The Pomp Podcast - 347: Steven Galanis on Creating The New Autograph With Cameo

Episode Date: July 28, 2020

Steven Galanis is the CEO of Cameo, the world's leading marketplace for personalized video shoutouts. He previously helped finance films in Hollywood and spent 5 years as a professional options trader in Chicago after graduating from Duke University.  In this conversation, we discuss the original idea for Cameo, how they found product-market fit, the celebrity acquisition process, who makes the most money on the platform, deep fakes and generative media, how they raised more than $65 million, and who is the most requested person not on Cameo. ===============================  BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. https://www.blockfi.com/pomp ===============================  When the New Yorker magazine asked Mark Zuckerberg how he gets his news he said the one news source he definitely follows is Techmeme. For more than two years and nearly 700 episodes, The Techmeme Ride Home has been Silicon Valley’s favorite tech news podcast. The Techmeme Ride Home is a daily podcast, only fifteen to twenty minutes long, and every day by 5pm eastern its ALL the latest tech news. ===============================  Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Stephen Galanis is the CEO of Cameo, the world's leading marketplace for personalized video shoutouts. He previously helped finance films in Hollywood and spent five years as a professional options trader in Chicago after graduating from Duke University. In this conversation, We discussed the original idea for Cameo, how they found product market fit, the celebrity acquisition process, who makes the most money on the platform, deep fakes and generative media, how they raised more than $65 million, and who is the most requested person not on

Cameo. I really enjoyed this conversation with Steven, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. The first is BlockFi. I'm an investor and a very happy user. They currently have three products. You can buy and sell crypto, you can deposit crypto and take out a US dollar loan using your crypto as collateral, or you can deposit crypto or a stablecoin into an interest-bearing

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The next is a new podcast. It's really, really cool. When the New Yorker magazine asked Mark Zuckerberg how he gets his news, he said the one news source he definitely follows is TechMeme. For more than two years and nearly 700 episodes, the TechMeme ride home has been Silicon Valley's favorite tech news podcast. The Tech Meme Ride Home is a daily podcast, only 15 to 20 minutes long, and every day by 5 p.m. Eastern, it's all the latest tech news.

But it's more than just headlines. You could get a robot to read you the headlines. The Tech Meme Ride Home is all the context around the latest news of the day. It's all the top stories, the top posts, and tweets, and conversations about those stories, as well as behind-the-scenes analysis. The Tech Meme Ride Home is like the TLDR as a service. The folks at TechMeme are online all day, and I mean all day, reading everything so they can catch you up quickly. So listen to the one podcast anyone who's anyone in Silicon Valley listens

to every single day. Search your podcast app now for Ride Home and subscribe to the TechMeme Ride Home podcast. Lastly, don't forget that I write a letter to over 50,000 investors every morning about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at Pompletter.com. Again, Pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Steven. This was an awesome one. I hope you guys enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital

Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. Steven's here. He's got a massive beard, got the Cameo hat, ready to rock and roll. Thanks for doing this, man. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. All right. For the few people who are watching this that don't know you, let's go through your background. What'd you do before you started Cameo? So coming out of Duke, I was an options trader for the first five years of my career um so i my very first job was clerking at the chicago board of trade in the soybean oil

options pit that's open outside market making literally i was a clerk so somebody would make the trade they'd write it on a card i'd take the dupe i'd drop it i'd check it with the other trader to make sure there's no counterparty risk and i'd drop it off at goldman sachs's clearing desk and yeah that was my first job uh the hours were great uh the green rooms only opened 9 30 to 1 15 and there's nothing you could do before and nothing you could do after so that was a fun first job uh you know traded for a while after that eventually got badged up uh ended up with the spx uh trade-in uh in the cebo and the spx pit so open out of pride uh options um you know really enjoyed that while doing uh that i had the opportunity to start a

film investment fund so my uncle had actually produced the movie lone survivor among a bunch of other ones irishman was his most recent um and when lone survivor came out i ended up running a theater for all the guys in the pit to go kind of do a premiere and at that a bunch of the guys that traded with were like stephen why the hell are you you know training the pit with us why Why aren't you in Hollywood being a movie producer, like, drunk? So I did what any entrepreneurial, you know, young Greek hustler would do. I stayed in the pit and I started raising 25 Gs, a pop from all the guys that probably would have pissed it away, you know, betting on sports.

There wasn't crypto at that point to, you know, to be speculating on it, at least that much in, you know, 2011, 2012. So this was still, you know, I'll take the under of the first half of, you know, a college basketball game between you know rutgers and towson or something like that so these guys were were happy to part with their money and tell their wives and their girlfriends that they were investing in movies and television shows uh i started doing that i met my now co-founder martin we started a film investment fund where we produced a couple movies and television shows uh if you guys are really bored you can watch safe saf3 on amazon prime right now probably

the worst television show ever made but amazon prime just launched it about seven years after the release so we were catching up on that last night which was a lot of laughs uh remake of baywatch in 2013 with gopros and golf london as david hasselhoff said you guys want something fun uh go watch that give it a shout out uh maybe we'll get some residuals you know for all the money we lost on that investment but anyways um so i ended up at linkedin after trading i'd say one thing that really hit my mind when i was trading i remember walking into the cboe for the first time and this is a place where over 40 000 options traders you know worked and at this point you know back back in the day every stock had its own pit you know amazon apple had their

own pits and suddenly you know ge had their own pit and i walked in it looked like a dinosaur graveyard there were only about a thousand open outcry traders left there were really two pants it was the vix and the spx the spx was the biggest but i remember thinking for trading it's like all the good times have kind of happened already and of course the new guy you know i was hearing stories about what i missed in oa with the flashback what i missed with the flash crash what i missed in oa you know what i missed in uh the 2001 99 in trading all the big stuff that happened already. And I was very fortunate that a buddy of mine from Duke recruited me to come work at LinkedIn. And then when I got to tech, it was totally different. At LinkedIn, all the good

stuff was going to happen. It was about having a mission and a vision and realizing that. And I ended up, you know, having kind of my dream job at LinkedIn, working with amazing people, you know, getting to learn from people like Mike Ganson and Jeff Wiener, you know, how to build culture um you know how to work with you know people in different offices it was just a totally a total game changer for me and um we had the idea for cameo leaving my grandmother's funeral of all places it's october 5th 2016. martin flew in from la for the day for my grandmother's funeral uh he was an nfl agent at the time when i went to go work at linkedin he had the idea that if He could sign a six-round draft pick that was a big, muscular guy with a big personality.

He could maybe back into signing the next Rock for the next Jason Momoa and turn him into a huge action star. He signed the guy. He wasn't able to turn him into a movie star. So suddenly he had a big cash liability by backing this guy that he was having to pay for his training. But there was no way he was ever going to keep the investment. and he pulled out his phone and he showed me a video that he'd gotten made for his good buddy who was pretty high up in nike's marketing department he loved the seattle seahawks more than anything and become a father for the first time and he made this video and said hey brandon

this is cash bar from the seattle seahawks congratulations on having your son maverick i hope he gets your athletic ability and if so he'll be playing with me on the seahawks one day go hawks and this video i saw it the guys you know cassius marsh's padded up guy wearing no shirt driving in southern california just a really compelling piece of content you didn't know have to know who brandon was you didn't have to know who cash was but there was something magical about it and martin showed me this video and the second i saw it i had the eureka moment and it's like that's the new autograph and it was so obvious to me that you know today when you see someone famous Today, you pick up your phone, you try to take a selfie with them.

And if it's not on Instagram, it didn't happen. I grew up in Chicago, you know, 90s bulls. You saw Ron Harper, you saw, you know, Dickie Simpkins at a restaurant. You're pulling the menu out, you know, they're signing the menu, they're signing your shirt, they're signing your hat. And, you know, that menu ends up on your wall in, you know, a house like mine in Glenview, Illinois. Or, you know, I think back to the 98 Cubs season, opening day today, shout out, welcome back baseball. But I think back to summer of 98, you know, trying to get Sammy Sosa or Mark Grace to sign something, but you end up with Rod Beck or Glen Ellen Hill and Scott Service.

and 20 years later i shouldn't remember their name but because they did one thing nice for me one time you become a fan for life and and really that's kind of what we try to build a cameo we try to build a platform where every time somebody made a cameo the person who received them becomes a bigger fan of them for the rest of their life and uh you know fast forward four years we've now got 40 000 people on the platform we've done 1.2 million of these we call these not cameos we call magical moments every time we make one we really feel that you know we're making people smile laughing cry we're totally changing an inflection point we're being an inflection point change in their in their day and um you know we've just been blessed to to be off to the run that we're on and

and um you know we think it's early you know it's spring training ball still for for us we don't even think we're at the top of the first inning yet and how big this could get all right before we get into Cammy, I got a lot of questions, but I grew up in North Carolina in Raleigh. And so I know Shooter's Bar at Duke there. You got to tell, what's the story with you and Ryan joking around? Yeah. So I'm a Dukie. I actually, again, this is another kind of tie to technology and network effect, not knowing that I was doing network effect businesses back then. But I was a freshman at Duke and one of my really good friends from home is a guy named zach maritas a big crypto guy uh today he's the founder of a company called teamworks which is a

it's a series c company out of durham north carolina so you know big shock if you knew zach and i that we're both running tech companies now but anyways um so zach invited me to partner with him and we in the very early days of facebook this is when you still needed a dot edu address to come on you know he was the senior that knew everybody i was the freshman that knew everybody we combined forces we created a company called spartan entertainment we're both greek our dads are both literally from sparta and we ended up uh aggregating over 17 000 college students in this facebook group and over over the course of four years we came to really dominate uh night life you know at uh at duke certainly and then we started getting into raleigh and chapel hill by

the end of it. But we basically ran shooters too. You know, it started with our first entrepreneurial hustle was taking the most popular bar on campus, which at the time was just a biker bar, really. It was a bar that you would go to at the first week of school and the last week of school. And then it was just a kind of a redneck biker bar at the meantime. And we rented it out on Wednesday nights, which was kind of the athletes Friday nights because you weren't allowed to drink 48 hours before your game so we figured what you know if you had a friday game or saturday game wednesday was your was actually your saturday as an athlete and we started getting three dollar uh pitchers and we set up beer pong tables and started having that and today if you

go to duke on wednesday night uh our legacy is living strong i think that's my that is my legacy to duke uh wednesday night beer pong and cheaters that is an incredible story um all right so when you start Cameo, what's kind of the first couple of things you guys do? So you see this piece of content, you're like, bam, this is, you know, kind of the new autograph. Do you immediately say we got to go build a tech platform and kind of build a marketplace and, you know, what it comes to today? Or is there some other idea you start with? Well, the first thing I did was, we literally had the idea as I was driving in from, you know, we were downtown Chicago. And he'd always wanted to go to Trump Tower because it's a beautiful building I live across. Trump hadn't won the

presidency yet, so it was still fine to go to Trump Tower. But anyways, so we go get a cocktail on the roof. We have the idea. I drive him to O'Hare. The second he gets through security, he calls me up. And it's basically like, man, this is awesome. This is exciting. We're kind of getting each other worked up. So I'm like, screw it. I'm going to get on a plane to LA the next day. So I flew to LA the next day. And Martin and I kind of dreamed up this marketplace where for x amount of money you could do y activity with z person so the video was one thing but we thought we could sell autographs or personalized merch or you know anything you know tweet at me like follow me on instagram any anything you met you know from brett farms throwing a football with

you to anything you could possibly imagine like we just felt x amount of money y activity was z person uh martin and i are neither of us are technical so the first thing we needed was to park you know find somebody that could come build it and i had a buddy from duke named devin townsend that was the best engineer that i knew who actually happened to have been an early vine seller as well so devin in 2014 him and his best friend cody who's now cody kill one of the biggest youtubers on earth they decided to quit their jobs at apple and microsoft respectively they went down to bali they started messing around on vine they spent a year traveling the world and devin ended up with about a billion loops on vine and cody had 3.6 billion loops on by so they had actually

become more famous than they were rich they were never able to monetize that at all but they really understood becoming a creator devin moved back to la you know he started being the first engineer at different startups um he was at one that was just kind of floundering and i i told him the idea you know he didn't think much of it but he was a friend and i think he cut his best friend rate and was uh we were paying him 150 an hour or something like that uh before he became a official co-founder and i think i remember it was like december and we had a 17 000 bill so i was still working at at the time. Martin's not a fellow agent that's losing money on his only client. So I remember we brought that check over and it's like, shit, we need a little better deal here. And we cut

Devin in, got the hourly rate down, gave him some upside. It was a good trade for everybody involved. And Devin was really the perfect person to build this. I mean, how many CTOs, how many heads of product on earth were actually influencers themselves? So he intimately understood the problem and you know devon also brought a discipline that martin and i did not have we were like you know let's do the autograph like anything we could think of it's like let's build a site that does everything and devon was really he's like we need to be focused we need to pick the verticals so we decided to go with pro athletes first and we really felt like again we're building the new autograph and the problem we were trying to solve was uh you know espn had

released a documentary called Broke. And they talk about how 80% of NFL players who have broke within five years of playing their last game. So we were thinking about that problem a lot. And again, that's not a problem that a lot of people like wake up and try to solve, but it's certainly one as athletes or as people that had been around athletes. And it's just something that we were thinking about. And in this gap between fame and modernization was just another big theme what you're thinking about so we decided to focus first just on athletes and and you know if you're building a marketplace to connect you know athletes with their biggest fans and you have no athletes and you have no fans you better pick you know do you go with the chicken or do you go with the egg

we pick the chicken first and we really had conviction that if we can recruit athletes to the platform they all have twitter followings they all have instagram followings and if we got them on and we kind of made a sample video we would be able to get them to promote on twitter to promote on instagram and turn their followers into our customers for free so that was very much the conviction that we always had in our marketplace supply could be get demand um when we launched i'll never forget launch date it was uh it was it was mid-march i was in i literally was in arizona it was in scottsdale trying to get the second person uh on cameo we had one person on at this point you know we'd get on a plane we'd go anywhere if someone wanted to talk to us

and Jason Kipnis the guy who grew up around me was also our second baseman for the Cleveland Indians at the time guy worked with at LinkedIn was his best friend he knew about the idea Stephen let's go we get we pack the bags we go to Arizona to go pitch Kipnis to get him to sign up so he you know and of course I get there talking to him about it and immediately he's like yeah sure I'm in right it's like i had like three more days there so anyways it was a tuesday night i'll never forget it's about 10 o'clock and we had built the very first version of the site and today you go to cam here there's 40 000 people there's a million videos and literally imagine a google form that just said you know who like there was only one talent so there was no even

other profiles it was like who's the video for what's your email what does it say that's it And I'll never forget, we took the Cameo that was the first one that gave us the idea. We had Cassius send a tweet and basically said, hey, I'm on this new thing called Cameo for 20 bucks. I can make a video like this for you saying anything you want to whoever you want. You know, can't wait to hear from you. And he clicks, he clicks Twitter. I was at a restaurant in Scottsdale.

The guys were in Venice Beach. So Devin, Martin, my co-founders, Cassius, the only talent on Cameo. we're all in bed of speech at devon's apartment kasha sends a tweet out there are two dots there is one in scottsdale one in la he hits tweet we expect there to just be a flood and it was crickets nobody else came to say and immediately you know we're looking and you know i'm like oh shit maybe google's not working so i literally i signed off and the dot in scottsdale went away I came back, and then it's like, no, it's not like Google's not working. And then at the same time on Twitter, cash has just started getting eviscerated.

I'm talking, you know, you're a millionaire athlete for 20 bucks. How much is this company paying you? He just given us 25 Gs as our first investor, you know. So he's pissed off. You know, everybody's ribbing him on Twitter. He gets pissed off. Hey, screw you guys. I'm out.

He leaves. He walks out. Martin's freaking out our other co-founder because suddenly his only client is now out money he's given us and now his brand is getting tarnished on Twitter so he runs after him and Devin and I are just having a conversation like wow you know maybe yeah maybe we should have left our jobs you know like before we sold one we're now three four months in you know this is the only thing we're doing and as we're talking a dot popped up in Renton Washington which is uh where the Seattle Seahawks facilities and somebody came outside and we're like wow you know I remember

literally being on the edge of my I was on my elbows like leaning in with my phone on you know Google Analytics like what are they going to do what are they going to do and this person must have been on the side for two to three minutes and it felt like two to three hours because we're like are they going to buy what's going to happen and all of a sudden the doc just disappears and we were so dejected because it was like somebody's there we thought they might buy and they didn't you know aren't this is a disaster i'm gonna try to you know get back to linkedin will they take me back like whatever and uh and then all of a sudden my phone starts vibrating and i get the message i get a message in my dm and this guy goes hey uh hey cameo uh this is you know blah

my daughter lane uh loves cashless marsh and it's her birthday on thursday i'm trying to buy a video from your service but the payment processor is not working so at that point i'm like just tell me what to say what's the name like we'll get it done don't worry about money you know go and and and the guy gives me the information i text cash no response i text martin you know he's pissed off at me they're pissed off it was tuesday the birthday was thursday we missed thursday you know it's now the next wednesday when i finally get this video back it was the most unenthusiastic video i'd ever seen hey lane heard your big fan sorry i missed your birthday see you out there like it was it was so bad i skipped this video i was cringing i didn't even

want to send it but i'm like you know what fuck it like it's just good to do i'm gonna send it we'll see what happens so we ship the video and about 30 minutes later I get a video back and this dad records his daughter watching the video and she literally started crying she was so happy this girl's wearing a Seahawks jersey her hair is literally painted blue and green it's like Seahawks superfan and she watches this video and she starts crying and she goes dad how did you do that and he goes daddy's awesome that's how like if we made a commercial for Super Bowl it wouldn't have been better than this and he sent it back and then the second I had that like the I still get the chills you know down my spine thinking about it because the second we saw we

could make one person feel like that we had high conviction we could make millions of people feel like and then when we were going to athletes it wasn't like hey join this marketplace where there's you know no fans and there's no other talent it's like now the question was we would show it on the video don't you want to make your fans feel like this and people said yes and that's really how we got so as you're doing that what was the biggest pushback from the athletes first because you're building this marketplace right you guys focus on the athlete side you go to them and i've got to imagine like yeah i want to feel i want my fans to feel that way but like who else is on right how much can i make like all these normal questions what were the the big obstacles there yeah all

of them uh and i would even go one more uh at the time any type of direct to consumer monetization of fans was like super weird right it's one thing and for patreon to do it and you're like a long tail podcaster or musician and you have no other funds and you know it's not that weird to ask your your your followers to support you but these are like athletes making millions of dollars in that case and you know they were worried about their brand they were worried about selling out they were worrying about charging their fans for something like this they were worried that nobody was on it you know is is cameo even going to be the one right like you know early days in platforms there's no guarantee like at some point you start getting escape velocity but

you know there's seven other companies that had tried this that never got any traction you know we found out later right so there were there are people that have been burned You know, probably the one we were hearing the most about at the time was called Thuzio, which was Tiki Barber, I think was part of it. So, you know, these are like serious athletes and entrepreneurs teaming up, trying to do similar things, weren't able to do it. I think Steve Aoki had founded one with like Dan Bilzerian, you know, a few years before we got going. so people had tried it but what we had pretty high conviction was we really never set out to like build something that LeBron James would do we really felt there was an opportunity with Cameo to help people like you know my good friend Lance Thomas of the New York Knicks who you know wasn't

the superstar he wasn't Carmelo Anthony but he's like the beloved player that gets out of the community you know people love him huge personality we really felt there was an opportunity for those to serve those type of people versus that said i'd be lying to you if i told you we really found product market fit with you know backup quarterbacks you know or practice club uh you know left tackles we found product market fit one day when devin walked uh down to our morning meeting and he goes hey steven i think cody his roommate cody co with three million youtubers at the time and people like cody you know x divine starts would do really well on this and we put cody in on a cameo uh he made he we actually seeded we bought him a cameo for a youtube video that he

made that went hyper viral he decided to launch himself on the platform he popped off and other similar kind of monsters popped off then that started the expansion into reality tv and comedians and today sports is still probably we're famous for for sports we kind of came up as the new autograph. But as our business, it might be 10% now. And, you know, we've really found product market fit for people that are huge personalities or people that are really funny. How did you grow the consumer side, right? So it's kind of sounds like you just went and did the hard work of recruiting, you know, personality after personality or athlete after athlete. Where do all of the users come? And, you know, how do you convince them to actually pay for this stuff?

Well, just like anytime you're inventing a new, completely new product, right? The best way for people to know what it is, is to like experience it or see it. And, you know, a couple of interesting growth dynamics that we benefit from. Number one, all of our supply, unlike Grubhub or Uber or any other marketplace you think about, our supply can literally market themselves, right? If they're famous, they have Instagram, they have Twitter, they have followings, and their fans are the most likely people in the world to book them. So that was a big thing. Our supply can get its own demand. That's a really important concept of Cameo.

Secondly, we always say that every Cameo is a commercial for the next one. So just like I was able to show athletes once I had the first reaction video, don't you want to make people feel like this? the the customer flywheel was i buy you a cameo you shared a twitter you have 300 000 followers on twitter they all see this roast that i get michael rapaport roasting you they're like what is that that's amazing we have to we have the watermark there people started learning then they go to the site cameo oh my god look at all these people that are there so it's really it's really the flywheel effective supply beginning its own demand and then the fact that every cameo is a commercial for the next one. 85% of them are gifts. The vast majority of cameos are shared

on social. So that's the flywheel. And today you've got what I'll call kind of the traditional cameo, which is literally, hey, it's my friend's birthday. I buy, somebody sends them the video. You also have these promotional ones, and then you've got the roast. Maybe talk a little bit about the different variations of how somebody can buy or what message they can expect. So the first one, the promotional cameos is actually a product that we've had for a while. Basically, what we found was 5% of cameos that are booked get declined today, right? So the talent can say yes or no to anything. When we dug into declines, we found that 60% of declined cameos were actually small businesses

looking for kind of cheap influencer marketing. So we went back to our talent and we said, hey, Brett Favre, Waukesha Chevrolet has a 4th of July sale coming out. You know, they wanted to book a cameo. I know you didn't want to do it for 400 bucks, but would you do it for 5,000? Would you do it for 10, whatever the number is? And we found that the talent we're all with, almost all, would be willing to do to create assets that companies could use for their own Instagram or their own social media. they just want to do it for more money so very quietly we added for yeah i think there's five or six hundred of our forty thousand talent opted into this today where you might see on the when

you go to cameo.com is this for myself is this for someone else or is it for my business and if you hit for my business the price changes and it's more expensive the second product that we released that's gotten a lot of fanfare recently is cameo live and cameo live is our first stat it's synchronous video conversations so basically it's literally well not basically it's literally getting out of zoom with you know your favorite uh talent and um that one is something that's captured the imagination i think people when they first saw it you know they always assume or the future you know face time is obviously something that they're going to get into but frankly until covid we really resisted it because we felt that the coordination uh needed

like it was so much logistically harder to say you know hey stephen what are you doing at 4 42 central time right like pick up your phone for this thing and then frankly like devon as talent always believed that like fan conversations are just kind of awkward right it's like you know a lot and this is why cambia works because when you go run up on somebody that's eating at a restaurant like they freeze you freeze you don't know what to say like we've all kind of been there So, we really had a pretty high conviction that synchronous wasn't going to be a thing. But as Zoom became so prevalent, you know, since COVID, like the talent was excited about it. You know, now that my mom and her friends play their card games on Zoom, it's like everybody's using it.

So, at this point, it became a very natural extension. And I think we have about 100 talent that we're testing with Cameo Live. And so far, you know, the feedback's been incredible. uh the feedback actually has been we launched 10 minute zoom calls because we felt like 30 minutes would be awkward or if there's weird you want to pull the cord but what we found is like every one of the conversations basically people are like i want to stay out longer the talent and the fan are having fun they're staying on so that's um that's a product that we're excited about and then uh and then our third product we have is called cameo direct and cameo direct is in the app it's our

texting product so if you their talent that have enabled you to actually text with them and have an ongoing conversation so that's you know that's super interesting and and we think all these are are parts of building out that equation for x amount of money being able to do y activities in person walk me through the funding of the company and then we'll get into some of the questions that people send in but how have you kind of funded this it started uh martin and i you know bootstrapping it so my money from linkedin was going into devon's pocket at the 150 an hour best friend rate yeah i i don't know if that was actually best friend rate or not but i give a shit about sometimes too but uh so it started there we we bootstrapped it for about

five months um while i was at linkedin every single person that i worked with like those i had one quarter while i was still at linkedin when i was working on this at the same time and honestly i was probably the worst employee at the company that last year uh martin would call me in the middle of the day i'd miss like a sales call like i just i just remember but i was so distracted and all the like the people that i worked with all i got it right away and now about five or six of them are working for us which is kind of funny of the people that sat within like 10 feet of me while i was at linkedin but you know we we were basically going to uh build a billion company while staying on our fat salaries and our free lunches at LinkedIn. And then I

remember the big turning point for me actually happened. LinkedIn gives Christmas Eve through the first week of the year off for all employees. And I went to Nicaragua with about 10 people that I work with. And we're sitting on a hot tub in Nicaragua on New Year's Day. And this guy, will hearn who was a buddy of mine worked in another offices like steven this idea is so big like if somebody else builds it and becomes a billionaire and you stay at linkedin and never like take a shot do you live with yourself and honestly nobody had ever asked me that question but the answer was so obviously no that i never went back i wrote my next play letter which you know it's kind of funny you can go on my linkedin profile and actually see my next play

letter and I shared the letter that I sent to my team and I actually never went back to work that was I never went back I went right to Los Angeles after I you know got Martin and Devin and I'm like we need to burn the boats and just try this and I'm not asking you guys to quit your jobs yet but I'm going to do it and I just felt like that momentum was needed so you know for me I kind needed that kick in the ass and um and you know very shortly after i decided to go full time that's when like you know friends and family were wanting to bet you know i'd never asked anybody for anything i was always the ultra connector the helpful person so now when i had something that i was going to do that's when people were like okay let me get money let me

get money but the one that was most life-changing was uh exactly three months after me leaving linkedin this guy mike amson who was the top of the global sales organ linkedin just cold called me in the morning he's like steven i've been hearing what you're up to give me a call and i called him back and uh on the spot you know led a five hundred thousand dollar you know angel investment that you know he's like i think this is awesome i think this should be built here in Chicago. And frankly, if he didn't give me the money, Cameo would have never been able to be built in Chicago. And once he came in, it was just a series of fortuitous events. The second day of this guy named Jackson Jin, his VC career, just graduated Notre Dame. He was an associate at

Chicago Ventures. He got locked in the merchandise mart in Chicago. He couldn't figure out how to get out of the building. He was locked in because he was working after 8. And that elevator shut down and he saw me and my team working came in met us thought cameo was the most amazing thing ever next morning he goes to uh ezra gulston who was at chicago benches at the time and big cryptic guy as well and and ezra um literally is like jackson you know you're just falling in love with the first entrepreneur you've ever met you know like a million people have tried this it's not going to work it's not going to be built here whatever and jackson's like ezra you to take a meeting with steven this is different and uh ezra met me he put in 100k on the spot

so chicago ventures now is our first venture investment and then frankly since then every one of our rounds has been preempted we've we've never made a pitch like this is uh been incredible um you know ezra ended up leaving chicago ventures to start his own fund called starting line um he ended up co-leading the round with chicago ventures and origin ventures in chicago and their seed rounds all of our early money came from the midwest and then lightspeed ended up leading our series a jeremy liu who famously was the first money in snapchat saw a cameo at the party uh asked for the intro sent an email that was basically like stephen cameo's genius i don't know where you are in the world but we're having breakfast tomorrow um we ended up meeting had a

I was 10 seconds into my pitch to him. He goes, Stephen, I've been looking for a business like this for 10 years. Basically like, shut the fuck up, I get it. And I flew to Los Angeles from San Francisco to LA that day. I met another Lightspeed partner named Nicole Quinn in the LAX airport. I was just texting her today because I passed the coffee shop we met. We had a meeting there. I walked her onto the plane, basically.

She came to fly out to Chicago the next week or a series A was done. And then about four months after that, Connor Perkins came in and led, you know, a $50 million series B into the company. So again, we've been really blessed because these investors, they've had a high conviction because they've been customers. They've bought them. They've received them.

They understand the power. And then when they learn more about the business, there's only two things you have to really believe to understand how big can you forget number one you have to believe that there are more famous people on earth today than any time in history right like just think about quarantine uh tiger king comes on and carol baskin goes from somebody nobody had ever heard of or i guess a million people on facebook had heard of to someone that can make a quarter of a million dollars right in in a month on candy it's unbelievable and and then you have all these other people just popping up on tiktok every day

on SoundCloud, on YouTube, on Instagram. So as there's more content, as content is exponentially increasing, the amount of fame in the world is exponentially increasing. So there are more famous people than ever. And then secondly, people today are more famous now than they've ever been at any point in history. Last summer, Lil Nas X released a song, Old Town Road.

You know, he now has tens of millions of followers. And even if he's a one-hit wonder, he now has a platform upon which he can monetize forever. So in a post-Cameo world, in a post-social world, your 15 minutes of fame is something you can live on the rest of your life. Think back 20 years ago when Chumbawamba created Tubthumber, and who knows where they are today, right? Because they didn't have social, they didn't have a platform, so there's no stickiness. So all those millions and millions of people around the world that love their work, it's just not around anymore. And, you know, even on the sports side, you're a North Carolina guy.

and i was talking to danny green about this last week you know he played on that those teams with tyler hansbrough and hansbrough was you know the best maybe college basketball player since christian laidner just absolute legend and because he wasn't like because he did it you know 10 years too early he only has 21 000 followers on instagram right and then zion williamson had 2.1 million followers before he played his first game so the people coming up are more famous than the ones that came before and all you have to believe is that this is just an area under the perch like there's more fame in the world and then people are more famous in magnitude than ever and because of the way these platforms work the the wealth distribution it's like the power laws are crazy

you know on youtube the top three percent of creators makes 97 percent of all the ad revenue tiktok didn't have any way to monetize creators until i saw today they announced a 200 million dollar fund to basically you know almost put people on retainer to just keep making content for them spotify the top one percent of musicians streaming make like 99 percent of the revenue the same is true in pro sports the same is true when you think of endorsement deals there's five people in the nba that have two deals right so when you look at all this people are more famous than ever before and the gap between fame and modernization has just been getting wider and wider and wider it was just the perfect storm for a business like cameo to come to allow people to

monetize their fans in a way that is brand positive it's value prop in the fame economy is that you are getting paid to become more famous when you get a cameo from someone you like them more than you liked them before and you got paid to do that it's the ultimate so i got a ton of questions from people many that you and i both know uh pretty well ian borthwitt who is the uh the influencer marketing guy at uh seat geek and uh is very very deeply entrenched in the influencer world said uh will cameo go real world like at some point will it actually be you can pay to have somebody show up for an appearance i mean it's funny you know in the covid world that's the last thing in the world we're thinking of but if you look at what

we're doing with Cameo Live right now, we're building the mechanisms for bookings, right? Like the first step is like coordination of calendar. When are you available? How do we do it? Will you show up, right? Then adding location, it's something harder. It's something that we've strayed away from because frankly, I think that asynchronous conversation or even us being on zoom together right now is probably like 95% is good as us being in person, but it might be like 1% of the effort of, you know, you coming out to Chicago and like us sitting down somewhere, right? Look, think about how much effort said. So for us, I do believe that cameo live, AKA live experiences, meeting people in real life is something that will happen. Assuming the world

this back to normal one day there's just a it's very logistically difficult and you know to us there's just a million things we can do you know that really tech enables first that kind of give you like almost the same experience without having to worry about the logistics the location and safety makes sense who's the most requested talent that's not on cameo um for a long time is you know funny ian that's the first question for a long time it was david dobrik actually um who he's famously done a lot of stuff with and cp giving away cars all that um he's a big vlogger for those of you that don't know who david dobrik is really funny you know a lot of people think he might be the next jimmy kemo like he's that talented um the most requested person recently has been like

the rock um you know you that's that's the one that you know everybody would love to to get on the platform on the customer side uh but you know people like taylor swift people like beaver um aren't are are requested but not as much as the dough bricks of the world the shane dawson's historically of the world the casey nye stats so we we have a really interesting dynamic where the majority of users on cameo like the people coming to the website are actually like 18 to 24 but our purchasing demographic is actually older uh 20 25 to 34 35 to 44 45 to 54 and 55 to 64 and then 65 plus all by more than 18 to 24 because you know disposable income and who can afford it you know for someone like my dad getting you know jerry west to wish his buddy happy birthday for

400 bucks. That's like the bargain of a lifetime. But for someone that loves Jake Paul, paying 200 bucks to him is like, man, am I going to go to Coachella or am I going to do that? The trade offs are different. So we've found that a lot of the people want the digital talent. That's probably the people that get requested the most. And I'm sure if I look at the last three months worth of data i'm sure joe exotic would probably be the most requested person we don't have we got carol baskin i saw that people were real hype when she came yeah she was she was there for a while it's kind of funny because i reached out to her like immediately after tiger king and basically they told me to ask off and uh and you know it's kind of funny that now she's just

been this superstar how'd you get her what what finally got him across the line um honestly i don't i don't even know somebody on the team uh got through to the charity and she's doing all for charity i mean she raised i think in her first two weeks she did like a quarter of a million bucks and it's all going to big cat rescue so you know what you know in a world where all these parks are closed and i mean what an awesome way to be raising funds yeah uh shervin pishvar asked who are the top 10 in earnings so maybe not exactly go through the top 10 but just who are some of people who do the most volume yeah there's a couple archetypes of people that do really well um historically uh last year the top broker was gilbert godfrey so again comedians do extremely

well i think this year last i saw kevin uh from the office brian bongardner was kind of the top of the heap uh he's doing great um a lot of these viral stars um from netflix shows like jerry hams from Shears have done extremely well. The Real Housewives of Vertical have done incredible. So the Sonia Morgans of the world do really, really well. Hall of Fame Athletes is another place where we do really well. So Brett Favre has consistently been a top earner on the platform. The Bachelor franchise is big and someone like Chris Harrison or Lance Bass, boy bands have done good. Nostalgia is a is a hole does really well and when i think of the product market fit for cameo if you were to take out a one dollar bill and you're to look at the back of the pyramid right um i think cameo

has great product market fit the second you have your 15 minutes span all the way until you become the most famous person on earth and then at some point for some people that that curve does the basically the the gap between fame and monetization that we talk about like those curves just inflect and there's actually a point where you become more rich than you are famous it's like michael jordan would never would probably never do that he he we've heard him turn down 10 million dollars for a golf outing i knew that paul mccartney turned down like seven million dollars to play someone's wedding before these are things we've just heard being in the industry and all that stuff so i think there's a point where that curve inflects but then the thing that's kind of cool

about cameos cameos also someone somewhere where you can go when you were the most famous person in the world and you're not anymore right so retired NFL players if you've got a gold jacket you're on cameo almost every hall of famer is on when you're talking about the Ray Lewis's in the world and Brett Favre's um you know it's it's amazing Emmett Smith just joined today right so it's like the people that you know you expect to be there are increasingly there which is exciting and you know a lot of people get caught up in the three to five hundred people on earth that might be at the eye of the pyramid that are more famous than they are rich or more rich than they are famous and and frankly if those people were on they'd probably be priced at a point where most

people wouldn't be even be able to afford it so while everyone says they might want Taylor Swift like Taylor Swift might need you know five grand or ten grand how many of those could she actually video so i think we haven't built a product yet for the super a plus list and um we think we can build a massive business without them we think that there's the problem of people being more famous than they are rich it literally doesn't exist for those people so we want to focus on building great product for the people we have product working good for it and the thing that's kind of cool is like as we've gone along people like snoop dogg who are some of the most famous people in the world or you know tyra irving or pete alonzo like these guys now are just seeing

cameo think it's really cool and dope or maluma big reggaeton star who's now the most famous person in instagram terms that we've ever gotten on and those people come on the platform and they're seeing other interesting people they see the impact and then when you start getting more and more of those people then others come on like vincente fox the president of ex-president of mexico is on cameo now so you start looking at that and then if you're tony blair if you're you know georgia v bush or obama suddenly it's like wow okay cool my peers are there so this business is built brick by brick relationship by relationship it all starts with having a very high nps product for both the customers and the fans josh ellman wants to

know what's the weirdest place that people like to record uh the toilet i think that's always funny um dwight howard went viral uh earlier this year for literally being on the skidder and making a cameo um we spooked it for april fools we actually um we we did a fake product launch we called it cameo now and the whole idea was like the second you booked this celebrity their front facing camera would just turn on and we catch them like wherever they are and you know it might be like Lindsay Lohan blending a smoothie and just look it up but but we've had some fun with that um I think that's that's probably uh the weirdest we haven't had um trying to think yeah that's I think the toilets is probably the funniest but you know some especially the Tiger Kings like you get a

Doc Antle one he's like literally with the lions and they're there I mean the tigers a lot so But watching Cameo is a pretty new way. How do you think about deepfakes or generative media? Is that an advantage coming down the pipe for you guys? Is that something that you guys have to fight against? And just what's the thoughts there? If Cameo is the new autograph, it becomes inevitable that there will be, just like in the analog world, there are autographs and there are forgeries.

That is as old as time. There's big, dense scrolls out there. right? So forgeries have always been a thing. And I think if Cameo truly is the new autograph, there will be, you know, forgeries in the digital world as well. And I think deep fakes are just scratching the surface of that technology. At scale, I believe that the Cameo video, like that watermark will be just, that will be the certificate of authenticity in the digital age. and and i think again you know some people well couldn't they if they they you know put the watermark on the deep bank like the technology will be there but i think we will develop a core

competency around authenticity and our value our our our mission at cam is to create the most personalized and authentic fan experiences on earth so authenticity is always going to be something that i think is a core competency for our business and we're going to have to continue to iterate technology is going fast deep fakes you know there's crazy things happening um but i think when people come to canbeater.com or or in our app they know that what they're getting is real and that's important so you obviously have a lot of pride and a lot of your early investors have pride in having built the company in chicago maybe talk a little bit about the chicago tech scene eric carr uh said basically he wanted to know about your favorite places to eat

but uh i figured we'll talk about the tech scene instead uh sure so the chicago taxi is uh was was and has been extremely important to candy's growth um i truly believe that if i had built i i really don't believe that this business could have been built in san francisco i don't believe that this business could have been built in la even though that's the obvious place where it was built. I think if we were getting built in LA, that depending on which angel investors had come in, there's so many vested interests in entertainment there that if you took money from this person, then these people wouldn't work with you. There's just so much ego around the entertainment business. So the fact that we were able to raise all of our money very quietly in

Chicago, it kind of gave us the opportunity to be like, it's like a plant that gets watered and nurtured and all that happened. And once we had this strong foundation, then when the press kind of learned about it and Hollywood kind of learned about it, we'd already got to a point where like we had hit some escape velocity. And one thing that's really interesting about Chicago, while it's not known as a tech hotbed, like Chicago is famous for its marketplace businesses, right? like literally the board of trade and and the cboe like there's 150 year legacy of building great marketplaces in chicago you know that's why groupon came out of here that's why grubhub came out of here uh raise.com and spot hero or some you know other marketplaces where those

founders uh really kind of took me under their wing and and you know the best businesses in Chicago have been marketplaces and um and as somebody that was building a marketplace like to have people like you know Matt Maloney or or you know the CEO of Grubhub I mean in 2017 I remember we're on the phone and he's like Steven I built the biggest marketplace that's ever been built in Chicago you're building one that will be way bigger than mine if you don't fuck it up because you were because you were selling bits I'm selling bits or sorry you're selling bits I'm selling apples, meaning nobody cares about how many pizza parlors I have on Grubhub in New York if I'm in Los Angeles. Your town are global, their fans are all over the world, and location isn't a

variable. And, you know, hearing things like that from people like him as an entrepreneur, it gives you confidence that you start to realize, like, wow, I'm on to something. And I think, you know, the presence of people like Mike Gamson, who, you know, very quietly, like, gave me everything I needed and then 1871 the tech incubator uh in chicago you know it's one of those things that you know the critics will say like hey you know chicago loves to pump its chest about having the world's best incubator but who's really come out of there all it takes is one cameo to come out of there and for us if we ring the bell and it really works that like that was the greatest investment the city and the universities and everybody could have ever done because if cameo wins it can

literally be one of those tentpole companies that could transform the whole ecosystem and and the the biggest thing that chicago lacks it lacks you know that steady parade of exits and winners and you know billion dollar companies exiting you know early employees uh having their equity and their options that they took like turning into cash like people at cameo in many ways like because they haven't seen they don't look around like in the valley where they see their friends were early at this company and it changed their lives right and in chicago you know my employees are look like they're sitting on gold mines and a lot of times they don't know it because they don't see other people that have been successful and that's one of the reasons it's been personally important to me

to build this company here to make sure that you know the next me like when i was 21 years old i remember telling my mom mom if i didn't have the trading job i would have to go to new york i'd have to go to la and have to go to san francisco there's literally nothing for me to do here unless i want to work at groupon and and frankly like my hope is that the next me the 21 year old version of me that's at you know michigan or at northwestern or at university of illinois or at wisconsin they're in they're in the midwest they look at companies like cameo they feel like they can come work at one of those they don't have to go to the valley to go work at a facebook or google they can go work at a homegrown one but more importantly they can see people that look like

them they grew up like them that went to the same schools that they went to that that fucking you know hit it and i think if you see that that that's really the most important thing and chicago really fosters that and um you know it's interesting now our headquarters was sold uh by the landlord uh we've we're now fully distributed and we've actually decided that we're not going to go back to offices we're going to stay fully distributed out of that now that doesn't mean cameo is no longer a chicago company it doesn't mean that it's an la company it doesn't mean that it's a new it means that if you're talented and you're out there and you want to work for cameo you don't have to live in chicago and you don't have to live in la talent is evenly distributed

around the globe. Opportunity is not. So the fact that we can go fish in multiple ponds now, I think that can help us avoid some of the pitfalls that Chicago companies tend to have, namely a lack of executive bench. There are very few people that have kind of been there and done that. So now the fact that we can bring in great people if they're in the Valley, if they're in New York, if they're in Seattle, if they're in Austin, Texas, wherever they are, they can come work for us but the early people were here and and if this wins then those people win and then those people become the next founders or the next angel investors and you just need that flywheel going and and all it takes is one and for those people that you know talk about 1871 and say you

know nobody nobody's come out of it we're all the logos i mean look at any venture firm right if you're a venture in a venture portfolio you might make 40 bets maybe only one or two of those are really going to work and everything else going to zero. So if you're looking at a stage before venture founded, these are just entrepreneurs with an idea that have nothing that are coming there. Yeah, of course, 99.9% of businesses suck, right? And people are going to be there and they're going to play entrepreneur and they're going to come every day and try and dream. But I love that that place exists and I hope that Cameo's ultimate success is the validation for that because that place, the fact that that place existed, that kept me home in Chicago

and had me build a company here. And without that place, I wouldn't have been. People can't argue with the results, man. And I learned a long time ago that there's nothing more fun than winning. And if you could do it with the people that you grew up with or the place that you grew up in, it's kind of just a middle finger to everybody who tells you you can't do it the winning is the most important thing right um i mean i remember when tech stars chicago turned us down because they're like this business can't be built in chicago you're gonna have to go to the coast all your money's gonna have to go to the coast that's what everybody said but at the end of the day like i will always i have to win that's the most

important thing cameo has to win so if there was ever a point where like where i physically am like If it was better for me to go to LA, I'm there in a second, right? But it's important for the ecosystem that Cameo wins because if Cameo wins, Chicago wins. Couldn't agree more. What's the biggest lesson you've learned running the company over the last couple of years? The biggest lesson I've learned running the company, the value of mentorship and coaching, right? As an athlete, I played hockey my whole life, played football, played baseball, but through college and hockey. And one of the things that I always looked at was the difference between having an exceptional coach and a shitty coach is so different.

And for a company like Cameo, I'm running this business with a bunch of my friends who essentially were all doing this for the first time, right? We were all first-time founders, first-time executives. every one of my senior management is is basically uh running the biggest team that they've ever run um but you know what we lack for an experience like you know we've picked up a lot you know in four years of running a hyper growth business you know it's like like we're running so fast and sometimes when we brought people in we outgrow them but the one thing that i've just learned is that by continuing to invest in your co-founders and your and your key executives and your early employees you know who have like one of my ceo coaches called the vampire boy right they're kind

of they got to spend time with the founders they they're they're missionaries that are not mercenaries right later like people that joined cameo before you know we had raised any money right those are the true those are true believers now other people will believe as they come to have it but you know sometimes like at this point there's people that are joining cameo because it's It's like, oh, well, this is the next billion dollar business. And, you know, I come here and I can make a lot of money, but we're really a mission oriented place. And I think, I think everybody talks about how, you know, you can't win without the best

team. And, you know, at LinkedIn, Jeff Wiener, every all hands used to say, you know, talent is our number one priority. And as CEO, you've learned how true that is. You've got to have the right talent there. But I think one thing that I've learned is that every time I'm hired for resume over kind of potential um i found that uh that ultimately like that didn't work out for us and the best hires we ever made are people that are in stretch roles that are curious that have

a lot of grit they want to get better and by surrounding them with world-class coaches like you know for me bing gordon has been the guy for me that's just changed my life you get world-class coaches around you know you and your team like that that i mean that pays dividends like you employees what's the biggest obstacle for cameo moving forward the biggest obstacle is team building again it's like just finding uh great you know hiring great people uh developing great talent um it always you know in a world where we're distributed now like we were famous for the culture that we built in the offices you walked into cameo edwards in chicago you just felt special and now we're we have a i like to joke we have 134 offices around the world

and you know we're high we're back in a hiring spree and we're you know we're going to grow from 130 to 200 people in the next six months and you know how do you maintain culture you know via zoom and how do you build trust with people you don't know and it's very specifically for us it's It's like, you know, we do want to hire some of these, you know, senior execs. And Bing Gordon, my CEO coach, I asked him, I'm like, Bing, what's a Hall of Fame, what does a Hall of Fame executive team look like for you? And he goes, the best advice I ever got about how to build a Hall of Fame executive team came from Ray Bork, the Hall of Fame hockey player.

Because Ray Bork, you know, for those of you guys that don't know, he played 19 years on the Boston Bruins, won a Stanley Cup in his 20th season with the Avalanche. I think he got traded halfway through the season. So Hall of Fame player, best defenseman of his generation, had never lifted the Stanley Cup. And Ray Bork told Baines, he goes, to win the Stanley Cup, you need one or two grizzled little vets that want one last taste of glory that have been there, but maybe they never lifted the Stanley Cup before,

so their flame is burning blue, but they have all the experience. You need three to five, like, you know, one or two lines of other world league rookies that are too stupid to know what they're up against, but are going to play unbelievable hockey but then like the most important thing is you have a core that runs two to three lines deep six to nine you know a plus players who are at the peak of their career and are going to play the best hockey for the rest of their lives or in the case of the management team for the next six to nine years these are the people that you know forever are going to be known as i was ex cameo i was the one that helped ring the bell right and and it's

not just you know it's not just hiring the biggest resume at everything team building is so important and and that to me it made sense so for us it's finding you know uh someone on on the operations side and someone on the tech side that have been there done that they've seen scale but they either they either raised the you know stanley cup one time early in their career want to do it one more time or they've you know maybe been the number two or they've been they've seen scale but they haven't been the reason why they won and we need to get a couple of those people that is an awesome answer uh bitcoin and crypto what uh what are your thoughts or experiences so uh sure radloff and zach maritas and some others ezra laughed about this um so i was making a lot of money in college

zach and i were making cash you know shooters taking five dollar covers from everybody and uh uh, and Zach told me, he's like, Hey, you know, I'm setting up a couple of these, uh, these mines and, and, you know, I'm going to do Litecoin or something like that. This is probably 2012. I was trading and I'm at the time I'm, I'm an option. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? I had no idea. I'm just like, you know, he's like, just give me 10 G's.

Zach's like, give me 10 G's. Like we'll split this, you know, we'll split these computers and starting selling all this stuff. I'm just like you know no and then there's a guy named Dan Romero who uh you know from was that Coinbase Dan was literally my across the hall neighbor freshman year of college at Duke and I'm watching him and all these guys and they got this Coinbase thing and Dan was always my like he was always that that friend that like was playing with the future like when we were in college he's the one messing on Twitter I'm like why are we on you know why are we on Twitter he always just kind of

like like they talk about for what's next like don't look at the smartest people in the world and what are they messing around with on the weekends like dan was always like he's somebody i should have drafted more and i shouldn't decide if dan's doing it he's pretty damn smart and i trust him so i ended up not getting into any crypto i've never bought any bitcoin i've never bought i literally have never touched it and i i can feel the bubble coming when my mom and her friends were buying it uh and i think they did pretty well they bought it and it kind of felt like it was going up and up and up but at some point it's crashed and it's just been there uh look i believe it's the future i'm a huge fan of crypto um i am uh also as someone who is a

professional options trader for five years i have not traded a single option since i left trading and not because i don't care about the market i know how much edge the professionals have So for me, if I can't have an edge, if I can't have the most information, if I can't have the best technology, I'd rather not play the game at all than feel like I'm getting front-run by anybody. So that's my claim to fame. I've never owned any type of crypto. So there's people, obviously, that come on all the time that are in that position. But there is nobody who comes on and says, Dan Romero was their neighbor at freshman year in college. you know ryan radloff like all these guys who uh for those that don't know those names are very big

in the crypto space and you've never touched it never done and ezra gulstan from starting line you know he when he quit chicago ventures he literally you know he had made a lot of money in crypto and and he left his venture fund and he basically was like steven i will personally lead your seed round like like me personally i'm gonna raise the fund i haven't written so like crypto and zach has turned his you know server money that 10 grand you know that turned into 25 grand into cameos friends and family and you know he's done pretty i'm sure he's gonna do pretty well on that let's fuck it all up here but uh but that's yeah i've never i've never traded any crypto i love that and i have all the information about it too and i and i believe the thesis so that's

the other thing it's not that i'm uh it's not that i'm agnostic and it's not that i'm a disbeliever i just believe that if i cannot be it's the same reason i've not traded one single option since i did it professionally for five years if i can't be all in i'm all out it's a fair point i seem two questions to wrap it up uh what is the most important book that you've ever read um i read a book a week um i would actually go back to seventh grade on the book called ender's game um and that was the book that really turned me on to reading and before that i didn't get it like you know i'm i'm greek so i was always like a storyteller and i love history and i was i was a history major but when i read ender's game that was the one that really turned me on to

to to reading for for life and you know at this point there's so many great ones i mean as a ceo i think uh hard thing about hard things is just incredible um you know i i'm looking literally at my desk right now um another one that i i think was just you know transformative for me like i love that shrug um you know i i just finished like i've read all gladwell you know the gladwell books like those are another fun one but i think the tipping point um you know which i think was his first one that to me really like as i think about how you build viral loops and how you build things that stick and how you build trends like that was one i've been thinking a lot about uh there was a book i read early uh about category creation that a good friend scott

seagull gave to me that's called uh play bigger um that was another one that everything we did uh as we started thinking about the name of cameo the look the breath it was all category creation and we and and that was really influential i mean i've been reading a book a week since i was in seventh grade so i'm happy to you know go toe-to-toe with anybody on what's there come to my bookshelf anytime and i'm sure i can pick a couple good ones out play bigger is a highly highly underrated book that one is fantastic yeah uh not seagull for that he gave me that tip uh second question a little bit more fun and then you get to ask me when to finish up is uh aliens believer or non-believer yeah i mean look i think the universe is pretty damn big

um i think that it's crazy to think that there's nobody else out there so i'm gonna bet the field and i'll bet that there's something out there with the right you know recipe of life uh are there other humans i would bet that there's other humans in the world somewhere uh it's somewhere in universe i like literally you know 100 there are other types of life but i believe that there's literally human beings like you and i that are somewhere else maybe we'll meet up maybe we'll we'll have to bet on you on today we i've never had anyone say that that is that is pretty good uh you could ask me one question to finish up what do you got for me um all right so i for new hires i i always ask a series of three questions but all right one of

them isn't relevant so i'm only going to ask you two okay number one what is one interesting thing about you that nobody none of your listeners know so it wouldn't be on your twitter it wouldn't be on your linkedin and second what's your death row meal what is wait what was the second question what's your death row meal death row meal uh mcdonald's for sure um i'd go make chicken sandwich with a uh a large fry and a mcflurry for you nah i'd go m&ms yeah yeah uh but you'll like this i uh every saturday i basically uh either go mcdonald's or domino's and you know everyone gets all mad so you gotta go local but come on now that's important i you know and somebody asked the question we didn't answer about best food in chicago i have a very

contrarian take that domino's pizza is the best pizza in chicago and uh people ridicule me for it all the time but i will stand by it but if you actually want to know good eating i run a instagram food blog that i'm not as active on anymore but it's off the bone o-f-f-d-a-b-o-n-e on instagram and it's all food you you can eat with your hands so it's basically big pieces of meat you know from some of the best steakhouses in the world so if you're into that type of thing check it out on insta you can see what i eat my rights are there anything i put on is standby i love that the fact that you say domino's is the best in chicago i know you get a hard time for that because people give me a hard time in new york like what do you mean it's how is that

possible look man it's just consistent you know what you're gonna get every time every time i'm with you yeah uh most interesting thing um i don't know i'm like pretty transparent about everything so the hard part is like that people wouldn't know um i would say i'll give you an example so you don't know about me in 1988 i was chicago's best looking baby i literally won an award in so there's got to be something like that in your life that i hope you know is equal that you know you can be proud of maybe never told anybody before do you start do you start the interview with new hires with that fact is that is that how you just immediately put that yeah i got more where that came from but that's you know that's one that really blows people's mind yeah that

one's pretty good that's how it's hiding under the coven yeah that one's pretty good uh i'm trying to think what uh we go like way back when we were younger um well this one's pretty funny uh the day that i met my now wife uh we'd go to a coffee shop and uh playing uh football i basically have this finger that i tore a ligament and uh you know waited like eight months to go get it fixed and they couldn't fix it fully and so somehow in the middle of the conversation i was like look you got to chill out like i can't get married and so you know kind of i got what i deserved them out well that's awesome i saw the finger poking out i was gonna ask you about it yeah i feel like like weird stuff like that uh i grew up with four brothers

you need to make an only fans for your finger you you have brothers and sisters i've got a little brother okay so uh big shout out to my brother John came up with the name Cameron oh really yeah and he's actually a big crypto guy so he made me listen uh so I got four younger brothers and so if you grew up in a family with just boys you'll get this but uh probably the things that people don't know are like just the all-out brawls my brothers and I had as kids like I've got brothers with staples in the back of their head like all kinds of crazy stuff where people are just like wait a minute when you were 12 like you guys are putting each other in the you know in the doctor's room and in the hospital

like yes like that is literally what happened iron sharpens iron right absolutely all right where can we send people cameo.com what's your twitter account yeah come see us at cameo.com we are at book cameo on twitter unfortunately because at cameo has been squatted by cameo wood for years her name is cameo and she won't give it up i've offered her a lot of money if you guys a lot of maybe we could start like a go fund me with some you know crypto and maybe we can have a compelling thing or if you guys just want to do what i like to do just just tag anytime you buy cameo just tag at cameo anyways and that's always a lot of fun i'm at mr312mr then the number 312 chicago's area code on twitter so uh you know this is a lot of fun and you know hope you guys all

enjoying uh cameo and if you got special requests of people that we need on tweet it at book cameo or at me and uh we'll do our best to get them on there for you all right everyone that is uh chicago's prettiest baby from 1988 sign it out we'll do this again soon man thanks awesome thank you