Kiva Chronicles: A Guiness for Kiva Kiva was on a program featured on Tuesday's Oprah Show, where she interviewed Bill Clinton about his book on giving. The response has filled every loan request that Kiva had on its site.
Jess is in Swaziland. My Dad, Mike Flannery, is in town. Last night, Dad and I went out to the Liberties on Guerrero — a couple of Irish lads at the local Irish pub.
After a few Guinness, we were back home. My laptop lives on my nightstand. I checked in for one last glance at Kiva stats. We were out of businesses and there was no way to make a loan. This is the first time this has happened since January '06.
Ms. Winfrey, you sold us out. For you, I thought I would summarize the stats below. …
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I don't have time to explain the strategy that went into creating this chain of events. Rather, I'll just explain how I feel about it. I'm ecstatic. I don't think we made many mistakes this time around.
At a high level, the strategy was guided by the following beliefs 1) We are no longer terrified of running out of businesses and will not sacrifice our best thinking around risk in order to avoid a shortage and 2) We are not going to overspend on infrastructure to handle temporary press events. These lines of thinking contributed to the situation we are in now — sold out of businesses with a website that went down a few times for short periods of time, but generally held up. This is remarkably different than a year ago when we were on Frontline and down for 4 days.
I'm proud of the team. Mike is proud of me. Sam, Zvi and John: You guys are heroes. Same goes for you Ms. Winfrey.
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