sara125

What would be the benefit to foundations of doing a similar deal? Seems that they mostly have passed on YC-funded nonprofits including Immunity Project and Zidisha; and for good reasons. It seems that YC is a little behind when it comes to nonprofits - funding things that were very popular years ago like crowdfunding (Kiva comes to mind). These things are still exciting but they aren't at the edge of nonprofit innovation today. Organizations like Sanergy or GiveDirectly are really disrupting the nonprofit industry. Would love to see YC make a bet like one of those.

The thing that bothers me the most about all this deception is that at the end of the day, lenders will not only lose their money, but they won't be maximizing the the donation they will eventually be making (not of choice) via Zidisha. Kurnia wrote in Huffington Post that she doesn't believe in handouts. Yet, why should I as a donor give to Zidisha instead of an organization like GiveDirectly which has proven its impact in the most rigorous way possible? Zidisha will always come back to silly jargon like transparency or handouts instead of facing the real truth: admit your platform is not primarily a lending platform and then lets have a real comparison between donations made on Zidisha and cash transfers made through GiveDirectly. I believe Zidisha is a good experiment, but to succeed, it needs to start answering real questions.