In this interview, Steven Galanis, CEO and co‑founder of Cameo, recounts the company’s origin story, emphasizing the unconventional backgrounds of the three founders and how their personal experiences created a perfect founder‑market fit. He describes his CTO Devin’s journey from a Microsoft engineer to a Vine celebrity with 900 million loops, his decision to return to engineering after a failed influencer lifestyle, and his friend Cody Ko’s success on Vine. Galanis then outlines co‑founder Martin’s transition from a British NFL agent and movie producer who aimed to help short‑lived football players pivot into entertainment careers. Finally, Galanis shares his own past as a five‑year options trader on the Chicago Board of Trade. Together, these diverse skill sets and personal pain points—Devin’s need to monetize fame, Martin’s desire to secure post‑football careers, and Galanis’s analytical background—led them to identify a market gap for a platform that lets fans request personalized video messages from celebrities, which became Cameo.
Where did this idea come from?
Yeah, so the, uh, the founding story is pretty crazy, and I'll back up a second and kind of tell you about my 2 co-founders, because I think when you hear the backgrounds of all 3 of us, like, in real time, it didn't seem like this was going to be the obvious group of people to do it. But in retrospect, I think our group of founders had unbelievable founder-market fit, and I think that's something that gets overlooked a lot. My CTO and co-founder, Devin, was a classmate of mine at Duke. He was an engineer at Microsoft where he literally worked on the first facial unlocking technology for like a camera to open up, you know, like a new Windows computer. After 2 years of working at Microsoft, him and his best friend from Duke, a guy named Cody Kolodziejczyk, who was working in SF at the time, The two of them were just like, they hated their jobs, they missed each other as roommates. They decided to quit their jobs as software engineers and travel the world. And while they were doing that, they blew up on this little thing called Vine. So Devin, my CTO and co-founder, is someone who had 900 million loops on Vine. Wow. So he literally became world famous 2014, 2015, but in that time was never able to monetize. So he at once was more famous than he was rich. And because, you know, he spent a year traveling, when he came back to America, Despite being world famous on Vine and showing up at a concert like Coachella or Stagecoach and having people mob him, like, the thing that's funny is that ultimately, you know, he ended up having to go back to engineering because it wasn't a lifestyle. His roommate Cody Ko, his best friend, ended up deciding to continue on with the, you know, influencer life and ended up with 3.6 billion loops on Vine.
Wow.
And now is a YouTube star that does it full-time with over 5 million followers. So that's Devin, that's my CTO and co-founder. So one thing that's cool is like, you think about a platform like this, the guy who built this is solving a problem that he personally had. Mm-hmm. So I think that's really important. On the second hand, my other co-founder, Martin, was an NFL agent and movie producer. Martin was an NFL agent that is British that had never played a down of football. He went to USC, he ran track there, so he knew guys from the weight room that were going to be the 7th round pick. And ultimately what his value prop was, he was hoping that he could find, you know, people that maybe were big football players but like weren't going to be superstars in the NFL and then turn them into the next Rock. So his whole value prop was, come with me, your average NFL career is 2.5 years, and I will put you in movies which you could use through the connections that he had from his prior life as a movie producer. And You know, we are gonna set you up for life after football. So those were the 2 guys that I started with. I myself, after college, was an options trader for 5 years. So I traded at the Chicago Board of Trade on the floor. I was one of the guys that wore the coat and did the hand signals in the pit.
Sure.
After that, I had the opportunity to go work at LinkedIn, which was really the formative, you know, professional career of my life. And, you know, really got to learn about tech and understand what that was. But ultimately, We had the idea for this literally leaving my grandmother's funeral. And as I was driving Martin back to the airport, he'd flown in for the day from LA. He was telling me about this problem he was having with Cassius Marsh, one of his clients, and I believe at the time maybe his only client. Cassius was a super popular player. Like, if you like the Seattle Seahawks, you knew who he was, but no brands would ever pay any money to give him an endorsement. And a few weeks earlier, he had gone viral because somebody had stolen a Gucci bag out of his car at the Seattle Seahawks parking lot and stolen $50,000 worth of Magic: The Gathering cards that were in his Gucci bag. Now, they probably thought other stuff was in that bag. He gets on Twitter and he starts saying, hey, 12s, which are what Seahawks fans call each other, I know you probably thought other stuff was in— that bag, but what was in that bag is more valuable to me than anything else, or even money. I won't press charges. I just want my— I want my Magic: The Gathering cards back. Magic: The Gathering is a Seattle-based company. He is a popular Seahawks player. Martin couldn't even leverage this viral moment, and that was all over ESPN and Barstool and Deadspin, and he couldn't even leverage that into getting cashes a card deal to go down to play Magic: The Gathering cards in Vegas for a weekend, right? Or like a meet and greet. So at that point, he felt, if I can't get this brand to like sign on with Cassius Marsh, like I'm never gonna get any brand to do it. And he pulled out his phone and he showed me a video that today we call the first Cameo. And his really good buddy Brandon was at the time a marketing executive at Nike. He loved the Seattle Seahawks more than anything and had just had his first son. And Martin got Cassius to send him a congratulatory message saying, hey Brandon, it's Cassius Marsh from the Seahawks. Heard about your son Maverick. If he gets your athletic ability, he'll be playing for the Seahawks one day. Go Hawks! And I literally remember like driving on the, you know, Kennedy Expressway in Chicago and Martin showing me this video. And literally immediately we had the eureka moment. It's like, that needs to exist. That's cool. And having gone to Duke and having some family connections to the film business, You know, I'd been around talent before, but I'd never actually, like, seen anything like that. And I thought, that's really cool. And if I think that's cool, somebody that could theoretically get something, what would the average fan that could never get this feel like? And when we sold the very first video, this father filmed his daughter's reaction to it, and she literally started crying, she was so happy. And, you know, and at that point, really, the idea for Cameo was born. And what we're trying to build at Cameo, as I said, is We're trying to create the marketplace where for X amount of money you can do Y activity with Z person. So at the very beginning, you know, we were thinking live meetups and FaceTime and TweetAd and all these different things, but we kept coming back to the simplicity of this core video experience and what a wow factor it was. And, you know, ultimately we decided to go with that product and that's what we've been selling ever since.
