The Ryan Hanley Show - How I Built a $1B Business – Cameo CEO Steven Galanis

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Steven Galanis is CEO and cofounder of Cameo, valued at over $1 Billion. Cameo is an innovative marketplace allowing fans to book personalized video shoutouts from celebrities. He has been recognized as one of "Hollywood's Top Innovators" by The Hollywood Reporter, named to Crain's Chicago Business "40 under 40" and Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year for the Midwest Region. Today, Steven Galanis gave us an insider's look at building a revolutionary marketplace platform that disrupted the celebrity engagement industry. From their entrepreneurial journey to the platform's remarkable 500% revenue growth during the COVID pandemic, this episode offers a glimpse into the strategic thinking and core values that propelled Cameo's success. The conversation explores the fundamental nature of entrepreneurship, revealing Steven Galanis' belief that entrepreneurs are born with a unique mindset, and delves into how Cameo navigated critical challenges like the Brett Favre incident and post-pandemic market shifts. Through candid insights, Steven Galanis also shares how core values like 'Roll out the Red Carpet' have been instrumental in shaping the company's culture and driving its unprecedented growth. 📚 Interested in mastering sales? Check out Ryan's new sales course, "Master of the Close" at https://www.masteroftheclose.com   🎯 Takeaways: Embrace core values like rolling out the red carpet and simplicity for sustainable business culture. Maintain resilience and adaptability by learning from setbacks and crises. Create environments that foster diverse talents but align everyone under a unified mission.   💬 Sound Bites: Now one thing that I'll tell you is that entrepreneurs can be fostered by being around other entrepreneurs. I don't have any regrets, but, you know, I do tell people that I always knew I was gonna start a company. Are you learning? Are you growing? If not, find something else.   🔗 Connect with Steven Galanis: Website: www.cameo.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stevengalanis   📖 Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 05:49 Duke Alumni Entrepreneurs Flourish 09:10 Fostering Future Entrepreneurs at Cameo 10:26 Finding Your Ikigai Point 14:44 "Roll Out the Red Carpet" 19:23 Radical Follower Ownership Solution 20:47 Non-Ad Based Revenue Model 23:53 Antisemitic Video Controversy Involving Brett Favre 27:08 Cameo's Unexpected Turnaround Moment 31:39 Cameo's COVID-Era Surge Explained 35:02 Achieving Profitability After Struggles 39:53 Rapid Growth and Cultural Concerns 40:48 Value of Loyalty and Resilience 46:37 Leadership Regret: A CEO's Reflection 49:39 Steven's Business Insights Inquiry   📌 𝗙𝗢𝗟𝗟𝗢𝗪 𝗠𝗘 𝗢𝗡: Website: www.go.ryanhanley.com Course Page: www.masteroftheclose.com Apple: www.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ryan-hanley-show/id1480262657 Spotify: www.open.spotify.com/show/5AZFuTiQsgS9hMQDDdtlOr?si=98432b7806534486 Instagram: www.instagram.com/ryan_hanley

Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. We have a tremendous conversation for you today with Stephen Galanis, co-founder and CEO of Cameo. Yes, that Cameo, the marketplace where you can connect with creators, sports, with athletes, celebrities, all kinds of different influencers, icons, and have them send personalized messages either back to you or to a team member, a loved one. People use Cameo to send happy birthday messages, thank you messages, congratulations messages.

It's a wonderful platform for connecting people with the individuals that they follow, that have influenced their lives, who've done meaningful work and building that business, while as Stephen will describe, Cameo had product market fit from very early on, was not without its major crises throughout its development. And we get into those, dig deep on the leadership philosophy that Stephen and his founding team have used to navigate those crises and what has consistently allowed them to bounce back and be one of the most successful marketplace

businesses of our age. Wonderful, wonderful conversation. You are going to love it. If you're watching this on YouTube, please like the video, subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. If you're listening on Apple or Spotify, subscribe, leave a rating and review. It's incredibly meaningful to me. It's telling those platforms that more people should watch the show and it helps connect us with more audience members, helps us grow the show. And then if you have questions, comments, et cetera, YouTube is where we capture those and we pull off those questions in future episodes when we do our Q&A show so I love you guys for being here. Love you for listening to the show with that

Let's get on to this absolutely tremendous conversation with Stephen Galanis In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Steve, it's great to have you on the show, man. I appreciate you making the time. Thanks for having me. Yeah, there's a part super early in your story that I'm interested in because I think it's great to have you on the show, man. I appreciate you making the time. Thanks for having me. Yeah, there's a part super early in your story that I'm interested in because I think it's something that happens to a lot of entrepreneurs.

And I just want to take you back. Like, in college, you start this Spartan Entertainment. You're building this big community. You know, so far as I think I saw that you're nicknamed the mayor and all this kind of stuff, which is awesome. So very entrepreneurial. and then your first job out of college is actually kind of going back into the corporate world, right? I like a trader for large finance I'm interested in because I see this a lot in entrepreneurs journeys where early in life or college

They have this pull to build their own business and it's almost like we have to try the other side like was there was it like a feeling like you needed to try corporate life or like why not roll your your kind of entrepreneurial spirit right into an entrepreneurial endeavor right out of college? Yeah, that's a great question. Half of you asked that, you know, one thing I know a lot of you that are listening, you know, probably can empathize with the entrepreneur that was finding every excuse to be entrepreneurial

even before college was over or while it was going on. I can't tell you how many successful founders I know that were running the nightlife at their school. And I think it is a very similar skill set. But in my particular case, I had built the moat of my business in college, which had gotten really big, and there's a little background, so Spartan Entertainment was a company

I started with my co-founder, Zach Maridis, who's now running a really successful software company in the Triangle in North Carolina called Teamworks. The two of us started this business where we used Facebook in the OG days, this is still when you needed a.edu email address to even get on Facebook to eventually aggregate a group of 17,000 college students at Duke, North Carolina, NC State,

Elon and the surrounding communities. This became like the dominant force in nightlife in that area. In that generation, by my senior year, we were throwing 17 recurring events a week. You know, I'm getting paid cash every single time somebody's coming in the door. It was a great business, but what ended up happening was,

right at that point, because I was the first grade that had Facebook all through college, eventually once people started graduating, they needed to get rid of the.edu limitation. So they ended up opening it up up and then suddenly the bar owners and the venue owners like anybody could kind of create Facebook events it didn't just have to be college students so we kind of lost our edge if that makes sense that said the the network that we built was you know it was pretty enduring in

fact the signature party that we started Wednesday night, beer pong and shooters still goes on today and I'm about to have my 15th year reunion. So this thing's going about almost 20 years strong now, you know, which is pretty funny. But you know, really to answer your question, like I think you also have to go back to that time period. I graduated in 2010, which was right in the middle of the financial crisis. So you know, you can imagine that you could imagine that maybe if I'd graduated three years earlier or three years later,

sophomore year, junior year, you're interning on Wall Street or at a consulting firm and then you're gonna go work there. And there was this whole cohort of people that were walking around Duke at that time that maybe otherwise would have been at a Goldman or maybe otherwise would have been at a McKinsey that ended up starting companies like Coinbase and Plaid and Airtable. These are guys that were all the same age as me

and that cohort from Duke in that era was pretty incredible about the talent and founders that came out of it. But one thing that I feel really confident about is the time that I spent both trading and at LinkedIn were things that really did shape me professionally. Now I think in both cases, I probably, especially trading, if I'd done two years of it versus five years of it, I would've been better off.

But at the same time, I don't have regrets because I learned a lot. I made a lot of the connections that ended up, you know, being those that were my early investors or early employees of the company. So I don't have any regrets. But you know, I do tell people that I always knew I was going to start a company. It just took me like nine years to find my like really good idea. Yeah, I actually, you know, when I'm talking to younger people or, you know, whatever come up, and whenever you have a public platform like this, people seem to assume that you like have all these answers and you know, sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. But, you know, so I'll get questions asked and stuff and I'll tell them like, look, I think for some people and probably my guess would be the majority of people,

actually taking that time, if you have an entrepreneurial bent or that is ultimately your goal, taking that time to go into the corporate world in some capacity and getting a feel for that side of business because there are a lot of really good lessons that you can learn and also you can learn a lot of things that you don't like, right? And I find that my most successful entrepreneurial endeavor was actually the result of building,

I'm not going to say solely, but building against aspects of the business that I didn't like or I disagreed with and then building off of those. I wouldn't have had that if I hadn't spent about a decade of my life in different kind of corporate endeavors. Does that play with you? Does that sound right? And maybe what should someone be considering if they have a similar entrepreneurial bent that you have when they're coming out? How do you make that decision? Should I just press into more entrepreneur or whatever? We'll start from the top on this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a deep believer that entrepreneurs are born not made.

I think you can become more entrepreneurial by being, you know, hanging, working at startups or being around other entrepreneurs. But, you know, most entrepreneurs that I know, like they, you know, they were entrepreneurs in kindergarten, like it was, like, you know, they were the ones with the lemonade stand or they were, you know, flipping baseball cards

or pogs or like whatever the fuck it was. Like, I just see that over and over and over again. And in fact, there's a personality test we used to make everybody take in the OG days of Cameo. It's called 16personalities.com. And only 3% of the population has what's called the entrepreneurial archetype.

And this is someone that's forward looking, it's someone that's not deterred by failure, they're resilient, and those are just skills that are absolutely needed, 100%. Now, one thing that I'll tell you is that entrepreneurs can be fostered by being around other entrepreneurs. And one thing that we've done, and I take a lot of credit and I take a lot of pride in is we've always like openly wanted to hire like future founders, like people that know

they want to be an entrepreneur. They like want to get their feet wet. And I think there's probably over 10 people that have left Cameo over the years to become you know, venture backed CEOs, including two that became Unicorps, right, which is something, you know, I like think, I'm a college sports fan, I love thinking about like coaching trees and, you know, like the CEO tree and the alumni tree at Cameo has really spawned some incredible founders that have come through and, you know, try to do things from pet insurance to NFTs to marketplace for art

or different things in the creator economy. So we've kind of run the gamut, but I think that's super important. And then the last thing that I'll mention is that if you are an entrepreneur and you know eventually you're gonna start a company, but I really would say this is true for anybody in any job.

It's critically important to find the thing that's your Iki guy. This is a Japanese philosophy that I really love. For those of you not familiar, imagine a Venn diagram with four circles instead of two. And basically, you're trying to find the intersection of what are you great at, what do you love to do, what does the world need, and what can you get paid for?

And if you find the intersection of those four things, you kind of get what I call the Ironman heart, right? It's like that perpetual motion machine. It keeps you going through the good times through the bad times. You could have the best ride up ever, but that doesn't mean the come down's gonna be anything but rocky, but 99.9% entrepreneurs

go through major, major adversity at some period, and sometimes the sector that you're in is the hottest thing in the world, and then other times, nobody wants to touch you with a 10-foot pole, especially on the venture side. So ultimately, the way that I've always looked at it is, if you find the thing that is your Ikegai point, it allows you to keep going on

regardless of what's going on around you. And then the last thing that I think is really important, and this is, when you asked me the first question, Ryan, do I regret being in the professional world versus being an entrepreneur, as long as you're learning, you don't regret it, right? But the big thing is I see too often, and I've been guilty learning, you don't regret it, right? But the big thing is, I see too often, and I've been guilty of this myself,

like I mentioned, hey, maybe if I just did two years of trading, I kinda got what I needed out of that, and I would've been ready for the next thing, but I stayed for five, right? And ultimately, I think that's so important, whether you're in a role and thinking about a promotion, or at a company, should I stay, should I leave, are you learning, are you growing,

and if you're not, you should find something else. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I also think, one, just to build on top of that idea, even if you're at a job that's not your dream job, or maybe you aren't necessarily, you know, it's not your IKI guy, I think oftentimes we then down throttle how much effort we put into it, right?

We're like, oh, well I'm an administrator in this company and it's not what I wanna do, I wanna be over here. And then we spend half our day memorizing baseball stats because we can do our job in the first hour, right? I mean, that was like my career at American Express. And so it's like, I'll ask people, you know, it's like I'll ask people you know yeah I get it like you don't love this thing no doubt but like are you giving a hundred percent to it to even see like what you're capable of and I think a lot

of times we get into these positions and if it's not what we see ourselves doing for ten years we downshift and coast and that just kills all our momentum. Totally and that's really what the whole premise of the Yuki Guy framework means to say. If you found that thing, then you are going to put the time and the effort because you love it, you're great at it, you're inspired by it, all those things. You can make money doing it.

It's so important. Yeah. Now, do you think I want to go back and double click on this idea of you having multiple successful startup founders coming out of your culture. And I saw that you have six core values. I'm going to read all of them, but there's three I would love for you to kind of expand upon. But I'm gonna read all six for the audience quick here. Number one, roll out the red carpet. Two, act like an owner. three challenge assumptions, four embrace innovation, five fight for simplicity, and six make it memorable.

Three I would love for you to maybe expand upon in whatever way you see works, because I think they're topics that to me are kind of a little different, and I think very interesting, are one, roll out the red carpet, two, act like an owner, and three, fight for simplicity. Those three ideas immediately

caught me as differentiators from what I've seen in other kind of corporate core values. Well, I will tell you that those are the three that have stood the test of time. The other core values have been altered at different points, but those three along with run through walls, which is no longer a core value, but still very much an ethos of Cameo, are really the pillars upon which we built the company. So the thing that's kinda cool, I mentioned there were four OG core values at Cameo. We have six now, but each one of the founders,

and then Arthur Leopold, who was our first employee founding COO, each one of us had a value that we brought to the table that became the bedrock and foundation of our culture. So starting with, you know, fight for simplicity, starting with roll out the red carpet, that was the one that came from me. Like the whole idea with roll out the red carpet is

any single person that interacts with our brand, whether they're trying to interview for a job or they're a talent on the platform or a customer. Like the way that they should feel after interacting with Cameo is like they were just escorted down the red carpet at the Oscars and like they're the star of the show and you know the red velvet rope is there and everyone they want to meet's behind it

and like we're lifting that red velvet rope up and introducing them to everyone they ever wanted to meet. That is us to a T. And when we think about that from an employee perspective, we always talk about your first day at Cameo should be the best day of work you've ever had in your life. And then your second day should be better than the first. And that's such an ingrained part of our ethos. And when we think about things like roll up, like the return to office policy that we just did you know we're giving a $10,000 raise

to all of our Chicagoland employees to come do that we lived up to our value of roll out the red carpet there right like I don't know of another company on the planet that's doing that I totally think that people we're asking more out of them if they have to come in and their and their peers don't so like why should we not compensate them for that and do that in a really generous way? So roll with the red carpet, number one. Number two, act like an owner.

Is actually one that was a LinkedIn value. I worked at LinkedIn right before, so did Arthur. And this was one that we stole, but we really liked. You know, it's this idea that like every single person, like you mentioned earlier, you know, being in that role, but you really liked. It's this idea that every single person, you mentioned earlier, being in that role but you don't really love it, so you're remembering baseball cards. If you act like an owner, you're the CEO.

If you're the janitor or you're the COO of the company, you're gonna act like a CEO for your role. And we really believe in that. And part of putting our money where our mouth is, every single employee at the company has options in the company, so literally they are an owner. I've always felt that that was really important. And on top of that, it's just this whole idea of,

for the owner, the job's never done, right? So it's like, you're never just gonna go say this is good enough, you should really own your work and feel like you're, like your name, the Stephen Glanders and the Ryan Hanley, like money back guarantee is like stamped onto the work that you're doing. Fight for simplicity is a really interesting one.

That came from Devin, our co-founder. Devin ran product and engineering for most of Cameo's history. Today he kind of oversees all creative and runs design. And the idea with Fight for Simplicity is to build something globally scalable. It is so hard to do that if you have all this complexity, different buttons, different SKUs, et cetera.

So what we're always trying to do is like, how do we delete, how do we streamline, how do we make this as easy as possible? Because if you make it as easy as possible, it actually allows it to scale. And fighting for simplicity often means very difficult trade-offs, but cutting it all the way down and that's something that I think that we're pretty proud of

as far as the core product that we built, like what the whole universe of things we could have done was, but focusing for, we're nine years in to this per size video product. How do you, do you have a framework or maybe just expand on the philosophy a little more? Because I think a lot of people struggle with this. I think they struggle with it with all their work. Creators struggle with this, entrepreneurs struggle with this. I

think we all want to add in features or like you know complexity into the product as a show of value and it is a very difficult I think conversation oftentimes to stay focused on this idea of simplicity. So like how do you cultivate that inside the company and really stay on target? Well, of course we want good ideas coming to get surfaced, right? And you know, it's funny, I was in a product review yesterday for this product called Broadcast EMS that we're rolling out and one of the ideas that we had. So imagine an algorithmic list social feed. So basically if you follow, anyone that follows you on Cameo Ryan, you could send them a mass message

that appears in a one to one DM thread and start having a personal conversation with them. So we're really excited about that. One of the killer features we're thinking about is the ability for the talent to actually own, not rent their audience. So right now, you're following on Instagram, you're following on Facebook,

you're following on Twitch or YouTube. The platforms own your followers, you just kind of rent them. But what if we actually gave you radical ownership and you could take anyone that followed you and export their email or their phone number, their birthday to a CSV and use that in whatever Direct-to-fan rails you think is best

to go cultivate your network. So we were talking about this yesterday and we were really thinking about, okay, if we were to do this, what are the critical things of information? You want the name, you want the email, you want the phone number, you want the zip code, you want their birthday, you want the email, you want the phone number, you want the zip code, you want their birthday, but like,

do you really need email and phone number? So it's just constantly, because every time there's another field, you're gonna have drop off. So we ended up getting to a really elegant solution where three of those six things that we said were critical are like what we decided to move with in an MVP, and then later you can always add more information on or complete your profile in a deeper way.

Have you had any, that's not the right way to ask the question. This idea of radical ownership of your audience is so much different than most platforms as you just described. Why are you willing to do that when your peer kind of social platforms are unwilling to do that? What is the what is the thought there? And are you you know, what would be the concern of other platforms not to do this? Well, number one, the business model, our business model is really different from TikTok

and Instagram and Snapchat. We do not have an ad-based revenue model so for those platforms they monetize on DAUs, MAUs and basically selling their user data. The talent or the creators make the content for free and then they sell ads against it to advertisers. So they are always going to be an advertiser centric model and the talent, the deal they basically make with the talent is, hey, use our platform, you're gonna get famous, but then we're gonna sell, and if you get really famous,

you can make money doing other shit. That's basically how it works, is the red share that comes from any of that on TikTok or YouTube, it does not, you cannot support yourself unless you are the biggest person in the world on the platform. So that's kind of, so then what happens? You sell merch, you go on Cameo,

you have a subscription on Patreon or OnlyFans, that's how you monetize. For us, the talent are the four knocks. Our business model has always been talent-centric. The talent make more money than we do for everything. So for us, if we can provide the best tools in the world, the best rails in the world for talent to directly monetize their fan base and nurture it

and cultivate it and strengthen it, then I think we win in the long term. But it's impossible to go from a TikTok or YouTube business model where they have 100% gross margins basically on this ad product and they don't have to give anything to the talent or they give almost nothing versus our model where the town are making 75% to begin with. Yeah.

Yeah, I get that. It's also such a direct relationship as well. It's so personal. I mean that to me, it definitely changes that aspect of it and you know, I guess I wanna pivot into, and maybe this is the right time, this is the wrong time, but I'm so intrigued by the Bref-Farf story. And not in this, you know, you can do any kind of just preamble into how it happened. I'm not so interested in the how.

I'm interested in your mindset and philosophy to actually execute and to go see him and then you know tell that story for us because I you know the thing that happened whatever the controversy that's less interesting to me but probably important but to then go and do what you did I was like this is the kind of guy that if I did want to work for somebody this is the kind of thing that I would want to see out of the person that I work for. So I love that story. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Let's take it all the way back. This is December 2018. We're right in the middle of Christmas season, which is our busiest time of the year. I think literally this was like Thanksgiving weekend. Brett Favre had joined Cameo earlier that year

and at this point is the biggest person on the platform, like an American legend and Hall Famer and just getting a Brett on had really started to be a halo for us to get Snoop Dogg and other like that kind of level talent onto the platform. So that we're really just hitting kind of this big tipping point at that point. We had closed our Series A, you know,

maybe six months before and all of a sudden we get a, actually I think we closed the Series A like weeks, six weeks before this happened. And all of a sudden I get a frantic text message from this guy named Sean Finnegan who was extremely important to us in building this business and Sean was working with Brad on a lot of his social stuff and he goes, Stephen, we got a problem and I go, what happened? Some alt-right group had tricked Brett Favre into making a dog whistle

anti-semitic video where basically the script said something like he was talking about, you know, Basically, the script said something like, he was talking about, you know, the shout out goes to the families of the USS Liberty, which was this ship that Israel bombed of the US in like 1970s. It's like a very like esoteric reference in history. And Brett just thought he was doing the shout out for, for, you know, basically for,

he thought he was doing a shout out for veterans. And then this group took that and put it on 4chan and they'd made a bunch of little dog whistle references that I wouldn't have caught or I don't think anybody reasonably would have caught. And suddenly, they were making it look like Brett was, advocating for these, like these proud boy like groups,

like these alt right kind of neo Nazi type groups. And this became like a massive, story and you know first things first we always want to make sure our talent safe as I mentioned like the talent are our Fort Knox without the talent we can't do what we do we can't manufacture happiness so the biggest fear at that point was holy shit if like Brett loses his Wrangler jeans ad or you know and he leaves the platform and he never comes back that will put a cap on Whoever could go and join cameo because suddenly he becomes the cautionary tale and every single agent is gonna be like yeah Not worth it. I don't care how much you make you just threw everything else away. So this is really existential at the time and

So what we immediately do is we kind of let our talent base know that this happened. Like we were super transparent. We immediately built this kind of like early AI bot on Slack that would basically, you know, we went to the Southern Poverty Law Center and got this list of all these like hate words and different hate groups and then it would it would basically flag we called it Nazi bot at the time it would basically flag anything and then let our talent team know hey there's something fishy about this request or this reference and then what we did was you know I needed to make sure Brett stayed and he felt safe and I had heard that the 96 Packers,

the Super Bowl champions were having a reunion, maybe it was 97, they were having a reunion up in Milwaukee signing autographs and everything. So me and my chief of staff at the time, Adam Ostrom, we drove up in a huge snowstorm from Chicago to Milwaukee. We waited in this big ass line, there were hundreds and hundreds of people there, and we got to the front line,

and hey, I'm Steven from Cameo, Adam from Cameo. We talked to Brett, we told him how much we appreciated him and we were there for him. And you know what, and by the way, I didn't want to have that conversation, like that, you know, but you know what he said to me, he looked me just straight in the eye, he goes, Stephen, it wasn't my best day,

but it wasn't my worst day. I love how Cameo makes people feel, and just thank you for being there and stepping up. And honestly, that's one of those little moments that kind of saved the company at the time. And what we didn't realize was, even though that was as bad of a press cycle as you can kind of get,

a lot of people found out about Cameo from that. And instead of the platform dying, like we had the biggest month we ever had, you can kind of get. A lot of people found out about Cameo from that and you know instead of the platform dying like we had the biggest month we ever had and that really started you know just accelerating the flywheel of our business and the rocket ship really started igniting at that point. Was there anyone inside the organization that didn't think making that trip getting in front of Brett like was there any pushback or was everyone kind of like, this is our Hail Mary Pass, let's go. I mentioned like run through walls was that value

that's not there, but like, that's just how we built this business, right? Like Cameo was built by very gritty people building the business brick by brick. And when some insurmountable obstacle came in our way, we busted through it. And that's something that, you know, it's really, even as we're rebuilding our culture right now,

like that's the thing that, you know, and by the way, that run through walls, like what is that? I mentioned we hired a lot of entrepreneurs at this company, right? And like, what are entrepreneurs? They're run through all types of people. So that's not the only crisis.

I'm sure you've had many minis, but fast forward, COVID hits, you guys just absolutely go bananas. It becomes this way to communicate and deliver messages. It's also right, I mean, I remember this time and there's cameos everywhere and it's just, it's become a cultural icon to a certain extent. And then there's a downturn and You know just reading through all of my material and doing research and digging into the story

so incredibly impressed with the decision to to kind of Knowing that you had to down throttle and how painful it would be. I would love for you to talk us through that time because you've come out the other end now, this being a second major crisis, you know, come out the other end in a very good place. And this is another moment where just like with the Bref-Farv incident, I think people who don't have their head on their shoulders or maybe don't have the values that you guys have, they fall apart and you didn't. And I'd love you to take us through that time

and kind of how you led your company through that period. Yeah, it was a really, really difficult, tough time, but let's start even going into COVID because I think it's a really important part of the story. So coming into COVID, I mentioned like this Brett Farr thing happened. And when you look at the first. So coming into COVID, I mentioned like this Brett Farr thing happened and you know, when you look at the first four years of our business, like we became a unicorn on the exact four year anniversary

of launching, right? And that was at a time where like, there were no like AI, you know, unicorns popping up pre-revenue, like our business went from 300,000 to 4 million to 20 million to 100 in its first four years, right? And this is just like the classic, you know, rocket ship.

And you know, for us, one of the things that happened and you know, we got called a COVID darling a lot, but people don't really know that in 2018 and 2019, we were the fastest growing consumer marketplace in the world at that time too. So coming into COVID, we had this huge momentum. We had just raised our series B from Kleiner Perkins and churning group and a lot of like incredible investors that joined the cap table. And like this thing was like ready to launch.

When COVID hit, initially we didn't know how that was gonna deal with our business, right? The whole world shuts down. And in fact, the first week of COVID, the first week of lockdowns, our business went down by 50%. And we had an emergency board meeting that Sunday night about, hey, like, what were we going to need to do layoffs? Like, what were we going to need to do? We didn't know how long this was going to go on. So like, I remember me and the founders, we cut our salaries to zero, we got rid of like a lot of these benefits that we had.

Like you could Uber to work back in the day or like gym membership or like, well, if everything shut down, like we're not going to need any of those things. So we just basically did everything we could to avoid laying people off and took some costs out of the business. And then basically the next week, like it rebounded and then it just shot out like a cannon and you know, in 2020 we grew about 500% in revenue, right? So suddenly, this thing is full speed ahead. And as I like to describe it to people,

that period of time was playing the game Mario Kart, when you hit the star and you can kinda go 10 times faster and you can bump into shit and you just keep going. But then at some point, that star just kind of fades off. And for us, that was when the second vaccine came out. And if you think about why our business accelerated during COVID so much, you mentioned that this was becoming a new way to communicate.

Your mom is living across the country, so you couldn't see her for Mother's Day. You sent her a Kenny G to tell her how much you loved her and wish her a happy Mother's Day. So you're literally sending digital love. And you think about the Miss Weddings and birthday parties and like life events that happened. And like a cameo is such a great way to do it.

But on the supply side, for the first time in history, every athlete, actor, celebrity in the world was out of work. And none of them, even those that are like, if you're a pro, if you're an MLB player, you're an NBA player, you have an annual salary, but you get paid per game. So guess what, when the games weren't happening, they weren't getting paid.

So this was a massive supply-side tailwind for us. And there was more availability, they were busy, and it just kept people on their phones and at home, and it just, it was just the perfect storm for our business. Our leadership team knew that at some point that was gonna end, but at the same time, we had just raised $100 million, and now we are building up to try to future-proof the business

and ultimately take it public. If you remember that period of time, this is specs, this is direct listings. Coming into 2020, Cameo is named the most promising consumer internet company in the world by the information. We are just humming on all cylinders. We hire a public company ready management team. We hire kind of the best of the best. The team goes from a hundred people who are all in person in Chicago and LA to about 400 people that are fully distributed across 38 states and 13 countries, right?

And we're building international out. We're starting new business lines. We're doing all these things to try to diversify our base. And then all of a sudden the second vaccine comes out. Like when people got their second shot and organic traffic to our site ended up dropping by 65%. So the core business, which was never built on paid marketing was always built on for reality and talent promoting and customer sharing,

like just 65% less people came into our store and OpEx had three Xed, right? So suddenly, you know, we went from being profitable, break even business to burning $6 million a month and it happened in like under 90 days. So when that happened, all of a sudden our leadership team was like we have to take costs out of the business, it was a falling knife, we didn't know how far it was gonna go.

And over the next 18 months, which were probably the worst 18 months of my life, we had to tear the company down to the studs. And we went from over 350 all the way down to 32 people. And when we got to that third one, this was basically like, our board was talking about, hey, if we go that deep, you're a

zombie company, there's no way you can grow again, you guys are dead, blah, blah, blah. But I was just like, I can't go and look at my team again, if we're not profitable. I'm like, we have to get to profitability. And you know, happy to report that last year, you know, we break even for the first time. And, you know, this is a company was burning over $50 million two years ago and it just was an absolute wild ride and some of the lessons from that you know my biggest regret

is in the first riff we ended up you know laying off 25 percent of the company and we should have gone deeper we absolutely should have gone deeper in that you know our you know my naivety and like trying to save people's jobs ended up costing more jobs in the long term. And it's something that I deeply regret. Because if we could have done that in two swoops versus, you know, versus three, there's so many great people that aren't here anymore that I that I wish were here. But, you know, I'm so grateful to those that stuck it out and stuck around. And you know, you

mentioned, Ryan, like that culture is what kept people here. Because by the way, like when you lay off 300 people, these are awesome people. And suddenly they're at new companies and great jobs and they're calling the people that are still there, like, hey, the water's warm over here. Like, what the hell are you doing? I remember Mackenzie, my now chief of staff

came up to me one like late last year, late in that year. And she's like, Steven, I kind of feel like it's 2am at the bar, it's closed and like we're the only losers left on the dance floor. Like what you know, what's going on here? What are we trying to do? And you know, I in this is where like having a product that makes people happy every day and having a mission and core values and teammates that they love and leaders that they're inspired by like that's what kept people together. How did you handle that? How did you keep your shit together during that as you know one of the individuals that everyone's looking at through this hard time which people may understand logically but there's almost no way to

fully rationalize emotionally like how do you as a leader? Maintain your discipline your perseverance drive through Those are incredibly tough times. I mean, that's just that yeah I think there's parts I handled better than others But one big learning that I took from that is in the ride up and the initial crash down. I that I took from that is in the ride up and the initial crash down, I was probably the most positive person on the ride ups.

Like I was the pied piper. No matter how excited anybody was, I was more excited. And then when shit was going bad, like at the beginning, like my expectations were so high that like my tolerance for missing plan or like, you know, shit not, like shipping when we needed to or things not getting done. I just was so pissed off all the time, right? And, and I was more mad than anybody,

you know. So one of the things that I've been really working on myself through coaching that I've tried to do better is to be more of the ballast of the emotional ballast of the company. So when things are very exuberant, that's where I wanna pull them back. Or when things are really shitty, that's where I wanna pull people up. So I've been working on that a lot. But at the end of the day,

you have to be putting a brave face out to your company. You have to have conviction in what you're doing. And in that period of time, I leaned on some amazing entrepreneurs that were part of my YPO forum and other people that kind of have come up when I did. And we spent so many nights on the phone with each other, talking through the issues that we were all going through at that time.

And it was just, you know, I know it's funny my dad was like a long-time finance leader at a multi-billion dollar company and I remember him saying like, man that 18 months you got like 30 years worth of experience. Yeah well that I mean the worst part is I shouldn't say the worst part, my guess is years from now you will look back at that moment and it will be the success that you have coming in the future will have only been possible because of the maturation process, that accelerated maturation process of that, both of those two incredibly hard situations, right,

which were both different. One's a PR issue, one's an internal operations issue and sales issue, you know, revenue and just business. I mean, those types of experiences, I think you almost have to have them to a certain extent, you don't want them to happen, you don't wish for them to happen. But I look at some of the worst moments of my career, whether inflicted by a decision that I made that wasn't right

or just something that happened that I had to address. And those are the, like, it's funny, like when you talk to people, those are the things you talk about, not like, oh yeah, we hit this goal or we made this tweak to the product and this happened. You tell the stories about how you overcame these things because it's ultimately what shapes you. Yeah, I think that's a great point. And you know, one thing I was really worried

about culturally, like as we went from 100 to 412 months, it had been such a winning team that had literally had, you know, like we had the Brett Favre issue. We, you know, of course in any business, you've got your little minor lumps, but like in many ways, like it kind of, Cameo just kind of worked from the beginning, right?

We found product market fit right away. The first thing we ever sold ended up being the thing that we did. Had the name, had the space. It kind of was this company that had everything. And when we started hiring people in that pre-IPO level that were leaving public companies to come work for the next one that was going to be public.

We had the resumes of people we were hiring were way better. They went to better schools. They had better resumes. We started hiring for resumes and experience over what got us there, which was giving really smart young people that had no business, having the responsibility, giving them the shot to be great. And that was one of the periods where I really felt like, organizationally,

my Spidey sense at the time was like, I don't know how much resilience or grit this group of people have, right? And obviously, as layoffs started know we really found at that point like those that remained the 32 that like cut down all the way from the mid 300s like those people like they've been through health with us right and that's why you know when it came to the return to office I'm like of course I'm gonna roll out the red carpet for these people I know we need to be in to office, I'm like, of course I'm gonna roll out the red carpet for these people. I know we need to be in the office,

but I love these people. I want every one of them to be here for 10 years. And part of the reason I want people back in the office is because this group of people creates magic when they're together, right? So I don't wanna do anything to force somebody to get another job. These are people that when push came to shove, every single time in those spreadsheet exercises

kept being on the green list versus the red list. And by the way, there's so many people on those red lists that I would kill to still have at this company, right? But we had to do what we had to do. Yeah. I think you made a really good point of cultural hiring over resume hiring and I've also found and I'm interested in your take on this you know I found often when you find someone who is talented smart driven but maybe doesn't

check the box the resume boxes but but you can tell there's there's real there's potential there the ideas you get from those individuals tend to be, there's real upside because they're not thinking, like they haven't spent enough time in the box or even around the box to believe, to start to believe that you can only do things that are in the box, right? They're like, well, hey, there's this thing over here

that we can take from and integrate. All of a sudden you start to see this mashup of ideas because it's almost like their their inexperience actually allows them to think bigger if that makes sense. So Ryan I got a my CEO coach who's now my board member Bing Gordon kind of like legendary long-term partner of Kleiner Perkins like founding board like board member of Amazon for 20 plus years. He, one time, like we're both hockey players and he gave me, he gave me a framework on like team construction that I think was so valid and he had basically went back and looked at all the Stanley Cup champions in the last

like 25 years and he found that they had a mix of three archetypes of players. And you know, you'll see where I'm going with this when we come and talk about how that applies to the company. But basically, he's like every great Stanley Cup winning team first had kind of your two lines of guys, like six players who are at the peak of their career and they're going to do the best work of their life right now. Then you also have a group of another six that are young, dumb, hungry, stupid,

but they're playing out of their minds. They don't even understand what's at stake. They're rookies, they're second year in, but they're just workhorses and they're gonna do the best work of their life later, but they're playing out of their mind right now. And then he goes, lastly, every team needs this. You have to have the grizzled old vet

that still has the blue burning flame that wants to lift the cup one more time. Maybe they've had a hall fame career and they never won the championship and like they become the people that rally around this. And you know, at Cameo we've had a really good mix of those types, but that's a framework and archetype I like for team building that at least resonated with me.

Yeah, and then your job becomes, and I'm gonna position this in a question form, your job becomes managing those, not managing is the right word, creating an environment for those personalities to mix so that you can pull from their respective viewpoints and everyone feels heard, understood, and access to all those ideas. Is that, is that kind of the idea? Now you become kind of of service of those groups to make sure that they mix in the proper way?

That's how they draw it up, but in retrospect, like that's probably the the single thing that I fucked up or got wrong most in the build up especially in the heyday so when we were building this executive team like we're you know we're preparing to be a public company and some point in the next two to three years and we went and hired like kind of the best of the best you know our our head of product was one of the top product leaders at u. Our CMO led hims and hers, which was the hottest brand out there at that point. Our COO was the global head of ops at LinkedIn. Our chief people officer was the global head of people at McDonald's.

Our CFO was the CFO that everybody thought she was gonna be the next great one to take somebody public. So we built this all-star team. But the problem was, and I remember at the time, one of my board members told me something. She's like, Steven, you've been Michael Jordan this whole time, but now it's time to be Phil Jackson. The Last Dance had come out, and really, what she was asking was, you need, like the last dance had come out and, and really like what she was asking was like, you need to now be the person that just brings all these people together.

And I don't know if it's because it was remote. I don't know if it's because I brought in six senior executives, like all at the same time and everybody's kind of fighting to be number two. But like the sum of the parts, the whole was worse than the sum of the parts. Like that group of people, I could not, and this was my failure and it cost, you know, it cost the company time, it cost the company money,

it cost a lot of people their jobs, and this was my failure. I couldn't bring that group together to make that a cohesive, you know, high functioning, high trust management team. And that is the regret that I have from that period of time. So, and as we've torn the company down, I realized that the consensus-based management or trying to get everybody on the same page, I just had to step up more and be like, this

is the direction we're going, like figure it the fuck out, right? So I actually needed to become Michael Jordan again and not be Phil Jackson. So I think a lot of the management books will tell you it's all about being the maestro and creating the culture, but as a CEO at the end of the day, hey, I ran the company, we as founders, we controlled the board,

you can't really look at anybody else on the bad things, you know, at the end of the day, like that starts and ends with us, with me and my co-founders, and ultimately I didn't do a good enough job in that period. I think there's also a part to it that is knowing what your strengths are. You know, there are certain aspects of business,

having founded multiple companies now, that I know like this thing that maybe in a leadership book is bullet four on the leadership list. I'm just never going to be good at that thing. Right. It's never going to happen that I'm going to be that guy. Like I am East Coast. I grew up in the woods, you know, like gun totem, crazy parents, you know what I mean?

Like I'm just a straight shooter and I get told by any every time I toting crazy parents, you know what I mean? Like, I'm just a straight shooter, and I get told by any, every time I'm in a company, you know, I like the HR stuff, I just have to back up, they're like, you're too straightforward. They're like, you can't say those things to people. They like, won't hear it.

So like, I've always, I now like know that, but man, figuring that stuff out is just so important. Well, let me, I think that's a really important point. I also think that that period of time was a very weird period, right? You had the great resignation, you had all these startups have, you know, series A companies had more money than series C companies, you had like just there was so much craziness going around, quiet quitting, you know, people wanting to, you know, only be remote or only be in office, it was just chaos.

And then you had employee activism and woke-ism to the point where as a leader, you're trying to foster a culture that's inclusive for everybody. We're trying to build diverse teams, we're trying to have different leaders with different perspectives there. But at the end of the day, I don't know,

the captaining sports teams my whole life and having other businesses aligned to teams have always been the ones that have won right it hasn't been the dream teams it's been the ones that are aligned they have a share they have shared core values and that doesn't mean I don't care about diversity and it doesn't mean that I don't like bringing in different perspectives but it means that at the end of the day like everybody's got to be pulling on the same rope. Yeah Steven I dude I could I could talk to you for another three hours about business. This has been absolutely incredible I want to be respectful of your time, you know cameo is an enormous platform

I don't think we need to do a shout out of where people can find more of you But are you creating I'll just ask are you creating any? Content or do you have a, do you personally have a newsletter? Do you do anything like that that you'd like people to go chase your ideas? Because I think the way you approach brilliant or approach business is brilliant. And if you're sharing that anywhere, I'd love for the audience to be able to follow along with that.

Well, stay tuned. This is a plug for the soon to be launched Zeitgeist podcast. I'm going to be interviewing the top founders and marketers in the world that have shaped pop culture and hear the story behind the brands that are influencing like pop culture. So I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. We've got a really killer season one lineup, but look out for that probably in the next three months,

we'll get the first episode out. Tremendous and I'll get with your team and when that comes live I'll make sure we get it out to the audience here so that we can get people pushed over to the podcast. So just again man thank you so much for your time appreciate the hell out of you. Thanks Ryan, appreciate it. Thanks bud, you'll be good. in a crude laboratory in the basement of his home