Steven Galanis - CEO of Cameo

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What is going on, everyone?

Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode, we have Stephen Galanis here with us. Stephen Galanis is the co founder and CEO of Cameo. For those who don't know, Cameo emerged in 2017 and quickly became popular amongst the Gen Z crowd. For a low price of $5 to a whopping fee of $3000, customers pay Cameo for lightly scripted messages from some of their favorite personalities. On a high end, messages from Snoop Dogg can go all the way up to $3,000. Long story short, Cameo just raised $50 million in a series B round. And inside of this episode, I dive deep on what it takes to not only start growing scale a business, but how to maintain company leadership and culture when scaling. So that being said, thank you so much for listening to the Rise of the Young podcast. Make sure you subscribe to the Take a moment to share this episode with a friend. And that being said, enjoy the episode.

What's going on everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. Today we have Stephen Galanis here with us, the CEO of Cameo. Thanks so much coming on the show, man.

Thanks for having me.

Of course. So first off, I want to say not only have I used Cameo for quite some time now, but I absolutely love the community and brand that you've built with Cameo. But I'd love to just start off by saying, number one, I saw that you guys raised $50 million last year and you guys are exploding. And I want to ask you, where did this all start? And how long has Cameo been around for those that may not know?

So Cameo has been around now for we're coming out of year four. We had the idea for this leaving my grandmother's funeral. My co founder Martin showed me a video that he'd gotten made from this NFL player named Cassius Marsh, congratulating his buddy who's a huge Seattle Seahawks fan, on becoming a father. And Martin showed Me this video. We had the Eureka moment and we've been at it ever since.

Okay, and you guys are in Chicago, right?

Yes, we're in Chicago.

When you guys started Cameo, what was the moment of, like, traction early on, you know, because there's thousands of apps.

That are coming out.

How are you guys able to separate yourself in the market? And what were some of the early tactics you guys used to really gain traction?

Yeah, the. As far as, like, the early signs that it was gonna work, the very first time we sold one, we got the dad to film his daughter reacting to a happy birthday message. And that was really positive signal that this was a product that would make people smile, laughing, cry. As far as tactics, we really spent all of our time acquiring supply side. So getting talented join the platform. And then unlike Uber or Airbnb or grubhub, our supply can beget its own demand. So we created links for them to go Cameo Cody could share it out and turn his followers into our customers for free. And that's really how we scaled without spending any marketing for the first three years.

Very cool, man.

What's your background prior to Cameo?

Prior to Cameo, I graduated from Duke in 2010. While I was there, this was the early days of Facebook and I started my first business creating a Facebook group that ended up having 17,000 college students in it. And we were throwing parties at the bars at Duke, North Carolina and NC State. So that started my entrepreneurial bug. After graduation, I came to Chicago. I was an Options Trader for five years. After doing that, I went to work LinkedIn. And after LinkedIn, I started Cameo.

Very cool, man.

When it comes to getting all these high level celebrities on the platform, what was. Who are some of the earliest people that you guys brought on that really made a difference when it comes to celebrity endorsements?

Yeah. I think Dennis Rodman was a really big early name. Sonia Morgan was a huge name for the Real Housewives. That really opened up the reality TV vertical for us. Brett Favre was kind of the first, like household American hero type that household name that joined the platform in the first. Probably by year two he was on. But this was not a business where suddenly LeBron James was on after three weeks. Right. This is like an overnight success story that's on its fourth year. Yeah. And we've really built this business brick by brick.

Love it, man. When you guys raised the 50 million last year for series B, why did you guys decide to do so and how are you utilizing that capital when building the company?

Well, we had just raised our Series A about four months before. We hadn't even touched in the money, any of the Series A money yet. But the business had been exploding right after the first fundraiser. And Silicon Valley is a small place, so when the company's doing well, seems like everybody knows about it. We had a week where Ellen DeGeneres was talking about Cameo, where Snoop Dogg joined, and, like, just Howard Stern was pumping it up. So from, like, every angle, I think Antonio Brown joined, and it was like, on ESPN for a full day. We had every top VC in the country reach out that week, and ultimately we had a bunch of offers for the Series B. Jeremy Liu at Lightspeed, who was one of the people that led our Series A. I remember being in LA with him, and he said, stephen, sometimes when it's raining gold, you have to turn the umbrella upside down. Because we were very seriously not taking anything. And I think when you look at what's happened with COVID you know, we're certainly in a much better place today because we took that money. So I think protecting for the downside really was awesome.

Totally, man.

Speaking on that, how have you guys adapted with everything happening with COVID 19 and, you know, it's something where I know you guys have offices in Australia and London. So how have you guys adapted during this last month or two?

Yeah, frankly, the pivot to working fully remote and having a distributed workforce I think has gone really well for Cameo. Me, Devin and Martin co founded the business fully distributed from each other. Those two were in la. I was in Chicago. And if you know anything about la, Devin was in Venice beach and Martin was in Bel Air. So you might as well be in LA and New York. And so we developed, like, excellence early around doing things like Zoom meetings. And, you know, our people that work at Cameo, they're working with teammates in the UK and Australia, in London and Argentina, in la, Chicago from the very beginning. So I think for us, anyone that's ever walked into a Cameo office knows that it's a special place. But I think we've been pretty seamlessly able to transfer our special culture abroad during these times.

Very cool.

I'm curious when it comes to when you guys are first launching the app. So as you and your two partners, how long was the development process until it finally hit the App Store? And what was the first one month, six months into it, what did that look like?

We didn't even sell our first Cameo in the app for over two years. It didn't take two years to build cameo. We only sold on cameo.com and in fact, even as recently as Last December, the iOS business is only 1% of our business. So that's a big misnomer. The vast majority of Traffic comes through cameo.com but it probably took us about six months from idea to the first selling of the product. I think we had the idea October 2016, and we sold our first product in March of 2017.

Very cool, man.

How have you dealt with scaling and how have you been able to build, you know, team culture? Because whenever, for example, when I had someone from Cameo reached out to me to get on the platform, it was such a friendly experience, and I got on and it was, you know, just a very good community that I felt, yeah, you've been able to develop that through scaling the company.

I think we've hired a lot of really young people, and we've kind of homegrown them. So that's. That's a big part of it. You know, we take our values extremely seriously, and if leaders aren't able to adhere to them, we get rid of them. We have a really high bar for performance. Last year, 17,000 people applied on LinkedIn to work at Cameo for 69 jobs that we had. So, you know, it's literally harder to get a job at Cameo than it is to get into Harvard. So for us, we really try to maintain a high bar, and it really starts with being a great person. And I think if you're a great person to your coworkers, you'll be a great person to the talent we have on the platform. You'll be great to our customers. So we really tried to screen for that.

Very cool.

Where do you spend most of your time as CEO with how massive you guys have grown up to this point?

Well, the company, I think, is actually, like, not nearly as big as most people think it is. We've got just over 100 employees right now. So compared to, like, Instagram or Snapchat, like, we're certainly not a big company. You know, I've spent most of my time in Chicago, historically. Last year, I started spending an increasing amount of time in la, as we're really trying to solidify ourselves as a top place to work in Los Angeles, too.

Very cool.

I think once Covid's over, I'll continue to spend more time in la, you know, and make sure that I'm going back and forth on a more frequent basis than even I did last year.

Yeah.

You guys have an office on Wilshire, is that correct? I remember seeing.

No, we're in Abbot, Kenny. Okay, so our office I remember seeing.

Your office when I was in la.

Our office is on the corner of Abbot Kinney and Westminster.

Okay, got it.

Invented speech.

Okay, got it. When it comes to you as an individual with everything Cameo related, so you spend most of your time in Chicago. I just want to, I want to dive into, you know, as an entrepreneur when it comes to the daily tasks of scaling. What do you recommend entrepreneurs to do who are launching a SaaS company or launching a product and this may be their first time doing so?

I mean, number one, I think ship fast and ship often is really important. You need to get your product out in the market and see what people think of it. You should be embarrassed by your first release and that's how you're going to learn from our customers. I've talked to so many founders, including many people that had actually had the idea for Cameo and worked on that for three years and never shipped it. And ultimately, like, if you wait too long, somebody else is going to iterate and take the idea that you had. Secondly, I think it's really important. Team building is by far the most important thing, especially your co founders and early hires. It's really important to find special people that aren't just great talent, but are also amazing human beings because you're really marrying those people. And most companies die from suicide, not from homicide. They die not because they run out of money, but because the co founders don't want to work together. So it's really important to find good people that can complement your skill set. And third, and most importantly, I think it's really critical to be working in a space that you're actually obsessed about that you, you know, when you're doing something else, like you think about things like this. When I was, I love sports. When I was trading on the floor of the board of trade or when I was working at LinkedIn, I probably spent half the day on ESPN.com and the other half the day kind of reading what was going on in the entertainment world. So for me it made a ton of sense to get into something where I could get paid to do what I was doing for free before.

Love it. How long were you at LinkedIn?

I was there for two years. Two years.

Very cool.

So you went to Duke, then started working at LinkedIn.

I was a trader, then I worked at LinkedIn.

What would you say, did LinkedIn teach you anything regarding SaaS? A successful app and did you utilize, you know, principles and tactics there into Cameo or what do you think about that?

I Learned sales at LinkedIn in a formal way, I learned about culture. I learned about building diverse teams. When I was a trader, I did not work with a single woman for the first five years of my career. So it was really exciting to get into a world at LinkedIn where suddenly at the leadership, they were talking about balancing the gender gap on the C suite or at the director plus level. Team culture was nothing I had ever learned about. On my first day at LinkedIn, Mike Gamson, who was the global head of sales at the time, talked about this concept of next play, where he said, two years from today, none of you will be doing the job we just hired you for. We know that. We support that. We literally have the profile data to prove it. Your job in the next few years is to figure out what's your dream job. Our job is to help you get the skills to get that job. And it totally changed the, you know, I think the approach between the employer and the employee. And LinkedIn takes a, you know, really, they take their alumni network really seriously, which is something I hope we can do at some point if, you know, Cameo gets huge and people leave to go start their own companies. Um, yeah. I'm very fortunate that the CEO of LinkedIn and the global head of sales were early investors with me and have been really helpful as I've scaled.

Very cool.

How have you been able to not only not only build the team, but when it comes to having multiple offices and scaling internationally? I know that Based on the TechCrunch article I was reading, you guys are really putting an emphasis on international markets. How are you changing your thinking towards international markets and how is it different than the us?

I think in the US we were coming at a different point where we started by putting anyone on the platform that would listen to us and work our way up. I think on the international, we're going to come a lot more top down, which is tactically different. One of the appeals to international talent is that we can connect them with their the US market. So when I was in Bollywood or when I was in Asia, end of last year, most of the excitement was really around foreign talent selling back to the US or UK or Australian buyers, which I think is pretty compelling.

Very cool.

Internationally. Do you go to the international offices or is that something that you guys have just satellite locations? And how do you manage that?

Yeah. So in London, Abby Shepard, who is employee number two at Cameo, is running that. She sat next to me for the first two years, so she really learned our culture and has been awesome. She was a 19 year old intern when she joined Cameo and ended up dropping out of school and running her office out there. So it starts with having homegrown talent that, that can kind of export your culture. Interestingly enough, I was supposed to go to London for the first time to go see our office when I canceled. Basically this conference I was at got canceled. Cause of COVID This was right at the beginning of the march. And then I ended up banning all travel for the company going forward. So fortunately, I never got a chance to go see the office before COVID and who knows after Covid if we'll even have an office there or if we'll keep people working. Distributed.

Yeah.

Very cool, man.

Who would you say? I'm curious. I've seen an article about it. What's been the highest dollar amount for a cameo on the platform? For a celebrity?

We've sold $10,000 business cameos. So for example, you can go on Cameo and book Brett Favre to shout out your business, and instead of four, a hundred bucks, it's like $10,000. The most expensive consumer cameo that we've sold is 2,500, and that's for Caitlyn Jenner.

Okay, very cool.

I'm curious, cause I know when it comes to the amount of users and people that are creating Cameos, what was the from a interface perspective, going from a thousand to ten thousand to where you guys are now, how, how are you able to grow from the tech side and what were some of the challenges that you guys faced when doing so?

As you grow a marketplace, business search and discovery become increasingly important. So, you know, in year one, we had 300 talent on cameo, so you can literally browse and see everyone. Today we have over 30,000. So you really have to know what you're looking for. Categorization becomes important. Referrals become important. So we're, you know, I think at this point we're more ahead on the supply side than we are on the demand side. So we're really working internally on matching and tweaking algorithms and things like that to help everybody find the person that they want on Cameo.

Love that.

Growing up, would you expect, like, for example, I always like to ask people that come on the show. As a young entrepreneur, there's a lot of 18 to 25 year olds that listen, what advice do you give to young entrepreneurs starting their first business? After raising capital and scaling a team and having offices internationally, what's your advice to someone that's just starting their first business?

Number one, I think you should find a business to start, like always, right? You learn about business by starting businesses. You can only learn so much by going, you know, work at a company. There's huge. There's some interesting things about working at a big company. And you can get credentialed. You can build a great network. A lot of my top people at Cameo are people I worked with at LinkedIn that I recruited. A lot of my early investors were early executives there. But in general, if you're one of the 3% of people on earth that has the personality trait to be an entrepreneur, the personality type, you're never going to be happy, like, not running your own shit. So, like, go and run it, even if you fail. It's probably less painful as an entrepreneur to fail than it is to be working, you know, for someone. I think most entrepreneurs are people that it's not enough for them to be on a winning team, but they want to be the reason why they won. And not in an ego way, but just. I know the most painful thing for someone with an entrepreneurial personality type is to be in a situation where the business is making decisions that are affecting whether they win or lose without their input. That's a really hard thing. That's something I struggled with in my time at LinkedIn and also my time trading. So it's a lot better at this point to have the ball in my hands. And ultimately, I think the second thing that's important is when I started Cameo, one of my buddies at LinkedIn was like, Stephen, this idea is so good. And I hadn't left Cameo yet, and we didn't have the name yet, but the idea for Cameo, you go, stephen, this idea is too big. If somebody else becomes a billionaire and builds this product and you stay, and you never, like, take the shot, and you stay LinkedIn, could you live with yourself? If the answer is anything but no, which. The answer in my case was like, no, I could not live with myself. Then you should start the company. If the answer is yeah, you could, then don't start it. It's too hard. Find something else that you love to do. And you couldn't. You couldn't imagine somebody else winning.

So was Cambia the first company you started?

It's the first tech company I started, but I've had other businesses before.

Very cool.

Yeah. Did you realize from an early age, like, were you always entrepreneurial, or when did that come into your life?

Yeah, I was always entrepreneurial, and I think in college is where it really blossomed, because in high school, I was so busy. Yeah, I Did, like, as class president and captain three sports teams and did debate and, you know, I was so busy in high school, I didn't have a time to run a business. But the second I got to college, you know, I started my first business at 18.

I'm curious, how do you think colleges are handling the situation with COVID Because I know there's. And especially as an entrepreneur, right. There's a lot of entrepreneurs that go to college. Some. So I'd love to get your thoughts on college, what you got out of it, not only from a education perspective, but from a personal perspective. And then, yeah, to hear how you believe they're responding to it.

I mean, look, I think college, the books are the same at every school. It's really about the quality of people that you're meeting, you know, in real terms. My co founder and my first employee were both fraternity brothers of mine at Duke. So these are people I've known since they were 18 years old. And we had 10 years of knowing each other before we started a business together. So that I think builds a lot of trust. So it is unfortunate. Like, while education is kind of moved online, I think the main value of college, like what you're actually paying for are the people that you're meeting there. So in a world where the campuses go away, I do think the value of like your brick and mortar colleges go down. And then in that case, like, everybody should just be doing things like Lambda School to just learn the skill set versus pay a bunch of money for some big fancy degree.

Yeah, Very cool.

When an early stage entrepreneurs raising capital for a tech company. What's your advice when raising, whether that's a seed round or their first series A. What's some of the things you've learned through that process that you'd want to shed some light on?

The people that really, as an entrepreneur, like, if you ever have to convince people to take your money, it's probably not the right fit. Like, you need to tell your story to a lot of people taking bets, but you'll know when it's the right partner, when they basically come to you and they have so much conviction that they want to invest. You know, investors are seeing, you know, hundreds.

Right now.

It's slowed down with COVID but some of these VC firms are seeing thousands of deals a year and they're funding like 20. Right. So at the end of the day, it's really important that there's that initial spark. And if there's not that spark, it's kind of like dating, right? It's like when you see, you see a girl that you really like, if all of a sudden you go out with her once and then she's blowing you off or not texting you back, that's probably not the right one. There's somebody out there that really wants to be with you and love you. And if you're just chasing and you're not getting anything back, that's probably not the right fit. I think it's very similar, for sure.

When it comes to actually launching a SaaS product. Just talking about investing, do investors, based on your experience, look for, do they want to see a product before they invest or do a lot of SaaS companies raise capital before creating the MVP product? Or, you know, just what have you seen in your experience and what do you recommend?

I mean, I have no idea about SaaS products. I do think that SaaS products compared to consumer products probably have a longer development cycle pre launch. So apps like Superhuman is probably the big one last year that people got really excited about. The team was working on it for like three to four years, I think, before they launched it. So I think it's fine to have an idea, but it's probably easier to have an idea when you're an established team. Otherwise I think you need to ship and get it in front of customers.

Yeah, very cool.

So two more questions before I let you wrap up when it comes to the future of Cameo. From this point, what should consumers and users of Cameo be expecting and what are you excited about?

I think we're going to start getting more into content. Last weekend we just launched something called Cameo Cares, which was our first foray into interesting content, bringing together talent on our platform and having them do panels and stuff. I think we'll see more of that going forward. And I think you'll also see more interesting ways to communicate with talent. So Cameo Direct Product was their second product where you can now text with talent. I think we'll continue to find interesting use cases that are away from the gifting one and more for like you to engage personally with talent.

Very cool.

Last question. Looking back along the journey of starting Cameo to where you guys are now, what lesson have you learned as an entrepreneur that you want to give to a young entrepreneur listening today?

Look, at the end of the day, there were a lot of early investors in Chicago that told me like, I couldn't build this business here. Right. Don't listen to investors. You know, you have to as an entrepreneur. Like, you're seeing the world differently than anybody else and that's okay. And a lot of people are going to say no, and a lot of people are going to call you crazy. But that's why it's so important to be working on something that you're really, really passionate about. And at the end of the day, like, you know, if you have a dream, like, to change the world, go do it.

Love it.

Well, that being said, Stephen, I want to say thank you so much for coming on today. Where is the best place for people to connect with you, follow you? But also stay updated on Cameo.

Yeah, you can follow me @mister312 on Twitter, or you can just follow Cameo.

Got it. Awesome. Well, Stephen, thanks so much for coming on today. Everyone, make sure you follow Stephen. Follow Cameo. And that being said, thanks again.

Thank you.

Monarch Legacy of Monsters An Apple Original Series the world is on fire.

Fire.

I decided to do something about it on November 17th.

This place.

It's not ours. Believe me, the most massive event of the year arrives. If you come with me, you'll know everything. I promise.

Oh, my God.

Go, Go.

Go.

Monarch Legacy of monsters streaming November 17th only on Apple TV.

Plus.