How I Built This with Guy Raz - 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

What happens when three outsiders try to reinvent access to money… during the worst financial crisis in decades?Before Kickstarter.Before GoFundMe.Before crowdfunding became a thing, there was Indiegogo, an idea born from frustration, inequity, and more than 93 rejections from investors.It was a funding platform built not for banks, studios or gatekeepers… but for everybody else.In this episode, co-founders Danae Ringelmann and Slava Rubin reveal the unpolished and often painful story behind Indiegogo — from digging into savings accounts, to fighting over strategy, to grinning and bearing it when their idea was dismissed as “cute.” You’ll hear how their mission was shaped by loss of parents, financial instability, and a fundamental belief in fairness.How the 2008 crash nearly killed the company before it began.And how in the end, Indiegogo helped spark a massive cultural shift—proving that anyone, anywhere, could bring an idea to life.WHAT YOU’LL LEARN: How gatekeepers underestimate outsiders’ ideasHow grief and personal history shape entrepreneurial courageHow to recover from 93 “no’s” Why making money matters, but maintaining your values matters even more How co-founder conflict can sharpen (or break) a companyWhy Indiegogo didn’t become Kickstarter — and what founders can learn from thatHow to know when it’s time to walk away from your own companyTIMESTAMPS: 0:05:34 - Slava’s childhood, and the deep loss that shaped his worldview0:09:00 - Danae’s first lesson in leadership… from her dad’s moving business0:12:43 - “Hollywood Meets Wall Street:” the emotional spark that led to Indiegogo0:18:43 - The Golden Gate conversation where Slava asked, “Why not put this on the internet?“ 0:32:56 - Building Indiegogo: mismatched personalities, big arguments, and the first 10 campaigns0:40:22 - The 2008 crash hits: 93 investor rejections and many moments of truth0:46:53 - Expanding beyond film: the inevitable pivot that ignited explosive growth0:54:04 - Internal evolution: roles, titles, hires, and the first taste of real scale 0:59:56 - Why the founders eventually stepped away — and why some opportunities were squandered1:05:19 - The legacy: how Indiegogo reshaped culture, creativity, and opportunity1:09:44 - Bonus: Small Business Spotlight This episode was produced by Katherine Sypher, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant, with research help from Chris Maccini. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Jimmy Keeley.Follow How I Built This:Instagram → @howibuiltthisX → @HowIBuiltThisFacebook → How I Built ThisFollow Guy Raz:Instagram → @guy.razYouTube → guy_razX → @guyrazSubstack → guyraz.substack.comWebsite → guyraz.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Airbnb.ca.ca. slash host. How much did you guys have to put in three of you to get this off the ground? I remember, do you remember this lava? I remember each of us committing $30,000, which was a big chunk of our savings. 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. 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. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show 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 tens of thousands of New Yorkers donated money to build the pedestal of a 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 IndygoFundMe, there was Indygo. One of the first platforms to ask a radical question.

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 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, Deney 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 deserve to exist. In today's story, you'll hear from Denei 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 U.S. 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. 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 which is what affected that. 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? Because of your dad's, you know, passing your family's financial situation. was in, was massively affected in peril. 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. So when you started college, I know you stayed in the area and went to Penn, You studied finance and I think you went 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? 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 I did get the finance degree major, but never actually practiced finance formally as an investment banker. 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. 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. Yeah. 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. Wow. Wow. All right, Slava, I want to pause for a second and turn to Deney and ask you a few questions. I know, Denae, 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 business of some sort. Yeah. So it was a brick and mortar, hard work, heavy labor. It's my first job. He would put me in charge of crews 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. 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. Yeah. 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. 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. So that was a lesson to me personally about values and principles. 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 J.P. Morgan 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? 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. Like a mixer, like a networking event?

Like a mixer networking event. 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. 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. 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? Yeah. Suddenly I got barraged because somebody heard me, heard the word J.P. Morgan come out of my mouth because I worked 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. I have no power.

I'm 22. I'm an analyst. But you said J.P. Morgan, so all these people looking for financing were like, oh, you're J.P. Morgan. Let me give you my car. Let me tell you about my screenplay or my film. 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. 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.

Right. And that just felt so wrong. 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? 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. And 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, 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 it.

Do you remember what the idea was? Yeah, I was around energy efficiency. I guess you asked me why was I emotional. Yeah. I think I just grew up. with a hope or an optimism that that life would be more fair and that you would be rewarded if you worked hard. Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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. And he was doing, I think he was doing like an Arthur Miller play, right? Is that, is that this? Yeah. And did you help him get the financing for that play? So I failed. But I tried. So the goal was to produce a concert reading of, of the play in an off-Broadway venue. Yeah. And I got the producers there, and everybody loved the play. It was a standing ovation.

And I turned to the producers at point, 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 to pin on one person to say yes. And that was the inequity that drove me to eventually start Indiegogo. 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. And was your, when you got to Berkeley in this 2006, did you have an idea of what you wanted to do at the time or not quite yet?

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 inventive. 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. Got it. Okay. And business school winds up being pretty important because that's where you would meet another student, a guy named Eric Schell, who will eventually join you in founding Indiegogo. But Eric was also the one who introduces you to Slava. He was friends with Slava from before. And I guess what? One week. Slava comes out to the Bay Area from New York for a visit, and Eric introduces the two of you?

Yeah. I remember the weekend. Slava, you came out. We started talking, and I actually think we're at the lookout point for the Golda 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? 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 Denae actually looked at Eric and it was like, I thought you said this guy was smart because I really wasn't like, again, my background connected to this is my dad. I had that 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 Dena was referring to. It could be anything. And I thought, wow, that could be a big idea. Right.

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. No, no, no, no. It wasn't. 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 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? 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 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? Yeah, for me, it was the ability to let the people decide what should be funded. And 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 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. And clearly, Deney, you started to say or think, I'm assuming, okay, this is interesting. Maybe we should use, you know, figure out how.

how to scale this through the internet. Tell me about your thinking around this. Like, how did your understanding of what this could be evolve? Well, you know, I think I, I think that meeting with Slava was probably sometime around November. October. October. Of 2006. 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. When we come back in just a moment, Indiegogo launches and then stalls out right after the financial crisis hits.

Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2006, and Denae Slava and their friend Eric Schell are kicking around a new idea for a business, a crowdfunding platform that will live on the internet. When I connected with Eric and Deney, 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 Deney. She seemed really smart. Eric already really liked Deney. 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. And Slava, did you, I mean, you mentioned this idea of like high risk, high reward. How did you start to model out? Again, we're talking about 2006 and 7, 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. Did you have that mapped out? 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. You take a cut. Exactly. That's how Visa and Mass. And Astrocard and Square and Amex make money. There were lots of other ideas, but trying to have a business model was not so hard to figure out per se. 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 it today, equity crowdfunding, where people could, you know, 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, let's, 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. We also did explore. Is there any SEC loopholes we could get around? So at the, and when we were first starting, we were actually were thinking investments, like full-on investment. And we, we, the benefit of being in business schools, 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, and, And we decided, let's just do one thing at a time because simplification here is paramount. Right. You try to change, 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.

Yeah. But it was conducive to filmmaking because there are so many of these natural, benefits that you can get. Right. Premier, go to the Premier. 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, 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 that process. Yeah, as a matter of fact, we were already trying to network our way to different film conferences, movie festivals, etc., etc. 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 to have momentum. VCs are 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. 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?

It's all relative, but they weren't so high. You guys all pooled money, your own money? Yes, it was all of our own money, yes. How much did you guys have to put in, the three of you, to get this off the ground? 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?

Three years. Three years. Yeah. Let's talk about division of labor. 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 CMO, or not.

not having that discussion. 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. Tlava, you kind of fell into the sales marketing strategy roles, and Eric was the builder. Yeah. And I always tell the story that Eric is the hands, De Neu was the heart, and I was the eyes. And we just all work together because Eric would be the guy who kind of made this stuff.

Dene 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. How did you guys get on in that first year? 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 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? What would you say? And I couldn't answer. Interesting. And I think I go back to that moment because I think I wanted to think of myself. 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 the

what arose in those moments of conflict with Slava. Yeah. Slava you're going to say? 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 right 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 good about answering the question which is i got to come like strong with my answers knowing like the facts and really have done the research as opposed to just like push through nonsense uh which it ended up being great 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 decided to use Sundance as the play. Tell me about this launch strategy you guys came up with. 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 were aligned 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. 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? It was great. We filled the room. It was a pizza parlor. Yeah, we had a party. We, you know, I had guerrilla marketing. We 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 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 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. I mean, I have to imagine that these producers, especially young producers, are like, you guys are going to save this industry. Like, what do you remember, Dene? I remember being very, yes, popular among, the really emerging filmmakers.

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

How many? We had 10. We started with 10. And they were all movies or all of them were films? And the idea was, 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, you don't get the money. If you do raise the goal, you do get the money. Is that how it worked?

Tell me, explain how it worked. That's exactly right, which is 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. And our tagline was DeWo, Do It With Others. Do It With Others. Okay. It launches 10 projects.

What are they raising? How much, on average, what do you guys remember? They were trying to raise like 10K plus minus. Our second film, Tapestries of Hope, raised 25. Got it. Okay. So you guys launch in January of 2008. A couple months later, you got the Bear Stearns thing, some rumblings in the market.

but it's still 2008 and you know. But you have 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 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 raise money and we'll have a high valuation. Well, Q3 turns out to be to coincide with the greatest market crash 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 getting a lot of attention. But now when you go to raise money, what happens? Yeah, I mean, crickets. It was hard for anybody to raise money for anything. We definitely got a lot of nose. Danay, tell me about what you remember about trying to raise money because you were going to these pitches. What were they like? Well, 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 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. But he saw you guys launch this thing. 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?

Yeah. So I just remember getting clarity on do something meaningful. Yeah. And this was meaningful. So Slava, when it became clear to you in the fall of 2008, you were not going to be able to, by the way, how many, do you remember how many VCs you pitched? Yeah, we got 93 nose before we got a yes. Wow.

Wow, wow, wow. That's a lot of nose. That's a lot of pitches. 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 TweetDeco. And people would mention Indiegogo. And somebody would say, for example, I would track how the conversation went.

I was like, hey, do you want to go to this music festival this weekend? They said, no, I can't. Working in my Indiegogo video. What's your Indigo video? Yeah, I'm trying to raise money for my movie. Oh, that's cool. I'll come help. And I remember just thinking 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 sales, 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 they like it. So we have 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. 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. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the fall of 2008, and it seems like nobody wants to invest in Indiegogo. So Slava and Denei are asking themselves, how long can we keep this thing going? When it was clear you were not going to be able to raise money. How much runway did you think you guys?

had before you would run out of money. 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. Poor, I got you. But we did have very frequent conversations like, are we going to keep going or not?

And it was one of those that 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. Do you remember a moment? Because you're, you know, you're now into the getting into 2009 and the economy is getting worse and worse. In 2009, it was just a horrible year, you know. Do either of you remember a moment where you had to decide, let's keep going or let's end this? 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. Danay, do you remember the stress of that period of time creating tension between the co-founders or did it actually bring you guys together? It was not the source of tension, no. I actually think that probably brought us together.

Because you're in a foxhole together. 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. So you didn't feel bad for me. And you saw that. 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.

Yeah. 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 any, anybody, anything. Was that tied to, was that part of the plan initially or was that tied to the economy and just wanting to grow as quickly as possible? 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. Right. 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. Right. Those same VCs later, when we open up to everything, come knocking. And they're like, this is amazing. You're like funding. You're like funding. everything. So it's like fascinating how people's minds work. Yeah. 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. And by the end of 2010 I read you had like, you'd hosted over

10,000 campaigns. And from all over the world, all kinds of campaigns. Here's my question though, right? You're a platform. Anybody could launch a campaign to raise money. But the 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 curate these to make sure we

only get campaigns that were like, you know, 60, 70 percent sure going to work? Otherwise, we're just, we're just platforming these things that are, you know, that we don't benefit from. We believed in Open. You would have kicked me out right then. You'd be like, out the door. philosophically, we couldn't become the gatekeeper. Right. Otherwise, what's the point of all of this? Fair enough. 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 Dena said. 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 raised $5,000, why not let them keep the money and then you guys still get a cut of that? 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 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

to each of the models, both a kind of hit your target and get your money or get your money no matter what. And were you guys, I mean, I know you didn't have like gobs of cash coming in, but were you profitable pretty quickly? Not instantaneously, but by the time we're raising and actually getting everybody to say, yes, we're right there, yeah. You were one of the rare startups that actually had profitability. 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. I mean, it's interesting to me because I think, just sort of from 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, well, how do we know people are really going to want to support these projects? 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 they're going to be in the industry, how much is it 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. Okay, you needed to raise money, presumably, because you needed to hire people, you needed to do marketing. I mean, customer acquisition costs, you know, you were an issue and you want to. wanted to, even though you were getting media attention, you needed money. And 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 raised $15 million. And I have to imagine that was a much different experience than it was in the fall of 2008 and into nine when you're trying to raise money initially.

It was the exact opposite. I was going from all partner meeting to all partner meeting to all partner meeting. You weren't even talking to the junior people who are just there to like filter this through. Exactly. You were talking to the decision makers now. In the same day, most of them will come back with yeses and term sheets, etc. And it was fascinating.

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, any time there was an interesting one, like Deney, there was one, I think, in 2011, help the Haley's have a baby. They basically used the platform to raise money for IVF. Was that funded? Yeah. And the baby was born.

And this was, you guys called this, or it was called the first world's first crowdfunded baby. 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.

So you guys raise this money. And tell me about the 50s, $15 million. What did that enable you to do? I'm assuming hiring, I'm assuming marketing. Tell me a little bit about how you started to use that money. Yeah, we just level up on everything. We, for the first time now, start bringing in experience senior talent. And we started going from that scrappy garage company to being a real company pretty quickly. What roles did you guys take on formally? Slava, what was your role at that point? I'm CEO. Your CEO. Okay. And today? I think I was C-O. That was a hard transition. Why? 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. All three of us as founders are really evolving and having to deal with. with the growth, like DeNay mentioned. So it used to be that the way we dealt with it was we are three equal co-founders. There's nobody else. Right. There's no titles. That's how businesses start.

Right. And we just debate and argue around Dene'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 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. 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? Slava, do you remember why you said that?

I mean, Deney's always been really good at thinking about people. And we potentially would 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 Dena 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 Deney. 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, you know, different things, I wonder, and now you have 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, in trying to raise money to,

there 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. That would be okay, right? 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.

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. Yeah. To now, I want to ask you about 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? 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 moved 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 kindergarten at six. It was a very difficult lifestyle. And I also did feel less impactful. You know, I couldn't, I couldn't read between the tea leaves like I used to. Yeah. And then at the time, I think we also had a CEO change and so it then just felt normal. There was a,

Slava, you became, I think you became, tell me what you transitioned to a different role, right? I went from CEO to chief business officer. So tell me about that decision. Was that something that you wanted, that you prompted? Definitely not. No. 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 crowdfews. funding 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. So they asked, they basically said we want a new CEO. 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 Zuckerberg's. 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 Indigo could be. 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. 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, but it would go on to bring in more money. What was Kickstarter doing right that Indiegogo was not doing? I mean, Kickstarter comes out. They have a good design experience.

They have a curated product, so it's easier to just have up front 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 being able to have that all under one roof. So basically, as this whole industry grew, Indiegogo, you could argue, miss an opportunity to own those verticals and own those spaces.

I mean, I think that's a massive understatement. But it should have owned them. We were in the position to own all of 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. You know, both of you guys leave about 10 years after launch, 2018. He launched in 2008. And that year Indiegogo announced that it had done about a one point, it raised about $1.5 billion for different projects, which is a, you know, 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, it's 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 than the previous valuations. Yeah. 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. 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. 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 Web 3 and crypto, all of these things are ripe for innovation still today. 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 sort of 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? 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. 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.

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 Code Like a Girl, my Code Like a Girl sweatshirt, which is actually a code.org sweatshirt. Which was funded by Indiegogo. which was funded on Indigo 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 legacy in the world

and continue to have its impact. Yeah. I mean, that is probably what I'm most proud of is creating a place for opportunity. And I think back 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 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. That's Indiegogo founders Denei Ringleman and Slava Rubin. Since leaving Indigo, Slava started a venture fund and launched his own podcast. Meanwhile, Denae is still in Norway, where she runs a mountain lodge with her partner. She says it's a pretty popular retreat 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 from some. of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, sign up for my newsletter at guyraz.com or on Substack. This episode was produced by Catherine Sefer with music composed by Ramteen Arablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Chris Messini. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Jimmy Keely. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Andrea Bruce, Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Sam Paulson, Carrie Thompson, Ramele 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 sitting in the corner booth of a hamburger joint in Boston. 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 going to shove this food in my face and be so happy and exhausted. 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 adjunct 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. I was finishing at my PhD in bees. I was thinking, what have I done? 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 to worry about a big problem. 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 kind of. contacted almost daily by libraries and garden clubs, even some businesses. 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? So he started a Facebook page and said, hey, want to help the bees? Put some on your property. I will sell you the hive. And 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? 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 million dollars. I 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. 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 Noah'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, Noah launched a spinoff company called the Biodiversity Lab to 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. That's Noah Wilson Rich, 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.