Growing up in Lima, Peru, Pedro David Espinoza watched his mother fundraise for a library for the impoverished village of Pampas Grande and establish an NGO called Pan Peru.
“My mom’s an engineer, and one of her dreams was to give back to her hometown,” Espinoza says. “She taught me the power of making a difference and the power of generosity.”
Those lessons have guided Espinoza’s career path ever since.
When he applied for a scholarship to Berkeley, an interviewer gave Espinoza an idea: Turn Pan Peru into a social venture connecting nonprofits with large corporations seeking to make social investments.
So in 2014, Espinoza launched SmileyGo.com. The startup produced an app that matched companies with nonprofits to help them track their corporate responsibility investments and measure the impact.
SmileyGo grew to more than 30 branches in 51 countries, indexing the data of 1.4 million nonprofits in the U.S. alone, Espinoza says.
Espinoza eventually left SmileyGo to launch Pan Peru USA—a nonprofit that helps underserved communities in Peru, and Alpaca Pan Peru—an online marketplace and entrepreneurship program for women of Pampas Grande to sell handmade alpaca apparel. About 100 women have joined the program.
“These women have been able to pay healthcare and educational expenses for their kids while learning about product design and marketing,” he says.
Now, he’s inspiring others toward social entrepreneurship.
“I speak at Fortune 500 companies about my immigrant, entrepreneurial story to inspire thousands of people to be relational rather than transactional and to serve rather than receive,” Espinoza says.