In Chapter 15 of 16 in his 2010 Capture Your Flag interview, Music for Myeloma cancer charity founder Slava Rubin answers "How Has Your Experience With Indiegogo Strengthened Your Philanthropic Efforts Building Your Charity Music Against Myeloma?" Rubin shares how lessons learned as an entrepreneur starting IndieGoGo have helped overcome challenge building his non-profit. Specifically, his entrepreneurial experience allows him to deal with teammates, partners, and crisis management.
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: How has your experience with Indiegogo strengthened your philanthropic efforts, building your charity Music Against Myeloma?
Slava Rubin: When I first started Music Again Myeloma, which goes back probably four or five years, I had no idea what I was doing. I definitely not an entrepreneur, I was working in the Fortune 500 world as a strategy consultant. It definitely was a big initiative to start Music Against Myeloma, it took a lot of risk, but I really didn't have an idea about how to turn nothing into something and having the experience with Music Against Myeloma helped me start Indiegogo but now all my experience with Indiegogo really gives me an understanding of how to deal with major issues, how to deal with teammates and partners and really what`s an important crisis versus what`s a small crisis. We actually had a huge crisis last year. We use to go to The Cutting Room, which was a really cool venue in the Flatiron district in Manhattan and literally one month before the show they were like, ``Oh, by the way we`re closing down.`` So we had to totally find a new venue. So that’s a big crisis. It ended up working out okay and we had a really great event last year, but that`s a fairly big crisis. If I didn't have some of the experience from Indiegogo from previous years, I might have folded up shop and said it wasn't going to happen. But we worked through it, and I say we because I had a good team working with me, and it worked out okay.