Jessica Jackley on How to Embrace Tension as a Leader & Build an Unforgettable Organization
“You should ask yourself first, what truly, like in your bones, do you actually value and what do you really wanna get done in the world?” –Jessica Jackley
Jessica Jackley’s answer to this question has always been the same: To help people. But she never guessed she’d do it as an entrepreneur.
Jessica once believed that business was nothing but greed and manipulation. But then something funny happened: Entrepreneurs kept proving that capital could be used for good. So she listened—to talks from Dr. Muhammad Yunus, to the early pioneers at the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford, and to her friends in East Africa with brilliant plans to better their communities with just a hundred dollars.
That listening led Jessica to start Kiva, now one of the world’s largest crowdfunding platforms for social good. Today, she’s leading the world in social entrepreneurism: proving that when we listen, connect, and design solutions around real human stories, the paths to helping people are infinite.
In our conversation, Jessica shares her unexpected path to social entrepreneurism, how Kiva scaled, and her approach to designing an impact-driven career without sacrificing time with family.
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Key Takeaways
1) Consider any differentiators that you’re under-leveraging in your organization. It’s not uncommon for gold to be hidden in plain sight, when you simply look deeper at something that’s always existed within the organization. Your unique approach to a problem. The way stories are naturally told. The way your community interacts with the organization. There’s unique opportunity waiting in those places.
2) Use tension as a tool for building a healthy culture. As a leader, you set the tone for tension: so it’s up to you to show your team that tension ends in resolution, not resentment. When staff can voice their opinions instead of suppressing them, they gain more heart space for mission-driven work.
3) Design a career that works FOR you. From her early days, Jessica fell in love with social entrepreneurship, dedicating so much of her life to it. This clarity on what she wants to see happen in the world has allowed her to maintain strong boundaries, define her non-negotiables, and make real progress towards a vision she cares deeply about.
Meet the Guest
Jessica Jackley is a social entrepreneur, founder, director, professor, author, and mother. She’s best known for founding Kiva, the first microfinance crowdfunding platform with over $2B in small business loans since 2005. She also founded Untapped Capital, Alltruists, and served as CIO of Aspiration. She’s the Director of the Brittingham Social Enterprise Lab at the USC Marshall School of Business in Los Angeles, and teaches the Practice of Entrepreneurship. She published her first book, CLAY WATER BRICK: Finding Inspiration from Entrepreneurs Who Do the Most with the Least, in 2015. She’s a proud mother of her four children, and lives with them and her husband in LA.
