93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever
with Danae Ringelmann and Slava Rubin
Executive Summary
Danae Ringelmann and Slava Rubin recount founding Indiegogo with Eric Schell, early film projects, repeated funding rejection and a move to broader crowdfunding. They describe the platform’s growth, fraud and governance challenges, then their departures and later acquisition news as it stood at recording. Their family histories explain motivations without becoming health advice. Criticism of the board’s choices is their perspective, not an adjudicated cause of later performance. Platform, funding and acquisition figures remain historical interview claims.
Key Takeaways
Takeaway 1
The mission came from scar tissue. Slava's father died of multiple myeloma when Slava was 15; the family's lack of financial cushions shaped his view of access to capital. Danae's parents' moving business went bankrupt in a recession, and she watched investors take her father's energy-efficiency idea and run with it without him.
Takeaway 2
The founding insight was a merge of two frustrations: Danae's democratic-investing fund idea (Berkeley MBA, 2006) and Slava's blunt question - 'if you want to change finance, you can't do it in the finance world' - pointing her to the internet. Eric Schell introduced them and became the technical co-founder.
Takeaway 3
The founders describe using non-financial perks when their original investment idea faced legal constraints. This is their historical account, not a complete statement of securities law or evidence that rewards crowdfunding avoids consumer, tax, financial or fulfillment obligations.
Takeaway 4
They launched at Sundance in January 2008 with guerrilla marketing: a pizza-parlor party, scarves, and 'GoGo bucks' cards worth $5 to $500 (every card held $5 except one). Ten film projects, all-or-nothing funding, tagline 'DIWO - do it with others.' Second film, Tapestries of Hope, raised $25K.
Takeaway 5
The 2008 crash killed their raise-momentum-then-raise plan. Ninety-three VC rejections followed; Danae's father died weeks after the crash and she stepped back while Slava and Eric carried the company. They survived three-plus years on savings and frugality, with an explicit 'last stand' in mid-2009: commit to sales, upgrade the design, and shut down if it failed.
Takeaway 6
Opening the platform from film to everything was always the plan (the Amazon books-first playbook) and produced near-immediate hockey-stick growth: 10,000+ campaigns by end of 2010. Staying 'open' was philosophical - 'we couldn't become the gatekeeper' - and the harder early problem turned out to be fraud, not offensive campaigns.
Takeaway 7
Scaling strained the founding trio: titles (Slava CEO, Danae COO), structured values and culture work Danae championed, then a board debate Slava lost - he moved from CEO to chief business officer, Danae stepped down in 2018 after moving to Norway, and Eric left in May 2019. Slava's view, stated on the episode: take founders out too early and you handicap the company. In 2025 Indiegogo was acquired by Gamefound, backed by Ravensburger.
The Conversation Breakdown
Slava: loss and the first fundraiser
The episode recounts: Born in the Soviet Union, raised in Pennsylvania; his father's cancer was discovered after a basketball dive revealed a vertebrae fracture. As a teen Slava managed the morphine drip at home; the family had no financial cushions. Later, in a 'bottles and models' New York finance life, he founded Music Against Myeloma with the International Myeloma Foundation to raise research money through concerts - painful MySpace/PayPal-era fundraising that seeded the idea.
Danae: bankruptcy, JP Morgan and the begging producer
The episode recounts: Running crews in her dad's San Francisco moving business in high school; the business's bankruptcy and her mother's insistence that the buyer keep loyal employees. At JP Morgan, a 'where Hollywood meets Wall Street' mixer made a 22-year-old analyst the belle of the ball for the wrong reason; a veteran producer FedExed a script begging for funding. She helped stage a concert reading of his Arthur Miller play - standing ovation, zero investment - and the inequity 'drove me to eventually start Indiegogo.'
Three founders and the perks compromise
The episode recounts: Berkeley, fall 2006: Eric Schell introduces Danae and Slava; the 'number one or number two person' question Eric posed to Danae; SEC dead-ends on equity crowdfunding lead to the perks model; roles fall out as 'Eric is the hands, Danae was the heart, and I was the eyes' (Slava). Personality clashes between direct Slava and questioning Danae sharpen the thinking.
Sundance launch
The episode recounts: January 2008: a pizza-parlor party, GoGo bucks scarves, 10 film campaigns averaging around $10K, all-or-nothing funding rules, and established filmmakers 'turning their noses' while emerging ones embraced it. Early investor offers are turned down for low valuations; the plan is launch Q1, momentum Q2, raise Q3 2008.
The crash, 93 no's and the last stand
The episode recounts: Q3 2008 brings the market crash and crickets. Slava absorbs 93 rejections while tracking strangers on Twitter whose weekends changed because of Indiegogo. Danae's father dies; the founders live frugally, debate quarterly whether to continue, and make a mid-2009 'last stand' - sales and a design upgrade. In 2009 they open the platform to all categories and growth hockey-sticks; the 'Help the Haleys have a baby' IVF campaign becomes the 'world's first crowdfunded baby.'
Funding and professionalization
The episode recounts: September 2011: $1.5M first round; 2012: $15M Series A, with all-partner meetings and same-day term sheets replacing the 93 no's. Senior hires arrive; titles and reporting lines replace three-equal-founders; Danae builds structured hiring around what drives people; the values-drawing exercise Slava thought was a waste proves its worth; open-platform guardrails stay minimal (no hate, no harm) while fraud becomes the real fight.
Exits, Kickstarter and what could have been
The episode recounts: Slava loses a board debate over consolidating all crowdfunding verticals under one roof ('the Airbnb of crowdfunding') and is moved from CEO to chief business officer; Danae steps down in 2018 from Norway; Eric leaves May 2019. Kickstarter wins with curation and design while Indiegogo, in Slava's view, over-weighted unit economics. 2018: about $1.5B raised on the platform. 2025: acquired by Gamefound (Ravensburger-backed). Slava is now a VC; Danae runs a Norwegian mountain lodge popular with burnt-out tech executives. The code.org sweatshirt on Slava's back - a company that started on Indiegogo - is the legacy in one scene.
Core Frameworks & Ideas
DIWO (do it with others)
The original Indiegogo tagline and operating idea: funding as a group act, where 100 supporters of a small project deserve the same shot as a blockbuster.
Perks instead of equity
Historical mechanism, not a legal workaround: non-financial rewards supported early campaigns in their account. A new platform or offer still needs qualified review of securities, consumer, tax, payment, refunds and delivery obligations.
Hands, heart, eyes
Slava's framing of the founding trio's division of labor: Eric the builder (hands), Danae the operator and culture keeper (heart), Slava the forward-looking seller (eyes).
No meter, no runway
Editorial synthesis: make personal and business runway visible even without outside funding. Savings, debt, time and household obligations are finite; the metaphor is not permission to keep spending until resolve runs out.
Actionable Next Steps
- ✓If your wedge market is a beachhead (film, for Indiegogo), say so explicitly when fundraising - VCs rejected them as 'a film platform' for years, then called them amazing once the platform visibly funded everything.
- ✓When investors won't engage, instrument the customer signal directly: Slava watched TweetDeck for unprompted mentions and used those as the evidence to keep going.
- ✓Decide early whether you are an open platform or a curator - the choice is philosophical and hard to reverse; Indiegogo's openness attracted both the climate-denial campaign controversy and the fraud problem it actually had to fight.
- ✓Write the 'keep going or shut down' conversation into the calendar during survival phases; Indiegogo's founders admit they kept deferring it, which prolonged the pain without deciding anything.
- ✓Treat values and culture work as operating infrastructure before the first senior hires arrive, not after - Danae's 'cliché' culture exercises were what Slava later called people back from leave to restore.
Notable Quotes
“we got 93 no's before we got a yes”
“if you want to change finance, you can't do it in the finance world”
“Danae was the heart, and I was the eyes”
“Philosophically, we couldn't become the gatekeeper”
“But if you have no meter, nothing gets to go down.”
“I really believe that preparation plus opportunity equals luck.”
“I think the word cute was used way more than once”
The One Thing to Remember
Ninety-three no's only became a footnote because strangers kept proving the idea worked - Slava tracked people on Twitter planning their weekends around their Indiegogo videos and decided customer pull beat investor rejection.