His startup Cameo was a unicorn—until it crashed 90%. Here's how he went from near-bankrupt to profitable again. | Steven Galanis, Founder of Cameo

Cameo is one of the best-known recent consumer startups. You've either used it or know someone who's used it to get famous people to create personalized videos. And, for a while, they were a total rocket ship.

Year 1: $300K GMV
Year 2: $4M
Year 3: $20M
Year 4: $100M

They were backed by Jeremy Liew, the VC who seeded Snapchat in 2012. Cameo became a unicorn in 2021. But as the markets turned, revenue decreased, investor interest waned, and their valuation dropped from $1B to $100M. After the restructuring and the layoffs, Steven found a way to turn things around.

Now the company is profitable again. And growing.

Here's how he did it.

Why you should listen:

• Why you don't need liquidity to launch a marketplace.
• How to hack your way to a successful marketplace launch.
• Why organic growth is the way to grow a marketplace. 
• How to turn things around after your valuation crashes by 90%.

Keywords
Cameo, startup, entrepreneurship, product-market fit, celebrity endorsements, marketplace growth, business strategy, VC funding, early-stage startups, innovation, Cameo, gifting, unicorn status, Chicago startup, engagement, COVID-19 impact, business diversification, down rounds, product-market fit

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:46) Where The Idea for Cameo Came From
(00:11:54) The Client Interface of Cameo in the Early Days
(00:14:12) The Failed launch that Could've Ended it All
(00:21:23) Gaining Momentum
(00:25:37) The Math Behind Cameo
(00:31:27) Becoming a Unicorn
(00:34:34) Meeting Jeremy Liew (the VC who backed Snapchat)
(00:40:47) Engagement on the Platform
(00:43:00) The Impact of Covid
(00:56:06) Finding Product Market Fit
(00:56:30) One Piece of Advice

Chapters

• 2:46 Where The Idea for Cameo Came From
• 11:54 The Client Interface of Cameo in the Early Days
• 14:12 The Failed launch that Could've Ended it All
• 21:23 Gaining Momentum
• 25:37 The Math Behind Cameo
• 31:27 Becoming a Unicorn
• 34:34 Meeting Jeremy Liew (the VC who backed Snapchat)
• 40:47 Engagement on the Platform
• 43:00 The Impact of Covid
• 56:06 Finding Product Market Fit
• 56:30 One Piece of Advice

Transcript

Steven Galanis (00:00)

You know, what happens is like, there's always the next hot thing that VC money is after. And I see too many founders that just keep jumping from hot thing to hot thing. And then ultimately, you know, aren't building the thing that they would build for 10 years if nobody cared about. people looking back on it often think like, this was like a COVID darling. And we did really well during COVID. But what most people don't realize is in 2017 and 2018, 2019, Cameo was the fastest growing consumer marketplace in the world. Like this was a company that when we grew 500 % in 2020, that was the slowest we'd ever grown in a year. It's like the math's actually the most compelling part of Cameo. One thing that I'll argue is that the talent on Cameo make more money per minute on Cameo than anything else in the world that they do. And we're expecting all these people to come to the site and nobody came to the site, like zero, zero people. And it was actually worse than that. Cassius started getting trolled on his tweets. So all these people are like, you're a millionaire athlete. How selfish of you. This should be free. Why are you charging people? So then he kind of got butthurt and then he's basically like, [Bleep] you guys, I'm out. And then, so now the only talent on the site has just quit. My co-founder Martin is an NFL agent. His only client is Cassius. yeah. And by the way, Cassius had just wrote a $25,000 check to be our first investor in the business, maybe a week before. So now I'm down a co-founder. I'm down to our only talent and Devin and I are kind of like, shit, like what, you know, what are we going to do? 

Pablo Srugo (1:27)

Welcome to the product market fit show brought to you by Mistral. a seed stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo. I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early stage founders like you find product market fit. 

Stephen, welcome to the show. 

Steven Galanis (1:43)

Thanks for having me.

Pablo Srugo (1:45) 

I mean, look, we've had a lot of classic B2B SaaS businesses here and then we've had the cool ones so far have been like these robotics company. Like we had this one company, this robot that kills weeds with lasers on farms. So that was pretty cool. But this is definitely one of those really cool ones because the platform is one that I think, you know, first of all, many people have just heard of Cameo. And second of all, it's one of those ideas you tell people and they're like, that makes sense. Also, how can I use this? Right? So you can get Snoop Dogg or, you know, Jeremy Piven or whatever, like name your favorite actor athlete or whatever other superstar to kind of, you know, do a video for 1530 seconds a minute or whatever. So anyways, excited to kind of dig in to to head out how it'll happen. Maybe we can start there. Like, I think, you know, you started in what, like 2016 or so like, us back just to, to that time and really the origin story. around it because while it's an idea that I think makes sense when you hear it, not really like something obvious at all to come up with in the first place.

Steven Galanis (2:46)

Sure. Well, again, thanks for having me and excited to share the story. We had the idea for Cameo at probably the last place that you would ever expect to have your billion dollar idea, driving home from my grandmother's funeral. My co-founder, Barton and I were leaving Chicago ,this funeral home in Chicago and heading to O'Hare because he had flown in for LA for the day for the funeral. And while I was driving him home, he was telling me about a problem that existed for him. Martin had been an NFL, a movie producer for years and had pivoted into becoming an NFL agent. And his main value prop to players was going to be, if you sign with me, I'll find you off the field movies to get into and maybe I can make you a star. And his hope effectively was to take a big defensive lineman with a cool look and big personality and see if he could create the next Jason Momoa or the Rock and make them the next Conan the Barbarian or Rambo. That was literally what he was trying to do. 

Pablo Srugo (3:53)

Was he having any success with this? Did he get any money in movies and things like that? 

Steven Galanis (3:56) 

His first player, Cassius Marsh, and Cassius was a third or fourth round draft pick out of UCLA. He ended up on the Seattle Seahawks and he has the look. Like when you see Cassius, like he looks like a superhero. He looks like someone that could be in movies. And Martin was pulling his phone out just to show me a video of him. Like look at him, look at his swag, like look at the look. And while watching it, I was watching this video, in the video, Martin's getting Cassius Marsh to congratulate his good friend Brandon on becoming a father for the first time. So the video, imagine Cassius is driving in the car in Southern California, he's wearing a flat brim Sea Hawk hat, no shirt on, tatted up, driving, and he's got this phone on while he's driving, he goes, hey Brandon, it's Cassius Marsh from the Sea Hawks, heard about your son Maverick, if he gets your athletic ability, he'll be playing for the SeaHawks one day, go Hawks. And it turned out that Brandon was an executive at Nike at the time, works with the biggest athletes in the world, LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Kyrie, et cetera, but he absolutely loves the Seahawks, which are his hometown team. So Martin ended up, you know, sending this, this video to him from, from a player that was kind of a backup player. And he put it on Instagram and said it was the best gift he ever got. And as Martin's telling me that it was kind of shocking that this guy that's high up by Nike would care about a backup player, but because it was personalized, because it was his favorite team. You know, it really, it was a pretty special moment. And immediately like the Eureka moment went off for me. And I'm like, Martin, forget about trying to get Cassius Marsh into a movie deal. Like, why don't we sell those?

Pablo Srugo (5:42)

Like how short, I mean, you're describing kind of like what seems like a very tight kind of timeframe. Did it really happen like that quickly? Kind of this, this Cassius video and then this Eureka moment? 

Steven Galanis (5:52)

Yeah, it happened that, that quickly. I will say like, as we were in the car, he was kind of lamenting the experience of being an NFL agent with a player that's not a superstar, namely like you're losing money basically, right? So one small antidote that's kind of cool and related is that Cassius a few weeks earlier had gone viral on the internet because he's an avid Magic the Gathering player and someone had broken into his car and stole all his Magic cards. So he ended up going on Twitter. And he said, Hey, 12’s which is what with Seahawks fans call each other. I don't know what he thought was in that bag, basically money, guns, et cetera. But like what was in there is more important to me than anything in the bag or the bag itself. Just give me my cards back and I won't press charges basically. And I'll let you keep the Louis Vuitton bag they're in. And you know, that was a viral moment. Like I remember that was on PTI and they were talking about Barstool and here's this big defensive lineman making Magic the Gathering, maybe the nerdiest card game in the world. 

Pablo Srugo (7:01)

You can't make this stuff up. That's crazy. 

Steven Galanis (7:03)

Martin couldn't even get Wizards of the Coast, which is the Seattle-based company that makes Magic, to sponsor Cash, to give them an endorsement deal. So that was where we started uncovering some of the problems in sports. The top 1% of athletes make 99% of all the endorsement revenue. So here's someone like Cassius Marsh. that is a diehard fan of Magic the Gathering and yet Magic at that time wasn't interested in making him a paid endorser of their product. 

Pablo Srugo (7:35) 

So you think that these videos, like that there's something compelling here, I guess that people will pay for them. What's your next step? Like, as I understand you're your co-founder, can't, you're not a tech guy, you're like me, you might have an idea, you can't do shit about it.

Steven Galanis (7:48)

 It wasn't even necessarily that we thought there was, we didn't know how much people would pay for them or what the market was. It wasn't even about that. But what we knew was that this video elicites an immense amount of joy and it just felt like something that should exist. And the insight we had immediately like in that car ride was like, the selfie is the new autograph. When you see someone famous today, you pull out your phone and you want something to go on your, you know, your Instagram grid or your Facebook wall. Like that's what you want. Back in the day when you met somebody, you pulled out the Sharpie from your pocket, they signed the menu, they signed their shirt and went on your physical wall. But people in this digital age, they want something that they can share with their social networks.

Pablo Srugo (8:36)

So you knew it was a compelling moment. You didn't necessarily know that there'd be a business opportunity behind it. 

Steven Galanis (8:40)

Yeah, it just felt like something that should exist, right? And, you know, and then right after I dropped Martin back off at the airport, he goes through security. He calls me right when he gets through security and basically we start jamming on the idea and right as he gets on the plane, he's like, hey, you gotta get to LA, let's keep this going. So I actually booked the next flight to LA the next morning. He picked me up. We went right to Soho House. We must've killed 10 picantes. You know, we're drinking these spicy margaritas and we're dreaming up the marketplace that would become Cameo. And the core idea that we had was for X amount of money, As a fan, you should be able to pay to do Y activity with Z athlete. We were just athletes at the time that we had the idea and that, you know, it felt like that was a big idea. Like you should be able to pay to go to lunch with them or to FaceTime them. 

Pablo Srugo (9:33)

So it was more broad than just like,

Steven Galanis (9:35)

It was all these things, but we kept coming back to the video. It is one of the many things that you could do, but probably the easiest to execute, right? Because we're asking relatively little for them. If you're going to go book someone to come to lunch with you, that's a lot of their time. you know, 30 second to 60 second video, it's kind of selling the smallest amount of their time. But it's something that can have a really big impact because it can be shared. 

Pablo Srugo (9:59)

what do you do from there? Like, are you guys - do you know about lean startup methodology? Like, are you in the VC startup scene where you kind of know what to do? Or you just kind of like put one foot in front of the other and kind of see what happens?

Steven Galanis (10:13)

I was working at LinkedIn, but I really didn't know anything about the Lean Startup methodology. didn't know about things like Y Combinator. I knew that there was this tech incubator in Chicago called 1871, and I'd been there before. But again, that was things other people were doing. I had some friends that had started companies, especially from college, but I wasn't necessarily talking to them every day. So it's not that I had this startup bug, we had the idea, I'm a natural entrepreneur, I've had other entrepreneurial ventures in the past, non technical ones. But in this case, like, you know, suddenly we're two guys with an idea, right, two non technical guys with an idea. And the first thing I did was I called the best engineer that I knew, Devin and talk to him about the idea, and, and got him to agree to kind of code it for the best friend price of I think $150 an hour.

Pablo Srugo (11:12)

And did you wait for the MVP before you launched or did you already start like validating it and getting like athletes? 

Steven Galanis (11:18)

well the MVP at the beginning was really just like a front end almost like a Google form type website like today when you go to Cameo there's you know tens of thousands of talent on there you can watch videos you see reaction videos there's a lot to do but back in that era there really wasn't that much to do it was like we had no talent we had no past videos so it's kind of like here's the one person, Cassius Marsh, that agreed to be on the site, and here's all the things you can do. You can buy his merch.

Pablo Srugo (11:51)

Was that really V1? Actually, that was one of my main questions. Did you go out and get supply first, or did you just leverage the one guy you had with as many tasks? 

Steven Galanis (11:59)

We launched with one person. 

Pablo Srugo (12:00)

That's crazy. Holy shit. 

Steven Galanis (12:01)

I always say... I see so many founders often that are like, well, we need more people to get on, or we need the app to be further along. Like, let me tell you how like Bush League our launch was. We had one talent, Cassius Marsh, who had never done a video before. When, when the first customer ended up like booking, there wasn't an app yet on the talent side. So we actually would email the talent and tell them like, Hey, in your Gmail, like record a video and then email back to us. And then we'll put a watermark on and send it to the customer. So only website that we had at the beginning was a front facing customer one that basically was just like.. What's your name? What's the video? Like who's, what you want the video to say and yeah, Stripe integration.

Pablo Srugo (12:46)

 How did you even, let me ask this. Like I actually want to get really specific here because if you only have caches, does your website even talk about booking talent or was it just like almost like a website for him? Like for, know what I mean? For, what do want him to do? 

Steven Galanis (12:58)

One of the ideas, like the LinkedIn biospace has now become like a cottage industry, but we were one of the first to basically tell talent, we don't need you to promote Cameo, the service. we need you to just promote your own page. So what we did is we gave everyone like their equivalent of a homepage. So it almost served as a white label storefront and you know, Cameo.com slash cash was like his offering.

Pablo Srugo (13:24)

 At first you just had that one kind of storefront.

Steven Galanis (13:25) 

Yeah exactly. We just asked him to tweet that out and then over time we ended up like building, you know, more classic homepage and you know, search and discovery and browse and all the things that come with having more than an end of more than one in your marketplace on the supply side. 

Pablo Srugo (13:41) 

Do you remember what one of the like, what were some of the first few things that people bought with Cassius? Was it videos or was it actually other things?

Steven Galanis (13:47)

Yeah, the very first thing we actually sold were Cassius Marsh socks and a Cassius Marsh mug. So a little customized merch and Cassius has this big polar bear tattoo and like his nickname, you know, was the polar bear. So we put it on socks and we put it on a mug and like that's literally the first thing we sold. 

Pablo Srugo (14:08)

So you have him, it's kind of starting to like work a little bit. Is your next step then to drive more demand or now do you go to like 10, 20?

Steven Galanis (14:15)

Yeah, well, one thing we always had high conviction about was in our marketplace supply ought to be able to get their own demand. We knew that the best way to get Cassius Marsh booked would be for him to promote to his 76,000 Twitter followers that he had at the time. And to basically say, here's what I'm doing and like come and get one for me. And I'll tell you like our launch story, you maybe the worst launcher I've ever heard. Like, like as far as what a disaster it was. I'll never forget. I was in Scottsdale, Arizona on launch night. 

Pablo Srugo (14:48)

Which is when, by the way, what year are we talking about now? 

Steven Galanis (14:50)

This is mid March, 2017. So we'd had the idea October 5th, 2016, about six months later, we're ready to ready for prime time. I'd left LinkedIn by this point. You know, I'm all in like we haven't sold one yet,

Pablo Srugo (15:04) 

but like still bootstrapped, right? Like you hadn't raised anything. 

Steven Galanis (15:07)

I'm still still bootstrapped at this point. And, basically the idea was like, let's, you know, let's have Cassius tweet out that video that gave us the idea and basically say, Hey, I'm making Cameos now. Or, you know, I think at the time I'm on this thing called Cameo. If you want a video like this, you know, 20 bucks, I'll do it for you. And, and he sends tweet, he hits the tweet button, him, and my two co-founders are in Devon's apartment in Venice Beach, California. I'm in Scottsdale, Arizona with my buddy, Sean Fox, and we're trying to sign Jason Kipnis, like the second person to ever join Cameo at a dinner. So I'm at the steakhouse in Scottsdale and literally I'm pitching, I'm having a talk, but I have Google Analytics up on my phone and there's two dots, one in Scottsdale, one in Venice. It's time for Cassius to send the tweet out and we're expecting all these people to come to the site and nobody came to the site. Like zero, people. And it was actually worse than that. Cassius started getting trolled on his tweets. So all these people are like, you're a millionaire athlete. How selfish of you. This should be free. Why are you charging people? So then he kind of got butthurt. And then he's basically like, fuck you guys, I'm out. And then, so now the only talent on the site has just quit. My co-founder Martin is an NFL agent. His only client is Cassius. yeah, and by the way, Cassius had just wrote a $25,000 check to be our first investor in the business, maybe a week before. So now Martin's freaking out. Like I just lost my only, you know, client money. And as an agent, you're supposed to put money in their pocket, not take it out. So then he stormed out. both of them said, now I'm down a co-founder. I'm down our only talent. And Devin and I are kind of like, shit, like what, you know, what are we going to do? And then we're like, you know what? Maybe we should have not done this at 10 PM Eastern time, like maybe we should have done it earlier. Like we were talking about maybe a Tuesday night wasn't bad. Let's try it again on Thursday. Like we were talking about different things. And then all of a sudden I'm like, well, maybe Google's not working. So I remember signing off the site and Devin's like the dot disappeared in Scottsdale. And then when I signed back on it came there. So it's like, Nope, Google's working. Just nobody wanted to come to the site. And you know, long story short, what must've only probably been 15 or 20 minutes, but felt like 15 or 20 hours, a dot popped up in Renton, Washington, which is right by the Seattle Seahawks facility. So all of a sudden I'm like elbows on the table. I'm like leaning in, what are they gonna do?

Pablo Srugo (17:41)

One dot is in like one user. Like that's what you're talking about. 

Steven Galanis (17:44)

One user's on there and they're on for like what felt like hours. And at this point there's nothing to do. It's like enter the name, put your request in and like literallyput your credit card in, there was nothing else to do. And it's like, we're waiting and waiting and waiting. All of sudden the dot just disappears, no purchase came through, and we're just gutted. I really felt like I got kicked in the balls there. Then all of sudden my phone vibrates and I get a notification on Twitter. This guy DMs me and he's like, hey, I'm trying to buy a Cameo from Cassius Marsh. He's my daughter's favorite player, but your payment processor is not working. So at that point I'm like, just tell me what you want to say, we'll figure it out.

He's like, my daughter's birthday is Thursday. This was like a Wednesday, Tuesday or Wednesday night. And you know, then I remember sending the message to Cash and Martin. They were both so mad at me. They did, neither of them responded. We missed the birthday. A week goes by, we missed the birthday. And finally, I'm like, Cassius, can you just please do this? Like, I understand you're mad, but like, let's just do this for this little girl. And he makes what I today think is one of the worst Cameos I've ever seen.

“Hey Reese.. thanks for being a fan, sorry I missed your birthday”, there’s just no energy. So I send it to the dad and sure as shit I get a video from him having his daughter who has half her hair is green, half her hair is blue and she’s watching this video and she starts crying. She's so happy.   And that was the moment where I'm like, shit, we got something here. Because if you can make one person feel like that, you could make millions or billions of people feel like that at scale.

Pablo Srugo (19:35)

And does that make its way back to Cash? Does that have the impact that you were hoping for? 

Steven Galanis (19:40)

Not just Cassius, but everybody else. Like you can imagine the earliest days of starting a marketplace like Cameo, you have the classic chicken in the egg question. You have no talent on the platform. Right? So as I'm telling people, Hey, wouldn't it be cool for Michael Jordan to wish you a happy birthday? They're like, I'd love that. How much? Well, we don't have him yet. Well, who do you have? We don't have anybody. Imagine going to talent. Hey, you can connect with your fans. You can make money. You're going to get paid to become more beloved. Well, who's on it? Who's done the best? Nobody, right? So that's a really tough thing. So we relied on kind of personal relationships, friends and family that we knew. Like I went to Duke and did Devon and a lot of our friends were, former NBA, like future NBA players and NFL players and Martin was an athlete at USC. you know, he knew people. So we started with our own network. 

Pablo Srugo (20:30)

And then how, what about the demand side? Cause like the one thing that puzzled me about the story, cause I would have agreed with your kind of hypothesis, which is like, they should drive their own domain, right? And especially someone like Cassius who has like, you know, 70,000 grid followers, all this stuff. Like did he post again and then this time it worked because you optimized something or -

Steven Galanis (20:45)

What happened is we kept adding more and more talent, right? And then they would come on, they would post and like every time they posted, these people would like, you know, a few people would come on. And then the other thing too is like once someone bought, we learned right away they're almost all gifts. So I buy for you, then you share on your Facebook, you share it on your Instagram, you share it on Twitter in a group chat. And then those people saw the Cameo, a watermark, they're like, what the hell is Cameo? and that was it. So it's really this flywheel of talent coming on, promoting, somebody booking, they share it with the person they booked for, and then that person has to like the content to share it enough. So that's where the K factor comes from every one of these videos. 

Pablo Srugo (21:26)

How long did it take for you to start feeling that? Because obviously there's a point at which you really kind of took off. But I mean, from the moment that you launched, the moment that you feel like, okay, this is taking momentum. 

Steven Galanis (21:37)

That first month, March, 2017, we did like $144 in GMB and keep in mind, our take rate is 25%. I don't even think we could have, me, Devin and Martin could have bought ourselves lunch that first month. But then the next month we did $450. It's like, all right, you 3X growth. Then we did $1,000 in month three. Then, you know, we did like $4,000 in month four. And then we did $8,000 in month five. And then we went from 8,000 to 36,000. And by December we did a hundred thousand in a month. So like it was, you know, it was growing insanely fast in Cameo often like now, like people looking back on it often think like, this was like a COVID darling. And we did really well during COVID. But what most people don't realize is in 2017 and 2018, 2019 Cameo was the fastest growing consumer marketplace in the world. Like this was a company that when we grew 500 % in 2020, that was the slowest we'd ever grown in a year. 

Pablo Srugo (22:39)

That's insane. Yeah. I mean, that just that ramp, even on that first year is, is a very high growth, very compelling. 

Steven Galanis (22:46)

We did this without marketing spend, which I think is really interesting. Like there's not a lot of marketplaces. What marketplaces often have to do is they'll acquire supply side or demand, whatever's the harder side. And then they'll spend money to get the other side. In our case, what we ended up doing is hiring a bunch of like fresh out of college kids and interns to be DMing celebrities all day. So we never paid the celebrities to join.

But what we did was we invested in our supply side and then that became demand. it was, we were doing probably north of 100 million in GMV before we even really started spending money on paid. 

Pablo Srugo (23:21)

Were there any major in those first 12, 24 months, any kind of major celebrities you landed that you remember being kind of an inflection point? 

Steven Galanis (23:29)

There kept being different inflection points. The first major one was when Cody Ko joined. Cody Ko is one of the biggest YouTubers on earth. Yet also happened to be one of my fraternity brothers and me and Devon, my co-founder's roommate. And at the time when Cody joined, we were just doing NFL players basically. We started with pro athletes only. And then one day Devon's like, I think Cody and people like Cody might do well on Cameo. And when Cody joined, he put it on YouTube on his YouTube channel. He probably had a few million followers at the time. And that was just the first time the site went viral when Cody came on. you know, shortly after that, Dennis Rodman came on, which was the first talent that really was press worthy. This was probably like a year and a half kind of into the business. And I remember like the Chicago Tribune was the first paper to write about Cameo and then the headline was for $200 Dennis Rodman will wish you happy birthday. And like that was bold and intriguing and him coming on ended up being big. And then probably right after that, like Brett Favre is one of those people that just, you know, this guy is Hall-famer and someone that was like so popular in pop culture. And, when a Brett Favre's on, it's hard for any athlete at the time to say, I'm bigger than him or I'm bigger than Cameo. 

Pablo Srugo (24:54)

When did he join? What year? Do you remember? 

Steven Galanis (24:55)

Brett was on in 2018. So there just kept being like these things. And then by 2019, when Snoop Dogg joined, like that was kind of you know, for entertainment and pop culture, there's just not many people in the world bigger than Snoop. And, you know, and that was kind of, even before he did the Olympic stuff before any of that, but like, we just, you know, every day there just keeps being kind of the next talent that blows your mind in some way. 

Pablo Srugo (25:22)

how do you make the math work? I understand that, you know, it only takes 30, I mean, it only takes 30 seconds a minute, maybe they record a couple of times, like two, three minutes, and you make a few hundred dollars, maybe a thousand dollars, but like, I think if someone like Snoop or Brett Favre, like making like whatever they make, like real, real money, like how do you make it worth it for them to do this for 10 minutes a day or however they think about it?

Steven Galanis (25:47)

 Like the math's actually the most compelling part of Cameo. 

Pablo Srugo (25:50)

Interesting.

Steven Galanis (25:50)

 One thing that I'll argue is that the talent on Cameo make more money per minute on Cameo than anything else in the world that they do. So as an example, Andre Drummond was one of the first like Mac salary, NBA, all stars to join Cameo in the really early days. He was making 25 million a year. I remember talking to him and asking him like, Andre, like, are you interested in this? Because he went to high school with Devon. They're from the same area. And he's like, yeah, I do it, but I'd probably need like 40 grand. I'm like, like explain that math or I probably need 10 grand to do it. I'm like, explain that math to me. He's like, well, I should, I went to this Bar Mitsvah, you know, 40 grand a few years ago. And, and I think this is like, I'd probably need 10 grand for this. So then I broke the math down. I’m like you make 25 million a year, divide by 2,000 hours in a work year, 50, 40 hour weeks, divide by 60, do you know how much money you make per minute? He's like, I have no idea. I'm like, you make $208 per minute as a max salary NBA player. So if you could charge 100 or 150 bucks per video, and on Cameo you can do two videos per minute, you can make the same amount or more on Cameo at a $100 price point than you make in the NBA as a max salary. And this is exciting because instead of a mom, single mother paying for tickets and popcorn and hot dogs and Coca Cola to go see her son to go see you play for your birthday, you literally could give him a better present, more personalized for cheaper. And that was a a wow.

Pablo Srugo (27:24)

And how do they think about it? So that makes sense to me. But then there's something about just the fact that, but how many of these am I really going to do? Because even though in a minute I can make, let's say a lot per minute more or as much as my salary, you know, my salary is 20, is 2 million a month like versus how many videos am I really going to do? how, and how do these guys, I'm just curious, like how do they end up working? Do they take like an hour a week and just like crush through or what?

 Steven Galanis (27:49)

 Like it depends. Like, but you know, some of the math that's kind of compelling is like if you do $3,000 a day on Cameo, that's a million dollars a year. to actually break it down, if you're looking at someone like Brett Favre. Brett Farve is 400 bucks a video. You know, he can do 10 minutes of Cameo a day to make a million dollars a year. Right? it's pretty compelling. The tougher thing ends up being like, we're probably more demand side constrained than we are supply side constrained. So we have plenty of talent that would do more Cameos. And in fact, if you were to ask our talent, what's the number one thing you wish you could change about the platform, they're like, I want to get booked more. Right? So top of funnel is still you know, eight years in ,still something that, you know, we're, really trying to figure out, like we see our, our top line GMV is almost a hundred percent correlated to like session traffic. Like it's, it's crazy year after year, like when sessions are up, you know, the business is up. If sessions are down, the business is down, but it's actually crazy when you look at the session numbers to GMV and how correlated it is. And it's something we've seen, you know, always. So then it kind of gets back to like, what are we doing to get more traffic to the site? So a lot of what we've spent the last few years on is giving talent better tools to share. So they can go right in their app and create, you know, TikTok, Instagram posts that, you know, look super well designed and they're great. And they can put it out there and turn their followers into our customers, right? Cause that's what this business is all about.

Pablo Srugo (39:27)

And today is Cameo is gifting still the number one reason people will pay for Cameo? 

Steven Galanis (29:33)

Absolutely. Yeah. You know, gifting…. over 85 % of Cameos are bought for others, number one. And then among, you know, among all the videos, like over half of them are birthdays still. 

Pablo Srugo (29:45)

Do you do anything on the demand side besides just getting supply to kind of push it out, just to be more top of mind? like on, you know, and I don't know enough about the gifting space to know how companies that know that they're mainly gifts do this, but it's like to capture people when they're like gonna, you know, they, even think that this is an idea. Cause actually like, you know, as on the user side, I'm just like an average user. I've seen Cameo, like I've been exposed to it before, but there's a difference between that and me like thinking of gift for someone and even remember like, yeah. Like, about a Cameo from this person? Like, I'm sure she would love it. I'm like, I'm sure you would love it. 

Steven Galanis (30:19)

Yeah. Look, I mean, I think there's like a ton of ways PR has been a really big lever for us over the years. You know, we're really prominent in gift guides. So you're like, Hey, 10 great gifts for dad for father's day. Like you're going to see us on those things, but really nothing's better than word of mouth. You know, it's like our happy customers sharing it with their friends and family. Like that's how most people discover us. 

Pablo Srugo (30:45)

Got it. That makes sense. So I think, I mean, you know, I would argue, especially for a marketplace, like once you start kind of seeing that ramp, late 2017, 2018, there's clearly a level of product market fit. My understanding of your business is it just kind of kept growing, as you said, like in 2020, even though it was growing very fast, was actually the slowest growth. Walk me through, because obviously like, you know, the paradigm for, I mean, the macro changed a lot since COVID and 2022 and on, and a lot of companies have had to, well, some have completely shut down, but certainly like reprise do a bunch of different things. Like I'm curious, for you personally, what it was like kind of hitting unicorn status, raising a 100 million dollar round. Was that something you took to heart or was that just like whatever? There's no difference between this round and the last round. It's just one more round. Like, I'm just curious to get into your frame of mind when that happened in 2021. 

Steven Galanis (31:38)

When we became a unicorn, by that point, it was much more of an inevitable thing. Like I think where it really made a difference was actually like our series A and our series B rounds. Lightspeed led our series A and You know, the same team at Lightspeed led it that were the first investors in Snapchat and Snap was going public right around that time. And I remember after our pitch meeting, Jeremy Liu, who wrote the first check, walked in with Nicole Quinn, the partner that would join our board from Lightspeed. And he said, Hey, Steven, it's unanimous. know, the Lightspeed partnership wants to help build Cameo. We're going to offer you a term sheet today. You know, we've got deep conviction in this business. We think that Cameo is Snapchat, but bigger that Instagram can't copy, right? Like, and this is from the first check in that.

Pablo Srugo (32:28)

So we had Jeremy Liu on this podcast, by the way. a really sharp guy specifically talking about the investment in Snapchat. So it's an interesting comparison. And it was, I have other questions about that, but I can, I can understand the significance of those words from him. 

Steven Galanis (32:40)

A lot of people don't know. Cameo is headquartered in Chicago and Chicago is a place that's really good at B2B SaaS and logistics. 

Pablo Srugo (32:48)

There's not consumer. Yeah. 

Steven Galanis (32:50)

It is not necessarily known for consumer social. Now, marketplaces tend to be a strength. Grubhub was founded here. Groupon, which was one of the biggest, fastest growing marketplaces of all time, was here. Spot Hero, the biggest parking app of the world, is here. So there's been big marketplace businesses built, but there hadn't been a company like Cameo that ever came out of here. And because of that, tier one investors just weren't investing in in Chicago. It wasn't until just recently that Sequoia led a seed round in a company from Chicago. Lightspeed hadn't invested in Chicago and consumer since Grubhub Series A or Series B, whatever round they got in. you're talking like 2004 to 2017, sorry, 2018 probably when we raised that. About five months after we raised that round, Kleiner Perkins came in and it's like, suddenly now like this company in Chicago is getting anointed by Lightspeed and Kleiner and that ended up being a really, really big deal from a recruiting perspective. Because look, Chicago has like, there's enough people in Chicago to build any company you want. If you look at the 500 mile radius around Chicago, there's more software engineers produced in that circle than any other circle in the whole world. The problem is the region's been a net exporter of talent. So people go to Silicon Valley, they go to New York, they go to London, San Francisco. So it's always been about like, how do you build cool companies that the kids at University of Chicago in Michigan and Wisconsin and Illinois and Purdue and Northwestern, how do you get those kids to stay home? I was really excited as a Chicagoan, as someone that would have loved to have worked at a company like Cameo when I graduated Duke and came back to Chicago. I took a lot of pride in building that there. And it was really like, those were the rounds that kind of put us on another trajectory. By the time we were at Unicorn, we'd won every award in the world, we're fast growing, we had the brand recognition, we didn't need that there. It was just kind of an inevitability of where 

Pablo Srugo (34:58) 

It seemed inevitable by that point. That makes sense. 

Steven Galanis (34:59)

Yeah, we were just, six months before we became a Unicorn, the information rank Cameo, the number one most promising company in consumer tech. At that point, we weren't even thinking about that. We're thinking about IPL, right? and just unicorn was like a box to check on the way. 

Pablo Srugo (35:19) 

Milestone, a stepping stone. Absolutely. Let me ask this, like when it came to the series A, and especially think about Jeremy Liu, like, how did they think– what did engagement and retention look like for Cameo in those early days? Like, did you have a lot of repeat purchases that people keep coming back? How did you even think about that? Because it's not a typical like Snapchat is you're supposed to do use it every day. mean, and you could see that in the early days, like Cameo was never supposed to be like that. 

Steven Galanis (35:44)

So it was really early. And I'll tell you how Jeremy found out about Cameo. It's kind of a cool story. So we have this angel investor named Jana Messerschmidt. Jana was part of the syndicate called hashtag angels, which were all the like female executives at Twitter that after the IPO, you know, started investing in companies. She was a really early user of Cameo. She's obsessed with the Real Housewives. And she'd been DMing me on Twitter like every day for a month till I responded. And she basically is like, you have to let me on your cap table. I met her. I thought the world of her. I let her write a small check into our seed round. And then, you know, three months later, she calls me and she's like, Hey, Steven, I'm having a party at my house in Malibu. And Jeremy Liu, I just introduced him to Cameo and he's stoked about it. Can I connect you guys? my investors in Chicago at Seedstage, we'd created basically a spreadsheet of the best funds in the world and then the best partners there. And every individual partner at every top fund was ranked on a scale of five being the highest, one being the worst fit, and then, you know, A to D, right? And there was only five A people, you know, it was Reid Hoffman, Matt Kohler at Benchmark. you know, it's Jeremy Liu, like there was a tiny, tiny drop of people. These are not just the right firms, but these are the best investors at the firms to go do this. And Jeremy was like on that list. So of course I'm like, yeah, I'd love to meet him. So he sends me an email and he goes, Cameo's brilliant. We're having breakfast tomorrow. Where in the world are you basically? And I happen to be in San Francisco. So we meet at the battery. We have a quick chat and keep in mind at this point, we're probably doing tens of thousands a month in GMV by this point. Maybe it would get up to 100,000 by the time the process was over, but that's kind of the revenue. 

Pablo Srugo (27:42)

Very early still, 

Steven Galanis (37:43)

In year one, I think we did 300K in GMV. We did 4 million in year two. So this was that 300K to 4 million year. So 10X growth that year. And that's around the time where I met Jeremy.And I remember like I sit down to talk to him at the battery. We're scheduled for 15 minutes. I think I'm doing this rapid pitch. I'm maybe 10 seconds into my pitch. goes, Steven, no, no, no. I know what you're doing. And I've been looking for a business like this for 10 years. Let me explain to you why we're the perfect partner. And we spent the next three hours talking about what we could build and what Cameo could be in dream. And I had to go, it Labor Day weekend and I had to get back to LA for a wedding. So I had a flight and you know, I'm like, Jeremy, I gotta go. And before I leave Jeremy’s like “Steven, When you land in LA, you’re not american. You’re landing at gate 45, I need you to walk over to the united terminal gate 72 you’re gonna meet my partner Nicole Quinn there.” 
 
 

Pablo Srugo (38:40)

No way. 

Steven Galanis (38:41)

So I land, I walk over there, Nicole Quinn and I talk and it’s just love at first- she gets it ! she’s excited, she just  joined the board of Lady Gaga's company and Gwena Pelter's company. So she just got it, and her and Jeremy got it. And at the end of that, she's like, all right, Steven, this is Labor Day weekend. She's like, Tuesday, we're gonna fly to Chicago to come see you guys in the office, right? So I always tell this story to founders that when a VC, especially in consumer, when they get it, you know if they're into it, they will move heaven and earth to come track you down and find you and… learn about your business. So by the time I made it out to Silicon Valley, you know, I hadn't even met other investors yet. Like we get that term sheet from Lightspeed, that partner meeting the next, that following Monday. And then, you know, all my VCs are like, all right, well, we need to go build some FOMO and competition. And I ended up with five term sheets in the next four days because again, it's like people just felt our product. was just, and the thing that was cool for us always, and we didn't have a deck. at the series A, we didn't have the deck in the series B. The reason that they understood it was like, they were users of the product. They'd used it, they'd been playing around with it, they'd gotten it for their partners or someone gets promoted or retired. So it's always way easier in consumer when your VCs have used your product. 

Pablo Srugo (40:10)

Well, it's funny you say that because that was almost the opposite with Snapchat. For words like Jeremy Liu gets told by a senior partner to look at it. And it was because his senior partner had seen his daughter use it. And like the whole thing Jeremy Liu had trouble with was like, I don't fucking get it. Like he tried to use it. He's like, this is so stupid. But you know, ultimately he got it and whatever. But I understand with Cameo and a hundred percent, like when it comes to consumer, if somebody, like if an investor falls in love with your product, the odds that you or she will be, you know, want to invest are just much higher. And the opposite is as well.

Steven Galanis (40:40)

 And especially like, you know, when you start a pitch meeting out of like, “I bought a Cameo for my dad for his 70th birthday. It's the best thing I've ever gotten him”. That's a pretty warm way to start. 

Pablo Srugo (40:51)

Yes, You know, back to my question, I guess then in his case it was based a lot on just kind of thesis and understanding where this could go. But I am curious just in general, like the engagement question, the retention stuff. 

Steven Galanis (41:02)

So back to your engagement question, we're a marketplace business. We're not expecting people to come on. But the things that Lightspeed was excited about, Kleiner was excited about, and then in our series C, people were excited about was on the supply side, had net negative churn. So not only were our talent cohorts growing every single month when you looked at our waterfall. So that was great. In the early days, and honestly, even to this day, the biggest red flag would have been consumer retention, right? We had an NPS that was in the 80s or 90s. It was as high as any product, but people were, you know, not buying every day. You know, in fact, people were buying maybe once, you know, once or twice in their entire life cycle. that was always kind of, if you ever bearish on Cameo, was always customer retention. But the bullish bet would be like, there's 8 billion people in the world. They've sold like tens of thousands of these or hundreds of thousands. It's so new, right? And the TAM here is so big that if the product is that beloved, like people will, they'll figure it out eventually. So that's kind of the bull and bear case for Cameo. 

Pablo Srugo (42:14)

Was there ever a magic number? Like if somebody buys five Cameos and they're way more likely to buy another one or just anything related to that? 

Steven Galanis (42:23)

Not on the consumer side, but we've totally had that on the talent side. If you did your first three Cameos, like you're basically never gonna miss them, right? So it was always important. We had a metric called four and 14.  which was like doing four Cameos in your first 14 days. that kind of, if you did that, you were basically like locked into our platform for life. So we would spend a ton of time on the supply side, you know, with that insight, you know, making sure =we, activated talent is what we would call them when they hit that, that metric. 

Pablo Srugo (42:59)

And so walk me through, you went from a hundred K to 4 million to what , in terms of GMV?

Steven Galanis (43:03)

to 20 to a hundred and four years. 

Pablo Srugo (43:06)

Crazy. And is that, was that kind of peak a hundred million?

Steven Galanis (43:09)

No, 

Pablo Srugo (43:09)

you can't go beyond that. 

Steven Galanis (43:11)

Yeah.

Pablo Srugo (43:12)

 And then what happens kind of post COVID that then leads to -

Steven Galanis (43:16)

Let’s go over what happened in COVID first, because I think it's really important. So obviously, like COVID was was just such a crazy time in the economy, like people can't travel. But in our business, every single athlete, actor, celebrity in the world was out of work all at the same time. And what people don't realize is like athletes get paid per game. So when they don't play, there's no game checks coming in. Musicians get paid per gig. So it's not like you or I that got to sit at home at work and continue to get paid. Like if you're not performing, you don't get paid. So this ended up,you know, Cameo had been hot and you know, we just had Snoop and all these people are coming on. So we started in the first few months of COVID just seeing an insane wave of like the Lindsay Lohans and talent that we'd always wanted to come on. Charlie Sheen, like they're just, now they're just, everybody's just piling on and that continued to just have the rocket ship propel even faster because the market just hit this tipping point. And at the same time on the consumer side, you had stimulus checks coming. And if you go look at the first week of COVID, our business dropped by 50%, the first week of COVID. So I remember having an emergency meeting with my board and we're like, Brian, we need to talk about layoffs and how we're gonna solve this thing. And here's all the benefits and maybe we can cut the commuter pass because no one's going to work and maybe we could cut the gym membership. We were literally, founders, we're going to take our salaries to zero. We were just like, what do we need to save the business? And then a week later, they announced, I think stimulus checks started coming almost immediately. And then like, boom, business went up. And then if you think about it, from the consumer side, my mom is someone that is a cancer survivor. So she was one of these immuno-compromised people that you couldn't see. So for Mother's Day, I didn't get to see it, right? So what'd you do? You bought her a Cameo. There were no birthday parties. There was no going to concerts. There was no going to games. So on both the consumer side and on the demand side, sorry, supply and demand side, we kind of had these insane tailwinds that brought the business up on both sides. Now when the world reopened, like what happened? Revenge spending, right? So instead of… buying Cameos, like people wanted to go to dinner, they wanted to go to a festival or they wanted to go to the game. Every single musician that hadn't been able to tour for two years hit the road, they're touring, there'd been two years of no movie production happening, everything's just going. So then at the same time, stimulus checks are gone, like we start to see this drop in traffic that comes on both the supply side and the demand side because the supply was more busy and the demand side was… because they were spending money, the world was opening, they were spending it on other things. And suddenly the cost basis of our business didn't make sense based on where the new reality was after COVID. We were still way bigger than we were prior to COVID, right? Business was four or five X what it was, but when you're growing on this path and people invested you at a billion dollars, they expect that to go forever. And what we tried to do in that time with the money, is hire the best team we could. We hired an elite executive team, know, top execs from Uber and Airbnb and LinkedIn and McDonald, like just amazing talent that we brought into the executive team. We then started building other businesses. You know, we went after a subscription business, kinda like an OnlyFans Patreon competitor. We had a Cameo Calls business, which was FaceTiming with talent. We built a Cameo Live business, which could help, you know, musicians or actors do live streams, but it was really tailored, way better than zoom for a fan engagement. We started international expansion, you know, people were trying to copy Cameo all over the world. Like, let's build Cameo Japan, let's, you know, get in the UK, let's, you know, literally all over the world. So suddenly the company we were in 38 states and 14 countries from an employee base, and it got really big.

Pablo Srugo (47:20)

How many people did you have?

Steven Galanis (47:21)

At our peak, we had 437 and then probably another few dozen contractors around the world. Right. So, you know,it was probably close to 500 people. Right. And, and, you know, we're working on all these new business initiatives. get an NFT unit. I mean, like we're, but like that, you know, at that point, like I said, we were looking towards IPO. So we were trying to, we need to have a really diversified revenue base. And at that point, one of the things that we felt really certain about was merch. Merch, as I mentioned, was the first thing we ever sold. We bought a company called Represent: the world's leading celebrity merch company. And we really felt like this could be a thing post COVID when talent were busier that could stabilize our revenue stream. So suddenly we've got the merch business, we got the core business, we have Cameo for business, this B2B side, we have Cameo live, we have Cameo costs.

Pablo Srugo (48:15)

 Lots of things going on 

Steven Galanis (48:16)

Cameo past the NFT business. And our best people are kind of spread out on all the problems. And then when the business fell, the core business fell faster than the new businesses were able to make up the revenue.

Pablo Srugo (48:28)

How much, by the way, from peak to trough, like we're talking about a 20% hit, a 50% hit, like what kind of magnitude? 

Steven Galanis (48:32) 

We probably took about a 50% hit. Traffic was down maybe 60% from peak to trough, you know, and that's tough because OpEx went up three or four X in that time period, right? So that's where suddenly you go from being a profitable business in you know, in mid 2020 to business burning five, six million a month all of a sudden, right? And yeah, you can raise a hundred million dollars, but if it's, you're burning five, six million a month, it doesn't last that long. 

Pablo Srugo (48:59)

That's right. And then the other thing is the valuations usually are like, especially when you're growing that fast, they're always kind of these forward looking valuations and it was a hype time. you're, everybody was getting high valuations. 

Steven Galanis (49:11)

Totally. when we raised that billion. businesses like ours were trading 8 to 12 X forward net revenue. We were a $75 million net revenue business. We got the 12X multiple, 900 million pre, a hundred million post billion. It wasn't even controversial. Our round was 400 

Pablo Srugo (49:26)

Yeah, that's actually not that, like for that time, that's not that crazy.

Steven Galanis (49:29)

Really isn't. We had real revenue, right? There's a lot of companies in that time, in the Zerp time, that didn't have revenue or were purely speculative. 

Pablo Srugo (39:37)

There were 30 X multiples on, like for sure on ARR. 

Steven Galanis (49:41)

There are 100 X multiples. Like we had a pretty silver reasonable multiple. So our story wasn't that we got priced too high. It's just that the market started, as traffic came down, our business just wasn't producing the same way it was. And that's just something that didn't go to zero. if you drew the line from 2019 to 2023 or 2024, it's still a pretty good line if you ignore what happened in the middle. But of course you can't ignore that. 

Pablo Srugo (50:12)

Which by the way is actually kind of the macro story. You look at most things, go to e-commerce sales, look at whatever, and it's kind of like this trend line up into the right and this crazy blip that's COVID, and then it just kind of keeps going on that trend line. 

Steven Galanis (50:22)

And you know, like I think for some businesses, there's like actual structural things that change that would lead to evaluation coming down. But when we kept looking at ours, like the talent were still loving the platform and they were on it. And the customer NPS was still just as high. It wasn't that something else had popped in the market that made Cameo, you know, it wasn't cool anymore or everyone had bought it. You know, we've sold, you know, millions of Cameo, not tens of millions of Cameo or hundreds of millions of Cameos, millions, right? So this is still like a pretty small, you know, business. 14 % of American adults have unaided awareness of Cameo and about 40 % have aided. So there's still a ton of the market left to penetrate just here and forget about the rest of the world. So, you know, that was one thing that always gave us conviction is if we could get the cost basis right, like we have a real business here. And when we were doing as much top line as we were doing, we didn't need to be burning as much as we were. We could find a steady state of the business to get profitable and,you know, over three, like really painful rounds of layoffs. That's what we were able to do. And the business has now been profitable for the last year.

Pablo Srugo (51:34)

And so why was - the markdown you look online, it's like 90 % markdown recap, why was it so aggressive? It feels like from outside looking in almost overdone. I'm curious, like, what led to that? Or why did that make kind of the-

Steven Galanis (51:49)

it wasn't based on revenue, but valuation is always just- it's supply and demand, right? So ultimately, what happens in cases like this, especially when a lot of the money is coming from existing investors, is they're trying to dollar cost average, you know, the the investments that they made. So if you invested in a billion and you get to reinvest at, you know, way less than a billion, then your, at your entry multiple actually is like at a more reasonable place. You know, that might, the person that does both this most recent round and the series C their price is kind of like, it's like they invested at a three or 400 million valuation. Right? So it's all it is. It's dollar costs averaging down. And was just a factor of like, what was the market clearing price for us to raise the amount of money that we needed? And, you know, part of it is, you know, our business to make the acquisition and take some venture debt out with SVB. We needed to raise X amount of money to be able to restructure the debt. It was irrelevant what the price was. It was really like, what's it going to take to save the company? And, know, and that's what we did. And then from the employee side, right? Like, look, from an investor side, and I'm both an investor and an employee in the company. So like, I have every, I wear every hat here. As an investor, you never want to invest in something and have it go down that much. But as an employee, you got to remember if you're someone building the company that joined at a billion dollar valuation, your strike price of your options is up there. All of a sudden, like, you know, everyone knows you couldn't sell for that. So you're underwater. So what are the nice things about bringing the valuation down? Is it actually enables you to reset the strike price for all of your employees? And suddenly, like if you join Cameo today, it's like you joined at the series eight and you know, and now you're going to get - you're going to get upside on bringing you back to a billion dollars.

Pablo Srugo (53:33)

 But with much higher revenue and much higher basically everything else. 

Steven Galanis (53:35)

So I like to tell everyone it's like, if someone's coming to work for us now and they're like, well, I saw in the paper that the valuations down, like joining Cameo today is like joining a series A company that everyone in the world knows about. It's like a public company, kind of like a brand. It's got a hundred plus million dollars in GMV top line. It's profitable. there's not a lot of series a companies like that. 

Pablo Srugo (54:00)

So I think that's all true, but just to, just for the sake of it, because I think a lot of founders, especially the ones that are kind of getting to product market fit, obviously have never gone through or thought about a recap. Maybe if you could spend just a few minutes on like what that takes, what that was like, like how painful that really was. It seems to have all worked out ultimately.

Steven Galanis (54:21)

 It's super painful. you know, down rounds are always, you know, insanely painful. And I think one of the things that I will say is that so many of the investors that have been in the industry for the last 15 years, hadn't really seen a full cycle. So a down round became a death sentence effectively for a long time. Like in the stock market, companies go up and down all the time. When we became a unicorn, Snapchat was worth over a hundred billion dollars. It's worth like eight billion dollars today. It doesn't mean it's a shitty company. It's just like these things go up and down all the time. Nobody wants to take the tough medicine because from a fund perspective, Cameo, if you invested early is maybe something that marked up your fund and maybe returned your fund on paper and you fundraised off of that. So a lot of people kind of delay taking the tough medicine or trying to do, do a convertible note or let's do something that artificially keeps it. And then you have the issue of liquidation preference and like, do you continue to motivate the founders and the management team and the employees versus like keep your prefs. So, I mean, look, it's, it's brutal. It's a really drawn out process. I'm really happy for our company, like where we ended up for our employees. You know, if you invested in this round, I think you've got a ton of upside, but people, some people chose to invest. Some people chose not to invest and at the end of the day, all that matters to me is that this business is continuing to grow. It's stable, it's profitable, it's growing again, and it's gonna continue to exist as a going concern. And if we didn't take the tough medicine, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now because Cameo would have been gone.

Pablo Srugo (56:12)

Well, let's stop there. I know we're at the top of the hour. Let me just ask the two questions that we always end on. So the first one, we kind of touched on it a little bit, but I'll ask anyways, which is : When was the moment when you personally felt like you'd found product market fit with Cameo? 

Steven Galanis (56:26)

The first time I saw the first reaction video of Rhys Lane literally crying because she saw Cassius Marsh, I just knew we had something. 

Pablo Srugo (56:38)

And then the last question is if you could go back in time to when you were starting Cameo with a piece of advice for yourself or even some common advice you tend to give founders these days, what would that be?

Steven Galanis (56:49)

I think the biggest thing is to make sure that you're building in your EGI So what's 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? So often, and I've seen about six of these, six, eight of these cycles, micro mobility, AR, VR, web three, you know, what happens is like, there's always the next hot thing that VC money is after. And I see too many founders that just keep jumping from hot thing to hot thing. And then ultimately, you know, aren't building the thing that they would build for 10 years if nobody cared about. So I think it's so hard to do what we do as founders that you need to make sure you're working on something like you care about when everybody cares about it and you care about it if nobody cares about it. 

Pablo Srugo (57:35) 

Well, Steven, thanks so much for jumping on the show. It's been great. 

Steven Galanis (57:36)

Cool. Thanks, Pablo. 

Pablo Srugo (57:48) 

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