93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever

Summary

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Episode: 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever

Date: December 15, 2025
Guests: Danae Ringelmann and Slava Rubin, Indiegogo Co-founders

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the origin story, challenges, and enduring cultural impact of Indiegogo, one of the pioneering crowdfunding platforms. Guy Raz speaks with co-founders Danae Ringelmann and Slava Rubin, retracing their journeys from personal struggles with financial gatekeeping to their relentless drive for democratizing access to capital. The discussion dives deep into their early setbacks—including 93 investor rejections—the evolution of their business model, the highs, lows, and ultimate bittersweet transition out of operational leadership.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins Driven by Personal Experiences

• Both founders’ backgrounds were shaped by financial hardship and witnessing talented but under-resourced individuals being denied opportunity.
• Slava Rubin: Immigrated from the Soviet Union; lost his father to cancer at age 15, straining family finances and inspiring his first nonprofit, Music Against Myeloma.
  • “So all of that sucked. It really put perspective into all of it. … We didn’t really have a good insurance and financial setup. … There’s lots of nice people in the world, and there are some people that are less nice. And, you know, I got to interact with all of them.” (07:32)
• Danae Ringelmann: Grew up working in her father’s moving business, saw parents lose their business in a recession, reinforcing the inequity of access to capital and the importance of values.
  • “My dad couldn’t get jobs, and they couldn’t pay the bills… But they did not fire their most loyal people. … That was a lesson for me personally about values and principles.” (11:41)

2. Early Encounter with Gatekeeping and Idea Formation

• Danae’s “Hollywood meets Wall Street” experience highlighted the powerlessness of creators without connections.
  • “This was a man in his 60s… yet he was begging me, someone with no experience, just the right name on the card, for money.” (15:28)
• Both saw the unfulfilled potential of a more democratic funding process and conceptualized a platform where “the crowd” would decide what should get funded.

3. The Founders Meet and the Role of the Internet

• Introduced by mutual friend Eric Schell; a pivotal conversation takes place at a Golden Gate Bridge lookout.
  • Slava: “If you want to change finance, you can’t do it in the finance world…You probably want to use the Internet.” (20:12)
  • Danae initially skeptical (“I thought you said this guy was smart”) but realizes tech is the only way to scale.

4. Building Indiegogo — Early Obstacles

• Original idea was equity crowdfunding, but U.S. law prohibited it, so they pivoted to a rewards-based system (perks).
  • “We decided, let’s just do one thing at a time, because simplification…is paramount.” (31:46)
• Self-funded for years:
  • “Each of us committing $30,000 of our own money…We didn’t raise a dime for…three years.” (34:04)

5. Launching at Sundance & Early Growth

• Launch strategy: debut at Sundance Film Festival, with creative “GoGo Bucks” swag to jumpstart campaigns.
  • “We gave away scarves with GoGo Bucks…every card only had $5, except one card had $500.” (38:15)
• Initial projects were all independent films, using an all-or-nothing funding model (“If you don’t raise the money, you don’t get the money.” (40:16))

6. Market Crash and Relentless Rejection

• Planned to bootstrap, then raise capital off momentum—but 2008 financial crisis hit.
• Faced 93 investor rejections.
  • “Crickets. It was hard for anybody to raise money for anything. We definitely got a lot of no's.” (41:48)
  • “We got 93 no’s before we got a yes.” (42:54)

7. Opening the Platform and Hockey Stick Growth

• In 2009, broadened from film/arts to “anyone, anywhere” — led to explosive growth.
  • “Honestly, it was like hockey stick growth, like, almost immediately after that.” (51:14)
• Philosophically committed to openness—refused to curate or limit campaigns, even at the expense of short-term profit.
  • “We believed in open…We couldn’t become the gatekeeper. Otherwise, what’s the point of all this?” (52:14, Danae)

8. Struggles of Scaling, Culture & Leadership

• Transitioning from founders in a dining room to a legitimate, staffed company created tension and forced founders to let go.
  • “All three of us as founders are really evolving and having to deal with the growth…People need to be empowered…” (57:39, Slava)
• Danae pushed for structured culture and values interviews.
  • “Can you just come back and just be here and remind people who we are?” (59:52, Slava recalling calling Danae during her maternity leave)

9. Guardrails, Free Speech, & Platform Ethics

• As scale and funding grew, grappled with content moderation and platform boundaries.
  • “We tried to navigate it—just be fair, treat everyone the same…It’s because the site was open that it just attracted these projects.” (61:34, Slava)
  • Biggest ongoing challenge became fraud prevention, not controversial viewpoints.

10. Departure and Reflections on What Might Have Been

• All three founders stepped back by 2019; Slava pushed out as CEO after strategic disagreements with the board.
  • “Definitely not [my idea]. … I got into a debate with the board and I didn’t win that debate.” (64:24, Slava)
• Regret over not consolidating all crowdfunding verticals under Indiegogo’s roof — left room for others like Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Patreon, and equity platforms.
  • “We decided that we had to think too much about unit economics and profitability. And I think that’s a shame.” (66:50, Slava)

11. Legacy, Impact & Closing Reflections

• At acquisition in 2025, Indiegogo had facilitated more than $1.5 billion in campaigns but was acquired at a more modest valuation.
• Lingering pride in democratizing opportunity:
  • “I think the world has fundamentally shifted…And I do think we were part of that.” (71:00, Danae)
  • “Preparation plus opportunity equals luck.” (69:35, Slava)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “We got 93 no’s before we got a yes.” — Slava Rubin (42:54)
• “I think I just grew up with a hope or an optimism that life would be more fair and that you would be rewarded if you worked hard.” — Danae Ringelmann (16:27)
• “Can you just come back and just be here and remind people who we are?” — Slava, to Danae on Indiegogo’s culture during her maternity leave (59:52)
• “We believed in open. We couldn’t become the gatekeeper. Otherwise, what’s the point of all of this?” — Danae Ringelmann (52:14)
• “Preparation plus opportunity equals luck.” — Slava Rubin (69:35)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Early Personal Backgrounds: 06:35 – 16:45
• Formation of Founding Team: 18:49 – 23:31
• Pivot to Internet Crowdfunding: 20:12 – 23:31
• Launch & Early Model: 37:32 – 40:47
• Market Crisis & Investor Rejection: 41:25 – 43:01
• Opening Platform to All Categories: 50:10 – 51:14
• Philosophy of Openness: 52:14 – 52:25
• Team Dynamics and Scaling: 57:09 – 60:46
• Ethical Debates and Guardrails: 61:02 – 63:01
• Founders Depart: 63:04 – 66:46
• Reflections & Legacy: 68:52 – 71:49

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Tone and Style

• Candid, Reflective, and Human: Honest about struggles and mistakes, unromantic about how hard it was to persist after repeated failure.
• Conversational and Anecdotal: Heavy use of personal stories and feelings, especially around family, failure, and perseverance.
• Inspirational but Realistic: Recognition of luck and timing, but ultimate stress on perseverance and values.

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This episode is a masterclass in mission-driven entrepreneurship, grit, team conflict and resolution, humility before one’s own limitations, and the ways culture and values shape a company’s fate. Indiegogo's journey embodies risk-taking, endurance through rejection, and the ethical tensions of building an open platform—leaving listeners with powerful lessons on democratizing opportunity and the human costs of innovation.

Transcript

[Narrator/Host]

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[Guy Raz]

How much did you guys have to put in the three of you to get this off the ground?

[Danae Ringelman]

I remember. Do you remember this? Lava I remember each of us committing $30,000, which was a big chunk of our savings.

[Slava Rubin]

Yeah, we got offered some money and we turned it down. We were like, we don't need your money at a low valuation. We had this gen idea in Q1. We were going to launch by Q2, we were going to have momentum, and then we were going to raise money in Q3. 2008. The market crash happened in 2008, and that idea went right out the window.

[Narrator/Host]

Welcome to How I Built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements of they built.

[Guy Raz]

I'm Guy Raz, and on the show.

[Narrator/Host]

Today, how three founders came together to build indiegogo, a platform where people can fund movies, music, games, devices, even a new baby. Crowdfunding art or public projects isn't new. It dates back to at least the 1880s, when Texas, tens of thousands of New Yorkers, donated money to build the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. But a little more than 100 years later, the Internet made crowdfunding way more efficient and way faster. And around 2008, when the global financial crisis made traditional funding almost impossible, the idea suddenly felt urgent. Crowdfunding went from a fringe idea to an enterprise approaching a billion dollars by 2010, growing so quickly that some analysts predicted it might one day rival venture capital. Now, before Kickstarter or Patreon or GoFundMe, there was Indiegogo, one of the first platforms to ask a radical, what, if anyone, anywhere, could raise money for anything, as long as it stayed within a few basic guardrails. The idea for Indiegogo came from frustration from three co founders who each knew what it felt like to hear the word no one too many times. Their early years building indiegogo were full of the things you might expect in.

[Guy Raz]

A story like this.

[Narrator/Host]

Mismatched personalities, big debates, and even some fights. More than 90 investor rejections, and many moments when the founders nearly shut the whole thing down. But the founders, Slava Rubin, Dene Ringelman and Eric Schell, weren't just building a platform. They wanted to build something that would hand power back to the crowd and take power away from the gatekeepers, from the people who decided which ideas deserved to exist. In today's story, you'll hear from Dene and Slava. And long before they met, both had been thinking of ways to make it easier for people without connections to get access to capital. Slava was born in the former Soviet Union and immigrated to the US with his family when he was a baby. He grew up in the 80s and 90s in Pennsylvania. And when he was just 15 years old, his dad died of cancer. And Slava remembers the exact moment three years earlier when the cancer was discovered.

[Slava Rubin]

We were playing basketball together. He dove for the ball. He hurt his back. He was very athletic, very athletic, and he shouldn't hurt his back when he dives for the ball. So he had to go to the hospital. He found out that he had a vertebrae fracture, which was really weird. They did some more tests, and they found out that he had multiple myeloma, which is bone marrow cancer, which is what affected that.

[Guy Raz]

Wow. So after he passed, at that point, it's you, your brother, and your mom and tell me about. I mean, I can't Even imagine being 15 and going through that. How did it affect your. I mean, aside from just the devastating personal loss, what did it mean for everything else? Like, because of your dad's, you know, passing, your family's financial situation was in. Was massively affected, in peril.

[Slava Rubin]

Yeah. It was challenging to deal with my dad getting cancer. His first year was pretty bad. His second year was really bad. And the third year was, you know, absolutely terrible. Specifically, I'd be at home by myself having to make sure that I properly deploy the morphine drip for any of his pain. So all of that sucked. It really put perspective into all of it. Because my dad's passing and because we, you know, didn't really have a good. Let's call it, insurance and financial setup. Like good people who've been in America for a long time and know how to have all those cushions and parachutes set up. We didn't have any of that. So I went to the local public school. I was actually the only Jew at the local public school was. It was its own experience. But there's lots of nice people in the world, and there are some people that are less nice. And, you know, I got to interact with all of them.

[Guy Raz]

So when you started college, I know you stayed in the area, went to Penn, you studied finance, and I think you went to. To Morton as an undergraduate. Did you intend to, like, was it your sort of idea that, okay, I'm going to go to New York and go to Wall street and get into finance?

[Slava Rubin]

Yeah, of course, you know, because there's, like, in the 80s, you grow up, finance is the way to become wealthy and become important and all that good stuff? I'm an 80s kid. I did study finance and entrepreneurial management. I was actually entrepreneurial even when I was a kid with sports cards, so. So I did get the Finance degree major, but never actually practiced finance formally as a investment banker.

[Guy Raz]

And one of the things that I read about is that you started a nonprofit to raise money for, I guess, research and how to battle myeloma. It was called Music against Myeloma. And tell me what that was. You had, like, concerts and would raise money for it.

[Slava Rubin]

Yeah, so I was living in New York. I would kind of argue I was living the dream, or as the kids say, you know, bottles and models. You know, it was all fun, very easy. I made way too much money for being really young, and I should have been really happy, but I wasn't really that happy. And I had to kind of do some soul searching to understand why I wasn't happy. And I think the main reason is I was never able to talk about my dad.

[Narrator/Host]

Yeah.

[Slava Rubin]

You know, since my dad died, no one would ever bring it up. I would never bring it up. People didn't know if he was in jail. They were divorced. Like, who knows if he's alive or dead. It wasn't a topic I would discuss. So I just thought to myself, like, I need to deal with this, and the only way to deal with it is head on. And that was a catalyst of me. Then I partnered with the imf, which is the International Myeloma foundation, not the monetary fund. And yeah, we partnered and started doing all these different concerts and different fundraisers to raise a bunch of money for myeloma research.

[Guy Raz]

Wow. Wow. All right, Slava, I want to pause for a second and turn to Danae and ask you a few questions. I know, Danae, you grew up in San Francisco, and when you were, I think, still like a teenager, you worked for your dad. Right. Who I think had like a moving.

[Narrator/Host]

Business of some sort.

[Danae Ringelman]

Yeah. So it was a brick and mortar, hard work, heavy labor. It was my first job. He would put. Put me in charge of crews in high school, mostly men on the crews, mostly men who had lived pretty hard lives, made some bad decisions, but this was the work that they could get. And it was an opportunity for me to lead a group of people that maybe I was a little bit more uncomfortable leading, but do it in an empathic way.

[Guy Raz]

So that was my first job, from what I gather. While I know you went to college at UNC in Chapel Hill, and you went initially, I guess you studied pre med, and that didn't work out, obviously, because you're not a doctor, you decided not to do that. But I guess while you were in college, your parents business basically went belly up. Tell me what happened the Moving business went bankrupt.

[Danae Ringelman]

I mean, it's as simple as that. There was a recession. My dad couldn't get jobs and they couldn't pay the bills and they had to refinance their house. They had already done that a few times. So they had to just reorg and build back slowly and not get any credit, not get any help. Through it all, they did not fire their most loyal people. And I think in the end, after my father actually passed away, the one thing my mother wanted to make sure of is when we sold the business, she actually didn't care about the price tag. She just cared that the. The company that bought it would keep her employees that had been loyal to her for 30 years. So that was a. That was a lesson to me personally about values and principles.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, I guess one of the things that you took away from your parents experience is that being financially secure or at least making money became important to you. You decided to take a job in finance at JP Morgan in New York after you graduated.

[Narrator/Host]

And I guess somehow you got involved.

[Guy Raz]

In a part of the finance world.

[Narrator/Host]

That was investing in movies.

[Guy Raz]

How did that happen?

[Danae Ringelman]

Well, I started off in the media and entertainment group and the sports group, and so that kind of gave me a purview into the world of movies and film from a business perspective. I mean, I'd always gone to movies as a kid, but I never actually thought about the business behind it and somehow discovered or got invited to this event called Where Hollywood meets Wall Street.

[Guy Raz]

Like a mixer? Like a networking event.

[Danae Ringelman]

It's like a mixer networking event. So. So I almost thought I didn't deserve to be invited, that it was kind of an accident. So I thought I should just go and be a fly on the wall and just see what it is like, right?

[Guy Raz]

And here you are, you're like, what, 22, 23. And you go in, you're like, wow, they've invited me to this Hollywood meets Wall street thing. Yeah, and you're psyched and you get there.

[Danae Ringelman]

I'm psyched because I just want to listen and I just want to be this fly on the wall and see producers, what do they look like? And yeah, suddenly I, I got barraged because somebody heard me, heard the word JP Morgan come out of my mouth because I work there, and they just assumed I was this big financier. And suddenly everybody wanted to talk to me. And I was trying to explain, no, no, no, I'm the wrong person. I have no power.

[Narrator/Host]

I have no power.

[Guy Raz]

I'm 22, I'm an analyst.

[Narrator/Host]

But you said JP Morgan.

[Guy Raz]

So all these people looking for financing.

[Narrator/Host]

Were like, oh, you're J.P. morgan. Let me give you my car. Let me tell you about my screenplay of my film.

[Danae Ringelman]

And it wasn't. And it wasn't big time producers. It was striving producers, striving directors that hadn't been discovered. And after that night, I was kind of in shock and just trying to digest it all. And two days later, I just remember receiving a FedEx package from one of the theater producers I had met that night with a handwritten note that said, you know, it was wonderful to meet you. Here's. Here's the script. I look forward to talking to you about funding my next theater project. And here I was sitting at my analyst desk, and I think I almost started to cry. This was a man in his 60s who had been working his whole life bringing small productions to life, both movies and small theater productions. Yet he was begging me. Someone with no experience, just the right name on the card for money.

[Guy Raz]

Right.

[Danae Ringelman]

And that just felt so wrong.

[Guy Raz]

I'm just curious, because you go to this thing, you meet these producers, they all want help with their films, but why did it, like, why did it affect you emotionally?

[Danae Ringelman]

I think it was because I saw my parents work so damn hard all their life, and they never really got a break. I think there was one mini break that I thought my dad would get. He had actually come up with another business idea, got flown to New York, met with all these investors. I just remember I finished a basketball game, and he came to them, he made it to the game, and he said, I think this one's going to work, Dee. I was just so grateful. This was in high school. And then the next I knew it, the investors had taken his idea and pushed forward with it without him, basically taken it.

[Guy Raz]

Do you remember what the idea was?

[Danae Ringelman]

Yeah, it was around energy efficiency, I guess. You asked me why was I emotional? I think. I think I just grew up with a hope or an optimism that life would be more fair and that you would be rewarded if you worked hard.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Danae Ringelman]

And it seems, I think back a lot now, years later. It perhaps was a bit naive, but it was. It's what I felt. And when I saw my parents working so hard and never getting a break, and I did, I was a scholarship kid at a private high school in San Francisco. And, you know, I saw money. I saw people with money, and I saw the interconnected network of that. And then here I was slowly trying to potentially break into that myself on Wall street also, at the same time, Never feeling like I really fit in. There was just a sadness that hit when that guy was begging me for money, when I knew he was worthy of it. But I couldn't make a difference at that point. So I ended up working with him.

[Guy Raz]

And he was doing. I think he was doing, like, an Arthur Miller play. Right. Is that the sp.

[Danae Ringelman]

Yeah.

[Guy Raz]

And did you help him get the financing for that play?

[Danae Ringelman]

So I failed, but I tried. So the goal was to produce a concert reading of the play in an Off Broadway venue. And I got the producers there, and everybody loved the play. It was a standing ovation. And I turned to the producers at that point, said, all right, do we have something here? And they said, this is an amazing play. We're not gonna invest.

[Guy Raz]

Good luck.

[Danae Ringelman]

And that was the moment that I realized that there was a huge room of people that wanted this thing to happen, yet they didn't have the power to make it happen. And it was all dependent on one person to say yes. And that was the inequity that drove me to eventually start Indiegogo.

[Guy Raz]

All right, so you eventually moved back to the Bay Area and would go to business school. You went to Berkeley to do your mba.

[Narrator/Host]

And was your.

[Guy Raz]

When you got to Berkeley and this is 2006, did you have an idea of what you wanted to do at the time or not quite yet?

[Danae Ringelman]

Yeah. No. What drove me back to business school was to start something that would make the funding process more democratic. And my initial idea was a fund, actually, with a democratic twist, where the investors could be lots of people putting a little bit in, and then there was a democratic process to actually vote on what would get invested in.

[Guy Raz]

Got it. Okay.

[Narrator/Host]

And business school winds up being pretty.

[Guy Raz]

Important because that's where you would meet another student, a guy named Eric Schell, who will eventually join you in founding Indiegogo.

[Narrator/Host]

But Eric was also the one who.

[Guy Raz]

Introduces you to Slava.

[Narrator/Host]

He was friends with Slava from before.

[Guy Raz]

And I guess, what, like, one weekend, Slava comes out to the Bay Area.

[Narrator/Host]

From New York for a visit, and Eric introduces the two of you.

[Danae Ringelman]

Yeah, I remember the weekend Slava, you came out, we started talking, and I actually think we were at the lookout point for the Golden Gate Bridge, if I remember correctly. And I go into my, okay, here's what I want to do with this idea to help basically bring more projects to life, but with a more democratic twist. And you said, well, I remember this, Slava, you probably do too. If you really want to democratize access to capital, why aren't you using The Internet?

[Slava Rubin]

Yeah. I said, if you want to change finance, you can't do it in the finance world. So I was like. I kept on saying that, and I said, you probably want to use the Internet. And Danae actually looked at Eric and was like, I thought you. I thought you said this guy was smart. Because I really wasn't.

[Danae Ringelman]

Like, I didn't say that.

[Slava Rubin]

Again, my background connected to this is my dad died of cancer. I tried to raise a bunch of money, and I was using MySpace and PayPal and email, which is really painful, to try to get people to contribute towards a bigger project. That bigger project could be the movie that Danae was referring to. It could be anything. And I thought, wow, that could be a big idea, right?

[Guy Raz]

And this is like, when. I mean, the term crowdfunding may have been. I think it was actually coined at that point, but nobody had heard that term. It was not. It doesn't exist in sort of popular consciousness. And that wasn't really what you were talking about anyway. Initially, it was like the. The challenge you were trying to solve was how do we make capital available in a more democratic way? Like, how do we even the playing field when it comes to access to capital to start something?

[Slava Rubin]

That's exactly right. I actually talked about YouTube. I mean, I just thought that if YouTube is able to let anybody put up anything and let the data and the momentum get the best stuff to rise to the top, you know, that could happen for money. And, you know, YouTube seemed like it was growing really fast, and it was a really interesting new product and kind of a derivative off of MySpace and what was happening all there. Why not move this towards, you know, the movement of money?

[Danae Ringelman]

Yeah, for me, it was the ability to let the people decide what should be funded. And it. It also meant that it. You didn't have to be huge to be successful. Like, maybe you are a small project and you just need 100 people to support you, and that should. That deserves the same right to exist as a large film. And that was where meritocracy kind of came through, like, let the idea succeed based on how good of an idea it was to others versus on how good of an idea it was to a gatekeeper.

[Guy Raz]

And clearly, Danae, you started to say, or think, I'm assuming, okay, this is interesting. Maybe we should use, you know, figure out how to scale this through the Internet. Tell me about your. Your thinking around this. Like, how did your understanding of what this could be evolve?

[Danae Ringelman]

Well, you know, I think I. I think that meeting with Slava was probably sometime around November, October.

[Guy Raz]

October of 2006.

[Danae Ringelman]

2006. And I had to present something in one of my entrepreneurship classes, like end of the November, like two or three weeks or something from that moment. And so I had spent the entire semester refining this old idea, as I call it. But then this new idea, or new twist presented itself. And I remember going to my professor and saying, how do I decide which way to go? And he said, well, what are you more excited about? And I said, well, clearly this new direction, but I know nothing about the Internet. He said, well, that's your answer when.

[Narrator/Host]

We come back in just a moment. Indiegogo launches and then stalls out right after the financial crisis hits.

[Guy Raz]

Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built. This past summer, I took my family.

[Narrator/Host]

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[Guy Raz]

Is brought to you by American Express.

[Narrator/Host]

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[Guy Raz]

Hey, welcome back to How I Built this. I'm Guy Raz.

[Narrator/Host]

So it's around 2006, and Dene Slava and their friend Eric Schell are kicking around a new idea for a big business. A crowdfunding platform that will live on the Internet.

[Slava Rubin]

When I connected with Eric and Danae, I really did think this wasn't just another coffee shop, that, hey, we could have a small business. I thought this was a really high risk, high reward type of thing, which I'm very attracted to. I'm attracted to being able to have failure or get some great results. I had a ton of respect for Eric. I Thought he was really smart. Plus he was a technical person, which I loved. I had met Danae. She seemed really smart. Eric already really liked Danae. So we had three people that wanted to explore it. Plus we had this institution, which is Berkeley, to kind of help us think through some of the R and D process. So it was almost like free testing, if that makes sense.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Slava Rubin]

So we were doing this free testing, and as we were getting past some of the concerns, I was like, yeah, let's do this.

[Guy Raz]

And Slava, did you. I mean, you mentioned this idea of like, high risk, high reward. When how did you start to model out again? We're talking about 2006 and 07. And so at this point, I should remind everybody that nobody thought about business models then. People just thought about accumulating followers and then you'd figure out the model later. Did you guys also think about that way or did you, in your mind, Slava, did you think, okay, and here's how we're going to make money?

[Narrator/Host]

Did you have that mapped out?

[Slava Rubin]

I mean, we did. It wasn't like that hard to really figure it out. I mean, you had ebay already, which was. You had GMV through the business and ebay took a cut of the money. Right. You had YouTube. Not YouTube specifically, but you had different potential advertising platforms, et cetera. But our very high level point of view, which, fast forward 20 years later, it's actually pretty much the same, was money will go through the platform and you can get.

[Guy Raz]

You take a cut.

[Slava Rubin]

Exactly.

[Guy Raz]

That's how Visa and MasterCard and Square and Amex make money.

[Slava Rubin]

There were lots of other ideas, but trying to have a business model was not so hard to figure out, per se.

[Guy Raz]

Right. So social enterprise, do good and do well. Right, or do well and do good. I can't remember what the order is. I mean, the initial idea was equity crowdfunding. What we call today equity crowdfunding, where people could, you know, contribute to a project, let's say it's a movie, and.

[Narrator/Host]

Then they would own a piece of.

[Guy Raz]

It, they'd get a return on it. But that was not possible to do at the time.

[Narrator/Host]

Right?

[Guy Raz]

It was not possible because the laws wouldn't be changed for another 10 years. So how are you going to create.

[Narrator/Host]

Incentives for people to give money to.

[Guy Raz]

Somebody for their project? How did you think about, all right, let's. We can't do the equity. People aren't going to have a cut of the returns, but we got to incentivize them to donate to a project.

[Danae Ringelman]

We also did Explore. Is there any SEC loopholes we could get around? When we were first starting, we actually were thinking investments, like full on investment. And the benefit of being in business school is we had all these supporters, classmates coming from their industries, and we had a bunch of lawyers show up and help us try to nitpick through the laws and figure this out. And I do remember at one point there was a path, but we realized that we would have to maybe change some laws and prove this concept of raising money on the Internet. And we decided, let's just do one thing at a time, because simplification here is paramount.

[Narrator/Host]

Right?

[Danae Ringelman]

You try to change too many, move too many boulders at a time, you're going to fail. So that's where we came up with the perks concept as a way to enable people to get something for their early contribution. And we weren't sure what the right perks would be, but it was conducive to filmmaking because there are so many of these natural benefits that you can get.

[Guy Raz]

Right. Premiere, go to the premiere, you could meet the director, stuff like that. Okay, so there's rewards that you would get for being part of the project. Slava, you meet in the fall of 2006 and you spend the next kind of year and several months grinding into this idea and seeing how to get it off the ground. Did you, did you, any of you guys talk about, let's go out and raise some money for this thing? I mean, you two business school students access to, you know, maybe at least face, you know, pitching competitions with VCs and stuff. Tell me about, about that process.

[Slava Rubin]

Yeah, as a matter of fact, we were already trying to network our way to different film conferences, movie festivals, et cetera, et cetera. And we even had a few folks that wanted to give us money actually before the company even launched. I believe we even ended up getting media before the launch. But yeah, we got offered some money and we turned it down. We were like, we don't need your money at a low valuation. We had this genius idea, which was we were going to in Q1, we were going to launch by Q2 of 2008. We were going have momentum. VCs are suckers for momentum and media. So we were going to have media in Q3, and then we were going to raise money in Q3, 2008, off of our momentum and our media. The market crash happened in Q3, 2008, and that idea went right out the window.

[Guy Raz]

I got you. The idea was, even though you had some people offering you money, initially you said no, let's wait. We can fund this ourselves. Were the startup costs high?

[Slava Rubin]

It's all relative, but they weren't so high. We.

[Guy Raz]

You guys all pooled money? Your own money?

[Slava Rubin]

Yes. It was all of our own money. Yes.

[Guy Raz]

How much did you guys have to put in the three of you to get this off the ground?

[Danae Ringelman]

I remember. Do you remember this, Lava? I remember each of us committing $30,000 of our own money, which was a big chunk of our savings, or at least for me, we actually didn't raise a dime for. Was it four years?

[Slava Rubin]

Three years.

[Guy Raz]

Three years, yeah.

[Narrator/Host]

Let's talk about division of labor.

[Guy Raz]

How did you guys decide? Did you decide who was going to do what? Did you have, like, sort of formal roles, like, I'll be CEO, I'll be cto, I'll be cmo or not? Not having that discussion.

[Danae Ringelman]

I think roles kind of fell naturally. I just remember doing a lot of the finance and customer legal, all the fun stuff. The customer stuff was fun because we didn't have any, so I had to go find them. Slava, you kind of fell into the sales marketing strategy roles, and Eric was the builder.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Slava Rubin]

And I always tell the story that Eric is the hands, Danao is the heart, and I was the eyes. And we just all worked together because Eric would be the guy who kind of made the stuff. Danae was always the one who had the heart in terms of the customer and, like, the operations and making it all run well. And I was kind of looking forward, typically.

[Guy Raz]

How did you guys get on in that first year?

[Danae Ringelman]

Well, there were definitely some personality clashes. Slava and I probably had the most. It took a while to just get used to how we operate, you know. Clearly, Slav is incredibly direct, doesn't beat around the bush, very efficient in his communication. Sometimes people need more than that to really feel like they understand him. Eric speaks much less than the two of us. Very quiet, but incredibly cerebral and thinks through everything and listens incredibly well. So he often played mediator a bit, both in terms of helping us understand each other as well as appreciate each other. Yeah, I do remember Eric saying, we were standing outside late at night after class once before Slava got involved, and he asked me directly, do you consider yourself a number one person or a number two person?

[Guy Raz]

What would you say?

[Danae Ringelman]

And I couldn't answer.

[Guy Raz]

Interesting.

[Danae Ringelman]

And I think I go back to that moment because I think I wanted to think of myself as a number one person, of course. But maybe I'm better at being a number two person. So it left me with Some unanswered questions then. And I think that uncertainty was part of the struggles or what arose in those moments of conflict with Slava.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, Slava, you were gonna say.

[Slava Rubin]

Yeah, I have always been. And even back then, I'm sure more very action oriented and just like, let's do stuff, and if it fails, it fails. We'll just fix it. It's okay. So no doubt there were some challenges, but it was good because Danae would challenge one of my thoughts, and it would make me have to be really, really good about answering the question, which is I gotta come, like, strong with my answers, knowing, like, the facts and really have done the research as opposed to just, like, push through nonsense, which ended up being great.

[Guy Raz]

All right, you guys are ready to launch this thing by 2008. January of 2008. And you come up with a real, I think a really interesting idea. Given that you initially are focusing on films and creative projects, you decide to use Sundance as the play. Tell me about this launch strategy you guys came up with.

[Slava Rubin]

We'd been to Sundance. I've been to Sundance. Eric's been to Sundance. So we know that it's kind of Mecca for independent film. We thought that we would align quicker with the independent market in terms of trying to access film as opposed to getting these huge blockbusters to want to work with us.

[Guy Raz]

And what I have to imagine, the reception was amazing because there are all these people go to Sundance to get their films funded. Only a fraction of them actually get funding. So what was the reception like?

[Danae Ringelman]

It was great. We filled the room. It was a pizza parlor.

[Slava Rubin]

Yeah. We had a party. We, you know, had guerrilla marketing. We actually had this funny play where we gave people love swag at. At Sundance, you know, because there's all these companies trying to market. So we created scarves. We gave away scarves with Go Go Bucks, which was. We invented this concept of if you sign up using this card, you'll automatically get some free money. You don't know how much you're going to get. It's going to be between $5 and $500 on every card. And what we really did there was every card only had $5, except one card had $500. And everybody then got five free dollars to put into one of these campaigns. And obviously, some people only used the five, but other people used more. And it was a great catalyst. And we got a lot of buzz, really, in terms of media attention. And then people started being interested.

[Narrator/Host]

I mean, I have to imagine that.

[Guy Raz]

These producers, especially young producers, are like, you Guys are gonna save this industry. Like what?

[Narrator/Host]

What do you remember, Danae?

[Danae Ringelman]

I remember being very. Yes. Popular among the really emerging filmmakers.

[Guy Raz]

I bet.

[Danae Ringelman]

But I do remember the more established filmmakers kind of turning their noses on us. Oh, you're a cute little idea for.

[Guy Raz]

The up and coming. Okay, so, but you have this launch, you've got a website out there. How many projects did you have on the site initially? Like 10, 15, 25.

[Narrator/Host]

How many?

[Slava Rubin]

We had 10. We started with 10.

[Guy Raz]

And they were all movies or all.

[Narrator/Host]

Of them were films.

[Guy Raz]

And the idea was we're going to put, just like we know it now. You're going to put a number out and we have to raise this money. And if you don't raise the money.

[Narrator/Host]

You don't get the money.

[Guy Raz]

If you do raise the goal, you.

[Narrator/Host]

Do get the money.

[Guy Raz]

Is that how it worked? Explain how it worked.

[Slava Rubin]

That's exactly right. Which was we created this concept of these people are trying to raise $10,000 for their movie. If they raise the $10,000, they're going to receive this $10,000. If they only raise 8,000 or 1,000, everybody's going to get their money back. So there's incentive to hit the goal.

[Danae Ringelman]

And our tagline was dwo. Do it with others.

[Guy Raz]

Do it with others. Okay, it launches 10 projects. What are they raising? How much on average? What do you guys remember?

[Slava Rubin]

They were trying to raise like 10K.

[Danae Ringelman]

Plus, minus our second film, Tapestries of Hope raised 25.

[Guy Raz]

Got it. Okay, so you guys launch in January of 2008. Couple months later, you've got the Bear, the Bear Stearns thing.

[Narrator/Host]

Some, some rumblings in the market, but it's still 2008.

[Guy Raz]

And you know, and, but you had this plan, which I think is a very smart plan. We'll launch Q1, Q2, we'll have all this media attention. We'll have to, we'll get to start to get some profit from the cut we're getting from. It'll be like a flywheel. It will just attract more. And then Q3 will go out and.

[Narrator/Host]

Raise money and we'll have a high valuation.

[Guy Raz]

Well, Q3 turns out to be.

[Narrator/Host]

Coincide.

[Guy Raz]

With the greatest crash market crash since. Since the Great Depression. Right. You've got a financial crisis and a market crash and the perfect storm of things and mortgage crisis. Tell me what happens. You guys have this great website that's.

[Narrator/Host]

Getting a lot of attention.

[Guy Raz]

But now when you go to raise money, what happens?

[Slava Rubin]

Yeah, I mean, crickets. It was hard for anybody to raise money for anything. We definitely got a Lot of no's.

[Guy Raz]

Danae, tell me what you remember about trying to raise money. Cause you were going to these pitches. What were they like?

[Danae Ringelman]

Well, actually, Slava ended up taking on most of that at the time. I mean, my memory's a bit fuzzy because right after the market crashed, my father died. And that was a moment for me to step back. I had to step back for a couple weeks. Slava and Eric just completely jumped in and took over. Yeah, Yeah, I just lost my father, who was my biggest coach and mentor.

[Narrator/Host]

But he saw you guys launch this thing.

[Danae Ringelman]

He did. You know, he was supportive, but he also was saying, be very practical and realistic. Don't. Don't just fool yourself that you have a nice, pretty idea. But who cares if you can't make money? So I just remember getting clarity on, do something meaningful, and this was meaningful.

[Narrator/Host]

So, Slava, when it became clear to.

[Guy Raz]

You in the fall of 2008 that you were not gonna be able to.

[Narrator/Host]

By the way, how many. Do you Remember?

[Guy Raz]

How many VCs you pitched?

[Slava Rubin]

Yeah, we got 93 no's before we got a yes.

[Narrator/Host]

Wow, wow, wow, wow.

[Guy Raz]

That's a lot of nos. That's a lot of pitches.

[Slava Rubin]

I mean, getting a lot of rejection. It doesn't help the ego. But Twitter was really interesting because people were starting to talk about Indiegogo on Twitter, and I'd be listening to tweetdeck, and people would mention Indiegogo, and somebody would say, for example, like, I would track how the conversation went. I was like, hey, do you want to go to this music festival this weekend? They would say, no, I can't. Working my Indiegogo video. What's your Indiegogo video? Yeah, I'm trying to raise money for my movie. Oh, that's cool. I'll come help. And I remember just thinking to myself, like, you know, their lives, the two of them changed for this weekend because of the product that we created, and they're excited about doing their Indiegogo video. And for me, that was just like this wind in the sails, you know, it's like we're going in the right direction. Like, people that we do not know that they don't need to be nice to us, are talking about us and saying that our weekend is going to be different because of Indiegogo. And I just thought to myself, like, all these people can reject us as much as we want. Like, these customers are saying they like it. So we had to look ourselves into the mirror and just say, you know, do we want to bootstrap this further deal with our own savings. There was this opportunity cost of how much time do you spend doing this thing that might become a big fat zero? And how long are we going to be willing to do this? Until we can't do it anymore.

[Narrator/Host]

When we come back in just a moment. As the business starts to grow, the founders start grappling with people problems with their employees, and with each other. Stay with us.

[Guy Raz]

I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to.

[Narrator/Host]

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[Guy Raz]

Hey, welcome back to How I Built this. I'm Guy Raz.

[Narrator/Host]

So it's the fall of 2008 and it seems like nobody wants to invest in Indiegogo. So Slava and Dene are asking themselves, how long can we keep this thing going?

[Guy Raz]

When it was clear you were not going to be able to raise money, how. How much Runway did you think you guys had before you would run out of money?

[Slava Rubin]

Runway, I love this. So the way people think about running out of gas is they actually look at their gas tank, and they actually look at the meter go down. So eventually the meter is at zero. So they now have no gas. But if you have no meter, nothing gets to go down. You only get to decide based on how far you want to push the car. So there is no concept of Runway. We have no money. We just have our own savings and just trying to decide whether or not we want to keep on investing or going into more debt.

[Danae Ringelman]

But we did have very frequent conversations like, are we going to keep going or not? And it was one of those. We just. Let's discuss it next time. No one really wanted to make the decision, and we were all adjusted our lifestyle to be very frugal.

[Guy Raz]

Do you remember a moment because you're now getting into 2009, and the economy is getting worse and worse, and 2009 was just a horrible year. Do either of you remember a moment where you had to decide, let's keep going or let's end this?

[Slava Rubin]

Absolutely. I mean, we're like, middle of 2009. Personal balance sheets are running low, and, you know, we're all talking about how are we going to be running our own lives, like, having enough cash in our own lives to do whatever it is we need to do, whether it's pay the rent or buy breakfast, whatever it is. And we eventually just decided this is our last stand sort of thing. We committed to sales, and we upgraded the product in terms of design, and we said, this is the last stand, and if this works, it works. If it doesn't work, we might have to actually shut down.

[Guy Raz]

Danae, do you remember the stress of that period of time creating tension between the co founders, or did it actually bring you guys together?

[Danae Ringelman]

It didn't. It was not the source of tension. No. I actually think that probably brought us together.

[Guy Raz]

Because you're in a foxhole together.

[Danae Ringelman]

Yeah. I mean, I remember feeling lucky that my mom wasn't charging me rent and feeling bad for Eric that he had to pay it.

[Slava Rubin]

So you didn't feel bad for me and Yuslav.

[Danae Ringelman]

But I do remember feeling like we were avoiding the question or I was avoiding the question because I didn't want to accept shutting down.

[Narrator/Host]

Yeah. I wonder if one of the decisions.

[Guy Raz]

You guys took in 2009 was to open up the platform. So now it was no longer just specific to film or creative things, but it was any.

[Narrator/Host]

Any.

[Guy Raz]

Anybody.

[Narrator/Host]

Anything.

[Guy Raz]

Was that. Was that t. Was that part of the plan initially? Or was that tied to the economy and just wanting to grow as quickly as possible?

[Slava Rubin]

Slava, since day one, the idea was to democratize it for all funding ideas. We just started with film because. Trying to take a page out of the playbook of Amazon, starting with books only and then expanding to other stuff.

[Narrator/Host]

Right.

[Slava Rubin]

It's really funny because I would try to be raising money from VCs in 2008 or early 2009, and I would talk to them and they say, listen, we don't fund film stuff. Like, we're not a film platform, we're a funding platform. Those same VCs, later, when we open up to everything, come knocking and they're like, this is amazing. You're, like, funding everything. So it's like, fascinating how people's minds work, because unless you actually show it to them, they have a hard time, most people, abstracting what it is that we're trying to accomplish here. So, yeah, it was 100% part of the plan. Honestly, it was like hockey stick growth, like, almost immediately after that.

[Guy Raz]

And by the end of 2010, I read you had, like, you'd hosted over 10,000 campaigns from all over the world, all kinds of campaigns. Here's my question, though, right?

[Narrator/Host]

You're a platform.

[Guy Raz]

Anybody could launch a campaign to raise money.

[Narrator/Host]

And.

[Guy Raz]

But there are a couple challenges. The first is you just can't at this point. You're not vetting all of them because you just don't have the capacity. So you don't probably know exactly what everyone is trying to raise money for. The second challenge is, unless it's funded, you guys don't get paid. It's sort of like being a real estate agent. If you don't make the sale, you don't get a commission. So you have an interest in seeing campaigns that are going to succeed. But if I was on the team, I might have said, why don't we.

[Narrator/Host]

Curate these to make sure we only.

[Guy Raz]

Get campaigns that were like 60, 70% sure going to work. Otherwise, we're just platforming these things that are. That we don't benefit from.

[Danae Ringelman]

We believed in open.

[Guy Raz]

You would have kicked me out right then.

[Narrator/Host]

You'd be like, out the door philosophically.

[Danae Ringelman]

We couldn't become the gatekeeper. Otherwise, what's the point of all of this?

[Guy Raz]

Fair enough.

[Slava Rubin]

We were trying to accomplish Something in the world. And the thing that we were trying to accomplish is to have an open platform where people can have the world decide what deserves to get funded, not move, you know, who's the decision maker, like Danae said.

[Guy Raz]

So I know later on this would.

[Narrator/Host]

Change, but, but initially, just from a business perspective, Slava, why didn't you say from the beginning, we're just, it doesn't.

[Guy Raz]

Matter what you raise, you'll get the money. And I know you would change that policy later, but why did it have.

[Narrator/Host]

To be fully funded?

[Guy Raz]

In other words, if somebody was trying to raise $10,000, they only raised 5,000, why not let them keep the money and then you guys still get a cut of that.

[Slava Rubin]

I mean that's a perfectly fair idea. And debate looking back, that's not how we thought about it up front. We thought it'd be much better to have to hit your target. But your point is a really good question. We potentially could have started that way, but there's really a power to each of the models, both a kind of hit your target and get your money or get your money no matter what.

[Guy Raz]

And were you guys, I mean, I know you weren't, didn't have like gobs of cash coming in, but were you profitable pretty quickly?

[Slava Rubin]

Not instantaneously, but by the time we're raising, you were and actually getting everybody to say yes, we're right there.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, you were one of the rare startups that actually had profitability.

[Slava Rubin]

You know, as part of the concept of are we going to keep existing? Right. We needed to be able to make enough money to actually personally exist. Right. So if we knew that there was no way to get external capital, it was really just a very efficient way of saying, okay, we need to make money.

[Narrator/Host]

I mean it's, it's interesting to me because I think just sort of from.

[Guy Raz]

A 35,000 foot perspective, this seems like a no brainer. It's like when there's a project and people are going to support it, then you're going to get a cut. So it seems like it would be really attractive to investors. Although I guess their pushback was.

[Narrator/Host]

Well, how do we know people are.

[Guy Raz]

Really going to want to support these projects?

[Slava Rubin]

Yeah, I mean it's easy to say that now, 16, 17 years later, it's all very obvious today. But in the moment you have to underwrite a lot of risks. You have to underwrite whether or not you could acquire the funders, whether or not people are actually going to do what they say. How much fraud is there going to Be in the industry. How much is this going to turn off everybody? You know, what's competition look like? So there's plenty of risks. You know, most VCs don't actually want to do risky things. They want everything de risked, and then they just want to invest on the upside.

[Guy Raz]

Okay, you needed to raise money, presumably because you needed to hire people. You needed to do marketing. I mean, customer acquisition costs were an issue, and you wanted to. Even though you were getting media attention, you needed money. I guess By September of 2011, you finally raised your first round. It's about a million and a half dollars. Next year, you launch a series A and you raise $15 million. And. And. And I have to imagine that was a much different experience than it was in. In the fall of 2008 and into nine when you're trying to raise money.

[Slava Rubin]

Initially, it was the exact opposite. I was going from all partner meeting to all partner meeting to all partner meeting in the same.

[Guy Raz]

You weren't even talking to the junior people who are just there to, like, filter this through.

[Slava Rubin]

Exactly.

[Guy Raz]

You're talking to that. You were talking to the decision makers.

[Slava Rubin]

Now, in the same day, most of them will come back with yeses and term sheets, et cetera. And it was fascinating.

[Guy Raz]

Meantime, I think there's one. I mean, some of these campaigns that are on the site are getting all kinds of attention. I mean, anytime there was an interesting one like Danae, there was one, I think, in 2011. Help the Haleys have a baby. They basically used the platform to raise money for ivf.

[Narrator/Host]

Was that funded?

[Danae Ringelman]

Yeah. And the baby was born.

[Narrator/Host]

And this was.

[Guy Raz]

You guys called this or. It was called the world's first crowdfunded baby.

[Danae Ringelman]

It was amazing. It was amazing because it was a testament to our belief that if you give the world choice and the opportunity to fund what matters to them, they will.

[Guy Raz]

So you guys raised this money and tell me about the $15 million.

[Narrator/Host]

What did that enable you to do?

[Guy Raz]

I'm assuming hiring. I'm assuming marketing. Tell me a little bit about how you started to use that money.

[Slava Rubin]

Yeah, we just level up on everything. We, for the first time now start bringing in experienced senior talent. And we started going from that scrappy garage company to being a real company pretty quickly.

[Guy Raz]

What roles did you guys take on formally? Slava, what was your role at that point?

[Slava Rubin]

I'm CEO.

[Guy Raz]

You're CEO. Okay. And Danae?

[Danae Ringelman]

I think I was coo. That was a hard transition.

[Narrator/Host]

Why?

[Danae Ringelman]

Because I had to give up a lot. When you're working so hard to hang on to everything to make sure it all doesn't fall apart. You have a very tight grip. And so it was a process of letting go of control and learning to trust.

[Slava Rubin]

All three of us as founders are really evolving and having to deal with the growth, like Danae mentioned. So it used to be that the way we dealt with it was we are three equal co founders. There's nobody else.

[Guy Raz]

Right.

[Slava Rubin]

There's no titles.

[Guy Raz]

That's how businesses start.

[Slava Rubin]

Right. And we just debate and argue around Danae's family dining room. Right. Or in the kitchen. And now, you know, we're raising the A, the B, we're bringing on all these executives. Everybody has to have more clear roles. People. People need to be empowered to do their jobs. People have to have, like, lines of responsibility, reporting structures, yada, yada, yada. And that is challenging for all of us because all three of us have our own founder instincts. And we might want to resort back to the three of us arguing about something. But it's tricky because now this is this organization that has created itself that just hired this crazy senior executive from XYZ organization that they don't want to be exposed to that. Right? They didn't join three founders in a garage. They joined this thing that just raised a bunch of money that has these crazy growth numbers that they want to be part of that system. So all of that takes a lot of growing, for sure.

[Danae Ringelman]

And we started to really, when we brought people on board, not just do a kind of a cliche culture interview, but we actually had a pretty structured approach about understanding what drives the person and how they tick and what motivates them. I know even if we hired a rock star, if they were an individual and they just wanted to go shine on their own, they would not be successful. And I think I always questioned, is this me just being in my head and theoretical, and is this really as important? I got pushback sometimes from Slava or from other people. But then when I was out on maternity leave with my son, I think it was you, Slava, who you just called me and you said, can you just come back and just be here and remind people who we are?

[Guy Raz]

Slava, do you remember why you said that?

[Slava Rubin]

I mean, Danae's always been really good at thinking about people, and we potentially will be talking in ways or hiring people that were too mercenary or transactional. I'll never forget. Actually similar, but different, which is to come up with our values, which I thought was a poor use of time, which obviously was not a poor use of time. It Ends up being a very valuable use of time. But we actually did a exercise where we drew the things that we thought we wanted as our values. And then we shared all of that with each other, which I just kind of went through the motions to do it because Danae asked us to do it. And I was trying to be nice, but I actually did it, you know, with all my effort. And then by the time we were done, I was like, oh, this is actually pretty interesting. And it was great. And every now and then, we needed some more.

[Guy Raz]

Danae, I know that the ethos was indiegogo is an open platform.

[Narrator/Host]

Right.

[Guy Raz]

But now that you have serious money behind you and venture firms that are sensitive about, you know, different things, I wonder.

[Narrator/Host]

And now you have a lot more employees.

[Guy Raz]

I wonder whether you started to build guardrails around what you would accept and not accept. Like, for example, there was a group that was, I guess, in trying to raise money to. It was a climate. Apparently a climate change denial group. Right. And they were trying to raise money on the platform. And you guys came under pressure to remove them from the site because, you know, that was. People felt offended by it. But that would be allowed.

[Narrator/Host]

That would be okay, right?

[Slava Rubin]

Yes. So we definitely got to deal with the cutting edge of people's opinions, free speech, what is appropriate. In my opinion, the way we try to navigate it is just be fair, treat everyone the same. And I think most actually respected that, which is for every, you know, too far to the left, let's call it. We had something way too far to the right or for everything that was too much pro this topic. We had something that was very anti this topic. And that doesn't mean that we were looking for those things because we wanted to have the counterbalance on the site. It's because the site was open that it just attracted these projects.

[Danae Ringelman]

And that was the way I kind of dealt with it. We took some guidance, and it's through the terms that we just did some basic things like no one should be hurt here, no one should promote hatred and things like that, but actually end up becoming more of an issue. Is less about people trying to do bad if you want to. It's a subjective term, but it was more about misusing the product to try to raise money for fraud or something. So that actually was something that became more of the prominent issue that we had to tackle much earlier than people using it for things that maybe we didn't particularly care for.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Narrator/Host]

Today I want to ask you about.

[Guy Raz]

Your decision to step down in 2018. I mean, you stayed on the board, but you decided that you didn't want to be involved in the day to day anymore. Can you talk a little bit about that time and what led to that decision?

[Danae Ringelman]

Yeah, I was pregnant with my second child. One of the things we had to do that was not in the plans was move to Norway, which is where my partner was from, for a few different reasons. And then I stayed and I was doing all my meetings and midnight to 3 and getting up for kindergarten at 6. And it was a very difficult lifestyle. And I also did feel less impactful. I couldn't read between the tea leaves like I used to. And then at the time, I think we also had a CEO change and so it then just felt normal.

[Guy Raz]

There was a Slava, you became, I think you became. You transitioned to a different role. Right.

[Slava Rubin]

I went from CEO to chief business officer.

[Guy Raz]

So tell me about that decision. Was that something that you wanted that you prompted?

[Slava Rubin]

Definitely not.

[Guy Raz]

No.

[Slava Rubin]

No. I mean, that was me having a debate with the board as to how we needed to grow. I really wanted to create a massive company and I really thought we had the opportunity to create the Airbnb of crowdfunding because it should all be consolidated under one roof. There should be all to be all these verticals. And I got into a debate with the board and I didn't win that debate.

[Guy Raz]

So they asked, they basically said, we want a new CEO.

[Slava Rubin]

That's correct. You know, I think that founders are very important as part of growing a company. And if you take out the founders too early, don't get me wrong, you don't need to have a founder at the company like Mark Zuckerberg is still there. There's not so many Mark Zuckerbergs. But if you take out a founder too early, I do think you handicap the potential of the future of that company. And I think you see that with some of the results of Indiegogo. So I was sad that it happened for myself and I was sad that it happened for my coworkers and I was definitely sad that it happened for the overall potential for what Indiegogo could be.

[Guy Raz]

So both of you guys, and I think Eric leaves in May of 2019. So all three of you are gone before COVID Not on the day to day operational side. Here's a big question for you, and it's a bit of a sensitive question, but I think it's an important one, which is what happened after that. I mean, if you look at Kickstarter, which was not as innovative, it had much more limited Many more limitations. Initially, it would go on to. I don't know if it's. I don't know if it's profitable today. I don't know what. But it would go on to bring in more money. What was Kickstarter doing, right, that Indiegogo was not doing?

[Slava Rubin]

I mean, Kickstarter comes out, they have a good design experience, they have a curated product, so it's easier to just have upfront positive stories. But they definitely don't scale as rapidly as they could either. You also have GoFundMe, who does quite well. You have Patreon, who does well. You also have all the equity crowdfunding platforms. You have so many slices that really indiegogo should have owned and be able to have that all under one roof.

[Guy Raz]

So basically, as this whole industry grew, Indiegogo, you could argue, missed an opportunity to own those verticals and own those spaces.

[Slava Rubin]

I mean, I think that's a massive.

[Guy Raz]

Understatement, that it should have owned them.

[Slava Rubin]

We were in the position to own all them and, you know, we decided that we had to think too much about unit economics and profitability. And I think that's a shame.

[Guy Raz]

Both of you guys leave about 10 years after launch 2018. You launched in 2008. That year, Indiegogo announced that it had done about. It raised about $1.5 billion for different projects, which is a really nice milestone. In 2025, Indigo gets acquired by a crowdfunding platform for board games called gamefound, which is, you know, it's interesting. I mean, surprising, right, Given that at one time, Indiegogo was sort of a huge cultural phenomenon. Right. Like. Like, tell me about that acquisition. I mean, I have to imagine they acquired it for, you know, less than the previous valuations.

[Slava Rubin]

Yeah. So it's actually Ravensburger, which is a much more substantial European gaming company, which is kind of like a parent that kind of backs it. Yes, but, yes, it's quite remarkable. I would almost argue that beyond the effort of people trying to stop Indiegogo from succeeding, Indiegogo was able to succeed for as long as it's been and still succeeding today. I mean, VCs in the early days tried to say no, because we're not going to give you money because you don't deserve it, because it's a bad idea. But the customers on their own were like, no, we're going to use this. I still think there's huge opportunity out there. I mean, with web3 and crypto, all of these things are ripe for innovation still today.

[Guy Raz]

I mean, when you think about all the sort of challenges you guys went through in building this and then getting it to scale, then eventually its sort of final chapters and what happened after. How much of what happened and where it went with all the skepticism do you attribute to the grind you put in and how much you think had to do with just luck and timing and just the right moment?

[Danae Ringelman]

I think, I mean, if we didn't have the grind in the beginning, nothing would have happened. It was three and a half years, four years, about before we were able to even start to pay ourselves. And that's why I say it was probably irrational to continue at that point. We had a head of prison one point say, it's so rare to have all the three founders still here at this point in the company. It is so rare. And she'd been through many startups, and I remember being surprised by that. I said, really? That's unusual. She's like, yeah, it's quite unusual. And I think she said something like, it's just you guys care so much.

[Slava Rubin]

Slava, I don't really believe in, like, pure luck that much. I really believe that preparation plus opportunity equals luck. So putting in the work, then identifying the opportunity and, you know, kicking it open if it's just a crack. Yeah, I think a lot of people did a lot of great stuff to accomplish awesome things. And that includes all the customers and all the funders having to step up to do all that stuff.

[Narrator/Host]

Right.

[Slava Rubin]

I actually had a phenomenal experience even just yesterday, which kind of resonates to all of this, but different, which is I'm now a vc and I like to invest into young, amazing people. They don't always have to be young. But it just so happened to be this entrepreneur that I was talking to yesterday was 22, and I was wearing Code Like a Girl, my Code Like a Girl sweatshirt, which is actually a.

[Guy Raz]

Co.Org sweatshirt, which was funded by Indiegogo.

[Slava Rubin]

Which was funded on Indiegogo. Started on Indiegogo. So the young entrepreneur, he says to me, I love your hoodie. And I'm like, yeah, it's code.org, he's like, no way. I actually learned how to code starting with code.org, which was like 15 years ago. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is, like, now generational as to how this, like, lives on. And there's tons of that because there's so many incredible companies and products and movies and music and that all of this is now, you know, legacy in the world and continue to have its impact.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Danae Ringelman]

I mean, that is probably what I'm most proud of, is creating a place for opportunity. And I think, you know, I think back at how many people would say, oh, how's your little project going? Or getting all those rejections that Slava took most of the brunt of. I think the word cute was used way more than once to explain what we're trying to do. You know, I think the world has fundamentally shifted to not be so arrogant that a few people can decide what should happen and what shouldn't. And I do think we were part of that. We weren't the only piece of that unraveling, but I think we were a key part of it. And I'd like to believe humanity is a little bit better off for that.

[Narrator/Host]

That's Indiegogo founders Dene Ringelman and Slava Rubin. Since leaving Indiegogo, Slava started a venture.

[Guy Raz]

For fund and launched his own podcast.

[Narrator/Host]

Meanwhile, Danae is still in Norway, where she runs a mountain lodge with her partner.

[Guy Raz]

She says it's a pretty popular retreat.

[Narrator/Host]

For tech executives who are burnt out and need to recharge. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the Follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons, lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, sign up for my [e-mail] or on substack. This episode was produced by Kathryn Seifer with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Chris Masini. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Jimmy Keeley. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Andrea Bruce, Casey Herman, J.C. howard, Sam Paulson, Kerry Thompson, Ramon Mel Wood, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built this. And don't stop the podcast just yet, because right now you're about to hear an amazing small business story that you don't want to miss. This segment is presented by American Express with a Business Platinum membership. The best just got even better. Today's story starts with a young man standing sitting in the corner booth of a hamburger joint in Boston.

[Noah Wilson Rich]

It was like that kind of burnout eating where you're at the end of a really long shift and you're like, I'm gonna shove this food in my face and be so happy and exhausted.

[Narrator/Host]

That's Noah Wilson Rich. At the time, he was putting himself through graduate school by working multiple jobs. He was Worn out. And he was starting to feel that even with a PhD, he'd have to keep on bartending and adjuncting, teaching forever. This was at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, and the teaching jobs he'd counted on just weren't there, especially for people like Noah, who'd picked niche fields.

[Noah Wilson Rich]

I was finishing up my PhD in bees. I was thinking, what have I done?

[Narrator/Host]

Yep, bees. But here's the thing. Noah hadn't picked the wrong expertise. He just hadn't found a way to monetize it. Because around that time, people were starting.

[Guy Raz]

To worry about a big problem.

[Narrator/Host]

Bees were dying on a massive scale, and a lot of people wanted to know how to save them. Noah knew this because he was getting contacted almost daily by libraries and garden clubs, even some businesses.

[Noah Wilson Rich]

They were saying, how do I get bees on my property? How can I get biodiversity on my empty rooftop? There was a marketplace developing that was hitting me over the head. And it got me thinking, huh? What if I could do that as a business?

[Narrator/Host]

So he started a Facebook page and.

[Guy Raz]

Said, hey, want to help the bees?

[Narrator/Host]

Put some on your property. I will sell you the hive, Then.

[Noah Wilson Rich]

I'll volunteer my time to manage them in exchange for research funding. You keep the honey, I keep the data. Anybody want some bees?

[Narrator/Host]

And with that Facebook post, the Best Bees company was born. The first year, Noah had seven clients, then 12, then 65. Over time, the business model evolved. He started charging clients for the ongoing maintenance of their hives. You may have heard of companies that do that now, but in the late 2000s, it was a novel concept. But still, growth comes with challenges, as Noah learned. The first year, he brought in a.

[Noah Wilson Rich]

Million dollars and did not count on our expenses being 1.1 million. I thought, this is too big for me. What am I going to do? I should just go back to teaching. I should go back to bartending. And I said, no, I have nothing to lose.

[Narrator/Host]

So he got himself a business advisor who helped him grow responsibly, and he kept going. Today, the Best bees company has 120 employees operating in 24 cities. And NOAA's customers are still hungry for more. These days, they don't just want bees on their property. They want to turn unused green space into healthy bee habitats. So this past year, NOAA launched a spinoff company called the Biodiversity Lab to.

[Noah Wilson Rich]

Provide that service, inspiring others to take part in this global movement, not just to save the bees, but to advance biodiversity. It's a full circle moment.

[Narrator/Host]

That's Noah Wilson, the founder of Best Bees. His story was presented by American Express. To build a business like no other, you need a card like no other. There's nothing like Business Platinum. If you like how I built this, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short [e-mail] survey.