How I Built This with Guy Raz
93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever
15 Dec 2025
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What personal experiences influenced the founders' journey?
Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to how I built this early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. How much did you guys have to put in, the three of you, to get this off the ground? I remember, do you remember this, Slava? I remember each of us committing $30,000, which was a big chunk of our savings.
Yeah, we got offered some money and we turned it down. We were like, we don't need your money at a low valuation. We had this genius idea. In Q1, we were going to launch. By Q2, we were going to have momentum. And then we were going to raise money in Q3 2008. The market crash happened in 2008. And that idea went right out the window.
Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how three founders came together to build Indiegogo, a platform where people can fund movies, music, games, devices, even a new baby. Crowdfunding art or public projects isn't new.
It dates back to at least the 1880s when tens of thousands of New Yorkers donated money to build the pedestal of a Statue of Liberty. But a little more than 100 years later, the internet made crowdfunding way more efficient and way faster. And around 2008, when the global financial crisis made traditional funding almost impossible, the idea suddenly felt urgent.
Crowdfunding went from a fringe idea to an enterprise approaching a billion dollars by 2010, growing so quickly that some analysts predicted it might one day rival venture capital. Now, before Kickstarter or Patreon or GoFundMe, there was Indiegogo, one of the first platforms to ask a radical question.
What if anyone, anywhere, could raise money for anything, as long as it stayed within a few basic guardrails? The idea for Indiegogo came from frustration from three co-founders who each knew what it felt like to hear the word no one too many times. Their early years building Indiegogo were full of the things you might expect in a story like this.
Mismatched personalities, big debates and even some fights, more than 90 investor rejections, and many moments when the founders nearly shut the whole thing down. But the founders, Slava Rubin, Denae Ringelmann, and Eric Schell, weren't just building a platform.
They wanted to build something that would hand power back to the crowd and take power away from the gatekeepers, from the people who decided which ideas deserve to exist. In today's story, you'll hear from Dene and Slava. And long before they met, both had been thinking of ways to make it easier for people without connections to get access to capital.
Slava was born in the former Soviet Union and immigrated to the U.S. with his family when he was a baby. He grew up in the 80s and 90s in Pennsylvania. And when he was just 15 years old, his dad died of cancer. And Slava remembers the exact moment three years earlier when the cancer was discovered. We were playing basketball together.
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Chapter 2: How did the 2008 financial crisis impact Indiegogo's launch?
He dove for the ball. He hurt his back. He was very athletic, very athletic. And he shouldn't hurt his back when he dives for the ball. So he had to go to the hospital.
Chapter 3: How did Indiegogo pivot to support various types of projects?
He found out that he had a vertebrae fracture, which was really weird. They did some more tests, and they found out that he had multiple myeloma, which is bone marrow cancer, which is what affected that.
Chapter 4: What challenges did the founders face during the early days?
Wow. So after he passed, at that point, it's you, your brother and your mom. And tell me about, I mean, I can't even imagine being 15 and going through that. How did it affect your, I mean, aside from just the devastating personal loss, what did it mean for everything else? Because of your dad's, you know, passing, your family's financial situation was in was massively affected in peril. Yeah.
It was challenging to deal with my dad getting cancer.
Chapter 5: How did the founders handle conflict and roles within the team?
His first year was pretty bad. His second year was really bad. And the third year was absolutely terrible. Specifically, I'd be at home by myself having to make sure that I properly deploy the morphine drip for any of his pain. So all of that sucked. It really put perspective into all of it.
um because my dad's passing and because we you know didn't really have a good let's call it insurance and financial setup like good people who've been in america for a long time and know how to have all those uh cushions and parachutes set up we didn't have any of that so i went to the local public school i was actually the only jew at the local public school was uh it was its own experience but
There's lots of nice people in the world, and there are some people that are less nice, and I got to interact with all of them. So when you started college, I know you stayed in the area and went to Penn. You studied finance, and I think you went to Morton as an undergraduate.
Chapter 6: What strategies did Indiegogo use to attract early users?
Did you intend to – was it your sort of idea that, okay, I'm going to go to New York and go to Wall Street and – get into finance? Yeah, of course. Because in the 80s, you grow up, finance is the way to become wealthy and become important and all that good stuff. I'm an 80s kid. I did study finance and entrepreneurial management.
I was actually entrepreneurial even when I was a kid with sports cards. So I did get the finance degree major, but never actually practiced finance formally as an investment banker. And one of the things that I read about is that you started a nonprofit to raise money for, I guess, research and how to battle myeloma. It was called Music Against Myeloma.
Chapter 7: What lessons did Indiegogo learn from its competition?
And tell me what that was. You had like concerts and would raise money for it? Yeah, so I was living in New York. I would kind of argue I was living the dream. Or as the kids say, you know, bottles and models. You know, it was all fun, very easy. I made way too much money for being really young. And I should have been really happy, but I wasn't really that happy.
And I had to kind of do some soul searching to understand why I wasn't happy. And I think the main reason is I was never able to talk about my dad.
Chapter 8: What is the legacy of Indiegogo in the crowdfunding space?
Yeah. You know, since my dad died, no one would ever bring it up. I would never bring it up. People didn't know if he was in jail. They were divorced. Like, who knows if he's alive or dead? It wasn't a topic I would discuss. So I just thought to myself, like, I need to deal with this. And the only way to deal with it is head on. And that was a catalyst of me.
Then I partnered with the IMF, which is the International Myeloma Foundation, not the monetary foundation. And, yeah, we partnered and started doing all these different concerts and different fundraisers to raise a bunch of money for myeloma research. Wow. Wow. All right, Slava, I want to pause for a second and turn to Denae and ask you a few questions.
I know, Denae, you grew up in San Francisco. And when you were, I think, still like a teenager, you worked for your dad, right, who I think had like a moving business of some sort? Yeah. Yeah. So it was brick and mortar, hard work, heavy labor. It was my first job. He would put me in charge of crews in high school, mostly men on the crews, mostly men who had lived pretty hard lives.
Made some bad decisions, but this was the work that they could get. And It was an opportunity for me to lead a group of people that maybe I was a little bit more uncomfortable leading, but do it in an empathic way. So that was my first job. From what I gather, I know you went to college at UNC in Chapel Hill.
And initially, I guess you studied pre-med, and that didn't work out, obviously, because you're not a doctor. You decided not to do that. Mm-hmm. But I guess while you were in college, your parents' business basically went belly up. Tell me what happened. The moving business went bankrupt. I mean, it's as simple as that. There was a recession.
My dad couldn't get jobs, and they couldn't pay the bills. And they had to refinance their house. They had already done that a few times. So they had to just reorg and build back slowly and not get any credit, not get any help. Through it all, they did not fire their most loyal people.
And I think in the end, after my father actually passed away, the one thing my mother wanted to make sure of is when we sold the business, she actually didn't care about the price tag. She just cared that the the company that bought it would keep her employees that had been loyal to her for 30 years. So that was a lesson to me personally about values and principles. Yeah.
I guess one of the things that you took away from your parents' experience is that being financially secure or at least making money became important to you. You decided to take a job in finance at J.P. Morgan in New York after you graduated. And I guess somehow you got involved in a part of the finance world that was investing in movies. Like, how did that happen?
I started off in the media and entertainment group and the sports group. And so that kind of gave me a purview into the world of movies and film from a business perspective. I mean, I'd always gone to movies as a kid, but I never actually thought about movies. the business behind it, and somehow discovered or got invited to this event called Where Hollywood Meets Wall Street.
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