In Chapter 5 of 16 in his 2010 Capture Your Flag interview, IndieGoGo co-founder Slava Rubin answers "What Has the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of California at Berkeley Done to Help Launch Indiegogo?" Rubin shars how the University of California Berkeley Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation provided early-stage support launching his company with Haas School of Business student co-founders Danae Ringelmann and Eric Schell.
Slava Rubin is CEO and co-founder of Indiegogo, the world's largest crowdfunding platform. Indiegogo empowers anyone, anywhere, anytime to raise funds for any idea—creative, cause-related or entrepreneurial. Prior to Indiegogo, Rubin worked as a management consultant. He earned his BSE degree from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Transcript:
Erik Michielsen: What has the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of California Berkley done to help launch Indiegogo?
Slava Rubin: It`s really amazing. Most people don`t know but some of these schools how they help with entrepreneurialism and I must say I was shocked to see how much Berkley did to help entrepreneurs. The Lester Center is just a testament to that because they have their own incubator where they help bring up and support these different startups with office space or different resources, which we were lucky enough to be able to get. As well as, besides the Lester Center, the whole community, there were different classes we where we were able to leverage the professors or the student body to be able to do different market research or testing or bouncing off different ideas. The amazing thing is that Indiegogo was one of many different ideas that came out of Berkley in that year for graduating in 2009 and some of them are quite successful in the last few of years as well.