In Chapter 4 of 13 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, crowdfunding entrepreneur and IndieGoGo CEO Slava Rubin answers "How Has Your Entrepreneurial Experience Helped You Grow as a Person?" Rubin shares the transferability from work to personal life of handling challenging experiences. He notes what he has learned about receiving feedback and improving his listening and communication skills. Slava Rubin returns to CYF for his Year 3 interview. As CEO and Co-Founder, Rubin has helped transform cause and project fundraising by establishing his company IndieGoGo as a global leader in crowdfunding. He is also active in philanthropy, starting the Music Against Myeloma annual charity event to fight cancer. He graduated from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
Transcript:
Erik Michielsen: How has your entrepreneurial experience helped you grow as a person?
Slava Rubin: I think that I’ve definitely learned a lot of the ups and downs in entrepreneurial life and that’s really helped in my day to day life. I think it’s also helped in terms of managing challenges -- challenging experiences and there’s no question the challenge and the experience of helping to lead a team, hiring people and helping to try to create a culture is really important as I walk through my day to day experience.
Erik Michielsen: And what’s a good example?
Slava Rubin: A good example is sometimes I would think that my way of speaking is always the right way and I would just talk to somebody on the subway or talk to somebody, have some dinner conversation the way I think is right and before you knew it they thought, you know, maybe negative of me. When I heard two weeks later that they thought, wow, he wasn’t really a good listener or a good communicator and I think I'm learning a lot of that through working with my teammates.