YouSaid · the spoken record

Slava Rubin

lines on the record: 74
first: 2025-12-15
most recent: 2025-12-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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 could 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't really believe in pure luck that much. I really believe that preparation plus opportunity equals luck. So putting in the work, then identifying the opportunity and 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. Right. 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. It was 22. And I was wearing a code like a girl, my code like a girl sweatshirt, which is actually a code.org sweatshirt.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. You know, we had a head of PR at 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 it's final chapters and what happened after. I mean, 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?”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's actually Ravensburger, which is a much more substantial European gaming company, which is kind of like the parent that kind of backs it. 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely 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 these verticals. And I got into a debate with the board and I didn't win that debate.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was pregnant with my second child. I was 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 three and getting up for dinner. It was a very difficult lifestyle. And I also did feel less impactful. You know, 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so we definitely got to deal with the cutting edge of people's opinions, free speech. 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 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know that the ethos was Indiegogo is an open platform, right? But now that you have serious money behind you and venture firms that are sensitive about different things, I wonder, and I yield a lot more employees, 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, 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 that was people felt offended by it. But that would be allowed. That would be okay, right?”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, Denais has always been really good at. Thinking about people, and we potentially would be 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 an 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 Denae 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 there 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 Yuslava who you just called me and you said. Can you just come back and just be here And remind people who we are.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And we just debate and argue around Denise'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 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All three of us as founders are really evolving and having to deal with the growth, like Dene mentioned. So it used to be that the way we dealt with it was we are Equal co founders. There's nobody else. There's no titles”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think I was CO That was a hard transition. 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 it going to turn off everybody, you know, what's competition look like. 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As part of the concept of are we going to keep existing, 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that's a perfectly fair idea in the debate. Looking back, that's not how we thought about it up front. We thought it would 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I know later on this would change. But initially, just from a business perspective, Slava, why didn't you say from the beginning we're just, it doesn't matter what you raise, you'll get the money. And I know you would change that policy later, but why did it have to be fully funded? In other words, if somebody was trying to raise $10,000, they only raise $5,000, why not let them keep the money and then you guys still get a cut of that?”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 who's the decision maker, like Dene said.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 where 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 almost immediately after that.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Since day one, the idea was to democratize it for all funding ideas. We just started with film because trying to take up Page out of the playbook of Amazon, starting with books only and then expanding to other stuff.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wonder if one of the decisions 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 anybody, anything. Was that tied to that part of the plan initially, or was that tied to the economy and just wanting to grow as quickly as possible, Slava?”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we did have very frequent conversations, are we going to keep going or not? And it was one of those we just let's discuss it next time. We know no one really wanted to make the decision. And we were all adjusted our lifestyle to be very frugal.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They like it. 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?”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mean, getting a lot of rejection doesn't help the ego Twitter was really interesting because people were starting to talk about Indiegogo on Twitter. And I'd be listening to Tweet Deck. 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 from 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 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He did. You know, he was supportive, but he also was saying be very practical and realistic. 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”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, Slava ended up taking on most of that. At the time, I mean, my memory is a bit fuzzy because right after the market crashed, my father died. And that was a moment for me. Step back. I had to step back for a couple weeks. Slav and Eric just completely jumped in and took over. I just lost my father, who was my biggest coach and mentor.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we had a party, we had gorilla marketing. Actually, had this funny play where we gave people love swag 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 us 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 use the five, but other people use 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 line 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Denis would challenge one of my thoughts and it would make me have to be really good about answering the question, which is I got to come like strong with my answers knowing like the facts and really I've done the research as opposed to just like push through nonsense, which ended up being great”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think I go back to that moment because I think. Wanted to think of myself as a number one person, 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Slava 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. 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. 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?”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I always tell the story that Eric is the hands, Daneo is the heart, and I was the eyes. And we just all work together because Eric would be the guy who kind of made the stuff. Denae 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. Salava, you kind of fell into the sales marketing strategy roles. And Eric was the builder.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember, do you remember this lava? I remember each of us committing thirty thousand dollars 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?”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 end 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 to have momentum VCs or suckers for momentum and media. So we were going to have media in Q3. And then we're 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Try to change 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We also did explore is there any SEC loopholes we could get around? So 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 contribute to a project. Let's say it's a movie, and then they would own a piece of it. They'd get a return on it. But that was not possible to do at the time, right? It was not possible because the laws wouldn't be changed for another 10 years. So how are you going to create incentives for people to give money to somebody for their project? How did you think about, all right, we can't do the equity. People are going to have a cut of the returns, but we got to incentivize them to donate to a project.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 have 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”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I connected with Eric and Dene, 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 Dene. She seemed really smart. Eric already really liked Dene. 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&D process. So it was almost like free testing, if that makes sense. 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2006, and I had to present something in one of my entrepreneurship classes, like end of 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.”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Clearly, Dene, you started to say or think, I'm assuming, okay, this is interesting. Maybe we should figure out how to scale this through the internet. Tell me about your thinking around this. How did your understanding of what this could be evolve?”
2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT