The Lesson: Entrepreneurial Funding
At the beginning of the Day, we discussed the paper trading of the previous week, and discussed why Xiao Mei won, and why Sophie Cao was kicked out. We then went on to discuss the contents of this handout on Startups.docx

We then discussed the differences between Equity Financing, and Debt Financing, and the pros and cons from seeking funding from the following four places:
Friends and Family
Banks
Venture Capital firms
Angel Investors

Then the question was asked "Is it possible to receive financing if the above four options are not available?" This brought us to the topic of Micro Financing.

Microfinance is the provision of financial services to low-income clients, including consumers and the self-employed, who traditionally lack access to banking and related services.
More broadly, it is a movement whose object is "a world in which as many poor and near-poor households as possible have permanent access to an appropriate range of high quality financial services, including not just credit but also savings, insurance, and fund transfers.“

One of the most beautiful things in life is being able to help out those less fortunate than ourselves. Kiva.org is a Non-profit organisation that is helps people from all around the world micro-finance entrepreneurial startups around thew world. Not only does it offer money to the less fortunate vai micro-financing, but it has a return rate of over 98%. That is better than most banks, and much better than any venture capital firm.
Here are Kiva's statistics to date:

The Task: Each of our four final contestants will:

1 - Choose a Kiva Entrepreneur to support: http://www.kiva.org/lend
2 - Open a new "Community of Lenders" on Kiva: http://www.kiva.org/community
3 - Find people to join there group, and fund-raise, fund-raise, fund-raise!

The Rules:
1 - Each contestant CAN NOT lend their own money.
2 - Member who joins their groups (community of lenders) MUST lend.
3 - Each contestant must keep records of who lends how much, with signatures of each lender.
4 - The contestant with the lowest amount of signatures with the lowest amount of money collected will be out.


Groups will linked here:

Xiao Mei's Group
Joyce Hu's Group
Linda Shan's Group will be supporting this Entrepreneur
Rachel Lei's Group - TBA

Any jiahua student or staff member can join any group they like, and donate as much as they like. We will be promoting this drive at the school for the next two weeks.

Results:
October 10th was the day we got everyone back together to talk about our results – just minutes before the 6th task would be announced. Here is how everyone did:

Linda: 19 group members and 2000RMB raised
Xiao Mei: 3 group members and 300RMB raised.
Joyce: 1 group member, Zero raised.
Rachel: Zero group members, Zero raised.

The results here are obvious. Linda is the clear winner, clearly, Rachel is out. Rachel did not even show up for this week, so there was no need to debate her poor results against Joyce.

I was disappointed with the results here. This task was to give a challenge to the competitors that they previously knew little about, and may have been uncomfortable to deal with. However, that is the way business works. You always will need to do things that you do not like, and character is built by being able to compete such tasks well, and with a chin up.

I was very proud of Linda’s work on this task. She did an amazing job and dominated her peers here. Linda struggled raising funds at first, but did not give up. In the end she not only won the contest and helped out her entrepreneur, but also showed great persistence and a great work ethic that earned her a right to win a by to the finals. October 10th’s contest will be Xiao Mei vs. Joyce, and the winner will face Linda in the final.

Congratulations Linda on a job well done!!

Click here to go back to the Business Contest