You can be on Entrepreneur’s cover!

Indiegogo Co-Founder: When What It Means to Be a Fearless Entrepreneur Changes Danae Ringelmann along and her two other co-founders launched the crowdfunding platform around four primary values. The company has grown, and what those values mean for the company has evolved, too.

By Catherine Clifford

entrepreneur daily

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Shutterstock

Five years ago, after being a year or so in business, the three co-founders of Indiegogo, the second largest crowdfunding platform in the U.S, were brainstorming about why they were passionate about their business and how they would build the company. They came up with a list of four core values that would become the axis around which Indiegogo's brand and community would be built on: fearlessness, authenticity, collaboration and empowerment.

Fast-forward to the present and those four values are still as important as ever, says co-founder Danae Ringlemann. What those four values mean, however, has changed as Indiegogo -- and crowdfunding as an industry -- has been on an explosive growth trajectory. Indiegogo has expanded into the triple digits of employee headcount, now has a New York City office and has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for more than 275,000 people in more than 200 countries.

Related: How to Be the Best Boss (Infographic)

In particular, the idea of what it means to be fearless as a company and as leaders has evolved in recent years.

"In the early days, fearlessness meant opportunistic and going for it, experimenting," says Ringelmann. Now, that same value means something quite different . "Fearless to us, while it may have meant opportunistic in the early days, means being ruthlessly prioritizing. We need to really listen to our customers and know what the opportunities are, but see the patterns, see the trends and then focus in."

For example, in the last year, Indiegogo implemented an "Objectives and Key Results" system -- OKR for short -- to keep employees on track with their short-term goals -- even as endless opportunities come their way.

Related: Too Fast, Too Careful: The Struggle to Find Your Growth Sweet Spot

The OKR system aligns individual employee's daily goals with company-wide quarterly goals. "This system helps people to understand their individual near-term impact on the company's performance, gives them bumper lanes to experiment which in turn helps them say no to opportunities that don't align to near-term goals, all while keeping them connected to our mission," said Ringelmann.

The transition from being opportunistic to ruthlessly prioritizing happened in the past couple of years, estimates Ringelmann. And in a sense, it's an enviable place to be in as a company: It's a feather in the cap of the Indiegogo team to have the luxury of having to pick what they most want to do as a company. After all, as an entrepreneur, you want to be calling the shots. But that kind of success and growth has also required more strategy and organization. Having core values when you are a team of three eyes-wide-open, dreaming-big entrepreneurs in business school is one thing. Running a company with more than a 100 bi-coastal employees who all stick to those core values and move their oars in sink is a more nuanced game.

"Values never change. They are your cornerstone, foundation of your company. But the behaviors that embody those values do change a little bit, as your organization grows," said Ringelmann.

Catherine Clifford

Senior Entrepreneurship Writer at CNBC

Catherine Clifford is senior entrepreneurship writer at CNBC. She was formerly a senior writer at Entrepreneur.com, the small business reporter at CNNMoney and an assistant in the New York bureau for CNN. Clifford attended Columbia University where she earned a bachelor's degree. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. You can follow her on Twitter at @CatClifford.

Want to be an Entrepreneur Leadership Network contributor? Apply now to join.

Editor's Pick

Business News

Mark Zuckerberg Told Meta Engineers to 'Figure Out' Snapchat's Privacy Protections: 'We Have No Analytics on Them'

Recently unsealed court documents detail "Project Ghostbusters," Meta's project to work around Snapchat's end-to-end encryption to intercept data.

Business News

Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced to 25 Years in Prison for Multibillion-Dollar Crypto Fraud

Southern District of New York Judge Lewis Kaplan said that the loss amount to the victims of Bankman-Fried's crimes surpassed $550 million.

Growing a Business

The Brand Whiz Behind Sun Bum Is Famous For Making Boring Products Fun. Then, This One Stumped Him.

Everything Tom Rinks touched turned to gold until he took on a brand launch at Target that fizzled. Then, he found a creepy doll on Ebay, and he saw a way forward.

Thought Leaders

How To Improve Your Soft Skills and Emotional Intelligence in 7 Easy Steps

Using these simple but effective approaches will help a person in their business, life and relationships.