And we were super hawkish on COVID. Being hawkish on COVID, but saved us because we were able to lay off all those people, stop losing money. Our payroll is a million dollars a month. So just saving that money, breathing deeply, and then asking yourself after that point, like, what is it? And actually a good business because the board wasn't pressuring us anymore. There was no competitor that we're worried about. Mm-hmm. We thought COVID was devastating. So we had no pressure. So taking the pressure off, having enough burn to, to last through COVID and then starting to do careful things and doing, doing things the right way, as if it were my money, not VC's money really saved us. And we wouldn't have done that without COVID.'cause COVID got everyone off the, the crack of VC money. Yeah. I I, I find that to be like a very interesting kind of moment in a company's life cycle. Yeah. When the sugar high goes away mm-hmm. And things become real. That's when I, I think that's when you find out what you're really made of and how real the business was. Right. Yeah. When all the fanfare is taken away. Totally. But it's tell me about the scale of branch today. Like what is, in whatever numbers you're comfortable sharing, what is the extent of the work right now? Yeah. So Branch is, financial services app. Mm-hmm. We do investing and let, you can make an investment. You can send money to your friends and or you can get a loan. We work in Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, and India. Overall we lend about$3 million a day wow. To 40,000 people every day. And we're profitable. So our, our annual profits are like$30 million and our revenue's almost$200 million. So we really came back from, from nothing. It really started to happen 2023 for 25, and mostly in India. So the reason those numbers are getting big is because we work in India. We randomly launched in India. Thank God that saved us.'cause the African markets don't really scale. Yeah. But that, that's what I found out. Wow. That is a huge, how are you so calm? You see, you seem like such a calm guy, but that just imagining$3 million a day. Yeah. Going out to so many people. Just that would, that would keep anyone up at night. Are you, how, what's your stress level out 10 most days now? Now it's very good. Yeah. Very good. It could get bad about a year ago is bad, so every once in a while, something, something bad happens. But I'm currently in the flow, just loving what I'm doing. Yeah. When was the last gate? The big one was about a year ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How do you see your work now?'Cause you've, it almost feels to me like you've spent. What is it? I mean, Kiva was started, you said 2000, four or five. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Two. So you've spent 20 years in this space, right? Yeah. I don't know to what degree you care to even like categorize it, but do you see your work as primarily philanthropic or do you see it more as, you know, I build companies and I try to build companies that help people. Hmm. Is it more building companies? Is it more philanthropy? And then I'm gonna find a way to make that a business. Yeah. Does that question even make sense? Yeah. I understand the spectrum of ideas there. I would categorize it as something I feel like is really important. Something I think is serious work. It's means a lot to people and it's good. I would, I would definitely get away from any idea that it's like miraculous or changing the world or you know, I think early on in my career I've felt too much into like, like. Running along with narratives that were saving people's lives or transformational. Did you think you bought your own or you drank your own Kool-Aid at any point? Yeah, well, I believed it, but it took me years and years of exposure to microfinance, realizing that it, it is financial services for the poor and that's good, but it's not changing someone's life necessarily. Like that would be a stretch that's a little bit of a you know, a white man's exaggeration about how we can make an impact in the developing world. And like it's very egotistical to think you're transforming someone's life. And I've just, you know, been a lot more modest about it. Yeah, I think at first I, I really felt that, I'm, I'm always surprised by how many founders'cause you, it almost feels like you need to come up with that narrative. To be able to ask people to put in those kind of hours, to be able to ask people to give you their money. You kind of need to first sell yourself on this being world changing and all of that. Yeah. And I find that people do their best work when that sort of washes away and you're just sort of left with, no, this is a good business that happens to do some good in the world. Sure. Is that how you think about it? Or is that Yeah, yeah. No, it's, I totally agree with what you just said. It's that you gotta get away from the big exaggerated narratives of philanthropy. Social impact. It's, it's very egoistical. Yet there's good in what you do. And, you know, I've seen a lot of my employees, both at a charity and at a for-profit, go through a cycle of having high expectations, getting jaded, going through a trough of despair, and then coming back and like thinking, this is good work. Yeah. Like this meant a lot to somebody. You know, somebody at a gas station today in India. Needed 20 bucks and the, our app just sent them the 20 bucks. They filled up their car with gas and they got home like, this is good because not, maybe not transforming their life and that, that would be a stretch to, to think I could do that for someone else. I I have three questions Yeah. To sort of end this thing. The first one I have is, are there stories and you can share, you can rapid fire as many as you want. Are there specific stories through your 20 years of doing this that really stick out to you? That, that really, maybe when you're having trouble sleeping at night, thinking about eternity, they help you sleep a little better, or they just make you feel warm and fuzzy inside? Do you have specific stories like that through these 20 years? I think, yeah. The most, the thing that probably gives me that feeling the most is talking to kids. So also at that time, I didn't have kids, I would travel around America. I went through various campaigns around America, but one of us speaking at schools and then running these curriculums with, you know, third graders, fourth graders, fifth graders, and picturing myself in that context and just loving, like, truly on that kid. And this is, you know, an American kid. But I honestly think like exposing them to other cultures, exposing them to philanthropy, exposing them to social impact, and just knowing a lot of them throughout the years I'm still friends with or having them talk to me and like having them say what an impact that was in their life. I think that is probably the biggest thing that I'm proud of. We had Kiva University and just going to those conferences around the world and how much it means to, to the donors. Almost more than the borrowers. Yeah. Yeah. Is probably the biggest thing. If I, if you had asked me to. To do a summary of, you know, I have to pretend to be an unbiased sort of interviewer here. This is hard. I have to wear a suit. This is journalism. Yes. Yeah. To act like this is journalism as just a guy in a, in a suit, in a room. Yeah. But did I think if I was to give the sort of summary of your career, I, I feel like you gave a lot of people opportunities and a lot of people that wouldn't have had those opportunities. Yeah. Do you, are there moments in your life where you feel like somebody gave you an opportunity that maybe changed your life or, yeah. If you hadn't gotten that, life would be very different for sure. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So much, I mean, at every stage, I think as an entrepreneur, I really identify as being a founder. Like I love founders and I feel like I'm a founder. I feel like I've figured out what I want to do. In my twenties and I was just like, yeah, that personality type really fits me. And then, so I just love, like all the other founders that very rich and famous people that helped me during that time spent a lot of time with me truly to help me that their names will not be mentioned. But just yeah, having, having so many the Silicon Valley community is real. Yes. You know, and just the, the community of people that legitimately wanna help other founders is, is amazing. And so I love being that person for, you know, I try to be that person for generations of, you know, founders. Whenever someone wants to trade notes or whatever. I go around all the world, I still travel all the time to all these places. And so whenever I show up in like, Lagos, Nigeria, or you know, Bangalore or whatever, I'll just tweet or LinkedIn that I'm here. And if you're a founder, you wanna hang out, lemme know. And I just have these founders, friends from all over the world. Oh, you're starting your. Healthcare business in Kenya, you know, how's that going And help them get funding and all that stuff. That's my favorite thing. That's beautiful. Number one. Number two, to anyone listening that maybe is in that position I know you hear this all the time about Silicon Valley, but it's hard to really grasp until it happens to you. When I was starting the company, I was 21 years old. And I just went onto Wikipedia and I looked at every Living Berkeley alum that had a Wikipedia page. That's a lot. And I emailed all of them. How did you sort, how do you sort Wikipedia by Berkeley, A alumni. Oh, I had a lot of time, man. I didn't, I I literally, I went to the Berkeley page and you get like a note notable alumni. Then you go there and then you go to every agency who's still alive Yeah. And who has an end date. Right. And so then I emailed every single one still alive. That's key. And the shocking part was hard to email people who are gone. But the shocking part was how many people responded? Steve Wozniak responded. Yeah. These billionaires Yeah. Took me out to lunch. It's, it's, it's surprising and a lot of people don't think they would. Yeah. If you just write like Craig at Craigslist. Yes. That guy responds. Yeah. Try it right now. Hi Craig. But yeah, it's amazing how like those sim mark at Facebook, I don't know, they, it, they often really work like I'm Matt at Branch and like I'll respond to any email you send me really fast. Yeah. Not that I'm a big wig like that, but the, the supportive nature and approachability of even the most famous people in Silicon Valley is disarming. Yeah. Yeah. Well, dude,'cause I, I think. And this will segue nicely to my last question for you, but, you know, I didn't, I haven't done a lot of the things that you've done. And I, I've never built anything of the skill that you built with Kiva or with Branch, but I know what that dread feels like and I know anyone that's ever built anything Yeah. Knows what Dread, that dread feels like. Dread. They know it lives with you, live with dread. They also know what the purpose and passion feels like of staying up at at Happy Donut. Mm. Until 4:00 AM and working, right? Yeah. And I think that's what, I don't know. I heard Lorne Michael say this one time on, he is doing Jerry Seinfeld show, and he said what you have to remember is that sometimes it takes just as much effort to make a bad movie as a test to make a good movie. And just because Good the product it did doesn't work out or isn't as good, doesn't mean that the person felt any less sincerely about it. Doesn't mean that Yeah. That they worked any less hard, you know? Yeah. So much of it is just luck and academics. Absolutely. Yeah. But I wanna bring this back to where we started. So as a first grader, you would stay up thinking about eternity and it would keep you up at night. Do you have things like that now? Do you have stuff that keeps you up at night? Hmm. I still have a lot of, I don't know, trauma that I'm getting over that haunts me. When I wake up in the morning, I, I usually feel it, and it takes me a few minutes to many minutes to realize that it's okay. I, I still feel the flight or flight wake up every day. And so I look forward to the day when I don't wake up tense and depressed. That's very different. I'm not depressed 10 minutes later. Yeah. But for some reason, right, the, the beginning of the day is that it's like I should be worrying about something. And it usually happens overseas. And so the tension of waking up, oh, fuck what happened while I was sleeping. Then just realizing like, I don't need to be worried about that anymore. Like, I'm not in that situation. And shaking it off, having coffee is nice. I can relate too much to that. Yeah. The, the thing I wanna end with is just saying you're, you're far too humble if a guy, and you're, you're far too, sort of honest and transparent about your work to, to, to take this compliment. Well, but thank you for whether or not anybody else believes it and whether or not you believe it. I believe it. Thank you for doing what you've done. I think you've helped a lot, a lot of people. A lot. I think you've helped entire regions. Mm-hmm. So thank you for what you've done. That's very kind of you. Thanks. Matt Flannery, thanks for being on the podcast, man. That was fun. It went very fast, dude. Yeah. We clocked down full hour and a half. Wow. Are you serious? Yeah. That's incredible, dude. Dude, that was awesome. Yeah. Warm Intro is produced by G one Moon, associate producer Alex Seko audio and video work by Jin Han, hosted by me Chai.