This is a great post by Guy Kawasaki about lessons entrepreneurs can learn from kiva's successes. It's quite inspiring to read about an organization that is changing the game. My two favorite lessons:
"Ignore the naysayers. The Flannerys got a lot of advice that you can’t send money around the Internet without government approval; that Kiva couldn’t scale beyond a few African villages; that a non-profit couldn’t offer an investment product; and that it would violate SEC regulations as well as the Patriot Act. Besides this, Kiva was a no-brainer. :-)"
"'Bank' on unproven people. What would the ideal background be of the founder of Kiva? Investment banker from Goldman, Sachs? Vice president of the World Bank? Vice president of the Peace Corp? Vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation? Partner at McKinsey? How about temporary administrative assistant at the Stanford Business School? Because that’s how Jessica started her quest. The spark that lit the fire was a speech by Muhammed Yunus, founder of the Grameem Bank and Nobel Peace Prize winner."
