Gumball Capital
When I was down in Palo Alto for Startup School 2007, I had a chance meeting with Kalvin. He is a student at Stanford and was involved with Gumball Capital.
While haven’t had a chance to talk with him since that time, I have been keeping my eye on Gumball Capital. This is a student group devoted to tackling poverty in developing countries through microloans. If this is the first time you’ve heard of microloans and microcredit, check out Kiva. This is more effective than just sending food and digging wells in terms of making a change; when the microloans are repaid, the capital can be loaned out again to another developing country entrapreuner.
Lately I have been looking at Gumball Capital’s activity and noticed an item on their blog. It appears that Kalvin (along with co-Gumballer Sophia) are going to take a semester off school work full time on the project. The inaugural Gumball Challenge will be taking place soon and it will take all the energies of the organizers. Can you imagine having a greater cause to devote to than merely getting good grades?
If you look at the things a person can do to change the world:
- personally donating to a microloan fund
- telling a few friends about microloans, hoping they too will contribute
- create a competition between Ivy league schools to see which school could raise the most money
To be fair, the third item is really more than one person. Through creative thinking, entreprunerial spirit, marketing, and social networks, every minute spent by Kalvin will be leveraged into a much greater amount of money than it would have been, compared to just knocking on doors for contributions.
Think big, have a vision, and change the world.
Tags: gumball, microcredit, microloan
