Matt Flannery

Social networking sites help people connect for all different reasons. You might go to craigslist to find an apartment, ebay to find a buyer for your toaster, or kiva.org to lend money to an entrepreneur. Matt Flannery and his wife Jessica Flannery founded Kiva in 2005 in order to connect lenders in developed countries with small business owners in developing countries. If you have $25 and an internet account, you can lend money to a butcher in Bulgaria, a hair stylist in Iraq or a clothing vendor in Uganda.

Matt speaks with Jessica about how he came up with the idea for Kiva, got the lending platform off the ground, and how he’s helping to provide capital to thousands of entrepreneurs globally, from scratch.