The Most Important Question: Why?
I’ve spent the past week reflecting on why MiraLend exists. Since the accelerator, I have adopted a simple one-liner following the touchstone outline, “MiraLend exists to create a world where all members of the community have access to a fair and convenient loan.” While this sounds great and ambitious, it cannot be carried out unless a meaningful “why” is backing the statement.
I wrote last week the history of MiraLend; when co-founder Mira’s family immigrated to the United States, her father, an educated and hardworking man, was unable to find a bank that would give him a fair loan since he hadn’t established credit in the US. Even as a child, Mira recognized that there was a flaw in the system and many years later she and her husband, Brad, decided to embark on creating a new way of assessing a borrower’s trustworthiness. Why? Because everyone, including immigrants, should be fairly assessed for a loan. After realizing the challenges that lie ahead, they re-shifted their focus to peer-to-peer lending which sought to give lending a more direct purpose and community feel, which fit into their initial why.
As I considered this and tried to understand the motive behind the creation of MiraLend and how it relates to our lending platform, I was met with a rather conflicting thought, are we philanthropy driven or investment driven? Initially, I wanted to believe that it could be both, investing in the community is both charitable and financially beneficial. However, I’m realizing that greater emphasis has to be placed on one or the other in order to have a clear mission, and ask, associated with the company. I think this realization has appeared throughout the accelerator, which is much more mission focused, whereas previous accelerators MiraLend has gone through were very “start-up.” What I mean is that we were previously focused on building a new product and how much money we could make and we wanted to do this as fast as possible. The entire idea was to pump out your fastest solution or minimum viable product, fail fast, fail forward! Very aggressive, Silicon Valley type stuff. But as I began to dive deeper into customer interviews and market research, I realized that this Silicon Valley start-up ideology didn’t really fit with what MiraLend initially sought out to do, help communities.
Moving forward, I think it is important to re-evaluate our why. The why drives a company and continues to push it forward even when it’s hard to see progress being made.
