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The Slava Rubin Interview:

Turning Loss and Emotional Honesty into a Business Homerun

 

Slava Rubin is the co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Indiegogo, one of the largest crowdfunding platforms in the world with 15 million monthly website visitors from 223 different countries. Having started the company just before the 2008 economic crash, he has the hands-on experience needed to inspire entrepreneurs during their uphill climbs.

 

Like many of us, Slava’s journey has been marked by personal suffering and business frustrations. After years of trying to swallow the grief of his dad passing away, Slava decided to take action for cancer research. What came next was a deep bonding experience and the discovery of a world-changing business idea.

 

From this conversation with Slava, you’ll learn how to turn setbacks and “lean” times into opportunities, why you should focus on where the wind is going, and the importance of prioritizing people over PowerPoint.

 

“Life in New York City as a consultant was pretty good, but I didn’t feel like I was accomplishing much positive in the world. I wanted to finally be able to talk about my dad passing away, and turn a negative into a positive. This led to a friend and I creating a charity for cancer research.”

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Notable Revelations in the Interview

 

“My dad had cancer for three years and when I was 15 he passed away. It was Multiple Myeloma, a bone cancer.”

 

“We’re eastern Europeans from Belarus, and you don’t show your emotions too much. So we hunkered down and did our work. I focused a lot on sports and channeling my energy there.”

 

“After college, I was a consultant in New York City making more money than a young person should be making. Life was pretty good but I didn’t feel like I was accomplishing much positive in the world. My new year’s resolution was to start talking about my dad passing away. I tried to turn a negative into a positive, so a friend and I created a charity called Music Against Myeloma that raised money for cancer research. It was great because it was a vehicle by which I was able to face reality and persevere forward. And I learned how many other people had to deal with it too -- it was a real bonding experience.”

“In 2005, my cofounders -- Danae and Eric -- and I shared our experiences of trying to raise money for our respective things. We said it’s really hard to raise money using the Internet, why can’t we create a platform where anybody can raise money for any idea. So we created and launched Indiegogo in January 2008.”

 

“After the market crashed in 2008, we bootstrapped as we went along, which lasted two years. We kept trying to do our work, get more customers, get more traction and results.”

 

“Yes, we were rejected by 93 venture capitalists. But I always try to feel where the wind is going. The wind always felt like it was behind us as opposed to in our face. The momentum, trends, and industry were all going in the right direction, we just hadn’t nailed it. We just kept keeping on and finally hit a lot of momentum.”

 

“The market crash was able to level-set everything because there wasn’t free money floating around. We didn’t hire many people and we kept ourselves lean. We evolved the product and expanded to many verticals. We tried to be hands-on with sales instead of hoping things would just come to us. We learned a lot more from the feedback and analyzed every piece of data.”

“Not only did I not make money for the first three years, I was paying my money to work day to day. Was I ever in doubt? There were definitely days when I wondered if it was going as well as it should be, but my co-founders and I thought there was momentum and so we kept moving forward one day at a time.”

 

“With Obama’s signature of the JOBS Act, we now get to experiment with equity crowdfunding. This gets us back to our roots: we’ve always wanted to allow anyone in the world to invest in any idea, whether it’s with someone they know or don’t know.”

 

“There are always ups and downs to the roller coaster of being an entrepreneur. If you’re involved to become famous or rich or to get an awesome result, you’re going to get disappointed. Because it’s really the journey that’s the exciting part: having to figure out solutions, being creative, and problem-solving. It’s important to persevere, to be persistent.

Do it for passion. When you wake up in the morning you’re excited to do this work, whether it’s hard or easy, it makes you happy to face these challenges. If that’s not the reason why you’re starting a business, then when you face some challenges and it’s hard, you’ll think it’s not worth it -- you’re not getting rich enough fast enough, you’re not becoming famous enough fast enough.”

 

“I believe that to be a good leader it’s important to have as much exposure to various people as possible as opposed to getting stuck in your computer or work, like your PowerPoints, Excel documents, email, etc. The most valuable things you can get are customer feedback, employee engagement, partner discussions...so really interacting face to face and learning directly from them, there are some incredible nuggets you can get out of that. I don’t sit at a physical desk, I mostly use my phone. I find that I can get the best results by interacting with various people.”

“Over the years of being rejected by 93 venture capitalists, I was always trying to feel where the wind was going. It felt like it was behind us as opposed to in our face; we just hadn’t nailed it yet. But we knew we needed to keep moving forward, one day at a time.”

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The Slava Rubin Interview:

Turning Loss and Emotional Honesty into a Business Homerun

 

Slava Rubin is the co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Indiegogo, one of the largest crowdfunding platforms in the world with 15 million monthly website visitors from 223 different countries. Having started the company just before the 2008 economic crash, he has the hands-on experience needed to inspire entrepreneurs during their uphill climbs.

 

Like many of us, Slava’s journey has been marked by personal suffering and business frustrations. After years of trying to swallow the grief of his dad passing away, Slava decided to take action for cancer research. What came next was a deep bonding experience and the discovery of a world-changing business idea.

 

From this conversation with Slava, you’ll learn how to turn setbacks and “lean” times into opportunities, why you should focus on where the wind is going, and the importance of prioritizing people over PowerPoint.

“Life in New York City as a consultant was pretty good, but I didn’t feel like I was accomplishing much positive in the world. I wanted to finally be able to talk about my dad passing away, and turn a negative into a positive. This led to a friend and I creating a charity for cancer research.”

Notable Revelations in the Interview

 

“My dad had cancer for three years and when I was 15 he passed away. It was Multiple Myeloma, a bone cancer.”

 

“We’re eastern Europeans from Belarus, and you don’t show your emotions too much. So we hunkered down and did our work. I focused a lot on sports and channeling my energy there.”

 

“After college, I was a consultant in New York City making more money than a young person should be making. Life was pretty good but I didn’t feel like I was accomplishing much positive in the world. My new year’s resolution was to start talking about my dad passing away. I tried to turn a negative into a positive, so a friend and I created a charity called Music Against Myeloma that raised money for cancer research. It was great because it was a vehicle by which I was able to face reality and persevere forward. And I learned how many other people had to deal with it too -- it was a real bonding experience.”

“In 2005, my cofounders -- Danae and Eric -- and I shared our experiences of trying to raise money for our respective things. We said it’s really hard to raise money using the Internet, why can’t we create a platform where anybody can raise money for any idea. So we created and launched Indiegogo in January 2008.”

 

“After the market crashed in 2008, we bootstrapped as we went along, which lasted two years. We kept trying to do our work, get more customers, get more traction and results.”

 

“Yes, we were rejected by 93 venture capitalists. But I always try to feel where the wind is going. The wind always felt like it was behind us as opposed to in our face. The momentum, trends, and industry were all going in the right direction, we just hadn’t nailed it. We just kept keeping on and finally hit a lot of momentum.”

 

“The market crash was able to level-set everything because there wasn’t free money floating around. We didn’t hire many people and we kept ourselves lean. We evolved the product and expanded to many verticals. We tried to be hands-on with sales instead of hoping things would just come to us. We learned a lot more from the feedback and analyzed every piece of data.”

 

“Not only did I not make money for the first three years, I was paying my money to work day to day. Was I ever in doubt? There were definitely days when I wondered if it was going as well as it should be, but my co-founders and I thought there was momentum and so we kept moving forward one day at a time.”

 

“With Obama’s signature of the JOBS Act, we now get to experiment with equity crowdfunding. This gets us back to our roots: we’ve always wanted to allow anyone in the world to invest in any idea, whether it’s with someone they know or don’t know.”

 

“There are always ups and downs to the roller coaster of being an entrepreneur. If you’re involved to become famous or rich or to get an awesome result, you’re going to get disappointed. Because it’s really the journey that’s the exciting part: having to figure out solutions, being creative, and problem-solving. It’s important to persevere, to be persistent.

Do it for passion. When you wake up in the morning you’re excited to do this work, whether it’s hard or easy, it makes you happy to face these challenges. If that’s not the reason why you’re starting a business, then when you face some challenges and it’s hard, you’ll think it’s not worth it -- you’re not getting rich enough fast enough, you’re not becoming famous enough fast enough.”

 

“I believe that to be a good leader it’s important to have as much exposure to various people as possible as opposed to getting stuck in your computer or work, like your PowerPoints, Excel documents, email, etc. The most valuable things you can get are customer feedback, employee engagement, partner discussions...so really interacting face to face and learning directly from them, there are some incredible nuggets you can get out of that. I don’t sit at a physical desk, I mostly use my phone. I find that I can get the best results by interacting with various people.”

“Over the years of being rejected by 93 venture capitalists, I was always trying to feel where the wind was going. It felt like it was behind us as opposed to in our face; we just hadn’t nailed it yet. But we knew we needed to keep moving forward, one day
at a time.”

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