Well, I’m a strong supporter of the notion of microfinance. I had the great pleasure of meeting a number of years ago Jacques Attali who’s starting an organization called PlaNet Finance which was trying to help microfinance institutions get started. And we’ve seen some incredible success stories about microfinance. But I think quite frankly that while it can help some and the early stages of development we also need is to create great institutions of higher education, of research and that can educate the smartest people in every culture to be innovators so that they can create new wealth and compete on the world stage because to bring economies all the way from a state of limited development to a really competitive position on the world stage requires the kind of miracles we’ve seen in South Korea and other places where you see truly innovative scale ability to manufacture, to produce amazing new things. I think many different countries can achieve similar success but it will take not only the beginnings of moving out of poverty through microfinance but also scale institutions that can educate and train people to be truly world class. And there are smart people everywhere. We can do this but it takes large scale effort to really move to the forefront.
Bill Joy is the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers.