Two pictures

I've waited so long to blog and I'm feeling the pressure.  Stress...that's usually the reason I will stop blogging for a period of time.  When going through a lot of stress, everything non-essential drops off in my life.  This blog has looked bad for the past two months, for sure.  But you should see my apartment.

I'm gonna start blogging again, and take the pressure off myself, so hopefully I can start to write more often with short, possibly mediocre entries instead of infrequent attempts at saying something really coherent.  So, to get me going again, I'm just gonna post two pictures:


#1: Word Power.  Premal's brother, Chirag put this together.  It shows the impact of certain words, found in Kiva loan descriptions, on the funding rate of the loan.  As you will see, there is one word which doubles the speed with which your loan gets funded:  hospital.  I'll leave that to you to try and explain....



#2:  Billboard on 101.  Most of you all are probably familiar with Bay Area highways.  101 is the thoroughfare through Silicon Valley...In the coming weeks, the below billboard will go up.  It's a gigantic advertisement for Kiva.  Wow.  I hope this isn't too controversial.  Is Kiva using donor dollars to pay for billboards? Luckily, no.  PayPal is donating the space to Kiva, in addition to free transactions.  Thank you PayPal!  it will be interesting to track the impact of a physical sign on our website.  I have no idea of the conversion rate from someone driving to someone lending on a website.




You'll notice, oh you observant reader, that this billboard is in Las Vegas in front of a Playboy logo.  That's because the above photo is just a photoshop'd simulation of the real thing, to go up soon in Redwood City. 

Hopefully, it won't be 2 months before I write again.  If it is, it'll be because of....stress.