But beyond sharing his story, and beyond explaining the power of microfinance to change people's lives, Yunus spoke about the poor in a way I'd never before heard. He described them as hardworking, motivated, intelligent entrepreneurs who had the power to improve their own lives -- not hopeless, desperate, devastated individuals waiting for a donor to make everything better.  Many of my assumptions about poverty, and about my role in helping to alleviate it, were turned upside down. (A few years after that evening lecture, Yunus and his Grameen Bank won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, honoring their work pioneering modern microfinance.)  Listening to Yunus speak that night, I was inspired to do something. I wanted to meet hardworking entrepreneurs like the ones he'd talked about, and to truly understand their stories. A few weeks later, I quit my job at Stanford and boarded a plane to Nairobi, Kenya, to try to do just that.  Over the next few months, I interviewed over a hundred entrepreneurs throughout East Africa who had received $100 to start or grow their microenterprises. I formed powerful connections with many of those entrepreneurs, all of whom were working hard every day to lift themselves and others out of poverty -- a seamstress in Kenya who used her business profits to send her daughters to school; a goat-herder in Uganda who could finally afford mosquito nets for his family; a farmer in Tanzania who explained proudly how she could now, for the first time, feed her children three meals a day.  These dignified individuals showed me how even a simple endeavor could be run with incredible acumen, creativity, and wisdom. It was through their stories of perseverance and optimism that my beliefs about poverty, about empowerment, about entrepreneurship, and about my own path began to shift.
One evening, when I was 24 years old, I heard Dr. Muhammad Yunus speak to a small classroom of Stanford University students. I was not a student at the time, so I crashed the lecture and sat quietly