I recently interviewed Cameo Co-Founder and CEO Steven Galanis on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:
Adam: Our guest today built a business that changed the way people interact with celebrities. Steven Galanis is the co-founder and CEO of Cameo. Steven, thank you for joining us.
Steven: Thanks for having me.
Adam: You grew up in Glenview, Illinois, right outside of Chicago, and from a very early age you were known as the mayor, a nickname that stuck with you through your time as an undergrad at Duke. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?
Steven: That is an amazing question, and it is timely, because just yesterday I was back in my old high school lecturing, and the first question they asked me was, what are your Glenview credentials, what did you do. I was one of those hyperactive kids who had a ton of passion and loved doing everything. I was of that age where your schedule was packed 6 a m to midnight. I was an athlete. I played hockey, football, baseball. I was also always really active in student government. I was also a debater, so it is like a captain of the football team and I was a state champion debater. I did a bunch of stuff like that. But all through it, the big influences were really from my family. One of the people who really influenced my life was my Babu. I am Greek. My grandfather Spiro. My grandfather was a wedding photographer, and he started his studio, Foto Studios, in 1945. It is the oldest continuously operated wedding studio in Chicago. The cool thing about that is, when you are somebody who is filming the weddings or the christenings, I would go into any of my friends’ houses and they would want to show the album that my grandfather signed. Because of that, he was that larger than life personality that everybody knew and everybody had stories about. My mom is exactly the same way. In that family, there were always two passions, and I think those two passions ended up coming through. My grandfather was also a stockbroker, so during the day he was always trading, and at night he was shooting weddings. I grew up with a family of entrepreneurs, where the Wall Street Journal was on the table, CNBC was on at the dinner table, and you are talking shop and deals, and what is happening, and that is just what I loved. It is kind of cool that one uncle is running that business today. My other uncle is a big movie producer in Hollywood. He did Rambo, Conan, Lone Survivor. With Cameo, we are also using the camera, so for three consecutive generations in our family, we have made money with the camera, which is really interesting.
Adam: So much of what you shared centers around mentorship. Your grandfather an early mentor for you, your uncles mentors, your mom. You can find mentors in so many places, and a very easy place to find mentors is your family.
Steven: My mom is definitely that entrepreneur side, and then my dad is steady Eddie, an accountant, the type of guy who actually passed on Cameo’s friends and family round when my mother and brother invested, because he said the family had too much exposure. If it works, he is good, and if it does not work, he is out twenty-five grand. But the point is my dad’s pragmatic side and my mom’s passion and ability to be a super connector that came from my grandfather. I am a really good mix of that, and I think that is what, as a person, made me somebody well-suited to do what I ended up doing.
Adam: How did the idea for Cameo come together, and how did you actualize it?
Steven: We had the idea for Cameo at the last place you would ever expect to have your big idea. We actually had it at my grandmother’s funeral. For full context, I mentioned I have an uncle who is a movie producer. This is my mom’s mother. She passed away. The funeral was October 5, 2016, and my uncle and a bunch of the guys he produced movies with flew in from L A for the day. I had been doing some film financing with my uncle, and through that, I became business partners with Martin Blencowe, who ended up becoming my co-founder at Cameo. I had not seen Martin in a couple years. He flew in and told me that in the interim, he had become an NFL agent with the hopes of finding the next Jason Momoa or the next Rock, a big defensive lineman with the personality he could bring to my uncle and turn into a movie star. It was an interesting thesis, but the problem was, the guy he signed, Cassius Marsh, was the second backup defensive end of the Seattle Seahawks, a fourth-round pick out of UCLA. For guys like that, there is no money to be made as their agent if you cannot find them off-the-field income.
Martin had a crazy story. Cassius is a die-hard Magic The Gathering player. Somebody broke into his car in Seattle and stole his cards. He went on Twitter and said, hey Twelves, which is what Seahawks fans call each other, I do not know what you thought was in there, but I need my cards back. You can keep the bag. I need my cards back. It goes viral. It is on Barstool. It is on P T I. They are talking about a big defensive end crying over his cards. Martin could not even get Wizards of the Coast, the Seattle company that makes Magic The Gathering, to give him a card deal out of that for Cassius. He was dejected. I am driving him home. We are stuck leaving O’Hare. He says he knows this guy is a star and commercially viable, but because he does not play he cannot get him money. I had never heard of him. Show me who he is. He pulls out his phone and shows me the video that today we call the first Cameo. Martin had a friend now in marketing at Nike. He had just had his first kid. Martin got Cassius Marsh to record a video congratulating Brandon on becoming a father. In the video, he is driving, no shirt, all tatted, flat-brim Seahawks hat. Hey Brandon, it is Cassius Marsh from the Seahawks. Heard about your son, Maverick. If he gets your athletic ability, I know he will be playing for the Seahawks one day. Go Hawks. I saw the video and immediately had the eureka moment. Martin, we should sell those. That is a new autograph.
We started having the idea that the selfie was the new autograph. When you or I were growing up, if you were in L A and ran into James Worthy at a restaurant, what did you do? You picked up the menu or the napkin. Hey, can you sign my napkin? Now we are in the Instagram and TikTok age. If your kid sees Bronny, he is taking a selfie, and that goes on TikTok, on Instagram. Instead of autographs on your wall, you want things on your digital wall. A marketplace where for X amount of money, a fan could pay to do Y activity with Z person became an idea we were excited about.
Adam: I love the example you gave, not only because James Worthy was a guest on Thirty Minute Mentors, but because when I was a kid, I was that kid who pestered every player for autographs, every coach, every manager, and you flipped the script. How were you able to take your idea and turn it into what ultimately became a billion dollar business?
Steven: At the beginning, we were talking about the things that make you well suited to build a business. People talk about product market fit, but in Cameo, we really had founder market fit. Martin had done movie production and was an N F L agent. If he was as big an agent as Ari Emanuel or as big a producer as Jerry Bruckheimer, he is never going to think about a business like this. It is the scraps at that point. He knew enough to be dangerous but had not hit it yet. We had another co-founder, Devin. When we first had the idea, Martin and I were just two guys with an idea. We had never written a line of code. We could not build it. So, who do we know who knows how to code. Devin is really special. I went to Duke with Devin, so I have known him for over twenty years. Devin and Cody Ko were two early stars on Vine. Cody had over four billion loops on Vine, Devin had about a billion. They got famous on the internet, but there was no monetization back then. They became part of a new class the internet was making more of every day, people more famous than rich.
One story from that time. I was in Las Vegas with Cody, our friend Adam, and Devin. Cody had a few million followers on Instagram. He tagged me in a picture, the boys in the lobby at the Aria. I did not know to turn notifications off. My phone started getting hot in my pocket. There were so many notifications my phone overheated and died. That was the first time I thought, there is something with these influencers. At the same time ESPN had a documentary called Broke. They said eighty percent of N F L players go broke five years after their last game. I was at Duke when we won the national championship in 2010. Martin walked on at U S C on the Reggie Bush, Matt Leinart team. We had friends selling out the Coliseum or Cameron Indoor, then riding the bus in the D league, or in the N F L for a year, then they tore an A C L, and now they are a paraprofessional at their high school coaching J V football, but they are legends at U S C or Duke. That was personal to us.
From my side, I am the mayor, the connector, the person who brings it all together, and I am an options trader by background. Finding supply and demand and pricing is how my mind works. We had one of the few engineers who could build Cameo technically and also be a creator on it. We had a former college athlete and N F L agent in the movie world. I brought it together. That was the right team to attack it.
In a marketplace, you have the classic chicken and egg. I would tell everyone, imagine if Michael Jordan could wish you a happy birthday on a video. Awesome. How much does he cost? We do not have him yet. Who do you have? No one yet. On supply, would it be great to get paid to send personalized videos to your fans. Who else is on it? Nobody. How much money? I do not know. We were lucky. We had friendlies willing to come on. Cassius Marsh ended up being the first on Cameo, our first investor, and someone I love. There were no businesses willing to give him endorsement money. We were trying to launch around a person with little commercial viability, but he had passion. He thought it was cool. When he made the first video, the dad filmed the daughter. She was crying she was so happy. Suddenly, it was not about the money. Do you not want to make people feel like that. That got the flywheel going.
Adam: You brought up a really interesting topic, the huge challenge of building a two-sided marketplace, which you have been able to do successfully. Few companies build a two-sided marketplace successfully.
Steven: It is really important to figure out which side is harder to get and work backward from that. In our case, we felt demand would follow if we could get the right supply. Examples of marketplaces are Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash. The difference is that our supply side is famous. They have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, and by promoting to their followers, they can turn their followers into our customers for free. For us, unlike other marketplaces where you spend to get demand, our supply could be its own demand. We focused on supply-side acquisition. We built a team whose job was to DM celebrities on Instagram all day. A business like Cameo cannot get built without Instagram D M, because Instagram D M was the first time anyone could send a message to anyone. Your listeners can DM Elon Musk, Sam Altman, LeBron James. There is a chance they will see it, because your D M goes to the same place as everybody else’s. On other platforms, at a certain level, you cannot even DM them.
Adam: It is an important lesson I share all the time. Do not be afraid to reach out. If you reach out to someone you do not know, there are three outcomes. You do not hear anything. You hear no. You hear yes. If you do not reach out, there is only one outcome. Do not be afraid to reach out. Your business is the perfect example.
Steven: In our business, there is nothing more true. People are comfortable with different mediums. Some pick up the phone, others need text. With the new i O S update, unknown numbers go to a different tab in your texts. Someone texted me, and it never popped up. It was hidden. Text messages are getting filtered in a big way. There is a great opportunity to pick up the phone and call if your texts are not getting through. There is always a next medium. Then one gets too spammy, and people filter it out. You keep finding the next thing.
An early story. Jeremy Piven was doing a comedy set in Chicago, and we are big Entourage fans. We wanted him on the platform. I DM’d him. He said bring the team to the show. We went. After, he was in the bar area talking. Everyone waited to be respectful of fans. We came to get him on Cameo. There was a woman on a performance plan. I was doing everything I could to put her in position to hit her number. The gap opened. I said, go talk to him. She froze. She could not do it. Two other women on the team jumped right on. I knew at that point the first person was not going to be able to work at Cameo. She did not have that run-through-the-walls energy or the bravery to just go talk to somebody and make it happen. That does not mean she was not talented. It meant this job was not right for her. We always say, if someone is not on Cameo, I never say no. I say, not yet.
Adam: That is the mindset that allows you to build a highly successful business and get to where you want to be.
Steven: It is about bringing it to hearts and minds. Early days, we talked to Andre Drummond. He was a max salary N B A player making twenty-five million a year. The money he could make from Cameo would pale in comparison. On the call, he said he needed to be ten grand. We had never sold one over a hundred bucks. Why ten grand? He said he got paid forty grand to go to a bar mitzvah last month. I said, okay, but you are a max salary N B A player. You had to leave downtown Detroit on a Saturday night, drive to a bar mitzvah in Grosse Pointe, kiss babies, spend time, drive back. The R O I of that is not that high.
If you take twenty-five million and divide by two thousand hours in a work year, then divide that by sixty, your per-minute earnings making max salary in the N B A are two hundred eight dollars. If each Cameo is thirty seconds and you charge one hundred dollars, that is the same effective rate as max salary. For one hundred bucks, a single mom in Detroit could bring her son to see you play for his birthday. She has to get parking and tickets, and hot dogs, Cokes, and popcorn, and he is sitting in the 300 level and can hardly hear you. For one hundred dollars, which is less than that, he can have a keepsake he watches for the rest of his life. You get paid to make someone a bigger fan of you. That is how we got Andre Drummond on. Sometimes you need the right R O I. For someone else, it might be, see this little girl and how happy she is because you made that video, do you not want to make people feel like that? People look at the money on Cameo. For example, Russell Wilson just joined Cameo two days ago. When we started, Cassius Marsh, the backup defensive end of the Seahawks, was the first guy we got. We flew to Seattle. He was living with journeymen and practice squad guys. We would take anyone. The dream was Richard Sherman. Russell Wilson was beyond the dream. Nine years later, we got in touch with him. He is on the platform. He asked if Cameo is just for athletes or if his wife could join too, and she is even bigger than him. The moral is, these businesses are built brick by brick. There are no shortcuts. You keep asking and keep reaching out.
Adam: Always keep asking, always keep reaching out, and continually figure out what resonates with the person you are reaching out to.
Steven: You nailed it earlier. If you reach out, there are only three things that can happen, and the worst is them saying no, which is the same as not hearing back. The upside-downside is pretty clear.
Adam: You have led Cameo through rapid growth, getting to unicorn status. Then there were significant layoffs, three rounds, a lot of downsizing. You subsequently reemerged, reinvented Cameo, and enjoyed significant growth since, all in a relatively short period. Can you walk listeners through each of those periods and what you learned leading through them?
Steven: First off, the hyper growth was more fun than ripping it down. It is important to understand the whole story. As Cameo launched, it quickly felt special. It has all the ingredients. You are dealing with celebrities and athletes, which is buzzworthy and sexy. Fans are sending in reaction videos. Our product is making people happier than anything else they have bought. It had a magic recipe. We went on an insane growth path. From a top-line booking perspective, we went from four hundred thousand to four million to twenty million to one hundred million in our first four years with no marketing spend. It was the perfect model. We are a take-rate business. We did not pay for paid marketing because our supply acquisition created demand. Cameos are mostly gifts. Eighty-five percent of the videos are you buy for me, then I put it in the group chat and share on social, and every Cameo becomes a commercial for the next. The flywheel spins. With momentum, a rising tide lifts all boats.
We were the fastest-growing consumer marketplace in 2018 and 2019, according to Andreessen Horowitz. Then Covid was insane. The supply side was unemployed at the same time. No games, no film production, no tours. Demand side, people had birthdays every day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, but during lockdown, you could not see them. Tailwinds on both sides. I describe that period like Mario Kart when you hit the star. You go ten times as fast and you bump into things. In that period, we raised one hundred million. The Information named us the most promising company in consumer internet. Every investment banker was calling us. Then the second vaccine came out, and it changed. People could travel, go to games, go to concerts. In about sixty day,s our organic demand dropped sixty percent. We went from profitable or break-even to burning millions a month. The company had gotten four X bigger. We went from one hundred twenty people to over four hundred in twelve months. We went from in-person in Chicago and L A to thirty-four states and fourteen countries, fully remote, no offices. We missed cultural things. We were overaggressive on hiring. When organic traffic fell, it was a falling knife. We would cut what we thought we could, then revenue would fall, then we would cut more.
The darkest day was going from one hundred eighty down to thirty-two. At that point, we had already gone through two RIFs. They are all terrible. In that RIF, there were people I thought would be with us till we rang the bell one day. We had to part ways. It was gut-wrenching. When you build a great culture and have amazing people, ripping it down to the studs is brutal.
Our board and executive team felt cutting to seventy-five to one hundred was critical, otherwise we become a zombie company and could never grow again. I knew I could not go in front of the team again and say this is not the last RIF. If we got to that tiny level, turtle mode, just get your shell and stay alive, I knew we could get to break even. Around the same time, we fundamentally changed the market. We opened Cameo so anyone could join. Previously, the only ways were my team reaching out, a referral, or applying, and my team manually saying yes or no. We looked back and realized hundreds of thousands had applied, and we had not let them on. Some applied a little too early. They were going to be on Euphoria and blow up. They were a TikToker who had not broken out yet. They were a minor leaguer who became an All-Star. We missed people we could have ridden the wave with. By opening it up, we let the market decide. That product-led solution allowed us, while we cut our talent team from forty to two, to keep growing. It worked. Shortly after we changed, George Santos randomly came on Cameo the day after he was expelled from Congress. He did not talk to anyone on my team. Before, a junior employee might have said, I do not like him, and said no. He downloaded the app. I got calls, is it true George Santos is on Cameo? It became a huge story. With thirty-two people versus one hundred eighty the previous December, we got thirty percent year-over-year growth, in part powered by open enrollment.
We learned that the talent and customers do not care how many people work at the company. They care that the technology works, they get paid on time, and customers get an amazing video. Those never suffered. Our headcount came down, and our valuation got cut, but revenue did not fall by that much. By focusing on our mission, our vision, and having loyal people who felt the weight of the world on their shoulders. This is a platform that has paid out over three hundred fifty million to talent since we started. People would miss Cameo if it died. I am grateful to the team for sticking by me and our mission. When you go through one RIF or two or three, people get great next jobs. The hard thing is to stay. They stayed because of the magical moments they create and the intense ownership. I need to be here so this stays alive, because the world needs us. We get paid to make people happy.
Adam: Steven, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful, personally and professionally?
Steven: I was talking to the kids at my high school yesterday. The teacher, a classmate of mine, said something important. It is not crazy, I am running a social media company today because he was the first grade of high schoolers who had Facebook all four years of college. In a way, I was two years older than him, but I did not adopt social media the same way. I tell kids today, you are the first generation with AI as native tools. There is nobody with five to ten years of experience in AI right now. Today, if you have an idea, you do not need to know how to code. You can use tools and for zero dollars have your website built and test product market fit. When Martin and I had the idea, if we did not know Devin, it would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars and a dev shop wait. Even with Devin, it took six months to launch. Now you can have an idea and validate it today.
I was sitting with my CTO at a Cubs game, and we asked, how many people in this stadium can code. One percent. Forty thousand people means four hundred can code. How many people have had an idea? Probably forty thousand. Those people could not actualize because they did not have the money, the skills, or someone to ask. That does not have to stop anybody today. You can learn anything on the internet. You are limited by your curiosity and ambition. People are not going to get replaced by AI. They are going to get replaced by people who harness AI to become superhuman and better at what they do. My advice is, there has never been a more exciting time to build or have an idea. The tools are out there. Just go do it.
Adam: Thank you for all the great advice, and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.
Steven: Thank you for having me.
