Slava Rubin hands over the reigns at Indiegogo

Current COO Dave Mandelbrot will become CEO, while Rubin will be Chief Business Officer

Indiegogo is the second biggest crowdfunding startup out there, after Kickstarter. The company is about to see a big change in leadership, though, that maybe could give it the extra juice to take on its number one rival.

Long time CEO Slava Rubin is stepping down from his current position, he announced in a blog post on Monday, handing over the position to the company's current Chief Operating Officer, Dave Mandelbrot. No specific date for when the transition would happen was revealed.

Mandelbrot has been with the company since August of 2013, starting out as SVP of operations, before taking over the COO role in December of 2014, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before that he had been the co-founder of Nextread, CEO of Tynt Multimedia, as well as Hark. Most notably he spent nearly seven years at Yahoo, from early 1999 to late 2005, as VP and GM of Media & Entertainment.

"Dave joined our team with a ton of leadership and execution experience and has continuously taken on more responsibility in the last two and a half years at Indiegogo, most recently serving as COO," Rubin wrote.

"Dave has done a fantastic job of running the business operationally as part of the leadership team, and is beloved across the company. I couldn’t be more excited about having him lead Indiegogo into the next chapter, and after the applause I heard when we announced it to the team I know that everyone else at Indiegogo feels the same way."

As for why Rubin decided to step down from being the head of the company, he made it clear that he felt his expertise could be better utilized elsewhere and for other purposes.

"The next stage in our company will be all about diving into new growth opportunities. As I look back on eight years, I’ve realized that the heart of my work to establish Indiegogo as a trusted funding platform is  in building innovative products, creating exciting partnerships, and  exploring all kinds of new initiatives," he said.

For that reason he is not leaving the company but instead has decided to step into the role of Chief Business Officer at Indiegogo, a move that will allow him to " focus full-time on innovation and growth," specifically on the company's marketplace business and enterprise crowdfunding."

Some of the "new opportunities" that Indiegogo will be looking at include equity crowdfunding and strategic partnerships with retailers and manufacturers. Also Rubin mentioned a potential expansion into China, something that would certainly give the company a shot in the arm. 

Founded in 2008, Indiegogo differentiates itself from the other big crowdfunding platform, in two distinct ways. First, while both offer a place for creative people to fund their projects, but only Indiegogo also allows for charity and causes, both of which are expressly prohibited on Kickstarter.

The second difference is that Indiegogo allows people who start campaigns that fail to meet their goal actually still wind up walking away with money, by offering a flexible funding option.

Indiegogo has seen over 600,000 campaigns from 223 countries, and nearly a billion dollars distributed on its platform. 

There was a lot of CEO turnover in 2015, and so far it looks like 2016 is going to be no different. The first month of the year is not even over and already a slew of big companies already have new faces in charge.

Earlier this month mobile messaging app Tango announced that it was replacing its longtime CEO Uri Raz with co-foundr and CTO Eric Setton. After that Indian e-commerce company Flipkart revealed that Binny Bansal, its COO and Co-founder of Flipkart, will become its Chief Executive Officer. 

Digital sports blog Bleacher Report also got a new CEO in Dave Finocchio, who had previously been in charge of the company in 2013, before stepping back from day-to-day responsibilities in 2014.