YouSaid · the spoken record

Slava Rubin

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74
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2025-12-15
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2025-12-15
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  1. “Yeah, for me, it was the ability to let the people decide what should be funded. It also meant that 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 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.”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “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. That could happen for money. And, you know, YouTube seemed like it was growing really fast and it was really interesting new product and kind of a derivative off of my space and what was happening all there. Why not move this towards the movement of money?”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Don't exist in sort of popular consciousness. And that wasn't really what you were talking about anyway initially. It was like 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?”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Again, my background connected to this is my dad died of cancer, and 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 Dene was referring to. It could be anything. And I thought, wow, that could be a big idea.”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Yeah, I said if you want to change finance, you can do it in the finance world. So, like, I kept on saying that. And I said, you probably want to use the internet. And Dene actually looked at Eric and was like, I thought you said this guy was smart because I really wasn't like, I didn't say that.”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “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. 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”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Yeah, no, what drove you 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 the 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.”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “So I failed But I 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 and said, all right, do we have something here? And they said, this is an amazing play. We're not going to invest. Good luck. 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 depend on one person to say yes. And that was the inequity that drove me to eventually start Indiegogo.”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Yeah, I was around energy efficiency. I guess you asked me why I was emotional. 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. 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. 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.”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “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 is 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, and I just remember I finished a basketball game and he came to them, he made it to the game. He said, I think this one's going to work D. 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”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “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 the script. I look forward to talking to you about funding my next theater project. And here I was sitting at my analyst desk. Think I almost started to cry. 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. That just felt so wrong. I'm just curious.”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “I'm psyched because I just want to listen and I just want to be this fly on the wall. Producers, what do they look like Suddenly, I I got barraged because somebody heard me heard the word JP Morgan come out of my mouth because I work there. 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. I have no power. I'm 22. I'm an analyst. But you said,”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “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”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “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 JPMorgan in New York after you graduated. And I guess somehow you got involved in a part of the finance world that was investing in movies, like how did that happen?”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “The moving business went bankrupt. 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 company that bought it would keep her employees that had been loyal to her for 30 years. That was a lesson to me personally about values and principles.”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Yeah, so as brick and mortar hard work, heavy labor was my first job. He would put me in charge of cruise in high school, mostly men on the cruise, mostly men who had lived pretty hard lives, made some bad decisions, but this was the work that they could get. 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. So that was my first job.”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “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 partnered with the IMF, which is the International Myeloma Foundation, not the monetary fund. Yeah, we partnered and started doing all these different concerts and different fundraisers to raise a bunch of money for myeloma research.”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Yeah, so I was living in New York. I would kind of argue I was living the dream, whereas 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.”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “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 Concerts and would raise money for it.”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Yeah, of course. You know, because there's like in the 80s, you grow up I did study finance and entrepreneur management. I was actually entrepreneurial even when I was a kid with sports cards. So I did get the finance degree major, but never actually practiced finance formally as an investment banker.”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “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 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 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's some people that are less nice. And I got to interact with all of them.”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “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.”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “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 Indigo were full of the things you might expect in a story like this, 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 Ringlan, 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.”

    2025-12-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “I remember, do you remember this? I remember each of us committing thirty thousand dollars, which was a big chunk of our savings. 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. In Q1, we were going to launch by Q2, we were going to have momentum. And then we're going to raise money in Q3 2008. The market crash happened in 2008. 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