Nearly everyone told Matt and Jessica Flannery that their idea — a website where people could make micro loans to individual borrowers in the developing world — wouldn’t work. Venture capitalists couldn’t see how anyone could make big money on loans as small as a few hundred dollars. And foundations, for their part, wouldn’t support something that they saw as commerce, not charity. “We were in this weird social entrepreneurship space, trying to fight perceptions,” Matt Flannery recalled. One lawyer friend even told Flannery that the website would be illegal. “He said, ‘You can’t just send money to someone in Uganda and have [him or her] send it back and have it be okay. If you do that, someone’s going to care. Someone’s going to show up at your door,'” Flannery said. “I read all the policy and case law on it, and I couldn’t find anything that said it was illegal. So we just started doing it.” That decision proved prescient.…