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Slava Rubin

Founder & Managing Partner, humbition · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderinvestorexecutivehost@gogoslava ↗indiegogo.com ↗

Slava Rubin co-founded the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo in 2008 and served as its CEO for over a decade. He is currently the founder and managing partner of the early-stage operator fund humbition.

11statements → 2claims → 0claims resolved → 4.09/5average certainty → 2.18/5average debate potential → 2said about them ↓

2 not checkable as stated how the 2 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 assertions · 3 opinions · 3 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Slava argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Slava Rubin on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

Everything Slava Rubin said on How I Built This that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Disclosure
Rubin: Indiegogo board replaced him as CEO after growth debate
“Definitely not. No, I mean, that was me having a debate with the board as to how we needed to grow. I really wanted to create a massive company, and I really thought we had the opportunity to create the Airbnb of crowdfunding, because it should all be consolid…”
Slava Rubin Dec 15, 2025 ▶ 55:07 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever
Insight
Rubin: Replacing founders too early handicaps a company's potential
“If you take out a founder too early, I do think you handicap the potential of the future of that company. And I think you see that with some of the results of Indiegogo.”
Slava Rubin Dec 15, 2025 ▶ 55:37 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever
Opinion
Rubin: Indiegogo missed owning crowdfunding by obsessing over unit economics
“We were in the position to own all of them, and, you know, we decided that we had to think too much about unit economics and profitability, and I think that's a shame.”
Slava Rubin Dec 15, 2025 ▶ 57:35 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever
Insight
Slava Rubin: Disrupting finance cannot be done from within traditional finance
“If you want to change finance, you can't do it in the finance world.”
Slava Rubin Dec 15, 2025 ▶ 17:18 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever
Opinion
Slava Rubin: Most VCs avoid risk and only want de-risked upside
“Most VCs don't actually want to do risky things. They want everything de-risked. And then they just wanted to invest on the upside.”
Slava Rubin Dec 15, 2025 ▶ 45:44 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever
Opinion
Rubin: Kickstarter did not scale as rapidly as it could have
“Kickstarter comes out, they have a good design experience, they have a curated product, so it's easier to just have upfront positive stories, but they definitely don't scale as rapidly as they could either.”
Slava Rubin Dec 15, 2025 ▶ 56:52 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Rubin: Indiegogo received 93 investor rejections before first check
“Yeah, we got 93 no's before we got a yes.”
Slava Rubin Dec 15, 2025 ▶ 35:52 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever
Insight
Rubin: Bootstrapped founders have no runway except willingness to push
“The way people think about running out of gas is they actually look at their gas tank and they actually look at the meter go down. So eventually the meter is at zero. So they now have no gas, but if you have no meter, nothing gets to go down. You only get to d…”
Slava Rubin Dec 15, 2025 ▶ 38:18 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever
Disclosure
Rubin: Indiegogo always planned expanding beyond film, copying Amazon playbook
“Since day one, the idea was to democratize it for all funding ideas. We just started with film because trying to take a, you know, page out of the playbook of Amazon, you know, starting with books only and then expanding to other stuff.”
Slava Rubin Dec 15, 2025 ▶ 41:05 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Rubin: Most Series A partner meetings resulted in same-day term sheets
“In the same day, most of them will come back with yeses and term sheets, et cetera.”
Slava Rubin Dec 15, 2025 ▶ 46:41 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever
Disclosure
Indiegogo turned down early pre-launch investment offers at low valuations
“We got offered some money and we turned it down. We were like, we don't need your money at a low valuation.”
Slava Rubin Dec 15, 2025 ▶ 26:05 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever

The other half of the tape: Slava Rubin's own voice is left out of every number here. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →

Statements about Slava Rubin, by other people (2)

Disclosure
Indiegogo co-founders each committed $30,000 of their own money to launch
“I remember each of us committing 30,000 dollars of our own money, which was a big chunk of our savings, or at least for me.”
Danae Ringelman Dec 15, 2025 ▶ 27:03 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever
Assertion Supported
Indiegogo operated without raising outside funding for three years
“We actually didn't raise a dime for, was it four years? Three years.”
Danae Ringelman Dec 15, 2025 ▶ 27:14 93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
93 Rejections, One Revolution: How Indiegogo Changed Crowdfunding Forever Dec 15, 2025 19m
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