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Interviews with world-class startup founders about their unique paths to uncover tactical insights they've learned about how to fundraise, grow, validate, hire, scale, and lead teams while building your startup.
Get full access to detailed takeaways on each episode, additional case studies, and more at join.foundingjourney.com
That's Cameo. In 2020, it was the fastest growing consumer start up in the world.
Steven Galanis:We went from 300,000 in GMV to a 100,000,000 in 4 years, right, without marketing.
Michael Houck:And that's Steven Galanis, Cameo's co founder and CEO.
Steven Galanis:And when we had the idea for Cameo, we were leaving my grandmother's funeral.
Michael Houck:He knew he was onto something big right away.
Steven Galanis:It spelled out in summer of probably spring of 2017 the idea that would become, you know, a unicorn business 3 years later.
Michael Houck:Pretty soon, he had huge celebrities and big creators making personalized videos just for their fans. And during the pandemic, it seemed like everyone was sending cameos to their loved ones. But tough times were ahead and revenue growth slowed. Burning tens
Steven Galanis:of 1,000,000 of dollars a year to be cut headcount drastically over the series of 3 rifts.
Michael Houck:Even after slashing Cameo's valuation by 90%, Steven still managed to raise more capital. And now he has the company positioned for its next evolution. He told me about what happens when a top VC fund pursues you, what it's like when a unicorn startup has to go and do layoffs, and also what the future of Cameo looks like. This is Stephen Galanis' founding journey.
Michael Houck:I don't even wanna start by talking about Cameo. There's a lot we can talk about with Cameo. We'll get into that. But first thing, I wanna talk about Spartan Entertainment. So I had to double check that you didn't go to Michigan State when I saw that.
Michael Houck:You went to Duke. And from what I could see, the business sort of had sub businesses around, you know, DJ rental equipment, party promotion, hot dog stand, I think, and and a bunch of other things. I think what I took away from that was that you really value the relationship capital that you're building with people because you can provide different services to the same customers even as early as as in college. So I think we'd love to understand how important that relationship capital has been from you and why that was a focus, so early on in your career too.
Steven Galanis:Sure. Well, first off, thanks for having me. It was Spartan Entertainment not because I went to Michigan State as you name, but because me and my cofounder are actually Spartans. Our families are from Spartan, Greece. My dad was born there, and and my cofounder is Zach's grandparents who report there.
Steven Galanis:So we were real Spartans, so that's why Spartan Entertainment was at Duke University. Look. When I graduated high school, it was a really interesting time. So I was at 06 high school, 2010 college. And right around the my senior year of high school, I remember at the first half of the senior year, you still needed a dot edu address to even get onto the the social network.
Steven Galanis:And as somebody that was a senior in high school, when the guys that were freshman in college were coming back for Thanksgiving, I remember them showing me this thing called Facebook, and it was, like, their favorite thing about being in college is really interesting. So at that time, I actually remember myself and and many other classmates would apply to certain schools that were rolling admissions versus the normal, like, April 1st just so you can put a deposit down somewhere to get a dotedu address and get this email. But the upshot of that was that every single person that I've known basically from high school through college and then obviously in the professional world, I was connected with, which was really, really interesting. Thinking about my Greek background, I would have cousins that I would see every year when I'd go to Greece. But today, like, they know what I'm doing every day.
Steven Galanis:I know what I'm doing every day because I could see their Instagram stories, or I could see it's their birthday on Facebook or something like that. And what we did at that point was we created a Facebook group for Spartan Entertainment that eventually would have 17,000 college students in it from Duke, North Carolina, NC State, Elon, a bunch of the schools out there. And at that time, the bar owners or the restaurant owners or the business owners locally couldn't be on Facebook. So if you were somebody that actually could provide services and mix businesses with the students, that was extremely valuable. And we built a lot of great businesses off the back of this one network that became super trusted for providing excellent value to students and and was super inclusive.
Michael Houck:I love that. Makes sense. You see an opportunity like that, that arbitrage of where you can get access to people. You guys have that. The businesses don't.
Michael Houck:Super clear. An interesting thing to me when I was doing research for this was that you didn't actually then jump into entrepreneurship straight after college. You actually went and worked at LinkedIn for a little while. And I'm just curious, like, why not either continue with Spartan Entertainment or why not jump right into entrepreneurship after having this great experience while you were a student?
Steven Galanis:Well, I wanted to, but my parents didn't like the idea of, me staying in college and and kinda pulling a a Van Wilder. But but real real talk, I actually right after college, that was if you recall. Like, I graduated 2010. So this was right in the middle of the o eight, o nine financial crisis. And one of the things that was interesting was if you graduated from a Duke in o eight or earlier, and it was kind of a direct path to Wall Street.
Steven Galanis:So people are going to Goldman or McKinsey, pick your investment bank. And then there were 2 full years, 2,009 and 2,010, where just literally nobody had jobs because those banks didn't know if they were gonna survive. The consulting companies were having their clients go out of business. So it was just really, really tough time in the chop market. And I recall graduation being at a a dinner with, like, 20 of my best friends and only 2 people at jobs coming out of school.
Steven Galanis:I had this this great business at Spartan that I was originally gonna come back and run. That summer, I went back home to Chicago, and I entered on the Chicago Board of Trade on the floor. And that was kind of my first taste of a different type of world. And while it wasn't directly entrepreneurship, like, trading is pretty entrepreneurial, I ended up trading for 5 years before I went to LinkedIn. And while trading, I started one of the businesses that would kind of lead me on this path towards cameo.
Steven Galanis:I started a a film and movie production, shingle called Blueberry Productions with this guy named Martin who I then would come to found Cameo with years later, and we were producing movies and television shows. And I was doing that while trading, so I was raising money from the guys that were around me in the pit in that. So even when I was, like, working somewhere else, I, like, had an entrepreneurial bent. And, obviously, I had the idea for Cameo while working at LinkedIn.
Michael Houck:Right. Makes total sense. When you and Martin were working on that company, how did you know when you had the idea for Cameo that you guys have built up enough trust as cofounders and and he was the guy you wanted to go take this moonshot with? Look.
Steven Galanis:I I think it goes by gut feel. You know, Martin and I met. I remember we were producing a show called safe, s a f three. It's probably the worst television show that's ever been made, so nobody should ever watch it. I think on Rotten Tomatoes.
Steven Galanis:It's like a one star. It's awful. But the idea was what if we rebuilt Baywatch in 2013 with drones and GoPros? And Greg Bonin, the founder of Baywatch, was attached to it. My uncle and and his cofounder who were really prominent producers at Hollywood, they've done Rambo, Conan, lone survivor.
Steven Galanis:Yeah. They were coming in. This was their 1st television thing. So when I had the opportunity to do that, I did it. My uncle ended up introducing me to Martin and was like, hey.
Steven Galanis:If you're gonna be in the entertainment business but not move out in LA, here's a guy that's great. I've known him for years. He's kinda young and hungry like you, but I think you guys would be a good duo. We met, and it was kind of an instant connection between the 2 of us, and that would have been in 2013, 2024. We're still working together in in some capacity.
Steven Galanis:So it's been an awesome ride. And my other cofounder, Devin at Cameo, was somebody that I literally recruited to my fraternity at Duke. Like, I've known Devin since he was 18 years old. So I'm somebody that really values, like, loyalty and deep seated high trust relationships. And while some people say don't go in business with your friends or family, like, for me, I've routinely done that.
Steven Galanis:I've hired people that I've worked with in the past that I know of that are coming through warm referrals, and many of the best people that I've ever worked with or worked for are are those that are here. And on the flip side, like, as many of the founders listening or operators know, sometimes you hire someone that you worked with in the past that it doesn't work out at the next place, or you have to fire one of your best friends or your brother. Like, I've done all of that, and those are really, really painful moments. But the upside of getting it right with people you love is definitely better than the downside, but at least my experience.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I agree. You gotta be you gotta be, candid and and honest, and that's the way to to lead. I think any sort of I I've been there too. And any sort of learnings from those early companies when you were forging those relationships with the people who you know that you can trust and rely on for years to come that sort of just emphasize that for you and made it super clear.
Steven Galanis:Yeah. I I think back to Spartan and what I learned there, there were 2 things that I I really, you know, valued in lessons that I made. The way that our core business model worked was we would basically go to bars and restaurants and say, hey. We wanna do an event here. We're gonna take a $5 cover charge for everybody that walks in, but you get all the bar.
Steven Galanis:So you don't pay us anything. We just bring a crowd to your establishment that maybe wouldn't come otherwise. And if nobody comes, we make no money. And if a lot of people come, we're gonna do well. Right?
Steven Galanis:But if a lot of people come, you're gonna do well too because we're not taking a cut of the door. So I've always liked these these kind of take rate businesses. And part of what will allow somebody to pay a cover fee, like, why are you gonna pay $5 to go to this bar when you could go and freeze somewhere else It's like what's behind the red velvet rope has to be really special. Right? It has to be a differentiated crowd, good people, great drink specials, etcetera.
Steven Galanis:So when we got started with Spartan Entertainment, we took this bar shooters, which today is kind of the the bar most synonymous with Duke. It's like the big 1,000, 2,000 person place that you would go to the 1st week of school or the last week of school. Or if Duke wins the national championship, they would open that place up. But it was kind of a a biker bar for the most part, like a North Carolina Hells Angels type biker bar, country bar, and all of a sudden, we got them to open on Wednesday nights and bring a $3, pitcher drink special there, and the kids loved it. And it ended up we would did it on Wednesday nights because if you were an athlete at Duke, you tended to have a 24 a 48 hour rule for competition.
Steven Galanis:You couldn't go out 48 hours before a game, and most games were on sat Saturday or Sunday. So the Wednesday for the athlete was kinda like the Friday night or the Saturday night for the average student at the school. And we ended up getting this, like, great crowd of college athletes that would come and that people wanted to be at Shooters because the lacrosse guys were there and the baseball guys were there and the basketball guys were there, the hockey guys were there, and that's what kinda got it all going.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I think finding the right people when you're starting something new is so important. And and you clearly did that with Spartan, but also you did that with Kameo. I read some stories about sort of how you found those raving fans early on and who the real power super users of Kameo were gonna be who just truly love the product. Yeah.
Michael Houck:Can you tell us about, like, how you found them and what you look for that made you have the conviction in Cameo as an idea?
Steven Galanis:Well, first off, I mean, when we had the idea for Cameo, we were leaving my grandmother's funeral. Martin ended up flying in from Los Angeles to Chicago for the day for the funeral. We had when I went to go work at LinkedIn, Martin had actually became a not a foul agent because our movie production stuff was slowing down. Netflix was changing the model. So, like, the same things we were doing in the past weren't gonna work anymore.
Steven Galanis:So we actually had kind of this year, 2 year period where we weren't directly working with each other every day. So we're catching up in the car. I was talking about tech and how exciting and awesome it was. The one thing I love about tech is it's all about growth mindset. It's all about the mission, the vision that you're building for, and what's to come, not what was.
Steven Galanis:And when I was at the in when I was trading in Chicago in the pits where there used to be 40,000 people and now there were 400 people there because technology had changed everything. And you'd look at these trading pits where hundreds of people or thousands of people used to be, and they kinda look like craters on the moon. They were abandoned. It looked like a dinosaur graveyard. And as a 22, 23, 24 year old down there, all the older guys were telling me, man, Steven, you should have been here in o eight.
Steven Galanis:You should have been here in flash crash. You missed the nineties. The eighties were unbelievable. It's like all the stories were about what was, and nothing was about what was to come. But everybody kinda felt like they were like a dinosaur, and I I remember having the very weird feeling as a 22 year old saying, I wanna be the last great open outcry option trader in Chicago.
Steven Galanis:Right? Like, some 22 year old listening to this right now doesn't believe he's gonna be the last great tech entrepreneur. Right? It was kind of a weird thing when we thought about it. And for Martin as an an NFL agent, his particular idea, like, why he thought, here's this guy from Brighton, England that never has played a down of football before and speaks with funny accent.
Steven Galanis:Like, why was someone gonna sign with him over Drew Rosenhaus or the biggest agents in the world? And he really believed in this connection between sports and entertainment. So he felt like if he could sign a big kinda action hero like looking guy, maybe he could find the next Jason Momoa or he could find the next Rock and and take those guys and put them into big action movies. And and Martin found this guy named Cassius Marsh. He was mid round draft pick out at UCLA defensive end, all tattered up, big buff guy.
Steven Galanis:He's got a great really, you look at him and he just kinda looks like he could be like a superhero. And Martin signed him, and because he wasn't a starter, he couldn't get any endorsement deals for this player. And he was telling me about one situation in particular where Cassius, who's an avid Magic the Gathering fan, had actually had his car broken into during the season, and somebody stole this bag with designer bag with, like, $40,000 worth of Magic the Gathering cards. So he actually tweeted out, hey twelves. I don't know what he thought was in the bag.
Steven Galanis:Money, jewels, whatever. But what was in that was actually more important to me than any of those things. Like, I just want my cards back. It won't press charges. Like, help me get them back.
Steven Galanis:So this goes viral. It's on. It's on PTI. Like, everybody's talking about this big defensive lineman kinda crying that his cards got lost, and that was a moment that made Magic the Gathering viral. Right?
Steven Galanis:Like, Magic the Gathering is not something that's trending on Twitter particularly often because of its connection with the NFL. And Martin tried to get Wizards of the Coast is what the parent companies called that Seattle based to basically say, like, hey. We have a Seattle Seahawk, this really popular player that, like, loves your thing. Can we get can we is there a deal we can do? Can you guys pay him to come to some convention in Vegas or play card shows or or give him a a deck?
Steven Galanis:And Martin couldn't get a deal out of them. Like, they they had no interest. And it was because Cassius was not a superstar. Right? If it was what Russell Wilson or Marshawn Lynch, they would have been all over it.
Steven Galanis:But because he wasn't super famous, it showed us that there was this gap between kind of, like, fame and the ability to monetize. Like, him being on the Seahawks made him popular. He had tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, but it didn't mean that there was a way to monetize that. So this was a really interesting problem that he was having. And he pulled out his phone to me, and he's like, but, Steven, look.
Steven Galanis:This guy's a star. And in the video that he showed me, Cassius is shirtless. He's driving down in Southern California. He's got a flat brim, shirt. He's got no top on, and he literally is filming this video.
Steven Galanis:And he goes, 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.
Steven Galanis:And Martin shows me this selfie style video, and I'm looking at it. And I'm like, wait. Who's Brandon? What was this for? And then that he's like, oh, Brandon's my buddy who is, like, very high up in Nike's marketing department.
Steven Galanis:He just had a son, and he loves the Seahawks. So I got Cassius to record a video, congratulate again. Immediately, I saw that, and that's, like, gives the Eureka moment. I'm like, Martin, forget trying to get him in a movie or or or get him a deal with Wizards of Coast. Like, we should sell those.
Steven Galanis:So probably 2 so I ended up dropping him off. We were stuck in traffic on the way to O'Hare when we had the idea. I dropped him off. He went through security. He calls me right away.
Steven Galanis:I get on the next flight to LA the next day. We then spend a day at Soho House in West Hollywood and just start kinda dreaming up what this marketplace could be. Like, the idea that would become Cameo. We really felt like for x amount of money, you should be able to pay to do y activity with c person. So that could be, like, go to dinner with them or have a phone call with them or meet them in real life or have them play your wedding.
Steven Galanis:Like, we had all these ideas. And Martin and I can't code. Right? We're both nontechnical founders. We both have big rolodexes.
Steven Galanis:We both are kind of your, like, classic go to market, run through walls type people. We were just 2 guys with an idea. So at this point, we have this idea. We know we could have something, but we have no one to build it. At that point, I started thinking about my network and who I knew.
Steven Galanis:And at this point, like, I worked at LinkedIn, but our Chicago office, there were no technical people in the whole office. It was just salespeople. So I really didn't know, like, a single software engineer, at least from my professional career, but a few of my classmates from Duke were I knew were talented engineers and have been working on startups and doing things like that. So I called one of them. His name was Devin, and Devin would go on to become our 3rd cofounder and our technical cofounder.
Steven Galanis:And and really the only reason why Cameo exists today and why it wasn't just an idea in 2 guys' heads. And he did a amazing job to help us solidify this idea. And instead of this big marketplace where you could pay any amount of money to do anything with anyone, it was like, let's make precise video messages for football players. Right? It kinda started with NFL, and then we would move on to different sports verticals.
Steven Galanis:And then next thing you do, Devin, who was actually an early star on Vine, he had over a 1000000000 loops on Vine. One day, it was like, hey. I think, like, my roommate Cody Ko, who's got over 10,000,000 followers on YouTube, and people like Cody might do well on this thing. So then we started finding some of the old Vine stars and YouTubers. It it's really when we hit those folks that, like, we found product market fit.
Michael Houck:Wow. That's a crazy story. I guess, how did you know that there were more people maybe didn't know? Maybe it was just, hey, let's get out there. Let's test it.
Michael Houck:But did you have any inclination that there'd be more people like Cassius or also more people like the people who'd want those videos from Cassius and,
Steven Galanis:like Oh, we we knew we knew for sure that there were a lot of Cassius out there. And I think part of this was our backgrounds. Like, go to Duke. Martin went to USC. He was a d one athlete there.
Steven Galanis:Played football on this Matt Liner, Reggie Bush era teams. So he saw guys, and Deborah and I were at Duke in 2010 when we won the national championship. Like, we all had great friends that were, like, selling out the Los Angeles Coliseum. We're selling out Cameron Indoor Stadium. And then 6 months later, after they win a national championship, they're, like, working at their high school as a parapro.
Steven Galanis:Right? Like, there was no NIL back then. Athletes couldn't get paid. And there was a documentary on ESPN called broke where they talked about how 2 5 years after playing their last game, 85% of NFL players are broke. Right?
Steven Galanis:So this was a problem. Not forget all the people that were famous that were really famous for what they did in college as athletes, but didn't make it to the pros. Even those that make it, the vast majority of them aren't gonna have enough money to sustain themselves. And I saw this at LinkedIn where there was a a a really prominent former Chicago Bears player, guy that had played in the league for, I think, 13 years. And he was now retired, and he was trying to pivot into wealth management.
Steven Galanis:And I was working with him to build his professional rule at x up. And how did how do you leverage LinkedIn and LinkedIn Sales Navigator to take all these relationships you had and find the the people that went to Wake Forest that were CEOs and you could like, I was teaching people that. And the tough thing is if you're an athlete, you spend your whole life trying to do this thing and and everybody tells you you can't do it. Everyone here in high school, they're like, you're never gonna be college. And then when you're in college, you're never gonna make the pros.
Steven Galanis:So they all think that the stats don't apply to them because they've they've always been the ones that did it. And then all of a sudden, you're most of us, like, we make more money kinda every year in our professional career. But as athletes, like, you you go to the NFL right now and you're starting salary $600,000. And once you're done with that, it's gonna take you a long time to find anything that would pay close to it. So it just ends up being hard where it's tough to go from winning a Super Bowl than to becoming an SDR at at some SaaS company.
Steven Galanis:We truly believe that there was a widening gap between fame and modernization. And one of the big thesis is that that I think collectively the founders had on Cameo was that there are more famous people in the world today than there were yesterday, and technology was creating more every day. So, you know, TikTok, every single day, there's, like, new stars getting made. But the underlying business models of if the talent's growing exponentially for TikTok, YouTube, SoundCloud, like, if you're a musician, you could just put your own music out. You used to needed to get signed before you were on the radio.
Steven Galanis:Now it's opposite. You know, if you're a creator, someone like Cody Ko. Right? 10,000,000 followers on YouTube. Cody spent years in LA going to every audition trying to get cast in something.
Steven Galanis:Nobody ever cast him in anything. And guess what? Like, he started making his own videos. He got popular. He developed the following.
Steven Galanis:So he gets to be the producer. He gets to be the director. He gets to be the casting agent. He's not relying on somebody else gatekeeping and saying, yeah. You're the one or you're not the one.
Steven Galanis:So that's changed a ton. And when you look at the underlying business models of sports, of entertainment, of the creator economy, they're all very heavily skewed to, like, the top 1%. So in music, the top 1% of musicians make 95% of all the streaming revenue at Spotify. On YouTube, the top 3% of creators make 97% of all the ad revenue on the platform. In sports, the top 1% of athletes make 99% of all the endorsement dollars.
Steven Galanis:In the screen actors guild, 99.9% of the screen actors guild is unemployed at any given time. And during the strike last year, there were some stats that said 86% of the screen actors guild doesn't make enough money to pay for their health insurance, which you only need to make $20,000 $24,000 or something like that to qualify for your health insurance from that. So we realized, like, this was already a problem in the system. The system was already broken for a lot of these folks. But because of technology, the stresses on the system were gonna be more than f.
Steven Galanis:Right? Like, there's now more mouths to feed. There's an exponentially growing amount of mouths to feed that are being supported by a business model that's growing linearly if it's growing at all. Like, the music industry isn't the record labels are not making more money than they were 20 years ago, and the movie studios are making more. Like, the game has changed, and there's so much stress on the system.
Steven Galanis:And our belief was that it had to be direct to fan monetization. That had to be the only way that you could bridge this gap between how much fame is in the world and and fans' willingness to support.
Michael Houck:I worked at Uber and Airbnb. I know the marketplace business model very well. And I think whenever you're starting a marketplace, you have the chicken and egg problem. You have the cold start problem. Right?
Michael Houck:I think when you guys have that opportunity, you're like, okay. There's an opportunity here. There's more of these people doing this thing. Just like with Uber and Airbnb in the early days, there's that appetite to do the thing the platform was enabling. When you see that, how do you capture it?
Michael Houck:How do you make sure that both sides of the marketplace can grow?
Steven Galanis:We have a really unique marketplace insofar as our supply side are famous. They have tens of 1,000 or 100 of 1,000 or millions of followers on x, on Instagram, on Snap, on whatever platform, TikTok, whatever platform they're using. So unlike a driver in Uber that joins, like, our supply can beget their own demand. But that's a really interesting part of our flywheel. So, like, the way that Cameo works was we would go and get somebody new to come on the platform.
Steven Galanis:We'd give them a link, Cameo.com/theirusername. We would then tell them to tweet that link out, which would drive people to their direct booking page. We never told people to promote Cameo itself or but we told people, like, let your fans know. Right? The best way to get to your fans is if you share it, like, that's gonna be better than anything we can do.
Steven Galanis:And our business model, makes sense because you make 3 times as much as we do from every video. So if you win, we win. Right? And we're gonna create the tools to make it so easy for you to do this, to connect with your fans, to build deeper relationships, to be supported by them. But and because we're gonna aggregate a bunch of talent that are gonna share disparate networks.
Steven Galanis:And one thing we didn't know when we started, but we found out to be true pretty quickly is that most of these are bought as gifts. Right? So 80 plus percent of cameos are bought for other people. So if what may end up happening is your girlfriend might follow one of the Real Housewives, come to the page, and then find someone on the Chicago Bears that, like, you would like. And that's kinda how the marketplace works.
Steven Galanis:So it's a rising tide that we've solved boats, and the network effects were pretty apparent quickly.
Michael Houck:What are those tactical things that you did? You said to make it as easy as possible for them to bring their audience over. What what what were those things you guys did early on?
Steven Galanis:I mean, the link in bio thing was huge. Right? Like, now when you think of link in bio, you think of link tree, you think of of others. But we were kind of the first company that that I was aware of that was really pushing, like, hey. You have this link in your Instagram bio.
Steven Galanis:Put it there. Or right when we started, Instagram swipe ups were a new feature. Right? So you couldn't post a link in a story before that. So there were just a lot of these tactics that ended up being really important from us from a distribution perspective.
Steven Galanis:And the other thing that we realized right away was that there's this inherent, like, k factor in every cameo video. Right? So I buy for you. Like, I I send you the video, then you're gonna show it to a bunch of people. There's a watermark on it.
Steven Galanis:Right? So we would always say every Cameo becomes a commercial for the next one. And for us, we've always tried to to maintain even though we don't directly, like, oversee the quality of the video in the marketplace, we've always said that we want content that's good enough to share. Right? Because if you get a cameo and it's not if if I buy a cameo for you and I don't like it that much and I don't send it to you, like, it's so costly because if I give a great one that you send and then you send it to all the people, you put it on your Twitter, you you send it to all your friends, it goes in a group chat.
Steven Galanis:Suddenly, there's, like, 100 or thousands of people that are seeing every single order that got made. And that's one of the things that really got our flywheel going.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I think we used a cameo at LaunchHouse, my last company, to promote what we were doing early on, promote our membership offer early on. And it worked really well. People would share it. It went viral on social media.
Michael Houck:That strategy works really well. One thing you'd mentioned was the eureka moment. I wanna go back to that for a second. So the a lot of people will say that you can find a great start up idea just by iterating iterating iterating. In some cases, it happens.
Michael Houck:It just hits you all at once. I think for you guys, it sounds like it hit you. There's that lightning moment, and then you sort of got out there and started iterating from there. Would you say that that is an essential part of finding a unicorn idea? Like, a truly venture scale idea is having that moment.
Steven Galanis:It's interesting. Right? Because when I saw this video that Martin showed me, and he told me that this guy who's an executive at Nike put it on Instagram and said it was the best gift he'd ever gotten in his life. And this guy works with LeBron and Kyrie and Michael Jordan. And here he is like talking about a player, a backup player on a team you ups and saying, that's the best thing you ever got.
Steven Galanis:That was like really, really surprising to be. And when we sold our 1st cameo ever, I remember this dad ended up filming his daughter's reaction to it. And she literally started crying. She was so happy. And there was something like, so visceral about the feeling that you got when you got a cameo or you saw it.
Steven Galanis:And even if you didn't know who the person who the video is for or who the person was, you just knew it was kinda it was a wow moment. It was special. I remember, like, I'm 36, but I remember going to bar mitzvahs when I was in middle school in the polls. This was so like the Michael Jordan polls era. And, you know, Tony Kukoch or Ron Harper would, like, pop up in some kids' bar mitzvah montage, and that was such a wild moment.
Steven Galanis:So it's not that this was a new idea, but the technology on how to, like, make this thing that only you can only get a video, a cameo video in the past if, like, you happen to know the agent or you ran into them and you had the courage to say hi and they were willing to do it. It was like it was so impossible and suddenly this made it so frictionless. Right? And that was the thing that made it special, but, like, I remember from tech like, when I had the idea, then I go back to LinkedIn and I'm telling people, hey. What do you think about this?
Steven Galanis:What do you think about that? Just like anyone else, there are people that were like, that's a great idea. There were a lot of people like, that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard. And one thing that I think is really interesting, and and I've seen it happen over and over again, the people that were, like, closest to the industry were the ones that were most certain this could never work. And the thing that's interesting about, like, me, Martin, and Devin is, like, Devin was an agent, but he had one player.
Steven Galanis:Right? If he was Ari Emanuel, there's no way he would have done all the things needed to make this work. And and Devin was a coder, but if he was if he was Steve Wozniak, like and he had built Apple or something like that, he wouldn't have put the time in to to make it needed. So we all have the skill sets in retrospect that could allow us to be world class, but none of us had achieved at a world class level yet. I had been a CEO before of this business in college, but if I was Jeff Weiner, I wouldn't have been killing myself to make this work.
Steven Galanis:So there's just something about having the hunger and still not having achieved at that level yet. As a first time founder, like, we always hear about, like, why second or third time founders work. Right? You know who to hire, but, like, we didn't have industry experience. Like, we weren't scared, and this is something that's been interesting is we built Cameo.
Steven Galanis:We're headquartered in Chicago. People don't know that. A lot of people think it's LA. It's New York. But our whole business was built with, like, people that never worked in the entertainment business before that weren't clouded by, oh, I can't reach out to this person because this was my mentor's client, and he's gonna be mad at me, and I'm gonna get blackballed.
Steven Galanis:Like, nobody cared about that. We were just a bunch of kids from the Midwest that were like, hey. This person would be great to get on Cameo. I'll reach out to anyone. I don't and if they say no, no is the same as as the reality right now, which is that they're not on the platform.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I love that. You gotta be you gotta be scrappy. It's actually the same same philosophy that, I think Renaissance Technology took with hedge funds originally. They didn't hire any finance people.
Michael Houck:They hired math PhDs and physics PhDs. Right?
Steven Galanis:We didn't hire a lot of you know, too many math PhDs, but it is the same idea.
Michael Houck:I think you guys recently brought more capital into the company too. Right?
Steven Galanis:Yeah, we did.
Michael Houck:That tells me that you guys still see some significant upside in terms of where things can go from here. Is the strategy to build out the product more? Like, when you guys are so later stage, how do you think about bringing new capital into the company at that point?
Steven Galanis:Look. Part of it was we needed to. We had been burning a lot of money. If we didn't, we wouldn't exist today. We had investors that were really excited about the upside of the business and, like, what it could be.
Steven Galanis:But part of it was we had to make some really difficult decisions to make the business fundable again. We cut headcount drastically over the series of 3 rifts. Like, that's very public. What people don't know under the hood is that this business has been profitable for most of the last year. And going from a business that was burning tens of 1,000,000 of dollars a year to be to building an EBITDA positive business was really difficult, but we're excited about it because at this point, as a profitable business, we we really own our destiny again, which was not something that you can really do when you're on the venture train.
Steven Galanis:You can do it as you keep hitting your milestones, but the second you're not hitting those, then all of a sudden, you've got a mountain of prep stack sitting on top of you. You've got investors that are unhappy because they came in at a higher price. And ultimately, at the end of the day, like, those were factors that had nothing necessarily to do with the underlying the quality of the business. Should this thing exist, you know, just bringing happiness to the world. One thing that I'll tell you is, like, our company is 90% smaller in headcount than it was at the peak, but our customers and our talent didn't care.
Steven Galanis:The constituents that we care most about in the marketplace never cared about how many people were working for them as long as they were still being able to get their cameos or or have a great experience making videos on platform. And then and ultimately, like, by one of the things that's so interesting, like, from the first buildup of Cameo to this the rebuild and what's different, I really believe, like, when you're on the venture train, you raise big round and you wanna talk about how many people you're gonna hire, what you're gonna add. And the all the my senior leadership team right now, our operating goal is to double the head like, we wanted 10 x the valuation of the company before we double headcount again. That's so different than let's raise $50,000,000 and hire a 150 people.
Michael Houck:Yeah. It's also different environments too. Right?
Steven Galanis:The the game change. Right? When we were a series a company, Reid Hoffman wrote a book called Blitzscale that was kind of a bible for the times. Right? And the whole idea was raises for world changing ideas that it's a winner take all market or winner take most.
Steven Galanis:And what you need to do if you're especially in in a consumer marketplace business, and Uber was an example of this Airbnb group on all these companies, is you need to raise as much money as you can as quickly as you can to get as big as you can so then ultimately crowd out the market. And we ran the blitzscaling playbook. We ran it to the t we did the things that that we were supposed to do. We hired the world class management team. We brought in exceptional leaders from their top tech companies.
Steven Galanis:We hired really well. We hired great peep like, there were just there was so much that happened, but, ultimately, for us, like, our core business slowed down when the second vaccine came out, and less people started coming to Cameo every day. And it didn't matter that we had a world class team that was almost public company ready from a have the right people in place, the right leaders, the right processes, all that. The underlying business couldn't afford couldn't afford that anymore. And, frankly, we what we realized through a series of 3 super painful riffs was each time we would make it to a riff.
Steven Galanis:I remember being in these meetings with with my executive team and you're on the spreadsheet. Should we keep this person or that person? And people constantly telling me there's no way we could have less people than this. The business won't function. I'll tell you.
Steven Galanis:On riff 1, I was told that. And on riff 3, when we went from a 185 people to 35 people, I had a board that was like, this is gonna you're gonna be a zombie company. There's no way that Cameo can survive. You're never gonna grow again. And guess what?
Steven Galanis:We've made the cuts. We, like, made some product changes. We shipped one thing that worked really, really well, and the business was 30% bigger last Christmas than than it was the Christmas before with 80% less people.
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Michael Houck:Wow. Dang. That's actually really impressive. I've been there too. My last company, we were hitting all our milestones.
Michael Houck:We raised a bunch of money. We're growing revenue. And then we had a crisis, and things fell apart. And we had to reduce headcount. I ended up leaving the company.
Michael Houck:In those situations, it's super hard to kind of stay mentally even keel. You know, you never wanna be too high or too low as a founder, but those situations really kinda put you in that that tough spot. How do you handle that when you're going through all those rifts?
Steven Galanis:It fucking sucks. Right? It's the worst thing you can do because the people, whether they're on the keep list or the cut list, like, these are people you recruited and you mentored and they've given their all. And when they left great businesses to come to work for you or they chose not to leave for some amazing opportunity because they believe in your vision. As the CEO and the founder, like, that is that's the cross out that we bear, right, when we make miscalculations that our mistakes cost people jobs, right, at the end of the day as founders.
Steven Galanis:And and then for those that how you treat those on the way out, it's that's really important too because Yep. If you don't if you're not as generous as you can be from a severance perspective or you're not opening your network up to try to place people, then suddenly the people that are still there are like, hey. Does this leader have my back? So there's so much that needs to be done to to rebuild the culture. And, look, frankly, we went through, like, 2 years of hell, but I'm happy to report, like, we just had our old company, Cameapalooza, which we do every year.
Steven Galanis:We bring everyone to to come, and we just moved into our new headquarters. And we're fresh off funding, and we've recapped the business that we've given people. They got new equity grants, and it's like, if you're at Cambria today, it's kind of like being at a unicorn with series a upside. And and people the people that are here, they've had a 1000000 opportunities to leave. Right?
Steven Galanis:Like, we were we basically had 2 years where things weren't going well, and and there's rifts happening. And people that leave are leaving the company that are stars, and they're going somewhere else. So they're calling the best people in our company saying, hey. Come over here. The grass is greener.
Steven Galanis:The water's warm. And I'm so grateful to those that have stuck it out with us, and and they've been a huge part of this turnaround. And and, ultimately, when we get to the outcome that that we're building towards, they're gonna be handsomely rewarded for sticking it out.
Michael Houck:That's all you can ask for out of a leader is that kind of belief and loyalty in the people who stick around. It really breeds confidence and you know, I bet on a team like that. I think the company that that I've been building was sort of like a pseudo accelerator in a way. We had a membership offer. We'd bring founders together for cohorts and we'd invest in them out of our venture fund.
Michael Houck:And you actually did an accelerator pretty early on too, right, back in Chicago. You guys were part of was 18/71, right?
Steven Galanis:It still exists. And it was especially when I was there pre COVID, it was really like pretty special and differentiated kinda in the world. When I got there, there were 500, there were about 2,000 people working on 500 companies, all in one space together. So it was like community. It was the whole city behind you.
Steven Galanis:Basically, it was all the big the big fortune 5 hundreds partnered with universities, partnered with the best mentors from the big tech companies in town. And it just kind of was this really special ground zero place. And there's some excellent companies that have come out of that. Obviously, is COVID changed a lot, right, when they try to move that remotely, Like, the physical footprint of the places and is big. People don't come in as much.
Steven Galanis:It's not there's so many more I don't know. Just distributed work has just made physical like, physically gathering places for a time period there, like, less interesting than it used to be or less essential. Like, you can do meetups online now. You don't have to, like, go and and it but ultimately, it was really, really special. And it was special enough that if if 1871 did exist, like, I would have never built Cameo in Chicago.
Steven Galanis:Like, my 2 cofounders were in LA. I was the one that was here learning from other entrepreneurs, like, say telling my pitch 10 times a day every day and talking to other founders, and that was happening here while my cofounder Devin was building the app that what would become Cameo in Venice, and Martin was running around Hollywood trying to get people to join. Right? And I was I was in Chicago learning how to run a tech company.
Michael Houck:I think, obviously, you know how to run a tech company now. Right? And so the question is, down the road, if you were to start another company at some point, right, do you think that type of experience where you're in that type space with other founders also building early stage things, is that valuable enough where you think you would do it again? Or is it really something that people should just do sort of once to get that boot camp when they're starting out as founders?
Steven Galanis:Look. I think there's always value in I'm a people person. Like, my nickname since kindergarten has been the mayor. Right? But since it's not an accident that Cameo or Spartan Entertainment were the businesses that I started.
Steven Galanis:So I personally just love being around other founders, and I I derive a lot of energy from that. And I moved to Miami a few years ago, and and one thing I loved there was all these, like, world class founders that kinda all came to Miami at the same time. They were getting coworking spaces together. They're working out at each other's houses. Every night, you're at dinner with them, and I just love that sense of community.
Steven Galanis:At this point, I it'd probably be more likely, like, I would have a space and I would invite people to come to it than I would, like like, show up in WeWork or something like that. And and, honestly, even in the new Cameo HQ, one of the things that was really important to me was to have space for founders that are out of town coming to Chicago if they wanna work out of our office, like, they can't. Right? Because we wanted to have this, this place that's kind of the coolest place you could be in Chicago and have it be accessible to anyone in our network to use.
Michael Houck:Yeah. That makes sense. You can create your own at this point. I think another thing that is, like, sort of evidence of this value that you put on relationship capital is how you recommend people interact with investors. I read something that you said founders should spend 5 to 10% of their time every week sort of doing some sort of investor conversation even if they're not fundraising right now.
Michael Houck:Right? Do do you think that that's, like, a universal truth, or is that more true in maybe a weaker funding environment like we've been in for the last year or 2?
Steven Galanis:Like, I think it's universally universally true. There's some fundraise there's some founders that are kind of natural born fundraisers, and there's others that, like, wanna avoid it like the plague and don't wanna spend that one moment on it. In my experience, like keeping people updated constantly and meeting new people, it just, your pipeline just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. The more people that are aware of what you're doing. And frankly, if you've talked to someone over a longer period of time, they're going to have more conviction than this was like.
Steven Galanis:It's I don't know. It's kind of, if you're single and you only take 1 girl out when you're like, I want to get married and you like, go take someone out of date that day. Like it's either going to work out or not, but if you're single and you're constantly out, you're meeting people you're talking to, and you just have more options. Like that's going to help you find the person that's, like, actually right for you because you, like, know what you like but don't like. You you see, like, why they would be a fit, and you're not trying to squeeze a round square peg in a round hole.
Michael Houck:Yeah. That makes sense. I think the point about some people sort of loving that versus some people wanting to just sit down and write the code makes sense. I think would you recommend even if you're not that type of person who loves getting out there doing the sales, doing the fundraising, that you kinda force yourself to? And, like, what would you recommend to somebody who's trying to do that?
Steven Galanis:If you can't do it, then make sure you have a cofounder that or someone at the company that's that is willing to do that. You know, my 2 cofounders, they don't love they don't talk to investors. They're not interested in it. They don't wanna go to pitch meetings. They don't like, it's just not what they like to do.
Steven Galanis:And to be honest, like, we divided up the world really great. Hey, Arden, you go get the talent. Devin, you go make sure that the, you know, product works, and I'll go do all the shit in the middle. Right? So making sure and one of the one of my favorite venture capitalists is out of Atlanta actually has this saying for consumer founders.
Steven Galanis:He said, all the best teams have ever backed in consumer have these 3 these three traits of their founders. Now some founders could have all 3, but more often than not, it's like there's 2 or 3 founders, and they have the 3 traits between them. These consumer teams need the hustler, the hacker, and the hipster. Need the hustler to just run through walls and take some like, bend reality and make something happen that just you find a way to do it. And for us, that was Instagram DM ing being the the huge unlock for how we, like, got around agents and and talent.
Steven Galanis:And we built a team of dozens of people that were DMing celebrities on Instagram all day, and that's how we build our pipeline. The hacker is sub that's finding, like, some new and novel way to do it. And Devin built this platform where on the app, there's a teleprompter and it says, you say yes or no if you want the video. If you say yes, the teleprompter opens up on something that looks like Snapchat and you can nail the video every time because you're not gonna freak out what it says. And and then the hipster, like, they have to know what's gonna be cool in the future, right, in consumer.
Steven Galanis:And one of the examples I use of this, when we started Cameo, the Instagram highly polished design aesthetic was the dominant aesthetic out there. Yep. But, you know, what has transformed over last year is you now have authentic being more important than high quality. And we hit that on the head from the beginning. I remember sitting in 18/71 with some of the best consumer Internet advisors and media people, big Leo Burnett, advertising folks that were in Chicago helping, and they were like, the only way this will work is if you rent the celebrities out for, like, a day at the time.
Steven Galanis:You have the light, you have the right lighting, and you have their it's gotta be high production or people are never gonna pay for it. But we realized that people like the raw authenticity of it being on their cell phone, and that was something that made Cameo particularly special for the beginning.
Michael Houck:How do you think that you can get investors to sort of give you the time of day early on if you're not fundraising, if you're trying to just build those relationships? Investors are seeing tons of pitches. They're focused on getting a return for LPs. How do you get them to give you the time of day if you're not actively raising?
Steven Galanis:Well, I think first first off is like, this is something that just happens kind of over time. So in the earliest days, like when I was at 18/71, you would have someone that like, anyone that said they were a venture capitalist, they'd, like, sponsor drinks one day. Go talk to them. Go meet them. Tell them what you're doing.
Steven Galanis:If they're interested and they're like, let's get lunch or coffee one day, like, go follow-up. In my experience, like, one thing I'll say is that VCs, like, very often, like, they're they are salespeople. Right? They're great hunters. And when they see something that they want, like, they're gonna go and pursue you.
Steven Galanis:And that's why a lot of founders that maybe aren't the best salespeople in the world, like they end up getting funded or they build great businesses because the idea is that good or that there's something so compelling about the tech that they're building or what they're working on. From my experience, it's when you get those opportunities, take advantage of them and like be one of our values at Cameo is make it memorable. Right? If somebody, I can remember like the best founders I've ever met. I remember the first time I met them.
Steven Galanis:I remember being blown away by, by their passion or them telling me something crazy about how the world was gonna change, and that I would go home and think about it. And on the flip side, there's other people that you could throw them in the room with all the right people ever. They could have the best idea and they just can't articulate it. So to me, it's be super memorable, be someone that sticks out from the crowd, be someone that that person's not going to stop thinking about when they go home that night and that, like, they want to pursue and they want to hear.
Michael Houck:I love that. Yeah. Make be memorable yourself, do something interesting.
Steven Galanis:But also be, be authentic. Right. It's too hard to do this, that if you have to pretend to be someone else, right. To, to get a check from someone or them to invest in you. It's just not worth it.
Steven Galanis:Right? Like it's so hard. You're ultimately, they always talk about like your venture partners being it's a marriage, it's a 10 year journey together. And if you fool them over a 3 week period because you pretend to be something you're not, that's not gonna be good for either side.
Michael Houck:That's true. You obviously have done a really good job of building those connections with investors to the point of you've been able to tell stories without needing a pitch deck. Right? I think early on, I read that you guys even wet raised the series b without a pitch deck. But we didn't have a deck for our first few rounds either.
Michael Houck:But series b, that's that's genuinely pretty impressive. So how how'd that come about? How'd that happen?
Steven Galanis:Part of it was like and again, I think this is really unique to consumer when you have something in consumer that's just working. But the reality is when I'd go into these pitch meetings, the first five, ten minutes of all these I'd be at the best firms on Sand Hill Road, and the partners would spend the first 10, 15 minutes of my pitch showing me their cameras that they bought or why it was so awesome. So, yeah, that helps, right, when people know your product. And the other thing too is that Cameo gets called, like, kind of a COVID, like, growth story, and we work. We grew a lot during COVID.
Steven Galanis:But what people don't know is that if you go back on those entries in Orwitz marketplace reports from 2019, 2018, Cameo was the fastest or one of the fastest growing consumer marketplaces in the world in 2018 and 2019 before 2020. We went from 300,000 in GMV to a 100,000,000 in 4 years without market expense. So that is the type of thing that, like, when you have numbers like that and you have a product that makes people feel a certain way and it's got morality, that's why you can do it. If I if I had any other company, I'm sure I would add to have a pitch deck at the precede route.
Michael Houck:Do do you think there are benefits of, as a founder, just sitting down and creating a deck or even, like, a Notion memo? Even if your startup is super hot, do do you think there's value in that?
Steven Galanis:For sure. And while I say I have no deck, I actually do have a deck that I made, when I was sitting at 18/71, it's probably the worst pitch deck you'll ever see in your life. But forget the graphic design, which is terrible. The idea that would become cameo is crystal fucking clear in that deck. And that was for me, that wasn't for anybody else that this is not something I took to an investor or anything, but it was just me putting my ideas on paper.
Steven Galanis:And I literally am using clip art and aerial font, like it's horrendous. But if you forget about the, if you look at the substance of it, as opposed to like the cosmetic, does this look pretty or not? It's spelled out in summer of probably spring of 2017, the idea that would become a unicorn business 3 years later.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I think there's something to the idea that the ugliest decks tend to be the best. It's not universally true, but I do see that more often than not. Someone's just got
Steven Galanis:They always say, like, the best idea is is the good idea that looks like a bad idea. Right? So if your deck looks shitty and it was shitty, then you you never heard about that company, so it just went away. And and there's probably a lot more of the bad decks. There's probably a lot more that were bad decks with bad ideas.
Steven Galanis:Right? But there's also a lot of I've seen a lot of, you know, frankly invested in a lot of great looking decks that ended up being bad ideas. So but at least, hey, they put the if you were able to make this great deck or have this compelling vision, Maybe it's gonna work, maybe it's not, but at least you're being thoughtful. Like, I I do think it is rare to have the ugly deck with a good idea. But, again, that part of the reason this also happened is that all of our every single round of funding we've ever done came in doc.
Steven Galanis:Like, we we never until, honestly, until this last round that we did, we've never had, like, a formal like, we're gonna have run a process and, like, do this. It was I would constantly be meeting with people. They get exciting. And next thing they know, there's a term sheet, and now it's off the race. So that was something really unique about our fundraising journey.
Steven Galanis:And that's why I tell people just because I did it this way, it doesn't mean that it's a a way you could do it again, such as a first time founder, like, out of Silicon Valley. Like, there were a lot of it was just a crazy, weird, wild ride of how how Lightspeed found out about us or how Klyder found out about us. Like, Idris, like, the stories are amazing and fun, and I'll share them all one day. But it just it all comes down to, do you have product market fit? Like, do you have something that people really want and need and love and can't stop sharing with their friends and talking about in consumer?
Steven Galanis:Right? Like, it's just different.
Michael Houck:Any of those stories, even just one you could share with us today?
Steven Galanis:I'll I'll tell you one of my all time favorite stories is how our series a got done. So we have this amazing angel investor named Jana master Asher Schmidt, and Jana was one of the early women execs at Twitter. And she started this group called hashtag angels. That was like the top female execs from Twitter that wanted to like angel invest and do things together. We had just raised our seed route, our pre seed round, and somehow she found out about Cameo really early.
Steven Galanis:She DM me on Twitter kinda every day until I responded. It was, like, days and days and days in a row. And finally, she's like, I know you think I'm crazy, but, like, we need to talk. And she ends up talking to me and investing in the business. She's from turns out she's from Central Illinois, and she, like, actually randomly worked at a bar that my family owned.
Steven Galanis:And, like, there was just all these connections, but she loved Cameo, and she was obsessed with the idea. And I ended up letting her write a small seed check into the business and small angel check into the business. And then a couple maybe a few months later, she ends up calling me and said, hey. I just met Jeremy Lou from Lightspeed. He was at my house at Malibu, and I just showed him Cameo and he loves it.
Steven Galanis:Is it cool if I put you guys on email together? And at this point, we'd raised our seed round. We had drawn this spreadsheet that was just kind of an evergreen spreadsheet that we work with our seed investors that basically ranked, like, not just every venture firm, but, like, every partner at every firm. And the highest level was if it was a 5 out of 5 fit and, like, a 5 out of 5 partner or servers, like, a 5 a, right, which was like like, this is like an A plus firm and like the A plus partner. And there were only a handful ahead of this.
Steven Galanis:I remember at the time that were on that list, it was like, it was, it was Matt Kohler from Benchmark who had done, like, Instagram. It was Reid Hoffman. Like, there were, like, a few names in Germany. It was one of the 5 or 6 names total that were rate 5 a. And I get an email from Germany and he goes, hey, Steven.
Steven Galanis:I just found out about Cameo. This is genius. Where are you in the world? We're having breakfast tomorrow. And I have to be in San Francisco because I was meeting with YouTube for something.
Steven Galanis:And I told him let's meet me. We ended up meeting for coffee at the battery. I thought it was going to be 15 minute meeting. I start my pitch. I'm like 30 seconds.
Steven Galanis:Then he goes, Steven, no, no, no. I've been looking for this type of business for 10 years. Let me explain to you why, like me and Lightspeed are the perfect partners for you. We ended up talking for 2, 3 hours. I have to fly to a wedding in Los Angeles.
Steven Galanis:I literally am like, Jeremy, I'm about to miss this wedding. It was labor day weekend. So I had to make this flight or I was gonna miss the rehearsal dinner. And he basically goes, hold on one second, and he gets on a phone call. He comes back and he goes, alright, Steven.
Steven Galanis:When you land, you're on American Airlines. You're gonna land at gate 43. I I want you to walk over to the United terminal, which is at LAX, which is gate 71. And there, you're gonna meet my partner, Nicole Quinn, at this coffee shop right there. So I literally, like, get out of plane.
Steven Galanis:I land. I have this meeting in the airport with Nicole Quinn, and we talk. We have mutual friends. She loves the business. She's been doing a bunch of celebrity stuff with Lady Gaga and Reese Witherspoon and others, and it's kinda like love at first sight.
Steven Galanis:We have just this amazing rapport, and then she's like, right. I'm gonna come see you on Tuesday. So that was back in Chicago. So Tuesday morning, 9 of the 9 o'clock in the morning, she's in the office, spends the day with the team. At the end of the day, we go and I think we got a meal or or a drink or something, and she's like, hey.
Steven Galanis:This is awesome. I'd love you to come meet the rest of my partners and back in the valley on Monday. So I then show up at this partner meeting at Lightspeed. It's just just me. I think maybe we had I think I just hired, yeah, I just hired a CFO, and it was the 2 of us that go out there.
Steven Galanis:We didn't have a deck. We had no model. We have nothing. And we're in this partner meeting with 50 people at Lightspeed in person. And then all around the Zoom, the the people in Israel, the people in their other offices, and we started getting into our pitch.
Steven Galanis:And and at the end of that meeting, we go in, I have no idea how well it went. Like, I thought it was interesting. And we're sitting in this conference room and Jeremy and Nicole walk in. And keep in mind, Jeremy was the 1st check-in Snapchat. And he goes, Steven, it's unanimous.
Steven Galanis:The partners, Lightspeed, we'd love to lead your series a. And our belief is that Cameo is it's Snapchat, but better because Instagram can't copy it because of the modes that you've built. And we think you're building a business that's gonna change the world. And when you have a partner, like, with conviction like that, that is I always give that the story of, like, when VCs, like, go and chase a hot deal, like, they went when there were 10 other things that happened that week when I was in the valley, that all of a sudden my investors are like, shit. You got turn sheets on Lightspeed.
Steven Galanis:Well, we need to go and meet everybody else and go meet Greylock. Go meet Andreessen. Go meet Kleiner and Sequoia. And, like, we did go run this process. We end up with 5 term sheets in the next 4 days.
Steven Galanis:And but, ultimately, like, the reason I went with Lightspeed was the conviction that they had. And I love telling that story because when that's the difference between chasing a VC that you had a great pitch with and then 3 days later, hey. Following up. Do you need this? Like, when they want it, they they go they know how to get it.
Steven Galanis:And the thing is they take so many there's so many shots in gold that happens that for that week, right, there might have been another it might have been that they missed Figma that week because they're chasing Cameo. Right? So as a founder, you should never take it personally that investor that you really want, like, might be distracted or isn't getting you back to you. It's just that you're not their first you're not their first love. You're not the one that they, like, they wanna marry that week.
Michael Houck:Wow. Let that be a lesson to to anyone who's listening and has tried to fundraise or has even fundraised successfully. Now you know exactly what it looks like when partners are so all in on something and have so much conviction, and you are, as you said, the one they wanna marry. That's amazing. Yeah.
Steven Galanis:And and I and I think, look, when you're making a 10 year decision, like, who's gonna be on your board, it's important that there's that passion for the business coming in. And the reason my series b got done so well is Nicole Quinn. When she joined the board, she was the best cheerleader for Cameo, and we were kicking ass for beating our numbers. And she made sure that everyone in the valley that can lead our v, like, knew it, and then that led to an inbound series b process. So that's why I always I just spent a lot of time for all these funds, and it's interesting because I'm in LP and a lot of funds.
Steven Galanis:Like, I've been invested over the course of 8 years by so many of the top names in the valley and all investors that I love. And very often, like, founders will call me and they'll say, hey. I'm decided between Kleiner and Lightspeed and Sequoia. How do I make the decision? And and I I'll talk about the the merits of, like, each individual firm or each individual partner if I know them.
Steven Galanis:But, ultimately, I always tell them, like, who really loves your business? Like, who really, really wants to win? And that's who you should go with.
Michael Houck:Makes total sense. Hey. Thanks for sharing that story. That was a killer. Wanna wrap up just with couple rapid fire outro questions that we ask everybody.
Michael Houck:So you mentioned a few investors already who you loved and have who've been in spread on the journey, but maybe give one person a shout out who other founders should take capital from.
Steven Galanis:Yeah. One partner that has just kind of blown me away over the years, and I have a lot of amazing investors, is, is Brent Hill at Origin Ventures. Brent's out of Salt Lake City. Origin, like, most famously, was the first money in in Grubhub, was wrote the 1st term sheet that Cameo ever received. And just kinda time and time again, like, I found Brent to just be just an amazing voice to listen to and somebody that his firm, like, many different times, like, stepped up for Cameo, and and there's been a a lot of so many great investors on there.
Steven Galanis:But Brent's one that I I just never feel is gets, like, enough credit, but he's awesome.
Michael Houck:What's one thing you would change about the startup world?
Steven Galanis:I mean, look, there's there's so many things that I would change, but probably the number one thing that, I would change is I would I still think, like, the stats on, like, women getting found funded is it's just it's kind of insane. It's something like 97% of venture dollars go to men versus women. And there's a lot of survivor bias on that, and there's reasons why. But it should be easier for women to raise capital.
Michael Houck:Yeah. For sure. Okay. What's your number one piece of advice for a first time founders? Never start a company before.
Steven Galanis:The number one thing I always talk about is to try to find a company that's, like, really in the middle of your Ikigai. Your Ikigai's Japanese philosophy, see intersection of what are you great at, what do you love to do, what does the world need, and what can you make money doing. And too often, and we're seeing this right now with AI, but I've been around long enough now that I've seen 7 different VC hype cycles, micro mobility, ARVR, crypto, web 3. Just like there's always the creator economy. They're always in consumer.
Steven Galanis:It keeps being that next thing that everybody's chasing. And if you're gonna win and truly be the best in the world at it, you're gonna have to be at it for 20, 30 years. This is like, you might never build another company if you're gonna build the next NVIDIA or something like that. Like, look at Jensen's story, how long that took the conviction he needed to have to build what became a super valuable company or someone like Jeff Bezos that one of the things that I love when he talks about is people ask me how the world's gonna change in 10 years. I have no idea how the world's gonna change in 10 years, but the things I know that will be true in 10 years is my customers are gonna want their goods faster and cheaper.
Steven Galanis:Right? And if users work on that for 10 years, like, that compounding, you're gonna build a valuable business no matter how the world changes. And I always I I see too many first time founders chasing the hot new thing as opposed to doing the thing that they love, even if it's unsexy at the time.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I see that all the time. See it everywhere, especially with hype bubbles. Okay. Last one.
Michael Houck:This is a Peter Tier one that I love. What's something that you believe in that most people disagree with you about?
Steven Galanis:My the contrarian but right opinion?
Michael Houck:Yeah. Exactly.
Steven Galanis:Yeah. Probably can my most controversial contrarian but right opinion when it comes to startups is that I think that like, really, when I was at LinkedIn, I saw this. And, obviously, like, DI has been a huge theme of a lot of the last 5 years. I believe in diversity of thought. I think that that other types of diversity are often overrated.
Steven Galanis:And in my experience, I've always seen aligned teams win over, like, really diverse and maybe fragmented teams. So I think that is for a long time, that was, like, what are the, like, most taboo things you could possibly say in the valley? And I think that a lot of really good well intended initiatives have not played out as well as some had hoped. But I've seen this in sports teams my whole life. I've seen this in every organization I've been in.
Steven Galanis:Like, alignment matters more than having a ton of different opinions. And that that's my own personal conviction and by we've got a great team here. We have people that are from a lot of different backgrounds, but the best teams that I've ever had have been really aligned ones.
Michael Houck:I completely agree. And I think it's becoming less taboo to talk about it too, which is great. Cool. Well, Steven, thanks so much for spending some time with me today. I think folks are really gonna love this.
Michael Houck:And where can folks find you aside from obviously running Cameo day to day?
Steven Galanis:Probably on Instagram, but just follow our Cameo socials are big. My Twitter is at mister 312, Chicago's area code. But, yeah, I'm not super, super active. I'm not a big Tweeter, but Instagram's probably the best place or LinkedIn.
Michael Houck:Cool. Thanks, man.
Steven Galanis:Cool. Thank you.
Michael Houck:Thanks for listening. I write up my main takeaways from every conversation and make them available to all of our members at foundingjourney.com, along with a bunch of other perks and more content. If you found this conversation valuable, subscribe to Founding Journey on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or whenever your favorite podcast app is. I post a new episode every Thursday. Also consider leaving us a rating or a review.
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Michael Houck:See you next time.