The Money Mondays - Building Billion-Dollar Brands in the AI Era | Zeta Global & Cameo Founders 🌍 EP143

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

In this special episode of Money Mondays, Dan Fleyshman sits down with David Steinberg, Zeta’s CEO and co-founder, and Steven Galanis, co-founder and CEO of Cameo, to discuss building world-changing companies through innovation, vision, and resilience. Together, they dive into entrepreneurship, leadership, acquisitions, and the power of giving back through philanthropy.---David A. Steinberg is the co-founder and CEO of Zeta Global, a marketing technology company serving 44% of the Fortune 100. A serial entrepreneur, he has founded seven companies and taken two public. Known for his leadership in AI and data marketing, David also leads the David and Kristen Steinberg Foundation, supporting disadvantaged children through education and nutrition.---Steven Galanis is the co-founder and CEO of Cameo, the platform that connects fans directly with their favorite celebrities through personalized video messages. Recognized by Time and Fast Company as one of the most innovative entrepreneurs of his generation, Steven has revolutionized the creator economy and continues to shape the future of fan engagement and digital experiences.Like this episode? Watch more like it 👇AI is REVOLUTIONIZING Financial Services Forever w/ Pavan Agarwal 🤖 : https://youtu.be/-f0bn8XZC9kThe MARKETING Expert's Guide to Making More Money | Neil Patel 💵 : https://youtu.be/DcE0V0rVTbkHow to Build a Business (Even If You’re NOT Ready) 🏭 : https://youtu.be/NnCBHEEQL2IMy Honest Advice To Someone Who Wants To Learn How To Network: https://youtu.be/7j6MnJuhxKwWatch ALL Full Episodes Here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs0D-M5aH-0IOUKtQPKts-VZfO55mfH6k---The Money Mondays is a business podcast here to teach you how to make money, invest money, and donate money by showcasing some of the world's most successful people and how they do the same. Hosted by serial entrepreneur Dan Fleyshman, the youngest founder of a publicly traded company in history, this money podcast gives you an exclusive behind the scenes look at how the wealthiest celebrities, entrepreneurs, athletes and influencers make, invest and donate money.If you want to learn more business and investing while you work to improve your financial life, you're in the right place! Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@themoneymondays?sub_confirmation=1Dan Fleyshman,The Money MondaysLearn more here: https://themoneymondays.comWatch all the podcast episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs0D-M5aH-0IOUKtQPKts-VZfO55mfH6kLet’s Connect...Website: https://themoneymondays.comPodcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-money-mondays/id1663564091Twitter: https://twitter.com/themoneymondaysLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-money-mondays/about/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@themoneymondaysFB: https://www.facebook.com/The-Money-Mondays-110233585203220/

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a very, very, very special edition of the Money Monday's podcast where normally I'm inside of an RV motorhome, drive around the country. But today, because of my dear friend here, we're at his conference called Zeta Live. His company Zeta Global is a multi-billion dollar corporation, and he decides to put a lot of time, energy, and effort to throw an event for over 1,000 guests. And the number might be 1,000, 1,000, 2,000 people. Last year was like 11,200. Now there's 2,000 executives that are here inside the building.

And luckily, I got him for the next 15 minutes, so we're going to keep this podcast very short and straightforward. As you guys know, we cover three core topics, how to make money, how to invest money, how to give away to charity. He's done all of the above. He's very philanthropic. So, I'll further do, David Steinberg, give us the quick two-minute bio, so we get straight to the money.

A, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I founded seven companies, sold four taken to public. I'm chairman of another. Zeta Global is the premier artificial, intelligence-driven marketing cloud today. We help very large enterprises to create, maintain, and monetize customers at a substantially lower cost by using our AI and our data. Wow. I've dialed in. That was great. I've never said that before, right? All right. When you're running a multi-billion dollar company, how do you make the time and energy for this?

To have 2,000 executives here in New York City. How do you do it? How do you pull it off? Well, if it was just this, it would be easy. We started on Monday, Monday morning. Sunday, I flew from L.A. to New York. Monday morning at 7 a.m. Eastern time. I was on Bloomberg. We then had a crazy day. We closed the New York Stock Exchange and rang the bell. Ding, ding, ding. It is really loud. It is louder than you expect it to be. And you push it for longer. And I almost pushed it at the wrong time. The guy freaked out. So it was good. I didn't. But we did that. And then Tuesday, we had our global town hall for our 2,200 global employees. and then I flew to Dallas to give a speech. I gave a speech at my friend Emron Kahn's conference. Then after that speech, I flew back to New York, landed around 1230, got to bed at 1.

6 a.m. was up on Wednesday. Yesterday, we did our customer advisory board meeting. We did our bi-annual investor day. And then we took 150 people, including you, to dinner. And then today is Zeta Live. Oh, my goodness gracious. And then a few minutes ago, I heard you debuted something really big. We did.

Who is Athena? What is it? So Athena, which is the biggest product launch in our corporate history, is a conversational artificial intelligence super agent. So you can speak to Athena like you were speaking to me right now, and you could ask it any question you want about your business, about marketing. It will then tell you the answers, and it can automatically. radically control the Zeta marketing platform in real time and run marketing and then give

attribution all in one user interface. I have so many questions. Yeah. Well, ask Athena. Wow, that's magical. So who uses Athena? Who is it perfect for? Athena's to really help marketers today to no longer need data scientists, no longer need

operating people to run their market. everything can now be done via Athena. So we have 567 global enterprise clients today, including 44% of the Fortune 100 largest companies in the world. And they are going to have Athena fully integrated into their platform that everything goes voice enabled by Q1. Wow. Why do you like to create these experiences? Why bring these 2,000 people together? Why do you create this? Well, first of all, I find that even in an artificial intelligence world, serendipity plays a big part of innovation. Yes, just getting people together and learning from each other and spending time. I mean, nobody does this better than you, right? We throw an event. We plan for

1,300 people. We end up with 2,000. You throw an event, you have 50,000 people show up. By the way, It's amazing what you do for kids. Serendipity last night, it was so fascinating. You had Heather Ray Young and Terrick sitting next to me, and you replaced them with the CEO of AOL. Well, he's the former CEO of AOL, former head of global sales for Google. Tim is probably, I mean,

Tim Armstrong is one of the most accomplished individuals in the marketing ecosystem. Today he runs an incredible company around helping businesses to connect digital with the real world with a special edition QR codes. Yeah, it was fascinating. It was two hours. The serendipity was fascinating because my mind was blown by just listening to him.

Okay, so you're running a publicly traded company. You're on the news all the time. How are you juggling the world? You've got beautiful family. You're traveling around. You said 2,000 plus employees. This is a lot going on. How do you, David, manage all this?

Well, first of all, it comes down to having one of the world's greatest teams. If you look at our executive leadership team, which is the 14 people that sort of work with me and I meet with every Monday, each one of them could be CEO of another company. And if you look at our senior leadership team, which is 66, 67 people, they are some of the most accomplished executives in the world.

In fact, Dan, one of the things I'm personally most proud of is the individuals who have bet their careers on working with Zeta. Yeah. It's, you know, they feed their families, They build their future based on what we do as an organization, and we take it very seriously. So you recently bought another really big company. I think you spent a couple hundred million dollars?

$325 million, to be exact, yes. Why did you buy that company? Why are you in the roll-up phase? You bought another big company earlier this year. We're not in the roll-up face, just so we're on the same page. That's not a term we use. In fact, if you look at our four pillars of M&A, the number one pillar is we have to be, able to fully integrate them into our tech stack within 12 months of purchasing.

Roll-ups generally run a lot of individual businesses, and they can work, but that's not what we are. We bought Marigold's enterprise business for a number of reasons. One, we picked up one of the largest enterprise-grade loyalty programs for very large enterprises, which allows our models, our algorithms, to now train on that loyalty data in addition to our data cloud and our client's data. We picked up one of the most important messaging platforms for publishers in SELAgent, which we're going to merge into our publisher cloud. We picked up a very large footprint in Europe and Emia, which is SELigent.

And we picked up Cheetah Digital, which is one of the premier platforms in the marketing automation space. We got an additional 40 Fortune 500 customers and over 100 additional enterprise clients to cross-sell. our products and services into to make their businesses better so we've and and by the way we bought the business at a substantial discount to the multiple at which we trade so the deal is accretive from the day we do it wow cool now we haven't closed yet we expect to close some time in the fourth quarter so how do you decide when you can say let's say you have the pick of the litter right you're out there you're working with so many thousands of companies as your clients and you have a lot of relationships because you're throwing these large conferences, so you have a lot of options.

What do you think about when you're deciding, I want to acquire that company? That'd be a good fit for us at Zeta Global. It's a great question, Dan, which is not to say your other questions weren't great, but that was a good one. So this is, as I said, I've been doing this. I've been CEO and founder of seven companies over 35 years. When I started my first company, I was the youngest person in the room for the first 20 years I was CEO. I am now universally, Dan, the oldest person in the room when I walk in. No, it's okay.

But some of the things you build these incredible lessons along the way. And one of the lessons I learned as it relates to M&A is don't take your operating people off of their day jobs to go do M&A. So we built effectively a boutique investment bank inside of Zeta. And we look at a hundred different companies a year seriously to buy one. Wow. Because it has to hit all five of our criteria. One, we have to be able to integrate it in 12 months. Two, we have to be able to sell them, their clients, our products, or vice versa.

Three, the deal has to be accretive from the day we do it. Four, there have to be additional synergies to drive incremental profit, and we have to be able to grow it at least our own organic growth rate, which is greater than 20% a year now for four years in a row. And number five, we have to pick up incredible people. Wow. All right. So I know you're going to have to be running back shortly. So I just want to ask you one last question on the philanthropy side. Why do you think that companies or corporations should have some type of charity component for either their employees or their customers to like to see it? You know, if you're successful and you're not giving back to society, I don't know what you're doing.

So I started the David and Kristen Steinberg Foundation a number of years ago. And, you know, one of the things I love about what you do, Dan, is your focus on children. our biggest focused is disadvantaged children around education, around nutrition, and around helping them to move up to the next level of success. And it's something that, honestly, it brings me so much joy to do it. And, you know, I often say that the charitable giving that my wife, Kristen, and I do, is almost selfish in that it makes me feel so good to do it. And I think it's, in all frankness, when you and I first got to know each other, it was the thing that I think bonded us the fastest. Okay.

So where can people find David Steinberg, Zeta Global, where can they find your world, your ecosystem, if they're out there listening? Well, first of all, we can go to ZetaGlobal.com. second i'm on instagram and x uh and uh you know posts there pretty regularly and uh very excited to have people join me all right i'm going to let you get back to your conference as you guys know on the money mondays we want you to have these discussions with your friends family and followers it's not just about yourself that needs to understand about money you might have to have discussion with people from your past present and future have discussion talk about money it's

not rude to talk about it we need it in our lives there's loans credit financing taxes these are real things part of your daily life so have discussion we'll see you guys next monday here at the money mondays.com ladies and gentlemen welcome to a special edition of the monday monday's podcast normally we're inside of an rv motorhome traveler on the country but today we're at the zeta global live conference coming here for last three years so impressive they bring in over 1100 chief marketing officers CEOs and our guest today is just like that he is actually built to one of the biggest brands in the space. It's been fascinating to watch him grow over the years.

I think he's on year nine of this company and building something that everyone around the world has talked about because he's combined celebrities, influencers, athletes, comedians, all into one platform. I'm fascinated by it. So what we're going to do is cover three core topics. How to make money, how to invest money, how to give away to charity. On this episode, we're going to keep it much shorter. They're using me around 20 to 25 minutes.

Normally the episodes are 40 minutes because the average commute to work. is 45 minutes. The average workout is 45 minutes. This episode will be around 20 to 25 minutes for your listening pleasure. So without further ado, Stephen Galanis from Cameo. Give us your quick two-minute bio, so we get straight to the money. Hey, I'm Stephen Galanis, the co-founder and CEO of Cameo. Camio is a marketplace where you can book over 60,000 of the most influential people in pop culture to create either personalized video shoutouts for you or to become brand endorsers for your brands. So we have this marketplace. People can come on, search by what they like, and then find the people that are there.

I'm based out of Chicago, and I'm in Miami as well. We've been at it nine years, as you mentioned. It's been a crazy, blessed story. We actually had the idea of my grandmother's funeral of all places. And the problem we were trying to start from, solve from the very beginning was the internet was creating a new world where there was this gap between fame and monetization. So for the first time, people are kind of more famous than rich.

And we were really thinking about, what if we could create a platform that help people get paid to become more famous get paid to become more beloved because if you get a cameo from somebody you like them more than you like them before you'll buy more of their merch you'll listen to their podcasts you become a go from a casual fan to a rabid super fan okay you mentioned it happened in your grandma's funeral how did that come to be and people are crying this is a big moment in your life and how all of a sudden you become this zillion dollar company idea in this moment yeah it was crazy so my my uncle on my on my mom's side is a movie producer and he had done movies like Rambo, Conan, Lone Survivor.

And a bunch of the guys that he produced movies with came in for the day for the funeral from Los Angeles. One of those guys is Martin Blencoe who ended up becoming my co-founder at Cameo. At the time, Martin had become an NFL agent near one client, Cassius Marsh, a good buddy of both of ours. And Cash had just recently gone viral for having his Magic the Gathering card stolen. Martin was trying to find any marketing deal for him because as the agent, you make a higher percentage of marketing deals than you do for like a rookie minimum contract. And yet even though he is an NFL player that made them go viral, he couldn't get Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns Magic the Gatherings to get any type of money. So we were really thinking about this big gap. And he was really down on his luck.

He had just sold his watch to pay for his kids private schools. he's like, Stephen, I'm losing money flying up to Seattle every month. I don't know what to do. But he's like, I know this guy's a star. One of his ideas was if he found a big defensive lineman with like big aura and a personality, maybe that guy could be the next Jason Mamoa or the next rock. And he thought that my uncle could cast Cassius as a Rambo or a Conan. So that was his whole idea in finding him.

And you know him. He's got that. He's got that look. So he pulls his phone out and he shows me this video as we're stuck in traffic, driving from downtown Chicago all the way back in O'Hare, just gridlock traffic. He pulls out the video, and then at he's getting his buddy Brandon Boone, who I think now is the chief marketing officer at Wingstop, and Brandon literally had just had a son. And he named his son Maverick because he was very close with Mav Carter and a bunch of the guys

in LeBron's camp, but he loves the Seattle Seahawks. And then at Cassius Marsh, who was playing for the Seahawks at the time, goes, hey, congratulations Brandon on Maverick. if he gets your athletic ability, I know he'll be playing for the Seahawks one day, Go Hawks. And I saw this and immediately there was that Eureka moment. I'm like, dude, we should sell those.

That's a new autograph. Okay. So when you say that's the new autograph, what's really interesting about that is a lot of people for many, many years would wait outside of concerts, festivals, basketball games to get an autograph. And then about seven or eight years ago,

the selfie became the autograph. Correct. That's right around the time, obviously, cameo started to become big. Walk us to the concept of where the selfie is the autograph. Yeah, I mean, I think it's just simple. When I was a kid growing up in Chicago, you know, 98 Bulls, like that whole Michael Jordan, Scotty Pippen era,

if you saw a Dennis Rodman at a restaurant, what did you do? You grab the menu, you grab the napkin. They signed it, like they signed your hat. Today, if you see somebody famous, what do you do? Go up, take a selfie. And one of the things we're thinking about is in the digital world where your Instagram wall or your Facebook wall or your Instagram grid, is kind of the equivalent of like your office,

what your office wall used to be, instead of getting the signed jersey that's sitting in your office, like you need, you know, people want that kind of that digital experience that's on their grid post or it's on their Facebook wall at the time. And that's really, again, selfie's a new autograph. Okay, so on the How to Make Money Side

with the Money Monday's podcast, you have 60,000 creators, influencers, athletes, comedians, et cetera, they're on the platform. Let's say someone is one of those. They are an influencer, celebrity athlete, and obviously you have other categories. how do they sign up? How do they come to you? How do they find out? How do they make money? Yeah, three main ways. The first is we have a team of people that are constantly DMing people that we think could be good.

One of the cool things about Cameo at this scale now is our search bar is kind of a window to the zeitgeist. So all of a sudden, like, we'll see these names that are popping on the trending list that we never heard of. And it may be somebody just went viral for starting a new TikTok trend or some new show on Hulu came out that we wasn't on a radar yet. So the second we see that, our team will go attack and go get those people on the platform. Secondly, we have a talent-to-talent referral system. So that allowed us once we got into the locker room. So when we got Cassius Marsh on the Seahawks, anyone else on his team that he referred, he got 5% of their bookings for a year out of our cut.

And those referrals were 17% of our marketplace were referred by other talent, and they've done 65% of the lifetime GMV. So a lot of the biggest people we ever got came from are really happy, talent on our marketplace referring their friends and getting them on and then third and this is something we changed a few years ago when we first started the business you had to have about 25,000 followers to come on that's just the level where we thought you could be you know but what we're noticing when we looked at like the beginning of COVID all the way to Mother's Day 23 we looked at all the people that it applied that we hadn't let on and it's kind of it was a static thing right

if you apply and you're like I have 7000 followers on Instagram we don't follow like we weren't tracking every single one of the people that applied. So they just ended up in kind of a no man's land. And one of the things, when we looked at the purgatory, we realized there were thousands of people that we had missed. Like maybe they were going to get cast in euphoria and becoming the biggest model in the world.

Now they have 60,000. Right. Or they have six, you know, they have six million. You know, somebody goes viral on TikTok. Someone was in the minor leagues and now they're starting for the Yankees. We missed some really big people. So what we decided to do a couple years ago is open it up. open it up. So now anyone in the world can just go to cameo.com slash enroll, join

Camio as talent. And if you get booked, the algorithms will push you up and make you searchable. But the cool thing about that, if you join through enrollments, you can only get booked by sharing your link. So ultimately what you're doing is you're enabling all these people to do influence their marketing for you. And then those who there's demand for will end up kind of rising up in our system. Wow. Okay. So someone comes on there. They got to prove, bam, I'm approved on Cameo. They're excited. How do they now make money? How do they tell people, is it all through social? Does it email, text? They mentioned it on stage. How do they promote it? Yeah, all the above. I think, obviously, most people on the internet, like,

their biggest followings on the internet. So we always tell people, like, play where your fans are. And in this case, like, what, one of the things that happened just technologically, right when we were coming up, the Instagram story swipe up ended up being a huge thing. that kind of happened right as Cameo was going. So at that time, only verified accounts originally could post a link in their Instagram story and there were way less stories. So what would happen is first we would tell people like, hey, you have this link in biospace, go put that there.

So to this day, you still see so many people, www.cameo slash Dan that are just like right there. Secondly, they'll be like, hey, you know, I'm on this thing, came came up, come book me. And then third, you know, people have gotten really creative if they have a new newsletter, if they have an email list, if they're doing a tour, like they've found ways to integrate that into the other co-marketing that they're doing to their fans already. And it's pretty organic. But by far the most important driver of cameos marketing is actually the fact that these

videos all get shared, right? So 85% of videos in our marketplace are booked for other people. So if I book a cameo for you and you think it's funny, what do you do? You put it in the group chat and suddenly all these other people know about it. And that's really how we grow. So there's been a lot of competitors that have come and gone and faded away. What do you think made cameo stand out? Let's step outside.

Obviously, you're the CEO and founder. Let's actually look at it pragmatically. Why do you think that came out stood out versus all the other ones that came in wins? I think it was a variety of things. Number one, I think the timing was really important. There had been people and you know all about this that had tried to do this earlier. But until Snapchat became what it was, the people filming a selfie video was still, like, if you tried to do it five years before, like nobody had really done that before. So I think by the

time we started in 2017, everybody was pretty comfortable filming a selfie video. So I think that meant a lot. And the iPhone camera had kind of gotten good enough to go do it. Secondly, there's a lot of teams out there around the world that either could build the tech to do cameo or they could have the talent relationships. But there were very few people that could do both. And when I look at the founder market fit that our team specifically had, my co-founder, Martin was an NFL agent and movie producer. Now, if he was Ari Emanuel or if he was Jerry Bruckheimer, he would have been too big that he wouldn't have cared to go do this if that makes sense. So the fact that he was like in the space, he knew enough to get, he knew enough

to get, you know, but he wasn't as successful enough at that point to go do it. That was big. Secondly, my co-founder, Devin, who was our founding CTO, actually was one of the first people in the world on Vine with over a billion loops. Right. So he was like a top 100 Viner in the world. His best friend Cody Coe was like a top, top 30 Viner in the world. And one of the stories I'll never forget, the year before we started cameo, I went to the Mayweather Pac-Yow fight with Devin Cody and our friend Adam Q. And I'll never forget, Cody ended up tagging a picture of me, of our group, the four of us, like, in the hotel lobby of the Aria. And I didn't know to have my notifications off. And suddenly, like, my phone was charged for a

whole night out in Vegas. There were so many likes and comments. that my phone overheated and died in my pocket. And that was the moment where I'm like, holy, and I'd known Cody since college. I'm like, holy shit. Like this vine thing's huge. Like, and keep in mind, even with those likes, the two of them had not made a dollar on social media yet at this point.

So I literally am getting stopped more from Cody and Devin than I am from my buddies that are in the NBA or the NFL. And that was a big unlock to me because they hadn't been able to make money. And I think Devin being a creator and fundamentally understand. that as our founding, you know, CTO, like, that's a really, really unique skill set that got brought to the table. And then lastly, like, I'm a marketplace guy. I'm a X options trader. So, you know, thinking about pricing was big. And one of the things that we were able to do really early was find an equation to help people price themselves. Because when Cameo started,

nobody knew what it should be. Should it be $1,000. Should it be that? And I had this idea of you're basically getting a minute of their time. So it takes. their salary, which for NBA and NFL players, which we started with, were publicly available, divide by 2,000 hours in a work year, 50, 40 hour weeks, and then find out what they made per minute. So when we onboarded Andre Drummond from the Detroit Pistons, who was a $25 million max salary player at the time, we did that equation. And first he thought he needed to be $40,000 or $10,000 to do a cameo because he's like, I got paid $40,000 to go to a bar mitzvah. But for me, I was like, that's flying.

I'm like, dude, like the math's actually saying, you know, $25 million divided by 2,000 hours and a work year divided by 60, you make $208 a minute. So if you're charging $100 and you do two videos per minute, you're making the same effective rate as you are playing in the NBA on a max salary. And that was a really big, I think that pricing ended up being a really big unlock. And then once we had that set and the price was cheap enough that people could go buy, then you started getting the reviews because a lot of the early. early competitors we saw, yeah, they had Dwayne Wade, but he was $5,000 and nobody ever tried it.

So starting with, and also I think a lot of people, too, try to start with the A-plus list, and we really had this idea of solving the problem for the 99% of talent that really needed the money. All right, so there's a story I've been wanting to tell you for six years now, and really about the last half a decade in particular, I've been wanting to tell you about the butterfly effect. So in 2019, I actually went to visit you in Chicago, and you took me to a restaurant across the street and I got this message from Gary Vee. He was at the national at the sports card convention. I didn't know what the national was. He said come over to the card show before you fly out. So I thought I was going to go there for three hours and I'm there to see you. So you're

the butterfly effect for hundreds of millions of dollars of sales by the way. It gets you to the punchline. So I go to see Gary Vee. I go to the show and I'm walking around with the sun and three hours turns out of three days. I just like I happen to have $9,200 in cash on me. I know that number because I spent all of it with his kid, with Gary's kid. I became Uncle Dan. And we went around and bought sports cards, right? Get back from the show, and I can't stop thinking about sports cards. And Gary and I started a group chat with called the National.

Get 36 people in the group chat. It gets too full. It's another group chat. Start another group chat. And then Gary says, oh, let's do a Zoom call. Bring people on that have no cards. But bring interesting characters. So I invite Logan Paul, Steve Ayoki, Lewis Howes, Rob G,

guys that are now having tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars of cards on the Zoom call had zero. Rob G bought the most expensive, you know, like Mickey Mantle card, Babe Ruth card, et cetera. And so from that Zoom call, that group chat still exists. Now Logan Paul obviously has tens of millions of dollars in cards. Aoki's got tens of millions of cards, Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, et cetera. And it's all because of you. The literal butterfly effect is because you took me in a tonne restaurant. Well, first off, that's an amazing story.

I wish I, you know, I should have got my referral fee on that. No, no, but, you know, the thing, Dan, that I, like, really have appreciated watching your whole, from the second we met, like, I remember you coming in and telling me at 17 years old, you had the trademarks and, like, just all the businesses that you built, you're such a force of nature. And I think that's why, you know, people just, when you, when you add, there's a lot of people that get started group chat. There's not a lot of people that could get the people in the group chat to go do that thing. And it's been, uh, incredible to watch from. the sidelines of how you've taken this community and you've really elevated like a whole category. You know, at that point, like, I collected baseball cards and stuff when I was a kid, but like,

you know, I didn't understand that world either. And now, you know, the National Week in Chicago is such a big one. It's usually, it's usually right around Lollapalooza when we do our big cameo plo ploosa. So we have a lot of our athletes in town coming in. And that whole space is just blown up. And, you know, I really appreciate the community building that you've done there. And it's just funny, like, you know, last night, Chip and I, I know you're going to interview Chip later, but we love talking about Eiki Guy, which is finding the intersexion of what do you love to do, what are you great at, what is the world need, and what you can make money doing. And from the outside looking in, it's so obvious that this passion and this, you know, the hobby has become that thing that you're able to, like, mobilize your own unique talents, the network you have, the Rolodex, the trust that people have in you.

And it's such a fun, it's just been fun to watch. So I'm really proud of you and I'm, I'm, I'm flattered. But, you know, those hundreds of millions of cards, guys, that was you. I, you know, I put you in the position, I guess. But, like, you know, you can only lead the horse to water. And it's just awesome to see what you built. So congratulations on that. So on the charity side of this, we like to talk about charity and philanthropy.

Why do you think it's important to have charity involved in personal brands or corporations? Is there a charity component to cameo? Can people donate to charity? Like, talk us through why should there be some type of charity opponent in people's lives or companies? Yeah, I think at the very beginning when we started Cameo, a lot of people were like, the athletes are not going to enjoy it unless it's for charity because it's a bad look. And in fact, when Cassius sent the tweet out that launched Cameo, despite him being a rookie making, I don't know, a few hundred thousand dollars a year, people are like, I can't, you're a millionaire athlete,

you know, you're charging people $20 to talk to you, like basically you're a scumbag. And Cassius almost quit before it starts. because the feedback was so poor when we originally launched. But at the same time, when you look at, when you look at like some of the moments that happened at Cameo, one of the first ones that really stood out to me was Hurricane Harvey hit in Houston. And we probably had 20, 30 people on Cameo. I think it was over Memorial Day weekend, if I remember correctly.

What we decided to do is to give 100% of all of our proceeds to Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund at that point. We got all of our talent to opt in. and like it was the biggest booking week we had. So we realized that was there. And all the way today now, you know, we announced a landmark partnership with Pledge at Super Bowl this year. And anybody that does cameo for charity,

it's a 95-5 split their way. So all that's coming out is really like our fees to pledge. Like we don't make money from it. And that's been a really big driver. People like Tony Hawk, you know, have been able to raise a ton of money on cameo. And it's just, it's another like fun way for people to go.

And, you know, when they have a give get or they've got, you know, they want to give back. They have a foundation. They have a cause to go do that. You know, and we have a lot of talent that that reads money for charity every day on cameo. So I need to get you back on to do a longer episode. I got to do back to back today. We got the founder of Zeta Global coming in here in a few minutes. Can you give people where can they find you?

Where can they find cameo? Tell us all about where they can track you guys down and get a part of this company. Yeah, my, we're cameo on our socials. I think maybe book cameo on X. And then outside of Cameo, I started a podcast this year called The Zeitgeist podcast where I think of it is how I built this for consumer brands. And I'm interviewing the founders of really interesting consumer companies. So we've had companies like Dude Wipes on and Lifeway Kiefer and just a lot of really fun brands this year. And we tell the stories of like how, especially in really crowded spaces and without a lot of money, people built iconic brands.

So check that out. You know, we're still early, but I think it's pretty good. Awesome. All right guys. You're listening to the Money Mondays. Check out Stephen Galanis and Camio across social media and this is really important. Have discussions with your friends, family, and followers about money. We all grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. We have to have these talks about money. We have to have these talks in our society because it needs to have talked about money. They have talked to $48,000. They could have got $58,000. That could change the course of their career. By that simple question of just being able to ask about it. We need to talk about it because if your kid doesn't know what to ask for salary and they ask for $48,000, they could have got $58,000. That could change the course of their career by that simple question of just being able to ask. ask their parents or their friends about simple things like that. We'll see you guys next Monday. Check us on the Money Mondays.com. Check out, Camille. We'll see you guys soon.