#27 - From Funeral to Fortune: How Steven Galanis Revolutionized Celebrity Connections with Cameo...

Welcome back to another episode of On the Subject. I'm your host, co-founder and CEO of Subject, Michael Velardo, and I am so excited about this guest today. It's actually the first time we've ever met in person. This is an incredible entrepreneur, leader, mentor, and undisclosed Subject investor. Steven Galanis, Mr. 312, co-founder and CEO of Cameo, and former high school hockey legend. Welcome to the show today.

Thanks for having me. I think we all need a hype man like that in our lives.

I do bring a lot of good energy. I appreciate that. And so I think it's so cool because we have so much in common. You know, both Chicago suburb kids, played hockey, you know, went to good schools, ended up doing sales at tech companies, didn't really thrive in an employee role, became entrepreneurs. So you're a huge mentor to me, a leader, and I love being able to learn from you. And you really inspire many of my leadership tendencies. And so I'd love to just really start it there is that The way that I first heard of Steven was my first report at Uber. His name is Dave Solitz. Shout out, Dave. Great guy. He's at Harvard Business School right now. Really brilliant guy. I'm sure you helped him get in there. So congrats to you and him. He went— he let me know, hey, I'm looking at going to a startup. I might leave Uber. And I'm like, totally. Hey, do what's best for you. And he's like, it's this company that's inventing the new autograph. Like, what does that mean? He's like, I could be the first employee there. It's a bunch of Duke guys. You know, I knew them through a frat or whatever. And that was you at 1871. So tell us how that started.

Yeah. So, so much there, you know, and David didn't need my help. I think he got into every business school he applied to. I think

he was a great guy.

I think I remember him being like, yeah, I'm trying to figure out between Harvard and Stanford and not bad options, everything like that. But anyways, yeah, it was, it was a really interesting time. We had the idea for Cameo leaving my grandmother's funeral, kind of the last place you think you're gonna have your big idea. As you mentioned, I was in sales at big tech. I was working at LinkedIn at the time. And, you know, one of the stories I always love telling that kind of sets up like how Cameo even started is my very first day at LinkedIn. There was a guy, Mike Gamson, who was the global head of sales at LinkedIn. So every non-engineer at the company basically reported up into his org. He was a direct to Jeff Weiner. Wow. And he was located in Chicago. He's a Highland Park guy, so from the North Shore, like similar area that we grew up. And, you know, the first day of work at LinkedIn, I think it was January 5th or January 6th, 2015. I remember being in this big kind of auditorium-type room at the LinkedIn Chicago office. Gamson is leading this call, but then there's, you know, BlueJeans at the time because I don't think Zoom was around yet or we weren't using it. There were blue jeans of all the different, you know, salespeople around the world watching like this opening keynote. And the first thing Mike Gamson said was, welcome to LinkedIn. 2 years from today, none of you will be doing the job we just hired you for. Mm-hmm. We know that, we support that. And at LinkedIn, we literally have the profile data to prove that that's true. So our job as a company is to make sure that we're talking to you constantly. We understand what the skillset you need to go be the best version of yourself for this next job that you want, whether it's internal or external. And all we ask is that you crush it every day. And when you're ready to leave, when you're ready for that next job, internal or external, go find someone better than yourself to replace yourself with. And that was the, you know, what Reed Hoffman ended up writing a book called The Alliance. And that was such a foundational story to me coming from you know, options trading where you never would talk about, you know, hey, here's like my other dreams or aspirations. 'Cause if your eye wasn't on the ball, you know, and you're trading someone else's money, they just felt like, you know, we need to get somebody else in there. So that philosophy is really important. And the reason I started by telling that story is the day that I left to go do Cameo full-time ended up being my exact 2-year anniversary of that. Oh, that's so cool. And I remember writing this letter to my team at LinkedIn. They call it a next play letter when you're announcing where you're going next. And I talked about the idea that would become Cameo. And, you know, my team was really excited about it. You know, I remember even, even, you know, Mike Gamson, you know, because I put this on my LinkedIn, you guys can all read this exact post from real time. And, you know, I remember him sending me an email that day or a couple of days later, just being like, Hey, hey, Steven, it's Mike. You know, thanks for the kind words in the post. If I can ever be helpful, let me know. And he was on the board of a lot of Chicago tech companies. You know, 90 days after I left, he cold-called me and on the spot led a $500,000, you know, angel investment into the company.

Oh my goodness.

Kind of in the early days. And we wouldn't have been able to build the company in Chicago and hire people like David and hire people like your brother that also came and worked for us. over the years, like my 2 co-founders were in LA.

Yeah.

I would've never been able to build the business without, you know, somebody like Mike there. And, you know, that was just one of those, you know, really foundational stories. So as far as how the idea happened, we were thinking a lot about a problem that, you know, frankly isn't too dissimilar from some of the stuff that you're working on as well here. We felt that the way that technology was changing, there was, there were more creators, more talent, more fame in the world than ever before. But the problem was the underlying business model that supports whether it's professional football players where 85% of them go broke 5 years after playing their last game and only 1% of athletes get 99% of all the endorsement revenues. In music for Spotify, the top 1% of streamers make over 90% of all the streaming revenue. And when you're talking about touring, Or merch, it's even more power law distributed than sports. Uh, on YouTube, the top 3% of creators make 97% of all the ad revenue on the platform. Wow. In, in acting, the Screen Actors Guild at any given time, 99.9% of the Screen Actors Guild is outta work, right? So when something like the strike happens last year, you know, the stats were coming out that over 80% of the guild couldn't afford to get their insurance from SAG. Because they didn't work, you know, 20— it was something like that to make $25,000, $26,000 a year to qualify for SAG health insurance. And, you know, they didn't— most of the vast majority of SAG members didn't even get close to qualifying for that. So when we looked around, we felt like there was this huge gap that was happening where there was more fame than ever before. Think about TikTok. Every day there's new people blowing up. Love TikTok. Think about all the content that's getting made on the streaming platforms. You know, it used to be that if you weren't in a movie or you weren't on a show on NBC or CBS or ABC, you know, you— nobody knew about you. But today, you know, you can audition for, you know, scores of shows that are getting produced every single day on Netflix or Amazon Prime or the streaming platforms. Or guess what? If nobody casts you, you can do what our good friend Cody Ko did and just start making content. And if it's good enough, you're going to develop your own following. So this was a huge change and how that worked. But as we saw, there were more creatives than ever kind of playing for a, you know, you had an exponential amount of growing fame and you had linearly, or in some cases declining revenue streams that were supporting everybody else. We knew that there was gonna be this larger gap between fame and monetization and the societal problem of people being more famous than rich because on the platforms you're trading distribution for content, but you're not getting paid for it. The vast majority of people. So for us, it was all about how could we find a way for talent to get paid to become more famous? Like, how do you get more beloved every time you make a piece of content and it puts money in your pocket, right? So that's really what we try to do with Cameo and the big problem we've been working on this whole time.

Yeah, I love it. And, you know, we— the first— we're 4 years old as a business. First 3 years, we really focused on product and we're really proud of what we built. But this year, we've really focused on distribution and marketing. You know, I didn't even have an Instagram or TikTok going into the year. Now we're doing a podcast with you. Like, I love content and content creation and like you're such a big empowerment of the creator economy. And so huge shout out to you. So one interesting aspect of your story there that I love to dig into and, you know, even dig in with myself as well as like, you know, you have your LinkedIn network, which is incredible. LinkedIn is one of the best companies to ever exist. Love LinkedIn. You also went to Duke, which is a fantastic school. How have both impacted the way that you think and then also the way you raise capital, interacted with the tech world? You know, because I think about my experience, I ended up doing my MBA at UCLA, undergrad at Penn, and I worked at Uber. For me, even though of course I love Penn, UCLA was definitely the most helpful from a, from an overall tactic and timing perspective. But Uber has been the most powerful network I've ever been a part of. And it's interesting to see how schools versus companies can impact your career in different ways.

Yeah, it's a great question. And I'll start with That same— before my first day at LinkedIn, you go in for a final round interview. And one thing they used to do at the time, I don't know if they still do it, but it's awesome. They would give you as a candidate something called your InMap, and it was a graphical representation of your network. Oh, that's really cool.

Yeah.

So you would see like, you know, one color, the blue, would be like everyone that you're connected with, you went to Duke with. And, you know, if you worked at Microsoft, if you worked at Salesforce, you would just see these different clusters. And then within the clusters, there'd be these nodes of connection, like people that you shared so many common connections with, and they were clearly there. And I have the map from my very first day. Oh, that's so cool. That I walked into the LinkedIn office when I was interviewing. Like, it's framed, it's in storage somewhere, but it's something like I gotta find, you know, it's like one of those things that disappeared during COVID and I gotta find it. I gotta put it back on the wall. And I would love, Ryan, if anyone from LinkedIn, if you guys are listening, I would love if we could like, I'd love to see where my network is now. Yeah. Because, you know, that was 8 years ago and obviously the Cameo journey has changed so much of it. When I talk about Duke, that place could not have been more important or life-changing for me. I think the single most important decision in my life was going there for school. And, you know, interestingly, I remember it kind of came down to, Duke and USC were like the 2 schools that I was thinking. And I always believed that kind of like Duke, USC, and Notre Dame for their region are like the same place. Yeah, they are very similar. They're excellent academic schools. They've got world-class sports. You know, I was an athlete. Like, that was really important to me whether I was playing or not. Great law schools. You want to be around it. Unbelievable alumni network that are super powerful, not just in their immediate geography, but kind of all around. You know, and, and I love the vibe that I got on all of those campuses. But when I ended up going to Duke, the thing that was so incredible to me was being around like a different level of success than anywhere else. I remember President Broadhead, who was the president at the time, were in the opening convocation and he talked about He starts listing off, he's like, there were 10,000 valedictorians that didn't get in this class. Wow. There were X amount of Olympic athletes. There were like literally going over like all this. And then, you know, and then, and then he's like, and then here's your stats, right, of this group. And, you know, on one hand it really humbles you because you realize like how kind of lucky and fortunate you are that out of a huge stack of resumes and applications. And it's the same when you make that amazing hire and all these people apply. you know, so many people that could change the whole trajectory of your company. Maybe they don't stick out on paper somehow. But, you know, one of the reasons I probably got in was Duke needed a hockey goalie the year that I was there. But if I was a tuba player, maybe I wouldn't have been there, right? Yeah. So you just never know. And, and the thing that particularly was exciting for me at that period of time was my senior year of high school was the first year where not the first year, but you basically at that point Facebook was still locked. Yeah, right. So you had only university, you had to have a .edu address to even be on the, on the, you know, on the, the social network at the time, right? And I remember, um, you know, kind of fall break my senior year of high school, all of these guys that I played hockey with and football with came back in town for this big Glenbrook North-Glenbrook South hockey game. And I remember talking to them And they were like, oh my God, Steven, this thing Facebook is out and like you're gonna love it. And they're showing me on the computer like at this party after the game. And and I remember seeing that and I was like, this is amazing. And at that point, like I actually applied early—not early—but like U of I had rolling admissions. I remember getting into U of I and like putting a deposit down just so I could get the .edu email address to get on. The upshoot of that is like every single person that I knew from high school and then college. you know, I was connected with on Facebook. That enabled me to build my first business in college, Spartan Entertainment. Me and my co-founder Zach ended up building a Facebook group that ended up having 17,000 college students. Wow. And we ran the nightlife at Duke, and then we had all these ancillary businesses. We had a college moving business. Something like 85 or 90% of Duke students live out of state, so You know, they need somewhere to put their shit after the semester's over. And we would hire, you know, hockey players and football guys and basketball guys and wrestlers to come and come to your room and move the boxes, bring them to our warehouse, and then bring them back when you came back after the summer to go to your new place. We had a DJ rental business. A lot of kids wanted to get into DJing. They would play our parties. They would intern for us, basically kind of work for free. And then we would give them equipment and then they could start putting the money that they were earning towards doing a lot of the events and parties we were doing. So my first entrepreneurial experience came from Duke, but social networking was so important of that. While at Duke, there was a guy named Xander who I met whose dad was a really early LinkedIn investor and board member from Sequoia. And because he happened to be a good friend of mine from freshman year, you know, Xander ended up getting me and a lot of our friends on LinkedIn like way before we thought we needed to be. So, you know, that was really interesting because, you know, from that period, a lot of people don't make a LinkedIn profile until they're in the job market to begin with. But because I had a LinkedIn profile from freshman year, like all my college accomplishments were things that were on that resume, living, breathing resume too. And that ended up being really interesting. So, you know, for me, this connection of like connecting people and the power of that, whether it's LinkedIn to, you know, I was coming out here for work this week. I hadn't been in LA in a year and our Cameo for Business unit was trying to set up different meetings for me with CEOs in LA that, you know, were big prospects of ours. And all of a sudden, This company called Byte pops up, which is a SmileDirectClub competitor. Yeah. And they're like, hey, you're connected with Nick Sarnoff, the CEO. That was my college roommate. You know, it's like, I didn't know that he even had, like, let you know, he used that TrueCard forever. I didn't know that he had left. LinkedIn can make it so you never have to know. Like, I don't know where most of my friends work today because in the same way, I don't know most people's phone numbers because it's saved in my phone. Right. So that, that aspect of like getting real-time information on your network is absolutely essential. And a lot of the skills that I learned at LinkedIn ended up being the same skills that we taught at Cameo. So the way that we grew the Cameo business was actually through Instagram DM. You know, we hired—

you said cold calls dead. Yeah.

Yeah. We hired an army of folks at Cameo that, you know, David was one of the pioneers of this. Where, you know, we'd say, hey, go get— you're doing sports, you're doing entertainment, go get them. And then David would sit there and DM Real Housewives until their thumbs— his thumbs were bleeding, right? And part of the way that you would sometimes get to someone really busy is you would look at their LinkedIn, at their Instagram posts, and see who else they were in. So, you know, if you happen to be good friends with Jeremy Piven, like, you might be a lot more, like, easier to get. So they DM you and And then you'd be like, oh yeah, I'll set up for, you know, with Jeremy, right? So that's kind of how we built it. This concept of social selling was something I learned about at LinkedIn where I was on the team that was selling Sales Navigator, which is LinkedIn's—

Great tool, we use it.

First prospecting tool. So, you know, while we weren't using LinkedIn as much, you know, at Cameo, the skills that I learned about social selling allowed our Cameo sales team to be at the bleeding edge of the spear when it came through social selling and social prospecting through Instagram. And, you know, Instagram is an amazing tool for any, like, emerging entrepreneurs out there. Unlike Twitter, unlike LinkedIn, anyone in the world can send a message to anyone else in the world on Instagram, right? And that's a really big unlock. Now, are they going to see it? You know, maybe, maybe not. But at least you can get the access there. And you'd be surprised at how many people with blue checkmarks you know, will end up still reading every single one of the DMs that comes in. You know, and, and, and so often that is how somebody got a job or how, you know, some entrepreneur got their break or got— or how some video editor ends up like DMing the right, you know, athlete and becomes their video editor. So, you know, shoot your shot.

Shoot your shot. You heard it here first. And I think there's a couple of really cool ideas that you've really brought into the portion. You know, cold call is dead. One of the ones, and this is probably an untold story before, and you might not even remember it, was when we first pitched Steven, we were Ameal Learning, and he really put down the name, which I appreciate right away, because he's like, I don't know how to say this or whatnot. So I'm— and we ended up changing our name to Subject. Huge credit to you. Better name. Congrats. Thank you. Way better name. So I'm assuming Cameo wasn't the first name of your business then.

No. Cameo—

What was the first name? Let's hear the story.

Yeah. Cameo, uh, was not the first name of our business. Um, actually, this is a, a, a pretty good story and it resonates based on, you know, even a post that you posted this week. Uh, my, my little brother, John Galanis, who worked for us for the first year of the, of the business, um, he's the one that came up with the name Cameo. And, you know, we had a process where we first, um, you know, we, we knew, we didn't know what it was gonna be called, but if you go in the Cameo database today, the first idea we had for a name was Starboard. Like it was just a board of all these stars. So literally, like in our prod database, everything still says like star. I love it.

We have Emil learning for Salesforce.

It's still there. The first website we went public with was Power Move. We just did like we just called it Project Power Move. We didn't know. We knew that wasn't going to be the name of the company, but it was something to start with. And then I remember we hired this branding firm in Miami that ended up being the firm that created the logo that would become Cameo and the and you know. Iconic, like this was their first cut at the Cameo logo, and you know we've never changed it to this day—the wordmark. But I remember they gave us four choices when we did this big branding exercise, and I think the choices were Hero Hub, Thrillo, Thrillo. Oh my god! One was like Whammy. No, not Whammy. Thrillo, and then Hyped H Y P D. So then I remember I downloaded my LinkedIn, my entire LinkedIn network. And part of the reason I did this was to, like, again, keep people excited and like almost like the concept today they call building in public. Like I did that and I felt from the very beginning getting my personal community behind Cameo from the earliest days or the idea that would become Cameo, at least for my journey, was really, really important. We're a consumer-facing business. You know, my friends and family are going to have to be our first customers. Like, that's just how it's going to work. The first talent that are going to join, when you have the chicken and egg question, are going to be people that I know. So I really felt like giving my whole community access to, you know, things as important as like, what should we call this consumer-facing brand? And I remember we sent the survey out and I was really excited about the idea, uh, the, the company Hero Hub. I thought that was like a cool Like very aspirational name for what we were going to do. And then, you know, again, like the reason this is important, I remember we sent this out and a lot of my college network is all in New York at this point. And they're all like, that sounds like a sandwich shop, you know, because like on the East Coast they call it gyros, right? And that's not anything that I would have thought about coming from Chicago. You know, I remember people dogging on Hyped. They're like, and it was H-Y-P-D. It was like, that's like too millennial, too Gen Z. Like we're going to be dealing with like retired athletes.

That's true.

Probably not the right thing. And then Thrillo was something that was like, like, again, we didn't, we didn't love. So then at that point, you know, my brother was like, hey, I think it should. And when we got the feedback, we— I had people vote. I did a SurveyMonkey with those 4 choices and we put Power— the 3 new ones and then Power Move and Power Move won. Wow. And we knew that that was not going to be good because it was already just like a throwaway. You know, filler title. So then, you know, after that, my brother, I remember, was just like, I think it's like it should be Cameo. Like, that's really what this is. People are making a cameo in your lives. Now, the problem was the cameo.com domain was taken and owned, and we weren't going to be able to get that. Cameo was taken on Instagram. Cameo was taken on Twitter. So what we decided to do is we bought bookcameo.com. And then over the years, we're able to acquire, you know, the, the domain. You know, crazy story about how we did that for another day.

The second podcast already. He already announced he's coming back in about a year.

No. Or, you know what, I can tell. It's interesting, right? Especially when you find the perfect name. So we ended up going to GoDaddy. We're trying to buy it. We end up getting in contact with the guy that owns it. And we end up structuring a deal with him to rent the website for six years and then have a purchase option to buy it later because the price that he wanted was you know astronomical. So it was kind of like okay, like what if we find you know you've you've owned this website since like the nineties. Like this guy like had kiss.com back in the day.

Oh, he's killing it. Yeah.

He was like one of these just OG. And unlike real estate, you can afford. you, you know, could just buy $20 a year to renew it. You don't need to— like, there's no real opportunity cost of it, of it being there. And, um, and I remember his friend was like one of the early, like, video porn pioneers. So when we signed the lease, the only rule was it can't be like video pornography, because if we're gonna do that, we're gonna do it with the right— with the guy that knows what he's doing there. Um, so yeah, we rented it for 6 years and Just recently, in the last six months, we actually finally bought Cameo.

Nice congrats!

So we now own the website, which is really exciting. And then I remember on Instagram, the person that had @Cameo hadn't posted since like 2011. You know, and there was one post ever. And you know, as our brand got bigger and bigger and bigger, we were verified. I was verified. You know, I reached out to one of my best friends who works at. at Meta, and she happened to, you know, have gotten to be pretty senior at Facebook, a good friend from college. And, you know, and I told her, I'm like, hey, we really love help, like, trying to acquire this domain. And because nobody had posted on it, we ended up, like, you know, getting it, you know, verified, put it out, put it under our name. Nice. And on X, we're still, you know, @BookCameo. There's A producer in LA, and her name is Cameo Wood, and she has @Cameo. And probably once a year I'll DM her. I'm like, "What's your price?" And she's like, "There's no price." And I'm someone, especially with my marketplace, I believe that everybody has a price.

Everyone has a price.

I will just tell you that the bid-ask spread is still infinite, and we haven't made any progress on that. And I think Cameo Wood has blocked me. But it is always funny.

We'll keep trying.

So many talent will always. You know, tweet

out,

hey, I'm on Cameo, @Cameo. So she has just been getting bombarded, you know, by people tagging her over the years. But, um, yeah, so Cameo Wood, if you're listening, you know, we'd still love to talk about @Cameo.

Help them out. Yeah, we had a similar journey. We were HiEmile.com, and you had said, hey, everyone needs to know how to pronounce your name. I don't know if it's Emily, Emile. Great advice. And then we went through a similar branding exercise. We went down to Symmetry, Finch, I believe one other, and Subject. And subject.com, shockingly enough, was the easiest domain to get and the best name. And so we've never looked back, but we still are Try Subject on a lot of our socials, which I don't love, but we're going to figure it out. Another parallel I definitely wanted to make sure we were able to chat is that you're Mr. 312. I'm Chicago Velardo. I am in LA now, so it's a little bit, a little hypocritical, but, you know, I love Chicago and it made me the person I am. You spent a lot of time in Chicago and Miami. Can you talk about that? What your journey to Florida was? It sounds like you're back in Illinois, but you're also bouncing back and forth. And did you ever consider LA?

Yeah. So historically, I split time between Chicago and LA because my 2 co-founders, Devin and Martin, were in Venice and Bel Air respectively. Our 2 offices historically have been Chicago and LA. LA is extremely important market for us.

Makes sense.

Chicago's home. So You know, once we got funded by Gamson, you know, a big part of that was like to build this and build it in Chicago. So we, you know, ended up expanding at 1871, like when David joined. And, you know, I think even your brother then joined in the next office,

Aberdeen,

in Aberdeen. So we ended up having these, you know, pretty like iconic spaces in Chicago that really were a center of culture. And one of the reasons Chicago was so important was I was thinking about people like like ourselves that maybe love sports or love entertainment and love content. And when I was coming out of college, there was not a company that I could have worked at to go do those things. Like I could have worked at Groupon, I could have done what I did and been a trader, but there just wasn't like, you know, creator economy, consumer video, social video that those just weren't jobs that existed in Chicago. And when you look at the entertainment business, Like the two guys that run Endeavor, you know, Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro are North Shore guys. Yeah, right. Like they're both, you know, they're they went to like New Trier and York North, right? And and these are guys that had to leave and had to go to LA and you know be in the mailroom at UTA or you know go to New York to to get into those type of businesses. But there's so many and I had a lot of friends that ended up moving out here or moving to New York. to go do it. But I really wanted to be part of the solution and build a business to help kids, you know, actually stay in the Midwest that wanted to.

I love that.

And, you know, and there's a lot of kids now that came up through us right out of college, first job, that have now gone on to found other companies or do other great things that just because they saw Cambio work in Chicago, they felt it was okay to stay there. And, you know, the other thing that was really exciting about what we were doing Is in Chicago, nobody, everybody was kind of aligned with our business from the beginning. Like it was exciting for the whole community.

So it's like that's how I got to meet you.

That something like Cameo could exist in Chicago and in LA. The reality is if you know if Ari invests in something early, then like UTA is probably not going to want to use it, right? So there's just so many more competitive egos here. In the space that I'm in, that by us being in Chicago and hiring people that didn't come from the talent agencies or didn't come from the record labels or didn't come from the studios, like these are people that just love sports and entertainment but had no network. Like they weren't scared to DM that person that might have been if they were in LA, like, oh, I was in the mailroom or I was on the desk of this agent. And if he hears I went behind his back and DM'd the Town, he's going to kill me and blackball. Like there just wasn't that fear. when Nick Cutres is coming in and straight out of, you know, straight out of Villanova and he's just cranking away and saying like, hey, I want to go and, you know, I want to be the most connected person in Hollywood. Right. And he could do that from Chicago.

Yeah.

So that was important. As far as your question on moving, COVID was, was a really challenging time. You know, I think as, as a leader, we had built this incredible in-office culture in Chicago and We just opened our new HQ, like HQ 2 in LA. We'd taken this like awesome Snap office in Venice. You know, it was a place that would have been able to host, you know, 75 to 100 people. We probably had 30 or 40 in LA at the time, and we probably had 100 or so, 100, 125 in Chicago. So we had 2 great dynamic offices. We moved into the LA space Feb. 1st, 2020. And our Chicago HQ, interestingly enough, at our Christmas party, probably December 12th, 2019, the owner of the building, Dave, comes up to me and Adam, my chief of staff. He's like, boys, I got some good news and some bad news. I'm like— he's like, what do you want first? I'm like, I'm an optimist. Give me the good news. He goes, I just made a lot of money. And I go— Awesome. Congratulations, Dave. What's the bad news? He's like, I just sold the building and the ones around it. They're going to build this huge new development here. We need you out April 1st. So suddenly, as anyone knows, when you go to find commercial real estate, that's like a 6-month process. At least it could take 3 months just to get the lease. And now I'm worried about how do I move my HQ and find something that's ready to go? So we end up talking to the people that are buying our building. They had just created this new tower, you know, a few blocks away at the far end of Fulton Market. Yep. Which was kind of gonna be the signature building on the, on the west side of the West Loop. And they wanted that to be Cameo Tower. Wow. That's cool. They had this 2-floor spec suite. They were willing to, you know, build out and they're like, if you take this lease, we'll end, you know, we won't knock your current office down until the new building's done. So it was probably Wednesday, something like March 11th, 2020, whatever the day was that Rudy Gobert got sick and the NBA shut down. Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks. That day, that morning, I was supposed to sign a 10-year lease on a new HQ in Chicago. And, you know, I remember like the, the guys had brought in, you know, we're picking out furniture, like fabrics, you know, Do you want this wallpaper or that wallpaper? You want this upholstery or that upholstery? Like they have a book of like, I'm literally touching fabrics and I'm looking at this beautiful mockup of our dream office. And in my heart of hearts, in my gut, I knew we were never going to move in there. So I told them, I'm like, guys, I think this COVID thing could be a real deal. I'm, I can't sign this lease today. And they're like, well, just so you know, if you don't sign, then we are wrecking balls are coming April 1st. Right. So now we're talking about 2, you know, 2, 3 weeks later. And I was like, I understand you have to do what you got to do, but I just can't sign this lease today. I sent everybody home that day and nobody ever came back to work in the Aberdeen office in Chicago. You know, and that was a pretty like crazy, pivotal, pivotal moment in the company. So instead of having a 10-year real estate liability when COVID started, And remote work is is at least starting to work for us at that point. You know, I had to make the really big decision here of like do we you know do we open it up? Do we keep hiring in LA and Chicago only or or do we open it up? And and I remember right before this happened, one of our employees that had always been a great star employee for us, she mentioned that you know her. Boyfriend or fiancé was getting a job in Minnesota. I think she was gonna go work at— the guy was gonna go work at Mayo Clinic. And she was asking, can I move to Rochester, Minnesota? And we had to make this— and this is like February 2020. We didn't allow any of our talent people not to be in Chicago. She'd been with us for a few years and we were like, yeah, like, sure, I guess that works. And I'm happy I did because she ended up continuing to be a good contributor for a while. But a month later, it wouldn't have mattered.

Yeah, right.

And then what we started to see is COVID got really bad in LA and Chicago. People started moving. So I had 100, 125 people in Chicago. But even as the business expanded and we ended up at 357 people, we had less people in Chicago after 3xing the size of the business after COVID than before because so many people had moved. You know, it was crime, it was the lockdowns, it was not being able able to enjoy the great amenities. You know, I remember spending a 90-day period here starting like the, like the day before the George Floyd murder and then the riots happened. And, you know, the beaches were closed in LA. Like you couldn't use—

you couldn't eat outside.

I remember I would go from Venice to Sunset Plaza and it would take me 15 minutes.

Yeah, right. And that was one of the nice things.

And, and then on top of that, you know, we had this Venice office, but as we were hiring people, You know, we ended up hiring people that lived in Glendale and Orange County and other. And back in the day, like you would only work for Cameo in LA if you worked on the west side because our office was in Venice. So suddenly, like if that didn't matter, then it's like well, if you're hiring people at Newport, can you hire people in California or sorry in San Francisco? And if you're hiring in SF, like shouldn't there be people in New York? So it just ended up spreading out, and for a variety of reasons, like. I decided to move to Miami during that period. And I've been—

I love Miami.

I've been a resident down there for a while. A lot of my, my peers and mentors and guys that I really look up to, we all kind of moved together at the same time. So for the last year, what I've been doing is commuting into work and I take the 6:20 AM flight every Monday, not during the summer because you kind of stay out of Miami in the summer. I'm in the office in Chicago at 9:30 in the morning. And then I used to do Fridays too, but I couldn't get people consistently to come in on Fridays. So then I would come, I would take the 6:46 PM flight and land in Miami at 11:10 every single Thursday night.

That's awesome.

I've been doing that for a year. As far as like our back-to-work policy, you know, we, we didn't, at the time I started doing that, I didn't force anyone to come back, but I just said, guys, I'm going to be here. I'd love to see you. And a lot of the people that are still with us, you know, they came up like through our, you know, through the Cameo program in the old office. And they've absolutely— their best friends are people that they've worked with. And then some of the people that have joined since COVID you know, this was maybe the most connected they've gotten. And, um, you know, we're real happy that 2 weeks ago we moved into our new global headquarters.

Congratulations. Looks amazing.

In Old Market. And it's even cooler than the old Aberdeen space. So Next time you're in Chicago, you're gonna have to check it out.

Okay, great.

And, uh, you know, and as I told everyone, like, work from home is always gonna be important at Cameo, but consider this your home. Like, we created a space that feels like home. It's better than your home. It's gonna be more— it's gonna be easier to, to, um, you know, do whatever you want, whether it's like, you know, eat— you're right in the middle of the Fulton Market— whether it's to, you know, host events. Like, if, if you, you're on a charity board, and you need some space to do a cocktail party, do it at your home, Cameo, right? And that's something that as we're rebuilding the company, you know, we're, we're really trying to exclusively hire, you know, in Chicago to be in person. Sure. And then, you know, our second hub would be LA because that's the second market we have and it's always been important to our business. And then New York is the other place that, you know, talent historically, you know, makes a lot of sense for our business with Cameo for Business. selling, you know, in the media space. Those are really the 3 markets that we're trying to prioritize.

I love that. And yeah, we've been really passionate about in-person forever. And, you know, we were a little bit flimsier during COVID to your point. But I think we share that aspect that, you know, the sports, the camaraderie, being in the arena, not trying to be too hyperbolic, but like being in the arena together is important. Being together is a lot of fun. And Being able to travel and be with the teams.

And one other thing I think that's so important, you know, Michael, about this is we just saw objectively performance in certain parts of our business get worse.

Agreed.

In December 2021, I got really frustrated with the pace of talent, new talent onboarding that our sales team was doing. And we had about 90 people doing sales at that point. And I remember finally, like, getting so fed up that I made everybody fly to Chicago for one week to work out of a space in 1871. And, you know, this was still like COVID was going on. I think the second vaccine had happened. People had to test, like, all the bullshit that you had to do back then. But we had everybody come in, and the craziest stat— and I, at the time, I remember talking to Crane in Chicago about this— the first day that everybody was back, there was more output than the monthly average output of the entire sales team.

Wow.

The previous 6 months.

Wow. I agree. I believe it.

Suddenly one day equaled one month. Right?

And that's what it is in a startup. You have to do that.

And that, and then I think about the tax, not just paying all the salaries, but just, you know, people and everybody thought they were working hard, but there's just, as you know, iron sharpens iron. Yes. And when you're next to that person, and even like from a learning perspective, you know, if you're like some new SDR coming to work for us and you DM, you know, some TikTok star that you're obsessed with and they're like, let's chat now. If you were in the office, you could grab me, you could grab Arthur, you could grab everybody, and and then you could put it on speakerphone, and the three of you could have that conversation. But guess what? Slack huddle don't do that. Nobody's doing it. As much as I would say, "Here's my cell phone number, call me or DM me about anything," you know how many ideas would come to me via Slack at that point, right? So I had to do things like cameo calls, which was our our celebrity meet and greet product where I would go solicit 1 hour a week, you know, 2-minute Shark Tank-like pitches from our whole employee base to just be like, hey, what's going on? What am I missing? Because that's the equivalent of tapping me on the shoulder in the office right now. So, and, you know, again, I don't think it's any fault of, you know, that cohort of employees' own. It sucks what happened during that period. But when I look at the people that I have that have remained with us through the rifts and the good times and the bad times, almost all of them are people that actually started with us before, at least on the go-to-market side, are people that started with us before we were fully remote. And that DNA as we're rebuilding the company right now is truly palpable.

Yeah. And I think there's one piece I definitely want to be able to elaborate on there from your end. And I've had a big reckoning with myself on this, is that the real culture building is being deliberate and being with small groups and individualized teammates. Like, you probably travel with Nick quite a bit and some of these other incredible teammates of yours. Yeah. You know, throwing the parties and being able to bring people together is awesome. And everyone loves having a great time. But then one person leaves 2 months later and you're like, okay, was it that good of a time? The one-on-one in the pit grinding, those stories of you closing a deal at this time, those bring more friendship, camaraderie, and loyalty than anything else in the world. And I'm really, really lucky to have— we have a handful of teammates that have been with us for about 3 years now. And those folks, I really hope and believe they could be with us for 10 years. And hopefully more people come along the journey, but all you need is a few loyal ones. Oh, by the way, random anecdote, I see you're wearing the KP shoes. Yep. Those are great. Shout out Klein and Perkins, both investors of ours. I know we have to be wrapping up somewhat soon, so I do want to make sure that we can end with an incredible question because your passion is so infectious. Love getting all the learnings in place. You said something that really hit home with me, which is like your decision to go to Duke was the most important decision in your life. And I couldn't agree more with you. We love education here and we're all about how do you make education a 40-year decision, not a 4-year decision. If you were to go back and speak to that 16, 17-year-old Steven Galanis, Obviously things have gone really well for you. What would you tell that Steven to double or triple down on and why?

Well, the one thing that I, you know, I never learned how to do, and I have regrets about it always, cuz it's one of those things where it's like, I remember thinking about this at the beginning of Cameo and then at year 2 and year 3, and now I'm at year 8, right? Leading a tech company. Um, when you don't know how to code, it's very tough.

I knew that's where I thought you were gonna go. I completely agree.

When, when you don't know how to code or you're not technical, It's literally like you're just blind to a really important part of the business. And I've been very fortunate to have a super technical, like talented co-founder in Devin that could like literally be half of me. And then, you know, subsequently a number of, you know, awesome technology executives that could see around corners that I couldn't do. And yeah, this started with Chas Jin, who was who's our VP of Engineering, and people like Rob Post, our former CTO, and most notably, Dom Scandinaro, who's the world-class CTO that has been leading Cameo for the last couple of years on the technical side. But I really, I completely depend on their expertise and their input. And, you know, what I wish I had done is, even though I didn't have the time to do it, I wish I had either earlier in college, uh, or, you know, when I was trading, I already could see that, you know, the pit trading that I was doing was, was kind of out, and the quant trading that was coming was really where the puck was going. I really regret that I haven't learned, you know, how to code, like even the fundamentals, like Not even so that I could be someone that could just be like, I have this fucking idea, I want to go ship it. It's not actually that. It's just like really, it's just like I'm actually illiterate when it comes to, you know, technology. And that's something that, you know, really like I think like limits me in some ways as a CEO. I have other strengths that make up for that. I've got great people around, but that is something like running a technology company. Not being technical, I think, you know, can, can be a hindrance.

Well, and so the one way that I definitely want to add on to that, I feel the exact same feeling. I was able to get a little bit of product management at Nike, and then also at UCLA took a couple coding classes, but still very much a blind spot. And a big driver for Subject was I wish we definitely didn't have it at Cary Grove High School in Illinois. Shout out Cary. We did have it at Penn, but I had no idea what it was. I was playing baseball and did not even know what computer science was. But then I got my first job out of school at a startup. I was the 5th employee, Dispatcher Inc. We were the Uber of trucking and acquired by Uber. And that's when I finally realized, like, wow, this coding stuff's important. So I wish I would have. But what you can do, Steven, is go to subject.com and take the computer science class because it's an amazing class.

I will. You know what? I didn't— I'm—

We'll get you investor free membership.

Yeah, give me my investor discount. Uh, I would love to try it. I'd love to give feedback. But this is exactly it. And you know, the thing that's great is that the internet truly like has enabled anybody to learn anything that they want right now. So nobody should feel like, because I haven't done that yet, it's not, it's not ever gonna happen. Um, for me, I know how I learn and like I learn best when I can just like go super, super deep on something in a relatively short period of time. Yeah. period of time. And, you know, at some point, like, I will learn this skill set. Um, and, you know, maybe it'll be today and maybe it'll be with Subject.

He's learning with Subject. And everyone else, please click on the follow, click on the subscribe. We're really trying to boost our YouTube and Spotify numbers. You can continue to listen to incredible entrepreneurs, leaders of industry like Steven Galanis at On the Subject. I'm your host, Michael Velardo. Thank you so much for another incredible episode, and thank you for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.