In Chapter 2 of 12 in his 2011 Capture Your Flag interview with host Erik Michielsen, IndieGoGo co-founder and entrepreneur Slava Rubin answers "Since We Last Spoke a Year Ago, What Has Been the Most Exciting Thing to Happen in Your Life?" Rubin points to the growth of his company, IndieGoGo, and is now used in over 158 countries by 22,000 users. He notes how four films featured at South By Southwest 2011 were crowd financed on IndieGoGo and how media exposure, including Good Morning America, continues to spread the company's project crowdfunding message. Rubin is co-founder and CEO of IndieGoGo.com, a crowdfunding startup whose platform helps individuals and groups finance their passions. Before IndieGoGo, Rubin worked in management consulting for Diamond Consulting, now a PWC company. Rubin founded and manages non-profit Music Against Myeloma to raise funds and awareness to fight cancer. He earned a BBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Transcript:
Erik: Since we last spoke a year ago, what’s been the most exciting thing that happened in your life?
Slava Rubin: Well, I mean IndieGoGo is doing well. It’s really about scaling the business and growing. I mean, now IndieGoGo has over 22,000 campaigns in 159 countries. There is millions of dollars that are being distributed, millions of page views every month. Since we last talked, we’ve been – you know, even in the last few weeks, we’ve been on Good Morning, America, or the New York Times, or Channel 7 News in New York. And we opened up where really anybody can create a campaign to absolutely anything, and just the excitement of the team as we’re hiring folks, and everybody being so excited to be a part of IndieGoGo, and making people’s dreams of raising money possible.
Erik Michielsen: What feeling do you get when you think about, you know, what type of projects are being built, and what effect it’s having on communities, on people’s lives?
Slava Rubin: I mean it’s amazing. We’re here at South-by, right? And there’s only a certain number of South-by movies that get in and there’s only a certain of South-by music that gets in. At IndieGoGo, we’ve had four films that got in, got funded through IndieGoGo, and musicians that got funded through IndieGoGo. We have people road-tripping to South-by, by funding they get through IndieGoGo. So just to know that there are all these tens of thousands of people here at South-by and a number of them all facilitated their dreams to get here through IndieGoGo, it’s just really quite incredible. And you were at the IndieGoGo party, and that was – that was fun too.