In Chapter 7 of 13, fashion stylist Lulu Chen answers "Based on your experience what’s the best approach to building a commercial stylist portfolio?" Chen shares how collaborative test shoots create early career fashion portfolios. Chen highlights collaboration as a cornerstone component bringing together young industry talent - often assistant-level staff - to do test shoots. These shoots help all parties develop individual styles and tastes that over time get refined into individual portfolios.
Transcript:
Erik Michielsen: Based on your experience what’s the best approach to building a commercial stylist portfolio?
Lulu Chen: Well as an assistant you meet other assistants on photo shoots and you develop friendships and you figure out who has the same aesthetic as you or same style and you do test shoots, which contribute to building your portfolio. Building a test shoot is basically the same thing as a regular shoot but on a smaller scale. When young talent comes together and contributes to a test shoot, they are exploring their style; they’re developing their tastes and they’re trying to develop a portfolio. So this is the time for them to be creative and to work together and to really collaborate because everyone is putting in their time and money and effort. It’s not necessarily something they got commissioned to do and so it really is about the collaboration.
In Chapter 6 of 16 in his 2010 Capture Your Flag interview, IndieGoGo co-founder Slava Rubin answers "How Has Indiegogo's Mantra, Do-It-With-Others, Affected Your Pursuits Outside of Work?" Rubin shares how he applies a "Do-It-With-Others" or DIWO approach to projects and ambitions inside and outside work. Rubin, along with co-founders Danae Ringelmann and Eric Schell, developed the DIWO approach to build a platform to provide filmmakers and mediamakers tools for fundraising, promotion, and discovery. Rubin shares that through college and early career, his tendency was more Do-It-Yourself (DIY) but over time he opened to finding complementary skills to build stronger teams.
Slava Rubin is CEO and co-founder of Indiegogo, the world's largest crowdfunding platform. Indiegogo empowers anyone, anywhere, anytime to raise funds for any idea—creative, cause-related or entrepreneurial. Prior to Indiegogo, Rubin worked as a management consultant. He earned his BSE degree from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Transcript:
Erik Michielsen: How has Indiegogo’` mantra, Do It With Others, affected your pursuits outside of work?
Slava Rubin: Yeah, I think that part of my inspiration involved with Indiegogo is the idea that there are all these tools out there and all these people, while they feel like islands, they really shouldn'gt. There is a lot of, now, ability to do it with others, whether it`s through influences like bloggers, partnerships with different companies, it always use to be that if you couldn't succeed by yourself, you were done. There was this whole wave of DIY, do it yourself, which really goes back, I guess to the rock band era, maybe 20 years ago. Now, it's really about leveraging all the things around you, the people, the tools, the information.
Erik Michielsen: As you're looking at what you`re learning in the work environment to facilitate stronger filmmaker success, what are you taking away from those lessons learned and applying them to your own life?
Slava Rubin: Yeah, really I've always been pretty competitive in wanting to do things I could succeed myself, but the older I get, the more mature I get, the more I know it's about finding the right people to work with, knowing what you don't know, trying to get the right teammates and trying to lead all together. Which is all about ``doing it with others``, I mean the leadership at Indiegogo is three people it`s Eric Schell, Danae Ringelmann and myself, and there is no question that we do it with others.
In Chapter 5 of 16 in his 2010 Capture Your Flag interview, IndieGoGo co-founder Slava Rubin answers "What Has the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of California at Berkeley Done to Help Launch Indiegogo?" Rubin shars how the University of California Berkeley Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation provided early-stage support launching his company with Haas School of Business student co-founders Danae Ringelmann and Eric Schell.
Slava Rubin is CEO and co-founder of Indiegogo, the world's largest crowdfunding platform. Indiegogo empowers anyone, anywhere, anytime to raise funds for any idea—creative, cause-related or entrepreneurial. Prior to Indiegogo, Rubin worked as a management consultant. He earned his BSE degree from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Transcript:
Erik Michielsen: What has the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of California Berkley done to help launch Indiegogo?
Slava Rubin: It`s really amazing. Most people don`t know but some of these schools how they help with entrepreneurialism and I must say I was shocked to see how much Berkley did to help entrepreneurs. The Lester Center is just a testament to that because they have their own incubator where they help bring up and support these different startups with office space or different resources, which we were lucky enough to be able to get. As well as, besides the Lester Center, the whole community, there were different classes we where we were able to leverage the professors or the student body to be able to do different market research or testing or bouncing off different ideas. The amazing thing is that Indiegogo was one of many different ideas that came out of Berkley in that year for graduating in 2009 and some of them are quite successful in the last few of years as well.
Since 2009, Capture Your Flag has interviewed a cohort of rising leaders who share lessons from their journeys to help others plan, pursue and achieve life and career aspirations. The resulting 3000+ Near Peer Video Library can be licensed for commercial use.
