February 20, 2008
On behalf of the Wharton Club of Northern California, Carr & Ferrell hosted a special presentation featuring Premal Shah, President of Kiva.org. Premal discussed key issues including: eliminating large-scale business inefficiencies through the power of the Internet, creating meaningful partnerships, such Kiva.org's alliances with PayPal and Google, and building a world class team.
About Premal Shah
Premal Shah is President of Kiva.org. Prior to Kiva.org, Premal was a Principal Product Manager at PayPal, an eBay company. Prior to PayPal, Premal was a strategy consultant at Mercer Management Consulting in New York. Premal has had a long-standing interest in microfinance. In 1997, he was awarded a grant from Stanford University to research microfinance in Gujarat, India. More recently Premal co-founded the Silicon Valley Microfinance Network and spent 2 months in India working to refine/validate Kiva.org's model. In 2006, Premal was a featured speaker at the Clinton Global Initiative and Global Microcredit Summit. Premal graduated with a B.A. in Economics from StanfordUniversity.
About Kiva.org
Mohammed Yunus pioneered micro-finance in 1976 when he discovered that very small loans could make a disproportionate difference to a poor person. Yunus was awarded the Nobel Prize for building Grameen Bank into a disruptive financial innovator in one of the world's poorest countries.
Building on Yunus' vision, San Francisco based Kiva.org has catalyzed the growth of micro-finance using the power of the internet. Kiva's unique person-to-person lending platform allows consumers with a computer and a credit card to directly offer small loans to entrepreneurs building businesses thousands of miles away in developing countries.
Kiva's success has been widely covered by the media including Forbes and The Economist magazine as well as leaders such as former President Clinton and Oprah Winfrey. In less than three years, Kiva has grown from a cold start to enabling more than 123,000 people lending more than $12.4 million to 18,000 of the world's working poor, with a repayment rate of 99.67%. For more information, please visit Kiva.org.
