Two Deals

Kiva has struck a lot of deals in the past year. Microlending on the web, at least last year, was an idea that seemed to sell itself. The confluence of the Nobel prize, web 2.0 buzz, the Intl Year of Microcredit, and dawn of p2p lending were all lucky trends that put a lot of wind in our sails. It doesn't hurt, however, to have a business partner that can sell anything. He's no huckster, but if Premal cares about getting a message across, he won't quit until he changes minds. I can't tell you how many times this year I've sat across from him and just marvelled.

Two such deals came together a few weeks ago -- the Blowfish Sushi pact and the YouTube agreement.

Blowfish Sushi is the magnificent restaurant that shares a wall with our office building in the Mission. Walking through the halls of our industrial complex, you can often smell tempura in the fryer next door. It makes it difficult to concentrate sometimes. We started eating there religiously this summer. The problem is that its pretty pricey, but it's largely known as the best in SF. One day at lunch, Premal started pitching the waitress for discounted Sushi. This led to the manager coming out and hearing a confusing pitched. We wanted what? Free sushi? Why exactly? Absolutely not.

This stalled the Sushi deal, for the time being. A few months later, by chance, he met one of the owners of Blowfish outside and started pitching *him*. Free sushi? Nah. Wholesale sushi? Hmm...

So now, we're getting 75% off our Sushi. Wow. Thank you Blowfish. I didn't even eat Sushi before I started working here. Since I started, my experience has been a little like someone getting into drugs. I started with Tempura, more like the smoking of Sushi. Then it was on to the tuna roll, more of a gateway drug. I'm still stuck there. However, I hear that Sashimi is amazing and it's definitely the next step for me. I'll be ready when tuna loses its effect.

A few weeks ago we had the honor of going out to Blowfish with Steve Chen of YouTube. Steve is actually Premal's friend from PayPal and they started YouTube not too long before Kiva launched. .. We discussed a pretty inconvenient truth right now about their business model. Because of specific conservative interpretations of copyright law, YouTube does not place ads on any of their pages where possibly copyrighted video is being watched. Thus, this is one reason why the majority of the most viewed pages on YouTube have no ads at all.

That said, they are able to legally use the space as long as they assume no profit from it. Because of that, Steve and YouTube have been donating portions of the real estate to nonprofits. Kiva, again, is the lucky recipient of a new trend and other's goodwill. Our banner is now showing up alongside silly videos 40M times per month and YouTube is currently driving over 15% of our traffic. This is an incredible gesture from YouTube and google that is helping to fund small businesses in over 30 countries.

Thank you YouTube. Thank you Blowfish.