Danae Ringelmann at Startup School SV 2014

First of all, this is totally awesome. Um, I want everybody to actually take a minute, a moment of silence, and appreciate the fact that you're here. Um, and appreciate the fact that your whole life has been leading to this point. You might all be thinking that I'm about to embark on this journey of startup Ville and Entrepreneurship, but there's a reason you're sitting in this room and your story has already started.

So I'm going to share my story with you and what I hope you realize is that, um, there's bigger meaning behind you just wanting to learn a couple tips and tricks of how to be a great entrepreneur. There's a bigger mission behind all of that in you, and I hope you all take a moment after today to think through that and appreciate that it's already there.

So I'm going to talk today about building what matters. Um, I'm one of the founders of Indiegogo. My journey started pretty much when I was a kid, and I'll talk about that in a second. Um, but we launched Indiegogo back in January of 2008, my two co-founders and I, and today we're now the largest global online funding platform in the world helping entrepreneurs, artists, causes, activists, you name it; you want to raise money for it, people are using it in every country, um, every industry to go after their dreams and make it happen.

Um, but like I said, my story didn't start in January 2008 when I decided to start a company. My story started actually when I was a kid, um, which is why I want you guys all to reflect on your own stories and where you've come from and why you're sitting here today. Um, I was the daughter of two small business owners in San Francisco. Uh, they were running a brick and mortar business, and for 30 years they struggled, uh, because they could never get an outside loan. They could never get access to capital; no one would actually give them a loan from a bank or whatever to help grow their business.

And so they technically bootstrapped for 30 years, which sounds like hell, um, in the venture capital world, but that's what they did. And their story is like every other small business owner out there trying to make it happen every day. But in watching them persevere and figure it out and, you know, cut their salaries when the economy crashed and September 11th happened, all that kind of stuff, watching all that, I actually grew very aware of a very big problem, and that problem was access to capital.

Um, why was it so hard to find money and raise money and go do what you wanted to do in the world? Um, so that actually led that awareness led me to Wall Street. I got my first job in New York City, super excited, um, in corporate finance investment banking. How many people have done that life? Yeah, raise your hand proud. Yeah, I've been there. Um, great training ground, but, um, it was one of those weeks where I was working 100 hours a week and I got invited to this event called Where Hollywood Meets Wall Street.

And I was working in the Entertainment Group, so because the word Wall Street was in the title, I thought I could justify it to my boss to go. Um, but really it was just an excuse to get out of the office. Um, and at this event Where Hollywood Meets Wall Street was happening, I was what I was expecting to happen was meeting a sea of, you know, Hollywood producers talking to these Wall Street bankers and I'd be this fly on the wall listening to what they're actually saying and actually learning how this business works.

But the exact opposite happened. Um, when I got there, I was about a room this big, full like it is today, and I literally was the most popular girl at the party. Why? It was a sea of emerging artists all hoping to meet their next Angel, and I was the one naive person from a bank that decided to show up. Um, and I was 22. Um, but what hit me, though, is I was a little kind of overwhelmed, but what hit me was two days later when one of the filmmakers that had met that night went through the effort and actually paid $15 to FedEx me his script.

And in his script, he said, "It was wonderful to meet you, J. I look forward to you financing my next film." And that's when my heart sank, because here I was a newbie investment banking analyst; I didn't control any money. I ran spreadsheets; I put pitch decks together. That's what I did. Um, but here was a man with a lifetime of experience begging me, someone with pretty much no experience, for money simply because I worked at a bank.

And that's when everything kind of came crashing down; my idealism came crashing down in that moment. And I did what any young girl does when you're really pissed off and distraught about something—you call your mom. And I did, and for the next 30 minutes, I cried on the phone and talked about how unfair this world was, how America is not the land of all possibility; it's only the land of possibility for the lucky few that are connected.

And my mom, who's very busy running her business, quietly and patiently waited, and when I finally exhausted myself, she inserted and said, "Well, if you're that pissed off about it, just go do something about it." And she hung up on me. Um, and so I did. I started working with some of those filmmakers and theater producers on the side trying to help them raise money, and then I started to fail and fail miserably.

And the biggest failure of all was when I helped, um, a theater producer that I had met that night try to raise money for a play—an Arthur Miller play called Incident at Oaishi, which was a play about racial profiling. Now this is right after September 11th in New York City so I thought this is it—this is the topic. Um, and so for months I worked with him. We rented out a venue about the size of this, packed it with an audience like this, got actors to volunteer their time; even Richard Dreyfuss signed up.

Um, I hustled to get investors there, and the whole point of the night was to do a concert reading, a one-time showing of this play, with a goal that these investors are so impressed by the whole night that they'll whip out their checkbooks and cut a check and fund the full production of the play. And I’d be on to a new career as an Off-Broadway theater producer. Everything went perfect except that last little bit, which was the investors turned to me and they said, "Oh my God, that was an amazing play. The audience was uproar, it was awesome." And they turned and they said, "That was amazing; we're not investing. Good luck!" All of it for nothing.

I almost lost my job because Arthur Miller was faxing me at work—all of it for nothing. Um, and it was actually in that real moment that I realized that the reason they didn't want to take a risk on me is I was a nobody. I didn't have a track record on Broadway. Um, and it was in that moment, though, that I realized that if my parents and this elderly filmmaker who had had a lifetime of experience taught me that finance was broken, it was this experience that showed me how it was broken.

And how it was broken was that the people who wanted this play to come to life the most, which in this case were the actors and the audience, they together did not have the power or mechanism to make it happen. And they were completely dependent on these third-party gatekeepers or decision-makers or investors to define their destiny and their reality. So that pissed me off, and that's what sent me back to business school.

I quit finance, came up with an idea on how to democratize access to capital, and I went back to Berkeley to start this business. Um, and it's there, um, that I met my co-founders and we launched it, and today Indiegogo is now the largest online funding platform in the world. We started before the word crowdfunding even existed, and so it all sounds nice and perfect, but it's eight years later, and I've learned a ton along the way. I failed a ton along the way, and what I want to do is kind of share some of the lessons learned because you guys are about to embark on this part of your journey. Your journey's already begun, but now it's time to execute.

And if I can instill just a couple nuggets of insight to set you guys up for success, I want to do that. So the first is know your why. And what I mean by this is, why are you starting this company? What problem are you trying to solve, and why do you care so much? If your reason for being is not authentic to your core, chances of you failing will actually go way up. And the reason why is, for me, my why was I wanted to democratize access to capital. I was aware of this problem; it affected my parents, it was now affecting me because I couldn’t help the people I wanted to help.

And so, um, my why became I want to democratize access to capital. And the reason it was so important and the reason why it was so helpful is actually my why found me my co-founders. It's a hard journey to figure out who should you partner with, but when you're clear with why you're doing this and you spew it to the world, the people who care about that too join you. And because I was spewing it over and over again, I was actually able to find my co-founders in business school.

The second thing is that your why gets you out of your way. So my original idea was a complete offline fund with a Democrat twist— not at all what Indiegogo is today. And when I met my co-founders and they were asking me, um, you know, what my real goals are here, and that was to democratize access to capital, Slava, my co-founder, turned to me; he said, "Well, if you really want to do that, why aren't you using the Internet?" And I said, "That is an amazing point; it is the most democratic tool out there." You can't invest online, but that actually led us to coming up with a perks-based model, innovating, pivoting, and because of that we're able to launch Indiegogo.

And I say that because if I was more obsessed with the solution of my original idea of the product and the solve that I had in mind, I would have been stuck on that. But because I was more obsessed with my why and actually solving a bigger problem, I didn't care how I solved it; I just wanted to solve it. And that allowed me to see a better way to solve it.

Another reason to focus on your why is it gets you through those dark periods, which there will be dark periods. I like to show this, scph, because on top was our plan: we'd launch January 2008, raise our first venture round fall of 2008, and then be off to the races. We all know what happened in the fall of 2008. Things did not go according to plan. Fast forward three and a half years, we finally raised that first round of capital, so that was three years longer than we actually anticipated. I had planned to not take a salary for one year; I ended up having to survive for four. It’s just the reality.

But if your why is not, uh, totally, um, you, if it's not totally powerful and meaningful to you, you won't stick it out. You won't stick it out. Entrepreneurship is just too hard. Um, our first employee, Erica, turned to us when we hired her in 2011 after we raised our round of capital, our first round. She kind of looked at our numbers and she saw they were always growing, but we didn't really have that hockey stick growth until the prior couple months right before we raised our round.

And she looked at her num...she's like, "Wow, you guys really did stick it out!" Why? And my co-founder Eric said, "Well, we were passionate about what we were doing despite reason." And that just sums it up. You have to be passionate about what you're doing despite reason.

Um, your why also informs your whole strategy, so it's actually a very practical thing, and it gives you bumper lanes for how you're going to execute. We're an open platform because we want to empower the world and allow everybody to find what matters to them. To actually empower the world, we can't be a gatekeeper ourselves; we can't have an application system. So that's why we've been an open system since the very beginning, and that's continuing to be the reason why people use this every day.

It also made us, uh, be global from the get-go, which is another reason people use this every day. Um, if we want to truly empower the world, we have to be everywhere in the world, and that forced us to do the hard work to create the backend infrastructure so that we could serve every customer in every country across the world.

It also informs your strategy, so we realize that we were doing something completely new. We were reinventing a whole new industry called funding and a new way to actually raise money. And so because of that, this was a new experience for most people in the world, um, that allowed us to focus on actual customer happiness being a key driver of our business and now a key differentiator. People use this every day because we help you the most.

Because oftentimes, when people raise money this way, it's the first time they've ever done it. Um, and the why also continues to inform your strategy and how you actually build your product. So again, we want to empower everybody to fund what matters to them, and everybody to raise money—that's what democratization of capital means to us.

And so with that, you need to have all kinds of funding options. You can't just do it one way or, you know, and say it's our way or the highway. You have to give people options so they can maximize their experience and optimize it for their specific needs. So we have fixed funding, flex funding, forever funding—all kinds of different funding structures so that people can be successful.

And one day, we were actually part of the Jobs Act happening. Uh, one day, we'll be able to offer equity crowdfunding when the laws change, which we actually helped change as well. And the coolest thing about having a really good why, though, is it attracts amazing people. The best talent out there can go anywhere; they're not looking for jobs. They're happy where they are.

But what will make them change their situation is if there's a company that actually allows them to do what they believe is right and do what's important to them. And because of that, um, we've had an amazing experience attracting the most amazing people who are not just—um, their skills aren't just out of, you know, out of control good, but their hearts are as well, and they're so motivated by this mission of democratizing access to capital. They continue to innovate every single day to help us achieve our mission.

Um, and lastly—and this is the coolest part—is your why actually attracts your customers— um, amazing customers. So we've had customers like, you know, young engineers out of Idaho, not connected to any university or anything, but they're just passionate about saving the world by creating solar-powered, uh, streets and roads across, across the world. They used Indiegogo and ended up raising over $2 million to bring their idea to life.

Um, and then this is one of my favorite ones: you buy them. Um, this is an awesome team of folks who have, are micro—uh, or crowd sourcing your genome or your biome, excuse me. Um, they got started because they were able to validate their market, gauge interest on Indiegogo by raising $350,000. They then got into Y Combinator, and now because of all of this traction and success, they just closed their series—$4.5 million series seed.

So what's happening is we're giving all kinds of cool opportunities to all kinds of ideas—ideas that maybe the world would have passed over had they not had a chance to actually see them bubble up and thrive. So the question is: how do you guys get clarity on your why? Well, not to be meta here, but there's a very simple exercise I learned in business school, which is the 5Y exercise, which is start with the statement: why are you doing the, uh, the company that you want to start? And, and explain that to yourself and then ask yourself, like a 2-year-old would, why again and then why again. And keep going until you get to a place where you're totally irrational, where you're just explaining the reason you're doing this.

Be, is because of a belief. And when you get to that kind of irrational place, that means you have something really real there. And for us, my why was I wanted to democratize funding. Well, why do I care about that? Well, it's because finance is broken and inefficient, and it's due to this reliance on gatekeepers. Well, why is the reliance on gatekeepers not good? Well, because it doesn't allow for equal opportunity.

So why is equal opportunity important? Because I feel like life should be fair. So why should life be fair? I just believe it; it's just what I believe. It's irrational. It's just what I believe, and that was so core to me that that was the reason why I knew I was on to something and that I need to stick with it. So do that exercise.

Uh, the second lesson we learned is be intentional with your culture. Um, so culture is, it's this big amorphous word that people like to throw around; all it is is who is who you are and how you— and how you are— um, it's the people within your team, and it's how you behave every single day.

And the biggest mistake I see my fellow entrepreneurs making is this: they always put culture, um, 11th on their top 10 priority list, literally! It's always important, but it never makes the cut. And I was actually at a dinner with some fellow entrepreneurs a few months or years ago, and this is exactly what he said. There was a fellow entrepreneur said, "It's so important; it it means everything. It actually determines whether we're successful or not. Um, but I, I never, um, I never can get to it."

And I said, "Oh, you're getting to it; you're there. There is a culture; it is happening. No matter whether you, uh, want to admit it or not, you're just not being intentional about it." So who knows what kind of culture you're building and if you're actually setting yourself up for success?

So the key is to make it a priority, and for us, we've had—we've made the kind of people we attract a priority: diversity. There's so much research out there that shows that diversity drives ROI innovation. If you're trying to change the world and you're trying to build something really meaningful in this world, which I hope all of you guys are thinking about doing, you need the best ideas, the most diverse ideas, the most diverse perspectives to actually get there. Because if you don't have that, you're going to groupthink and you're going to fail.

Um, and because of this, we've actually done a pretty good job; we're over almost 50% women in Indiegogo, over 30% of our engineers are women—woo, very excited! We have more work to do on the ethnic side, but again, it's back to diversity of perspectives, backgrounds, experiences—all of that is incredibly important for you setting up.

So if you're a one-person team right now or a two-person team, this is the perfect time to be thinking about this and going out and finding partners and team members who are nothing like you, who think differently, because by doing that one thing, you will set yourself up for success.

Um, the second thing is that culture, again, it's not—it's just—it's who you are and it's how you are every day. It's how you act. And I actually don't believe, um, in this concept of there's good cultures and bad cultures; there's just strong cultures and weak cultures, and what a strong culture is, is a culture where the values and behaviors that the people exhibit and embody every day are the values and behaviors that the company needs its people to exhibit every day to win—very simple.

Um, and so how do you know what values and behaviors you need to have to win? Well, it starts with you, the founders. And it's not like this big heady theoretical exercise; it's actually an exercise of distillation, of self-revealing, or self-reflection. And so the way we got there to our values, at least, is I made all my co-founders and I sit down around the table and in five minutes draw six pictures that answer the question, "I love coming to work at Indiegogo because..."

And literally, I learned that at that moment in time, um, my co-founders and I were terrible drawers and that design was going to be a key skill set they were going to need to fill as soon as possible. Um, but what it actually revealed is that my co-founders and I and our early team all came to work for the same four reasons.

Um, and for us, which your reasons might be different, but for us, the reasons we came to work every day is first, we wanted to change an industry, and in changing an industry that had never been changed, that got us excited; that got us motivated, and that's where fearlessness came from. The second reason we all came to work every day is we wanted to bring our whole selves to work. We don't have to be anybody else, put on a metaphorical union uniform or a real uniform; we just wanted to be ourselves, and that's where authenticity came from.

The third reason was—oops, let me go back, sorry. The third reason was, um, we all wanted to work with people that we had, um, and build something together. So we weren't— all of us were team sport people in high school and college, none of us were solo acts. We like to actually, you know, we liked environments where 2 plus 2 equals 5. That got us excited, so collaboration became our third value, and the fourth was we all wanted to spend our waking lives helping people that wanted to be helped.

You're at work a lot, especially in the early days of a startup, so for us what was super important is we wanted to be spending our energy helping people that wanted to be helped, which is where empowerment came from. And so, um, in the early days, um, what fearlessness, for example, meant to us is, you know, being super opportunistic, really finding our way. This idea word of crowdfunding didn't exist, so we didn't know if we were on to something or not.

But the next thing we did—and we actually just did this a year ago—is we actually defined the behaviors now today that really embody fearlessness. So as we started to grow, we realized that someone's definition of fearlessness over here was different from somebody else's definition of fearlessness. And while we had been hired when we started hiring people, um, we did skills interviews and per, you know, that kind of stuff, but we always did culture interviews, which was to make sure that, um, people's values and behaviors were aligned with the company's.

And, um, what we've done is over time, you have to continue to revisit these behaviors. And so today what fearlessness means to us is ruthlessly prioritizing. Um, it's people who say no to the least important things because we now have so many opportunities, it could easily be that we lose our focus, and that will actually kill our chance of actually democratizing access to capital.

Um, same thing with authenticity; in the early days, it really meant bringing our whole self to work, um, and today, because we are such a diverse team and our customers are everyone across the world, what really matters now, um, in being authentic is being respectful of different points of views.

And so we've identified this, and one thing I should say is while you want a diversity of people and backgrounds and experiences, which is where I started, what you don't want a diversity of is your values and behaviors because that's the glue that keeps everybody together. And then what you do with this is when you've clarified your values and your behaviors, you actually operationalize it and you reinforce it.

So you screen everybody in your hiring process for it. Um, I promise you this kind of sounds nuts and bolty but is so critical because then you actually, um, hire absolutely amazing people—people that are not only off the charts with their skills, but also off the charts with their alignment with your mission.

Um, you operationalize it in how you get stuff done and in how you reward and recognize. So every quarter, we have an all-hands, which here’s one, um, but we give out Iggies and Wiggies. Iggies, um, are awards for people who completely embody our values, um, and Wiggies are awards for people that make us laugh, but it stands for whoops, yiggies—anyways! Um, but Iggies aren't something from the top down; Iggiesca and it's very democratic in that way, but it's also very real, and it's very raw.

And it also reinforces the fact that culture is not a top-down thing; it's not something you can create; it's only something you can influence as leaders, and it takes the rest of the people and your team to continue to reinforce it as well. But it has to start with you, and then you can measure it. Nothing would be good; you're not a good, uh, Silicon Valley tech startup if you're not measuring yourself.

And so we do actually measure ourselves and how, uh, intentional we are being with our culture. And one way to do it is measure our engagement and happiness. So we do an employee MPS survey, which is how likely are you to refer a friend to come work here—similar to a customer MPS survey, which you probably learn about—and then we also have rolled out OKRs, which are productivity metrics, how well are we actually getting the things done that we want to get done.

Again, a strong culture is a culture where people's values and behaviors, um, that the company needs to win are the ones that people authentically embody every day. And when people are embodying the values and behaviors that they hold naturally, they are more productive, they are more happy, and so your execution and the company's results should actually show that.

Alright, lesson number three, and I have two more minutes. Um, we're all here in the valley; we're all probably interested in technology; we're here interested in entrepreneurship. But one thing I've learned in all of this is that technology is not the end; it is simply a means to an end. And if I look back and see how I got to where I am today, starting from a young girl, it wasn't, like I said, I want to be a technology entrepreneur one day.

What I did is I focused on my why and I focused on a problem that really bothered me at my core, and I, and I focused on that, and I realized I wanted to fix something. And to fix that, starting a company would be the best way to do it. So I actually became an entrepreneur because I had to, and then I found technology as a solve because that was the best way to fix that.

And I think because I came to it that way, um, my co-founders and I have been able to build something truly meaningful that is really impacting the world, changing the world, making a lot of money, and, um, and growing, and literally changing kind of the course of history—we're changing history literally—and changing the course of the future for all of finance and people across the world.

And someone noticed that; if you could play the video, the private sector is stepping up as well. Uh, from Indiegogo and Etsy to Disney and Intel, companies have pledged to help unleash a new wave of innovation here in America. These companies do different things; they come from different industries, but they share the belief that when we tap the potential of every American, all of us are better off. So, this is exciting! We didn't ask him to say that; that was awesome! When you have moments like that, you remember them.

There's lots of ups and downs; this is one of the ups along our journey, and this was recently after we— um, White House reached out and we did a Maker Faire with THB and he talked about this. But the point is, though, is we're included there, not because, again, we hustled and hadn't had say it; it's because we actually built something meaningful worthy of talking about at that scale.

Um, and actually one of the things that I'll always remember, um, is when we just raised a $40 million round of capital a few months ago—almost a year ago, I guess now—and we were talking to Kleiner Perkins; they were part of the round, but before they had decided to invest, John Doerr came to me and he said, "Regardless of whether or not we have the opportunity to invest in you, you should know you've built a really important company for the world."

And so as you guys sit here thinking about what you want to go build and what problems you want to go solve, don't think about how do I get really—how do I get big fast? That will happen if you actually build something super meaningful and super important. So don't think about, you know, what is the quickest way to success; think about what is the best way to build something important that the world really needs.

Um, and when you do that, you have customers like this, and this is a campaign that just went live. Um, we're literally unleashing another catalyst who will—of an organization that will unleash even more people to go into technology. Our code—they just launched their campaign this week, they're raising $5 million. Reed Hoffman, who is about to come speak, has committed to matching with Bill Gates and Microsoft and Salesforce are matching $2.5 million if the people can raise $2 and a half million for an hour of code, and the goal is to bring coding to 100 million people across the world.

So that is something you guys can do today. Um, if you want to be part of that, you can fund that campaign. Um, and after that, I want you all to go home and think about your why, think about how to attract people who think differently than you, um, and also think about how technology is just your tool and your mechanism for making change; it's not the end goal in itself.

And with that, I thank you.