Premal Shah | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1975or1976(age 48–49) Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India |
| Education | Stanford University |
| Occupation | Co-founder Kiva |
| Board member of | Center for Humane Technology, Change.org Foundation, Watsi.org, VolunteerMatch |
| Website | Kiva.org |
Premal Shah (born 1975 or 1976 [1] ) is an Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Kiva, a global poverty alleviation non-profit that has raised over $2 billion for low-income entrepreneurs in eighty countries. [2] [3] [4]
Shah was born in Ahmedabad, India, and raised in Minnesota, [5] [6] graduating from Irondale High School. He attended Stanford University, where he pursued his interest in economic development, with a specific focus on microfinance. [7] At the London School of Economics he received a research grant to study the microfinance work of the Self-Employed Women's Association. [8]
Shah was an early employee of and principal product manager at PayPal. [9] Building on his college interest in microfinance, Shah took a sabbatical from PayPal in 2004 to prototype a concept of person-to-person microlending in India. [10] [11]
Upon his return to Silicon Valley in 2005, Shah joined Matt Flannery and Jessica Jackley in launching Kiva and scaling it into a global organization. [12] Kiva has since raised over two billion dollars in loans from over two million lenders in support of over five million entrepreneurs from 62 countries, with a 96% repayment rate. 81% of loans are disbursed to women, and 67% of loan recipients live in rural communities. [3] [4]
In addition to serving as president of Kiva, Shah sits on the boards of other non-profit of organizations, including Center for Humane Technology, Change.org Foundation, Watsi, and VolunteerMatch. [13] [14] He is considered to be a part of the PayPal Mafia, a group of PayPal alumni who have gone on to found or co-found other successful companies, including YouTube, LinkedIn, Tesla Motors, and Yelp. [15]
Premal is currently listed as a co-founder at renewables.org - an investment platform for renewable energy in emerging markets. [16]
Premal lives in San Francisco, California, with his wife and two children. He speaks widely about the potential for markets, technology & altruism to address some of society's toughest challenges. [24] [25]
Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (microloans) to impoverished borrowers who typically lack collateral, steady employment, and a verifiable credit history. It is designed to support entrepreneurship and alleviate poverty. Many recipients are illiterate, and therefore unable to complete paperwork required to get conventional loans. As of 2009 an estimated 74 million people held microloans that totaled nearly US$40 billion. Grameen Bank reports that repayment success rates are between 95 and 98 percent. The first economist who had invented the idea of microloans was The Very Reverend Jonathan Swift in the 1720s. Microcredit is part of microfinance, which provides a wider range of financial services, especially savings accounts, to the poor. Modern microcredit is generally considered to have originated with the Grameen Bank founded in Bangladesh in 1983 by their current Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus. Many traditional banks subsequently introduced microcredit despite initial misgivings. The United Nations declared 2005 the International Year of Microcredit. As of 2012, microcredit is widely used in developing countries and is presented as having "enormous potential as a tool for poverty alleviation."
Microfinance consists of financial services targeting individuals and small businesses (SMEs) who lack access to conventional banking and related services.
Grameen Bank is a microfinance specialized community development bank founded in Bangladesh. It provides small loans to the impoverished without requiring collateral.
Maksymilian Rafailovych "Max" Levchin is a Ukrainian-American software engineer and businessman. In 1998, he co-founded the company that eventually became PayPal. Levchin made contributions to PayPal's anti-fraud efforts and was the co-creator of the Gausebeck-Levchin test, one of the first commercial implementations of a CAPTCHA challenge response human test.
The bottom of the pyramid, bottom of the wealth pyramid, bottom of the income pyramid or the base of the pyramid is the largest, but poorest socio-economic group. In global terms, this is the 2.7 billion people who live on less than $2.50 a day.
Kiva Microfunds is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California. Kiva's mission is "to expand financial access to help underserved communities thrive."
Founders Fund is an American venture capital fund formed in 2005 and based in San Francisco. The fund has roughly $12 billion in total assets under management as of 2023. Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Palantir Technologies, and an early investor in Facebook. The firm's partners have been founders, early employees and investors at companies including PayPal, Palantir Technologies, Anduril Industries and SpaceX.
Łukasz Nosek is a Polish-American entrepreneur, notable for being a co-founder of PayPal.
Legatum Limited, also known as Legatum, is a private investment firm, headquartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Legatum is a partnership that uses its own funds to invest globally. The firm also invests in activities to promote entrepreneurship and free enterprise as well as anti-slavery, health and education initiatives.
The Skoll Foundation is a private foundation based in Palo Alto, California. The foundation makes grants and investments intended to reduce global poverty. Billionaire entrepreneur Jeffrey Skoll created the foundation in 1999.
Jessica Erin Jackley is an American entrepreneur who co-founded Kiva and later ProFounder, two organizations that promote development through microloans.
Water.org is an international nonprofit organization that helps people living in poverty get access to safe water and improved sanitation through affordable financing. This organization was founded by Matt Damon and Gary White.
The "PayPal Mafia" is a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and/or developed additional technology companies based in Silicon Valley, such as Tesla, Inc., LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer. Most of the members attended Stanford University or University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign at some point in their studies.
Zidisha is a peer-to-peer microlending service that allows people to lend small amounts of money directly to entrepreneurs in developing countries. It is the first peer-to-peer microlending service to link borrowers and lenders across international borders without a local microfinance institution intermediary. The organization is named after the Swahili word zidisha, which means "grow" or "expand".
The Grassroots Business Fund is a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC. It has field offices in Kenya, Peru, and India.
Energy in Common (EIC) was a not-for-profit organization issuing microloans specifically and only for renewable energy technologies. It operated between 2009 and 2013 when it suspended its lending activity due to a lack of funds.
Watsi, legally Watsi, Inc., is a nonprofit healthcare crowdsourcing platform that enables individual donors to directly fund medical care for individuals in developing countries without access to affordable medical care.
Jeremy Stoppelman is an American business executive. He is the CEO of Yelp, which he co-founded in 2004. Stoppelman obtained a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1999. After briefly working for @Home Network, he worked at X.com and later became the VP of Engineering after the company was renamed PayPal. Stoppelman left PayPal to attend Harvard Business School. During a summer internship at MRL Ventures, he and others came up with the idea for Yelp Inc. He turned down an acquisition offer by Google and took the company public in 2012.
Julie Hanna is an Egyptian-born technologist, entrepreneur, investor and board director. She serves as Executive Chair of the Board of Kiva., peer-peer lending and crowdfunding pioneer. She is Special Advisor to X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory and Venture Partner at Obvious Ventures.
Kashf Foundation is a non-profit organization, founded by Roshaneh Zafar in 1996. Kashf is regarded as the first microfinance institution (MFI) of Pakistan that uses village banking methodology in microcredit to alleviate poverty by providing affordable financial and non-financial services to low income households - particularly for women, to build their capacity and enhance their economic role. With headquarters in Lahore, Punjab, Kashf have regional offices in five major cities and over 200 branches across Pakistan.
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