In Chapter 2 of 16 in his 2010 Capture Your Flag interview, IndieGoGo co-founder Slava Rubin answers "How is Your Company Indiegogo Helping Filmmakers Complete Film Festival Caliber Projects, such as the Sundance Grand Jury Prize Documentary Feature "We Live in Public", Presented in 2009"? Rubin shares how Sundance award-winning films "Dig!" and "We Live in Public" are two of many efforts utilizing IndieGoGo to connect content to audience. Rubin shares the democratic vision behind building the fundraising and promotion tools for media makers to complete projects and why Robert Redford showed up to speak at the company's one-year anniversary celebration at Sundance 2009.
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 company, Indiegogo, helping filmmakers complete film festival caliber projects, such as the Sundance Grand Jury Prize documentary feature ``We Live in Public``, presented in 2009?
Slava Rubin: We were pretty excited to have ``We Live in Public`` we also had ``Dig`` in 2009 we also had other award winners at SXSW the previous year as well. They won the awards after they were associated with Indiegogo. Some of them use it for raising money, some of them have been using for just promotion. It`s greats to have these blue chip projects associated with Indiegogo, but really it`s about having anybody using Indiegogo, whether you’re a Hollywood studio or whether you`re one of the top independent producers, like we have some of them here in New York, or whether you`re a high school trying to make your first film. It`s a democratic process and it should be because if you can cultivate your audience, you deserve to get it made. The idea is that never before in life have you been able to be so connected to your audience. It use to be that there were all these middle men, and the middle men really they took away part of the profit, but they also took away control and they also separated you from your audience, and at the end of the day the most powerful thing is content connecting with audience. On indiegogo, that`s exactly what you can do and you can mobilize that fan base, that audience, that collective for different action. That action could be to do something, to demand something or to contribute money and Indiegogo allows you to do any of those things.
Erik Michielsen: So, last year at the Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford can to one of your events and spoke specifically about on what you were doing. What have your learned from that experience and how has that propelled your vision?
Slava Rubin: Well, it was definitely a big surprise, I can`t say it was all planned to have the founder of Sundance, Robert Redford, to show up, but you know we just started Indiegogo actually just less than two years ago and on our one year anniversary he was able to come by. I think it was just a testament to us having good projects associated with our party, us having a pretty innovative spirit, and trying to advance the film and media community forward using some digital tools.