Cameo CEO Steven Galanis on building the first non-advertising driven social media company (at least in the US!)
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All right, welcome LPs. Today we are doing an episode with the co-founder and CEO of a super interesting company and one that's particularly timely given our recent main show episode on TikTok, Stephen Galanis of Cameo. So Cameo is an online marketplace where fans can book personalized video shout outs from their favorite celebrities. As I'm sure Stephen will talk about, it is the digital selfie. And

They have over 10,000 famous actors, athletes, and influencers on the platform from Flavor Flav to Denise Richards to Brett Favre, who has been very, very active on the platform. The big three. Yeah. Yeah.

who you can book right now to say basically anything you want on video for a price. Unless you think that this is just silly or frivolous or ridiculous, guess what? It turns out there are a lot of people out there who want this service and are willing to pay for it. Cameo is doing millions of dollars in bookings and earlier this year raised $50 million from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, Spark, Bedrock, and others. Welcome, Stephen, to the show. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.

Well, it's funny. The first time I heard about this, my first instinct was, will anybody really do this on the talent side? And then my second instinct was, wait, how has this never been done before?

It took me all of 10 minutes to flip from like, no, come on, to like, it is completely obvious. How is this not in the world already? I'm so curious to hear about your strategy of scrapping it together and laddering up from whoever you started with talent-wise to get the pretty amazing people who are on the platform today. From our side, I would actually totally agree with your assessment. When we started the business...

I had pretty absolute conviction that there would be insatiable customer demand for this. From the first time I saw a cameo, or what we today call a cameo, I really believed that this would be something that basically any fan would want.

The question was always, could we build repeatable supply? So in our marketplace, just like any other marketplace, the consummate chicken or the egg problem, we believed we needed to attack the supply side first for two reasons. Number one, the thing that's cool about our supply versus the supply at Uber or Airbnb or Grubhub or DoorDash or any of those places,

Our supplier famous and literally can drive their own demand. Right. So in our marketplace, supply begets demand because their fans, you know, the hundreds of thousands or millions of people that follow them on Instagram, on Twitter, on TikTok, on YouTube are the most likely people in the world to book them.

So we fundamentally believe that if we could build repeatable supply, we would have an opportunity to match demand pretty endlessly. And to answer your second question, why had nobody done this before? I think that technologically there were a couple things that needed to exist before Cameo could exist.

Snapchat was incredibly important probably to our development because prior to Snapchat, I don't think many people on earth had ever taken a selfie video before. I think Snapchat pioneered that format. Again, Instagram story probably took that to the next level. But I think you needed the...

the video selfie to become a thing before a cameo could become a thing. As we kind of like got into the business when we started raising like our friends and family around in our angel round, we actually found out that there were companies that did try to do this.

The problem was they actually started with A-plus list talent, and the entry-level price point was really high. There was one I remember that had Dwayne Wade and maybe even LeBron on it, but the price for them were $2,500. Yeah, especially together, I hear they're pretty expensive to do anything. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, we sold our first cameo, I believe, was $1. We were selling $1 and $3 cameos. And we always believed that if we could build liquidity in the marketplace and give people a great experience for $1 or $3, in the future, we could always go upmarket. But we believe that if you start too high, there's only so many people in the world that could actually do it. So for us, it was all about how do we –

do we price these in a way that makes them affordable to anyone, but also like still special, accessible and rare? Give us a sense of a couple of like example price points today for people who are like, okay, so you know, you mentioned some of those celebrities earlier, David.

Steven, off the top of your head, you know, two, three people that are on there today and what they cost. Yeah. I mean, probably the most famous example, right? Snoop Dogg is 420, right? I don't know. You know, like, I don't know how much Snoop Dogg, like, should be, but, like, that, that

to me is like the perfect price for Snoop Dogg right you know other guys you know I'm a big I'm a big sports guy so like for me you know that was always a great thing Lance Briggs who was like the you know along with Brian Urlacher kind of like the anchor of the Bears defense back in the day he's $55 right like

I look at all the time on Cameo and I can't believe the great value for a lot of these people. I think the Denise Richards is of the world. Charlie Sheens, most of them found their price point somewhere in the $250 range. So it's it's

Again, for a lot of these people, you know, that they seem so inaccessible prior to Cameo, like it's actually it's a great price point. And we always talk to our talent and tell them, don't worry about what you think your time is worth. Worry about what your fans could afford. As we were researching to talk to you today.

I think there's actually a really, really important underlying trend behind all this, which is not just technology and not just a marketplace and payments. And that's that. And this speaks to the timing of why this worked for you and didn't work before is that somewhere in the last call it three years, the relationship that celebrities and influencers had with their audience has completely changed. I've heard you talk about this on other shows, but I want to dive into this as we go.

But before we get to double click on that theme, tell us about what you did before Cameo because you had a decently non-traditional background for starting a company. And also get into, you guys are based in Chicago and you're building a big social app company, video company in Chicago. Tell us how all this came to be.

I think my entrepreneurial journey started in college at Duke. And while at Duke, I happened to be like the first person

of students that had my entire college career on Facebook. And this was still when the network was closed. You were 2009? I was 2010. But I remember when I was in high school, you used to need to have a .edu address to even get on the network. So I remember getting into University of Illinois and putting the deposit down just to get the email so you could join Facebook. That was a huge thing.

But why is that important? Well, while at Duke, I, along with this guy, Zach Moritas, who's now the CEO of a really successful company called Teamworks out on the East Coast, Zach and I started this Facebook group called Spartan Entertainment. And by the end of our four years of college, we had over 17,000 students in this Facebook group. So not just Duke students?

Oh, I've been to Shooters.

This place is awesome.

Only 8% of Duke students are in-state, so they all need to pack their shit up and get it to the next place. We started that. We had a hot dog stand. We had a t-shirt stand. We had a DJ booking business. We had an event booking business. So I really learned that if you could build a network effect business...

And you could get critical mass for whatever demographic you're looking for. There are always other things that you could do to sell with that. So we built a really, really lucrative business there. After Duke, I was an options trader and I traded on the floor of the Chicago board of trade for four or five years. While doing that, my uncle's a movie producer and he was producing movies.

In 2012, we had a bunch of big movies come out. It was like Lone Survivor and Rambo and Conan. They were just kind of like back to back to back. And all the guys in the pit were like, why are you here with us? And why aren't you in LA being a movie producer? So I did what any scrappy entrepreneur does. I started raising 25 grand a pop from all the guys that were around me. And we started investing in movies and television shows. While doing that, I met Martin. Wait, how does one go about doing that?

Like, how do you I know how you write a $25,000 check into like a C Corp startup. How do you decide I'm going to invest in this movie?

Well, the thing that was cool was my uncle always knew that I had interest in doing it. So he called me up one day and was like, hey, Steven, if you can, I'm producing this show called Safe. It's going to be Baywatch for, you know, in 2013. So imagine Baywatch. It's Greg Bonin, who is the original founder of Baywatch with drones and GoPros. Like what would Baywatch look like in 2013? Okay.

All the guys liked the idea, so I was able to go through them. He gave me a small allocation. He's like, "If you can raise half a million dollars," I think it was, or 250K, whatever it was, "I'll give you a producer credit on the show."

Well, within 24 hours, I was oversubscribed and we ended up taking down either half a million or a million dollar allocation. I don't remember what it was. And, you know, this show was getting filmed at Cape Town, South Africa. So I got to go to – I took my family down there. We got to go on set. Dolph Lundgren was like kind of the David Hasselhoff. So I got to meet Dolph and all that. You know, so it was a very, very cool situation. But anyways –

I met Martin, my co-founder there. So that was like that was kind of like one little important part of the story. While trading, me and Martin kept doing more of these deals. And because my uncle was a producer, we kind of had insider access to the deals that nobody else could get into. There was a lot of demand in Chicago to invest in movies because they don't see that type of deal flow. So that was really interesting. That's where I kind of learned that.

While Chicago doesn't necessarily have these celebrities walking around, there's a lot of FOMO because in New York or LA, they probably have it. And I think fast forward, that's why we were able to do so well raising early Angel and Series A money here versus going to the West Coast. And you guys have a huge LA presence. You think Cameo should be in LA, in Chicago. But I'm just thinking and listening to you, the demand side of the platform, the people, the audience, the people that are buying and requesting Cameos...

they live in Chicago, right? Like they don't live in LA. We're close to our customers here. No question. And look, my two co-founders are in LA. So they've always been there. I was the crazy one in Chicago by myself. So just to continue the story, I got a really cool opportunity when a college buddy of mine reached out and said, hey, LinkedIn is hiring for this role that

They're basically selling this product, Sales Navigator, into finance. And Chicago is going to be the next office. I got to be the first hire in the Chicago office to sell this product into finance. That gave me my first... So you went from being an options trader...

to then going into sales. Like this was a sales job for LinkedIn. For sure. Yeah. I'd never sold anything before. I probably had some natural sales skills, but LinkedIn gave me this opportunity to kind of see what tech was all about, which was

really fascinating. One of the downsides of trading, and I know I remember as a 21-year-old when I took my first trading job, walking out of the floor of the CBO for the first time, and it was like a dinosaur graveyard because there used to be 40,000 people there and all these different pits. And really, it was down to two pits, the SPX, which I traded in, and the Spider Pit. Those were the only two pits in the VIX, were the only two pits in the world that

were three pits that were still going. And as a 21-year-old, I literally remember having the thought saying, my dream is to be the last great options trader in Chicago, right? Like, that's such a weird thing. Like, no one in tech is like, I want to be the last great entrepreneur, right? So I think that, like, the writing on the wall was probably there for the first day I walked in. The more time I spent around the guys...

it was so clear that everybody had a fixed mindset. It was all about, man, you missed the good times. You should have been here in the 90s. You should have been here in 01. You should have been here, you know, 9-11, the flash crash, all this stuff. And everyone was talking about how everything great that ever happened in trading was like back in the day. And then when I got to LinkedIn, it was like,

It was amazing because everybody was talking about, look what we could become. Here's our mission to connect the world's professionals and make them more successful. And that was such a huge, big, ambitious thing. So for me, it was really, really exciting to get to LinkedIn. And I remember my first... Were you there around the IPO? I got there two years before the Microsoft transaction. So I left right...

basically I left like a couple of weeks after the Microsoft purchase. But my very, very first day at LinkedIn, Mike Gamson, who is now the CEO of a company called Relativity, but at the time was the SVP of sales at LinkedIn, gets in stage in Chicago and all the new hires worldwide are on Zoom, like all across the world. And the first thing he says, 9.30 a.m. on my first day, welcome to LinkedIn. Two years from today, none of you will have the job we just hired you for.

We know that we support that we literally have the profile data to prove it. Your job in the next two years is to become, figure out what your dream job is. Our job as a company is to make sure that you get the skills you need to get your next job. And all we ask is when you're ready to leave for another job internally or externally, you recruit someone better than yourself to take your place.

That's so different. That was mind-blowing to me. I never knew anything about culture. I didn't know about diversity. When I was trading, I didn't work with any women for the first five years of my career. And suddenly, you have people like Mike Amson and Jeff Wiener and the leaders at LinkedIn talking how important it was to balance out the...

you know, the gender bias and the upper levels of management at LinkedIn. And I just wasn't ever exposed to that and, and culture and values. Like these were not things that we talked about in trading. So it was so amazing to have that experience. Uh,

at the time that I did because really LinkedIn was the formative time in my career. It's kind of crazy all the things that come together to start Cameo. So you have literally options trading, market-making experience. You've got all your entrepreneurial DNA from Duke and then hustling and getting into these movies. Then you've got the Chicago connection. The best part are my co-founders. We didn't even talk about that. That's what I was going to flip to. Tell us about Martin and Devin. Yes.

So so Martin, who I first met doing the movie production stuff after a few years, when when I went to LinkedIn, the deal flow kind of dried up. And he had this crazy idea that if he became an NFL agent, he could maybe find the next rock by by trying to find, you know, big personality guys that he could turn into action stars and put them in my uncle's movies.

So the first guy he signed was this guy, Cassius Marsh, who played for the CLC. I was going to say, that's how Cassius got in his radar script. So that's how we met there. So for Martin, I had the guy that was an NFL agent and movie producer. So he just knew talent. And Devin, my other co-founder, who I went to Duke with,

Devin and his best friend Cody, Devin was an engineer at Microsoft or PM at Microsoft. Cody was an engineer at Apple. After two years of working in Silicon Valley and Seattle respectively, they both like hated their lives, hated their jobs, quit, and then spent a year traveling the world and blew up on this thing called Vine. Yeah, we talked a lot about Vine on our TikTok episode. Yeah, Devin ended up with like 960 million loops.

His best friend, Cody, who's now Cody Co., one of the biggest YouTubers ever. This is Cody Co. This is not just any Cody. So Cody had 3.6 billion loops on Vine. So literally, my CTO and my co-founder was a Vine star. And actually is someone that was famous enough to be on Cameo that if I had built it,

I would have wanted him to be on. And he's your CTO. And he's our CTO. So who better in the world to build this product than this team, right? You have the entrepreneurial marketplace DNA. You have the talent person. And you have this Vine star. And if Devin was as famous as Cody Co.,

then he probably would have been too famous to not care. Yeah, he wouldn't have been like, I'm done writing code. If Martin was Ari Emanuel, right, then he would have been too busy, you know, repping the rock and repping the number one pick of the draft that he wouldn't have had time to build Cameo. Right, timing is everything. Like, everyone is at the right place in their rise. And if you had joined

the CBOE a couple years ahead of time, you would have been too rich to care. You would have just been financing the movies yourself. So the thing that was fun was I think we really had... They always talk about product market fit, but I really think that this team had the correct...

founder market fit. And when, you know, there's probably 27 other teams in the world now copycatting and trying to do what we're doing. And I've met all of them, but the truth is they're always like missing something, right? They might have the product, but they don't have the talent DNA. They might have the talent DNA, but they're outsourcing the product and they're never going to be able to compete. One of my favorite investors who I met at Duke earlier this year talks about for founding teams and consumer,

the most important thing you need in a founding team is that you have each three of these people, the hacker, the hustler and the hipster. And if you're missing any of them, like it's not going to work. And sometimes that can be one person, sometimes two of one. But it's so important that there's not overlap, critical overlapping skill sets. So from a very early time, you know, I let Martin kind of take the reins on the talent side of the business.

I let Devin take the reins on the tech, and then I did everything in the middle, and I focused on building a company. We want to thank our longtime friend of the show, Vanta, the leading trust management platform. Vanta, of course, automates your security reviews and compliance efforts. So frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance and monitoring, Vanta takes care of these otherwise incredibly time and resource draining efforts for your organization and makes them fast and simple. Yeah.

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Were you able to take advantage of the distribution from Cody or from Devin when you were getting off the ground? Like, is there something that happened in getting users on the platform or getting the word out where you're like, oh, yeah, if not for that, like we would not have found. And you started actually with Cassius, right? Not with Devin or Cody. Yeah. Well, let's talk about that. So Cassius.

It's funny because people look today at Cameos, it's like, "Oh, wow, this thing went so fast." But it took us six months from when we had the idea to even sell our first one. And when we launched, we always had high conviction that because our supply had followers and was famous, that if they promoted on Twitter, on Instagram, they could drive the initial users to our platform, and that's how we could get the marketplace going.

So I remember the day that we launched, and it was a Tuesday night. It was sometime in March of 2017. I was down in Scottsdale, Arizona, trying to get the second talent on, who was a guy named Jason Kipnis that played for the Indians, who went to my rival high school. So I've known Kip for a long time. No way. So we were down there at dinner with Kip, trying to convince him to get on. Devin and Martin were in. What's your pitch to Kip at this point in time? You're like,

Hey man, I got this thing. Is this like, you're going to make more money or you're going to have fun? Or like, he's an all star. He's on top of world at the time. So like, I was just hoping like, you know, Kip would just put his name on it and Hey guys, we have an, now there's an all star. It just gave some credibility. Uh,

So I remember being down there and then Martin, Devin and Cassius Marsh were at Devin's apartment in Venice Beach and it was about 10 o'clock at night and we had this like original video that was the one that kind of gave us the idea.

And Cassius put a tweet out and he said, for $20, I'll make a video like this for anyone you want. And it was kind of a sample what we now call Cameo. We were called PowerMove.io at that point. Cassius sent the tweet out.

That was the problem, clearly. It was the name. - Cash has sent a tweet out, and I remember the guys have the Google Analytics going, and there's one dot in Scottsdale and one dot in Venice Beach, and we sent the tweet out, and we expected there to be this huge rush of people coming to the site,

And literally it was crickets. Nobody came. And in fact, not only did nobody come, but people started talking shit to cash and saying, you know, how cheap of you to be selling out for 20 bucks? How much is this company paying you? He had just given us 25 grand to help build it. So now he's mad at us. And like, it's a disaster. Martin's only NFL client is now out money and he's...

You know like so mad at him. He's your Jerry Maguire moment right here He and he storms out and Martin's pissed at me at Devon. What did you guys do? And then I'm just like maybe Google isn't working So I remember I signed off the site and the dot and Scott still went away and then I signed back on and it's like no Google's not working so cash and Martin might storm off

And me and Devin are just on speakerphone just trying to riff. And we're like, well, maybe Tuesday night at 10 Pacific time wasn't the best time to do it. Maybe we should have picked a different time, like all this stuff. And then all of a sudden, as we're talking, this dot pops up in Renton, Washington, which is where the Seahawks facility is. And now we're like, OK, cool. Someone's on the site. And the day cameo launched.

You can imagine, like today, there's like 20,000 people, there's all these videos, there's reactions, there's just stuff to do. There was nothing to do on the site. The MVP was a Google form. What's your name? You know, who do you want? And like, or what do you want them to say and put your credit card in?

And this dot's just staying there for like, it was probably four minutes, but it seemed like four hours doing on the site. And I remember like just being like at the edge of the table looking like, well, what is it? What's going to happen? What's going to happen? And then all of a sudden the dot just goes away. And we were so dejected and we're like,

shit, like the one person that came tonight, like didn't even want it. Like maybe I shouldn't have left LinkedIn yet until I'd sold some. So it was just so clear that like we, we screwed this up. And then my phone vibrates and I get a DM from this guy and

And he's like, hey, Cassius Marsh is my daughter's favorite person in the world. She's turning 16 on Thursday. I'm trying to book him to say happy birthday to her, but the payment process is not working. So at that, I'm like, don't worry. I tell him, just tell me what to say. Don't worry about it. We'll get it done. I texted to Martin and Cash. They don't want anything to do with me at that point. Like, they're mad at me. We don't get the video done for like another week. So we missed the girl's birthday. Finally, Martin gets Cassius to do it. And he's like...

Hey, Reese, it's Cash. It was like the worst candy of all time. And I was so embarrassed. I didn't even want to send it to the dad. But, you know, we got it. And I remember the next week I was down in Miami at the Miami Open trying to get someone on. And I remember DMing this dad and just being like, well, that's over. But, like, I threw it out there to the world, sent it back.

Two hours later, I get a DM. And the dad was like, oh my God, this was the greatest thing ever. And he sent a video of her watching it. And the daughter literally started crying. She was so happy. And at that, it was like,

I knew the second we had the first one, I'm like, if we can make one person feel like this, as long as we can keep cash happy and have them make more or whoever, if we can make one person happy like this, we can make thousands and millions and hopefully billions of people happy like that. Okay. So this is where I want to talk about the changing relationship. If I'm cash or anybody, the money's great, right? But like...

I don't think it's necessarily about the 20 bucks or 420 bucks. It's about, you know, this person loves me and my persona so much. And in 10 seconds of my time, I can make them so happy they're crying. And then they, I now have like this super deep relationship and like I've cemented them as my fan for life. And then they're going to talk about this and they're going to amplify me. And it just drives my own personal flywheel here.

That was absolutely the pitch that we were trying to sell. But until we had a reaction video, we couldn't really say it. So when I was getting cash on, we were purely talking about the economics. And I think at the time, Cassius was making a million dollars a year. And I told Cash, if you take a million dollars divided by 2,000 hours in a work week divided by 60, you make $6.25 a minute getting your brain beaten in in the NFL. Yeah.

So if you are charging 20 bucks a video, you do two of them or three of them per minute, you can make like literally six or seven X while you're making the NFL per minute by doing these at $20. So like that Jedi mind trick math like built liquidity and it got people to start at a very low price point. The idea is he should have taken all of his NFL earnings and just put it into buying equity and cameo. Yeah.

Well, his 25 grand check, I think, will hopefully do pretty well for him. But I got to say, like...

That started it. So we started with these pro athletes. So we started with all these guys. The first people we added were not people you launch a site with. And there's thousands of people on Earth that could have probably built a better opening roster to us. And we started just with pro athletes because we really felt we needed to be verticalized. We needed to be focused to start off. We always believed that more people could be on this. But we thought the problem was uniquely –

that only the top athletes are able to get endorsement deals. And there was a documentary called Broke that came out from ESPN that 30 for 30 many of you guys might have seen. And in that, there was a crazy stat that said like 80% of NFL players go broke five years after playing their last game. The average career is only two and a half years. So these people are so famous, but then they're not really prepared to do anything after football. And it's really, really tough for them because they've got a standard of living.

I,

Martin went to a thing and saw A-Rod speak, I remember, in 2016. And A-Rod was speaking at the University of Miami and he said that for the average pro athlete, they make 92% of all their lifetime earnings before the age of 28, which is crazy, right? I don't know, I'm 32 now. To think that for the rest of the next 50 years of my life, I'm going to make less money than I made, way less. I'm going to make a tenth of what I made from the years before that. Pretty crazy.

And so we really felt like that's where the pain point was. But then I remember Devin, like we had our daily video chat. Devin's like, I think

I think Cody and people like Cody might do good on this. And Cody, for those of you that don't know, Cody Ko, his roommate who had like 3 million YouTube followers, we're like, okay, cool, sure, yeah, let's try Cody and see what happens. And Devin and Cody, I remember, were driving from Calgary, where Cody's from, to Cody's cabin in Montana. So they were doing this long drive, and they decided to put Devin on for $1 and Cody on for $3.

And Devin and Cody were talking about how they have so many DMs on Instagram from all these people that have kind of asked for this. Hey, my little sister loves you. Can you wish her happy birthday? So what they started doing, they said, hey, I'm on this new thing. For $1, I'll wish you happy birthday. For $3, I'll make fun of your friend. And they kept opening their DMs and doing it. And then the people would be like, that's the best dollar I've ever spent. That's the best $3 I've ever spent.

And then Cody... So you're sort of taking this existing behavior and productizing it. Exactly. So then we started thinking, okay, Cameo is a way to monetize your DMs. That was the second pitch that we would talk about early. And then I remember Cody put a Cameo that we had booked for him from Thaddeus Lewis, who was one of my college roommates. He was a career backup NFL player. And he was...

Basically, Devin's a blonde and Cody's a brunette. And they made this YouTube video where Devin and Cody were going to like switch hair colors. And Cody was like scared to go blonde. And we booked Thad Lewis to like pump Cody up to be like a blonde. And like he played it in his video. And then at the end, he was like, and if you want something like this, I'm on it. Come to this site. And that's the first time the site really blew up.

Did that have the same problem that you had originally with cash where people thought, hey, like, you're selling out. Like, I can't believe you're asking me for money for this. This seems stupid. Like, why would this seem petty? Has that gone away? I think for the, at least for Cody, right, the influencer culture is literally about like selling. I wouldn't say it's literally about selling out, but like,

fans of influencers just are always buying whatever they're selling, right? Like their new merch line, their, you know, their phone cases, their meeting greets, their all that stuff in Patreon. It by this point had already kind of been established. So I think for digital creators,

Fans were already like used to kind of supporting their people because the economics of YouTube are kind of screwed up the top 3% of creators make 97% of all the money on the platform and then even I the last study I saw about this and I you know, this is third-party data But the last I've seen even among the people that are making money the median earnings on YouTube of even that that top 3% is like sixteen seventeen thousand dollars

So they're making all of their money basically by doing brand deals and by doing other stuff and by selling merch, by doing meet and greets. I think fans are just used to supporting them, even for athletes. Right. Like they sign autographs and they do showings. People pay. This isn't free. Right. Like we're not taking a new behavior. We're just enabling something that was impossible and making it possible.

Were you guys influenced by what was going on in China as you were starting all this and building all this? Or is it kind of like parallel innovations? And I'm referring to, you know, we talked about on the TikTok episode was going on in Kuaishou and then ultimately, you know, TikTok and Douyin and all these live streaming platforms in China where direct monetization is the business model.

We had no idea probably what was going on in China. We weren't influenced by it. To be honest, we don't even really pay attention to what's going on there that much outside of when we've had investor meetings, Series B, Series A. Some firms that have deep expertise of what's going on over there will kind of talk about the parallels.

But we're focused on what's in front of us. We see this. We know in this market in entertainment and celebrities, if you win the US, you're going to win the whole world. So at the end of the day, we're not...

very distracted by like other stuff that's there. I think, you know, now that we've made some hires like Stefan or CMO and head of international ran global marketing at TikTok. So he's literally like knows exactly. Well, it's so funny. That's the same approach that musically before TikTok took was, hey, if we win US, we're going to win the world because US drives the culture. Totally. And we saw that because, you know, Stefan was employee 16 and musically.

So he knew what that took. He watched that kind of evolve. He knew that if you won...

If you won the African-American culture and the rappers were on it and that became a cool thing, you were going to win the U.S. We're following a very similar playbook. On ours, there were two big trends that I think we recognized way before basically anybody else, at least in the real talent business. Because of platforms like YouTube and TikTok and Vine before it and Instagram, there are more famous people being manufactured every single day.

And people today are more famous than they've ever been. So I remember even thinking like Zion Williamson, when he came into Duke, he had 2.1 million followers on Instagram before he played his first game. One of my best friends started for the New York Knicks and was a captain there. Four-year starter at Duke, won national championship, and

playing on the Knicks as a starter and he had 47,000 followers. So people are more famous now than they have ever been. There's more famous people being manufactured every day. And the market, especially like the big agencies, they really underpriced, I believe, like the power of these influencers because like the whole culture was changing. Five years ago, Will Smith would never, is the highest paid actor in Hollywood, would have never been on TikTok.

or never been on YouTube. And now he's on it because the demands of fans are changing. They need accessibility. You can't be in your ivory tower or behind the red velvet rope as talent anymore. And this is why the people that are most in demand on our platform, it wasn't Justin Bieber or Beyonce or Kanye or Jay-Z. David Dobrik, who's a vlogger that you guys may or may not know, he was the one we knew about two years ago that was getting requested more than anyone we didn't have.

Right. And people would talk to me about LeBron and shit. And like we had the data who people are searching for. Steph Curry was the most searched for athlete in the world. And he was only number 30. And if I showed you the list of the people ahead of him, I bet you you couldn't even tell me who two thirds of them were.

So that was very eye-opening for us. It's kind of the same way that Amazon purportedly does private label products. They have the data on what people are searching for so they know what products to make. Similarly, you're like, yeah, I don't have to buy into this one person making a hot list and choosing what the price is to come speak at your event. We have the data. And the thing is, even traditional Hollywood...

In many cases, still don't get it. I had an A-plus list actors representative reach out to me about three months ago after our series beat. And he's like, you know, my client loves Cameo. He's obsessed with it. He'd like to become the official spokesperson. And all he's going to need is 20% of the comment.

We don't need a spokesperson. We are the spokesperson. He offered me 20. He's like for 20% of the common, you know, he will be the spokesperson. And like, I'm looking at what Cambio is worth right now. I'm like, dude, there's no fucking way. Not only that, but like he wasn't even willing to come on the platform. I'm like, I'm like, we've never given anybody equity. We've never paid anyone to be on it.

We've never paid anybody to promote. So we're not going to change it for you. We've gotten 20,000 other people to agree to this. And yes, you would kill it on here. But if you're not even going to be on, why are we even talking right now? That's really strange. That just so illustrates the whole world not getting it. But it's not strange because ultimately, if you look at what's working in consumers, especially in the fashion space, in the...

even in apparel, it's so hard to build a D2C brand today that pairing up with a Kylie can literally make something become a billion dollar business overnight. So I think that the direct-to-consumer, celebrity-based model, which Nicole Quinn at Lightspeed who led our Series A and is on my board, is probably the best in the world at doing right now between Sophia and Girlboss and House Labs and Lady Gaga's new thing and

And Honest Company, it's so hard to build an organic following now as a brand by pairing with a celebrity. It's so important. Our big thing at Cameo is that basically we are a marketplace of 20,000 different direct-to-consumer brands, but all the talent are just selling themselves. I think this is a really important thing. Yeah, right now they're just selling themselves, but like

I'm pretty sure D2C and Influencer are skating toward the same things because these influencers are brands in the same way that these single product companies are brands. And they're both trying to build like a new sort of like challenger brand that displaces the incumbent. And whether they're selling themselves and their time and their availability or whether they're selling you, you know, a consumer package good like

we're going to start to see these things really merge. And like we've already seen with Glossier, or not Glossier, well, Glossier too to some extent. Glossier, yeah, it was a blog. But with, you know, Goop, like the things that have sort of the hero founder behind them, whether they were famous for the company or famous before the company, like that is an enormous piece of power. Like I'm sure Emily Weiss would kill it on Cameo if she were on.

Well, and now we're getting more CEOs, right? So Alexis Ohanian's on, Crawley from Foursquare. Like founders and CEOs are getting on because look, if I'm a C-level founder or I'm just getting started and hearing from like Alexis or we have a lot of VCs on, you know, you can go book any of our VC investors. Like I make them join Cameo, right? They should be like the lowest price. And they're like five bucks for charity, but it's just...

But, you know, it's like, hey, here's my idea. What do you think of it? Right. Like we're going to have all types of different people on. There's, you know, the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Chicago is on Cameo and he does prayers for, you know, for charity. Right. So there's so many different. And you guys are like a collection plate.

And you guys mentioned that, you know, cameos for celebrities, there are animals on. There's an Instagram famous pig named Esther that did like 20 grand in bookings a couple months ago. I think the MIT Robotics Lab or one of the big robotics lab just put a robot on cameo. So we have our first non-living thing on cameo. It's amazing. Wow. That's so amazing.

I'm thinking more about the value prop as you pitch, you know, the talent to come on. On a percentage basis of bookings that flow through your system, how much is driven by that talent directly? And how much is audience that is Cameo's audience that ends up sort of getting directed to them?

At this point, it's very, very much a cameos audience. So people, it's actually funny. There's a founder that's working on like a complimentary business, a very early stage, and he's done a really good job getting, um,

like hall of fame, like baseball players, like older, like level players. And he's got these huge names and he was just talking about kind of the frustrations of, of getting them on, but these guys don't have a big social following. So he really needs to kind of bring the demand, which was why us getting the YouTubers and the Viners early was so important because that unlocked kind of those people knew how to promote themselves and, and Cody might tweet and then someone would see like an athlete they liked and that kind of built the network effect. Uh,

But at this point, the vast majority of bookings are now coming directly from people going to Cameo.com and browsing and finding. And that's why things like our search algorithm are becoming even more critical because today our algorithms mostly based not by who's on or how famous they are, but it's like how good are they at making cameos? So we...

This algorithm goes basically by how many have you done, how quickly do you do them, what's your all-time completion percentage, and what's the average turnaround time, and then your customer rating. So it's a function of that. So we basically try to like...

Our customers are coming to Cameo.com and we're trying to-- - Your search algorithm is like Airbnb's search algorithm or Rover's search algorithm. - Yeah, and you know, there's good and bad to that, right? The bad is that people that are new to the site, unless they kind of pop right away, they're gonna get buried by 20,000 others. But I also think our early adopters should get rewarded, right? So for us, we're constantly tweaking the algorithm

And now we'll make a tweak and then we'll hear about it the next day because nobody ever comes to us and says, oh man, this is so great. Your new algorithm made me more money. But if people's bookings come down a little bit because we make a tweak, oh, you just killed my business. But it's like, you don't have a business unless we're here. It's so interesting. I mean, you bootstrapped it using the audience of your early influencers and you had a strategy by...

by using influencers rather than traditional celebrities. So like people that had the following that they could direct to sort of like build your platform. But now it's a totally different value prop. And you can say, no, no, no, this is our audience we're bringing, not you bring your own audience. And I think that's really important. And I think something that

is often missed in a lot of these businesses where it's like, "Oh, well, they'll join because of the promise of future audience." That tends not to work. Well, look, when we got started and we were doing... Yesterday was our biggest day ever. We did 4,000 cameos yesterday. It took us a year to get to basically 1,000. So back

Back then, I remember in 2016, 2017, pitching people like, "This is Instagram, but this is Instagram in 2011 or 2012. You're going to get four likes per picture right now, and then in a year, you're going to get 40 likes per picture, and then two years, you're going to get 4,000." And in 10 years, likes won't matter at all, and we'll hide them.

But this was the same thing. I said, you just have to believe that this is going to be a thing. And I think now post the two rounds of funding that we had last year or this past year that really kind of put Cam in the map, a lot of talent were really scared to join early because they weren't sure if the platform would last.

And I think like the legacy of the Lightspeed and Kleiner around the A and B for us was that finally talent could see, OK, this is here to stay. People are making real money on this thing. You know, it's backed by some of the best investors on Earth. And, you know, it's worth me putting my name on it and really trying to build a following up on here.

How much value is there to the platform of all of the corpus of past content that's been created on Cameo? I mean, obviously, because it's requests, it's like it's the new stuff. It's like I'm paying for the request. But does I would imagine for especially you take an individual celebrity on Cameo, they're all of their past videos is what probably generates data for you guys for where to see them in the algorithm and that sort of stuff.

The thing that's kind of interesting is while a cameo for you or your friend is really interesting, it's not that interesting to watch. If I don't know...

And I'm watching like Charlie Sheen wish John happy birthday. It's like, it's not the most interesting content in the world. The reactions are super interesting. And look, some cameos are just objectively interesting. Uh, three weeks ago we went viral for Mark McGrath, uh, breaking up with, uh, some, some girls long distance boyfriend, you know, and like this got on barstool. There were hundreds of millions of views of this video. So, so they happen. And,

And we think that the great cameos, it doesn't matter who they're for. They're out there. So I think there's a content business we will be able to build in the future. I think it'll be great for our talent because there's certain people, like when people ask me, who should I book? Michael Rapoport is the best person on the platform, in my opinion, hands down. Perez Hill is incredible. You give them anything, they're just going to turn this into a work of art.

And because I know who those people are, I want to show people how funny their videos are and how big their personalities are. And if people watch that, then they become a fan of them. And this is – we talked about the value prop a little bit too. Our value prop at Cameo to Talent is, look –

You come on Cameo and you are getting paid to become more popular. Like literally when you do a video, that fan that got it likes you more than they ever liked it before. Statistically speaking, over 80% of them are going to get shared. So they're going to end up all over the place. Their friends are going to see it. They're going to see how funny you are or how great your content is or how nice you are. And literally it's this positive brand multiplier effect. That's fascinating. Yeah. Get paid to be more popular. Yeah.

Have you thought about the best ways to double down on amplifying the best content? Like, should there be like a TikTok channel of best cameos that you could just flip through all day and see...

Yeah. That's why, that's why we brought Stefan over. Right. Uh, I think Stefan at TikTok did this better than anyone on earth. And that's why, where we went to go hire CMO, like that was right away. Like that's like, that's who we need. And we went out and, and, and got them. And, you know, I think it's super exciting. I think you'll see more content out of us. Uh, we've been messing around with a podcast because at the end of the day, look,

We have like 20,000 of the most interesting people on earth on this thing. They love doing it. They love being part of the platform. You know, they're all asking what's next and, you know, what are the next things that we're going to build here? There's people that are just like cameo superfans.

They got one one time and they are obsessed with the company and they just want to see more from us. So I know our social platforms have been growing a ton. We just crossed 100,000 followers on Instagram last week and so many other brands. They'll go and buy, have fake followers and shit.

I'm very anti ever doing that because the authenticity is so important. So like the people following us, like they really like what we're doing. They didn't just jack it up so they could have a blue checkmark or anything like that. And and you're seeing this our best cameos. We're starting to feature them more. I really like what's going on on our Instagram page right now. But I think there's massive opportunity, just like TikTok did to showcase like the very best content and to put them on other platforms to drive eyeballs to us.

That was, like we said on our episode about TikTok, that was the genius of Musical.ly and TikTok was...

The best content won and it surfaced the best content. It didn't matter who you were didn't matter who you were following You could come on as a brand new onboarded user not have any idea what was going on and you're automatically seeing the newest best precious stuff without any effort on your part like that's huge Yeah, and you know, we have a lot of work to do before we get there. We're also in a different business as well You know like one of the really interesting things about cameos if we actually decide to become a social network is

We have a lot of the foundational pieces for that, but right now this is an e-commerce marketplace very much with social components to it. And the thing that's kind of interesting is if you really think about what Cameo could become...

you know, out of many different things that we could come into eventually is like cameo could become the first social network, not based on an ad revenue model, right. Which is super, super interesting. So for Tik TOK, for YouTube, for snap, for Instagram, for Facebook, the whole game is about like getting eyeballs on and having people watching this content and selling ads and data against it. I fundamentally believe that people are getting sick of selling data. Uh,

They don't want their data stolen. I think people would rather pay a premium to kind of have bespoke content for them. And Cameo is becoming this platform where every single video is being monetized for the fans by the fans, basically.

And again, you know, is it interesting enough that every video can be watched? Probably not. But neither is everything on Instagram or Snapchat or YouTube. We're aligning incentives much better. You know, we talked about this when we were launching the LP show at Acquired and starting Glow. It was like, you know, advertising is great. There's nothing wrong with advertising. But it is, at best, neutral to the content. Like, it doesn't, you know, add anything, right? But, like, direct monetization actually improves the relationship between the fans and the content.

Yeah.

For sure. I think personalization does too, right? Authenticity and personalization are the secret sauce because early when we were getting started, there were a lot of investors that were like, you know what you need to do? You need to pay these guys an upfront guarantee, get them in a room and record every name. Hey, John. Hey, Joe. Hey, Steve. Hey, Luke. And then use AI to construct. No, that would ruin the whole thing. But it's authenticity that makes it special.

Yeah, that's cool. Steven, I want to switch gears a little bit and go into general company building conversation. So you've grown super fast. You've had two big funding rounds back to back. You've drawn talent and dollars out of the valley to Chicago in a way that

You know, we haven't really seen since like Groupon, frankly, like the level of sort of excitement around this company. Tons and tons of founders listen to this show and early startup employees and stuff like that. So like reflecting back on mistakes you've made, what are some things you wish you would have done differently? And how could other people sort of apply that on their journey?

Oh, I mean, there's so many mistakes that we've made. But, you know, I didn't answer a question you answered first, and I'd like to address that before I get fully into this. You kind of asked why Chicago, you know, and for me, like Chicago was home. But one thing that was really, really special and I think helped me avoid a lot of mistakes that I certainly would have made if I was in L.A. or in New York or NSF was

In Chicago, there was this incubator, still is, called 1871. It's now ranked the number one incubator in the world. So while Devin and Martin were out in LA trying to build this, you know, build the tech platform and build the talent base, I was learning how to build a tech company. And through that, I got connected with a lot of the top investors and a lot of the top CEOs in Chicago because they all mentor at this place. They all kind of give back.

And through that, CEOs of other marketplace businesses, like Chicago gets known for kind of its logistics and B2B tech, but some of the best businesses that have been built here have been its consumer marketplace businesses. Groupon, Grubhub.

and then some emerging ones like Raise.com, the gift card marketplace, and Spot Hero, the biggest parking marketplace. These guys became early angel investors or became advisors to me really, really early and never asked for anything. They were just there to help. And I think when you think of the competency of Chicago

It's been the center of options trading and commodities trading forever. Marketplace businesses are our core. That is what people in this town do. They've been doing for 100 plus years. So it's not really a surprise that consumer marketplaces would be able to spring up in Chicago really well. And there's a wealth of talent that has worked at those. Now, on the downside, all those guys became my mentors and friends and really helped me

A lot of them were early funders of the business. The thing that's kind of funny is you'd never want to poach talent from your friends. So now it's like I have all these guys at my disposal, but probably if they weren't investors or weren't great mentors to me, I'd probably love to hire some of their top executives out. So that makes it a little bit harder. One of our themes on this show is that...

the power of incentives. You know, incentives are the most powerful thing in the world and like aligning them and, you know, so like those guys, like, yeah, of course, like they want to give back, they want to help, right? But like, this is the most powerful thing is like, you know, you're not going to poach their talent. I remember when Matt Maloney had his first call to CEO at Grubhub and,

And Matt told me, he's like, Steven, I built the biggest marketplace business ever to come out of Chicago. You're building a business that will be bigger than mine. And this is, we weren't even like a seed stage company yet. He's like, because you're selling bits, not atoms. He's like, at Grubhub, nobody cares in Chicago how many restaurants I have in San Francisco. So I have to build localized supply and demand in every market. Your talent is global and like their fans are all over the world. So if you just focus on the supply side, the demand side will come. And he's like,

He's like, I've never seen anything like this. It's the ultimate hack to getting a marketplace off the ground. And in fact, because they're all famous, when I was building Grubhub and I had the first three pizza parlors on, if I went and added 50 the next day, then nobody would get enough business. They would all leave. Because your talent can market themselves. If they come on the platform and they don't promote and they don't get booked,

then that's on them. It's not on you. So that was a big lesson early. But one thing he told me was, he goes, Stephen, the Chicago startup scene is littered with people that hired talent away from Grubhub or Groupon. And the most important thing is that you make sure that you find the person, not that like, he's like, there's so many people that hired their CMO that was the director of marketing, but like,

It's one thing to hire people from winning teams, but you need to hire the people that were the reason why those teams won. And that was a really, really interesting lesson that he gave me. You probably saw this at LinkedIn a little bit too. When you're at a successful company, the tide is rising, right? And that's great. And it's really hard to get hired at those places. Most people there are really talented and great. But like...

It's so hard to know from the outside who were the people that drove the tide rising up and who were the people that were floating on the surface. And sometimes it has to do with things like product market fit. In my time at LinkedIn, I was selling a product sales navigator into FINRA and SEC regulated firms that couldn't use the product because there was no compliance solution because

Because you have to archive everything. If you're a financial advisor, everything has to be archived for like seven years. So like half of our target market literally had no need for this. Or I remember they're like, we think venture capital is a big vertical. And I remember pitching VC firms before I was a founder and saying, look, with this, you could go search who's every San Francisco CEO, uh,

of a company under 10 people that, you know, graduated from, you know, Stanford and like worked at Google or Facebook. And here's a list of them and you could go hit them. But now, you know, it's like all referral based. It's all. So it's like we were selling something with no product market fit and

And, you know, and that's why I was probably one of the worst people that ever worked at LinkedIn. And look at you now. That was a great why Chicago. Let's hear some other mistakes you've made along the way and things you would caution other people against. Yeah, the biggest mistake we made, I think, was we overhired at a point, particularly, look, this company today, we just had, I think, our 23rd person has been here for one year, right? And there's 127 to...

something-ish employees right now. So there was a point where like for the first two years of the company, there were like sub 10 people here. And then there were points this year where we were hiring, like it would be a Monday and there'd be like nine people starting and the company expanded by,

35% in a day, right? And this was going on for like six months, probably right after our series A and then through our series B. And they always talk about hiring slow and firing fast. And we got to a point where we were hiring fast and firing slow, which really has a bad compounding effect because

I truthfully believe that every time you hire somebody, the culture gets better or it gets worse. Even if you're not personally interacting with those people, maybe the five people on the customer service person that's interacting with a bad manager or a bad coworker, their experience is worse. They're going to interact with other people at the company. So even when we were growing so fast, not that I think our culture ever got bad, but

But I think like when we were growing so fast, we weren't able to put enough time into the people we were coming up because we believed we were in this land grab. It's like, there's 5 million people on earth that can be on this platform. All we need to do is worry about the supply side. So let's hire, you know,

every 22, 23, 24 year old in Chicago that has Instagram and can DM people and like, let's hire all of them and let's ramp them. But we didn't get to put enough time, I think, into people that joined, you know, probably from like maybe let's say employee 40 to like a hundred. I think it got to a point where I wasn't interviewing everybody anymore. People suddenly got here and, uh,

There were diminishing returns on some of the talent people that we brought in because when you add the 157th real housewife, it's not going to have the same impact as you added the fourth, right? Because now the marketplace, it's not just how many we're adding. It's like, are we filling the buckets of people that we don't have? So we were building this strategy that was just-

Yeah, it was just get everybody on. And then very quickly, you know, within probably three months, our unit economics turned upside down. And just like if you're running a marketing campaign, because like talent acquisition was actually our marketing, right? Because we didn't spend any money on marketing unpaid, but we were spending money to hire people to acquire supply, which was beginning its own demand.

So just like any other marketing campaign that's not working, you know, you ramp it down and you find a new channel to expand it to. So for us, I think that was a really critical moment. We had, you know, we hired all this people that, you know, our headcount was up 5x of where it was in December and revenue was basically like, you know, maybe 30 or 40% higher than it was. It's like, that's not good math. So let's like ramp down the talent team or let's like reallocate some resources. Let's...

build out a marketing team. Now we are a demand-constrained business versus a supply-constrained business for the first time because now we have way more talent on that wants to do more canyons, and now we need to turn on digital marketing, paid,

and start actually doing what every other marketplace like our big mistake is we truly thought that our marketplace was special from every other marketplace that existed and we didn't have to worry about demand all we had to worry about supply and that worked for a long time and then the reality caught up and it's like steven your business model is not different than everyone that ever worked like

And we had to start playing the rules of marketplace. Maybe an Uber do a lot of marketing. That doesn't mean they're bad businesses. That's just how it works. Yeah. And then even there, like, um, so that was a, that was a big mistake. And I think the other thing that's tough is like executive hires, right? Like,

Just because somebody did something really well somewhere else, it doesn't mean – and this goes to the Matt Maloney thing. It might not mean that they were the reason why they won. They might have just been part of like a winning team. And I think like across the board at Cameo, every day now we can attract way better talent than we could two years ago or a year ago for sure. So the resumes that I get are insane and I'm looking at these people and it's like –

I'm now hiring resumes where before we were probably like really good at hiring people and identifying people that might have like a really, you know, high ceiling. And now sometimes it's like I think you get bigger people. At LinkedIn, I tell this all the time. You'd almost look for people with like a higher floor, right? Like, well, if this person did really well here, they can't possibly be bad. And I think that's a really, really tough thing because, you

you know, when I'm going to make it a marketing hire, I'm not just going to hire somebody off the street. I can go hire the CMO at TikTok, right? And like, I can go and try to get that talent and balancing that out with the people that have helped us get to that point, I think is really important. Another thing that we did that some people swear against and others don't is like,

I started this business with a lot of my friends and family. I had to fire my brother, which was probably the most painful decision I've had to make. And look,

This business would not be here if not for some of my best friends and family kind of stepping in and really helping this get off the ground. But sometimes they can't scale up with the business all the way. And those are really, really hard conversations. I've been super fortunate that my co-founders and Arthur, who's our COO, who is a good buddy of ours from college and I worked with at LinkedIn, they've been able to just scale beautifully up as the business has been going.

But the chances of that happening are really rare. And it would suck to put all this time in developing relationships with your best friends, building a company together, and then just getting to a point where somebody can't keep up anymore. That's really painful. How do you think about that for yourself? Scaling into the needs of the role and making sure that...

You were the right CEO of a one person or a three person business and then you were the right CEO of a 20 person business. How do you know if you're the right CEO of a 127 person business? Well, I think it starts with really identifying what you're world class at and then trying to fire yourself from every job that you're not in hiring somebody better than yourself. So if you were to work at Cameo, on Tuesday we do our all hands and I talk about this every all hands.

My goal is to be the worst person that works at Cameo as quickly as possible. I want every single person that is here to be better than me. If I'm the worst person here, then I think that the level of talent will be so incredible here that suddenly, like...

I can just focus on the things that I'm really good at, right? I'm really good at motivating people. I'm really good at really articulating our vision, our mission, selling the dream, getting people excited about what we're doing. And then things that I'm not so great at, it's like, I want to fire myself from that ASAP. I want to hire world-class people to go do that. And then really finding other executives and other leaders that can balance my weaknesses out so I can just focus on my strengths. Because

I personally don't believe that

I'm a huge growth mindset person, but I believe that for most people, their weaknesses are like fundamental deficiencies, but they can be counteracted by not working on your weaknesses, but quadrupling down on your strengths. I think that's so critical. So I think a lot of times people sit there and spend so much effort and time and trying to get better at things that they suck at. We're like, you should just focus all your time on the things that you're great at and try to get, you know, even more world class at them.

The other thing too is I think surrounding yourself with just incredible mentors is so critical, especially for a CEO. So I've been very lucky to have people like Mike Gamson, who is the very top of my org at LinkedIn.

Ended up introducing me to Jeff Wiener very early on. Jeff invested in the company, has become a huge mentor to me. Having people like Mark Lawrence from Spot Hero, George Mooses from Raise, Matt Maloney from Grubhub. Constantly being able to talk to these guys and hear like, hey, how did you do this? How did you do that? It's really critical. So many of our listeners will want to know, and Dan Lewis from Convoy talked about this too,

And so many stories, it's those mentors that help bring you along the way. How did you get those mentors? Like, did you have a strategy? Were you intentional about it? Was it an accident? Was it just that you were doing something interesting? Like, how did that start going? I think it started with Mike Jansen.

When I left LinkedIn, he knew about the business. He cold called me three months later. He funded our seat on the spot. And then I spent a lot of time with him. And I remember when Mike invested, he said, Steven, with my money, you get my most important resource, my most precious resource, my time.

Call me anytime. Text me anytime. And he was so generous with his time. And then he started introducing me to people like Jeff Wiener and a lot of the others that I've mentioned really came through Mike Gamsen really changing my life more than anybody. And I didn't solicit that. And it was so nice as a CEO to find other people that...

I had been there, done that, and had had people be helpful to them. And I think this is so Chicago. The tech community here is small but very tight-knit. Everybody knows each other. Everybody wants everybody else to win. You know, because a win for one is really a win for all here. I think being in Chicago really helped that where if I was in L.A. and –

You know, everybody, there's so many vested interests in entertainment there that if one person's your mentor, then you're their arch rival, you know, is like going to go out of their way to try to kill you. For us, like people are just really interested in what we're doing. And I think excited about, you know, me and what I and what I could do and what cameo working in Chicago could mean to this whole ecosystem. I think I think that was big.

One last thing I want to ask you or give you the opportunity to talk about before we wrap up, because I've heard you talk about this before, I think is also on this vein really important. You guys left your jobs and you went full time on Cameo well before the idea was fully baked. You had any signal this was working. This probably also speaks a little bit to why mentors were attracted to you. You guys took a real risk. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah.

Yeah, it's pretty funny because I have a group telegram chat with all the guys that I worked with on LinkedIn that sat right within kind of earshot of me. And when Martin and I had the idea for Cameo, I came back in the office the next day and I was telling everyone. And honestly, everyone was super excited about that. And

Like three of the six of them like now work here as executives, you know, which is really, really cool. And basically a group of us, LinkedIn would give Christmas through the first week of the year off to all employees, kind of like winter break, um,

And I remember going to Nicaragua and there were about eight of us from LinkedIn and we were sitting in a hot tub on New Year's Day and Wilhern, one of the guys I worked with in another office, was like, "Steven, this idea is too big." And up to that point on this trip, everyone was talking about, "I'm gonna run marketing, I'm gonna run sales, I'm gonna run product, and we are gonna build this billion dollar company while

getting free lunch and great benefits at LinkedIn, like out of spare time, right? Like none of us were going to quit our job. And I remember Will just asking me, he's like, Steven, this idea is too big. If somebody else builds this company and you're still at your job at LinkedIn and they become a billionaire, could you live with yourself? And nobody had asked me that question before. And it was so clear in my mind that I would not be able to live with myself if somebody else took this idea, ran with it and beat us.

that I never went back to LinkedIn. That story I told you about Mike Gamsen, his next play speech, and two years from today, none of you will have the job we just hired you for. My last day at LinkedIn was my exact two-year anniversary of my first day. And I remember thinking,

writing my farewell letter they call it the next play letter to the team and I explained to them what I was doing and I told that story and I'm like look in this case Mike Dampson's prophecy came true I'm gonna go pursue this dream on my exact two-year anniversary just like you said and you know that email was actually what started the chain of events that led to him investing and Jeff becoming a mentor and like you know you talk about full circle but uh

That's why I'll always say LinkedIn was the formative experience of my career. That's so awesome. I guess before we wrap up, one, anything else that you want to leave listeners with that we didn't talk about? And two, where can our listeners find you on the internet or follow you or any of that? Book you on Cameo. Yeah, I'm bookable on Cameo. On Twitter, I'm at MrMR312Chicago's area code. Nice. And a good beer. So follow me.

Follow me on Twitter and a good beer. I'm really, really active on LinkedIn. So that's always a good place to find me. Cameo.com is where you should be booking your cameos. Apple.com.

We're subject to the Apple tax on iOS because they call this a digital good. So do not buy Cameos in our app until I tell you differently because they're 42% more expensive than they are on web. So Cameo.com, not Cameo app. If you want to buy Cameos, that's where you should go. Love it. Steven, thank you so much. Great. Thank you guys for having me. Yeah. Have a good one. Thanks for coming on.