--:-- Host: Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. We have a tremendous conversation for you today with Stephen Galanis, co-founder and CEO of Cameo. Yes, that Cameo, the marketplace where you can connect with creators, sports, with athletes, celebrities, all kinds of different influencers, icons, and have them send personalized messages either back to you or to a team member, a loved one. People use Cameo to send happy birthday messages, thank you messages, congratulations messages. It's a wonderful platform for connecting people with the individuals that they follow, that have influenced their lives, who've done meaningful work. And building that business, while as Stephen will describe, Cameo had product market fit from very early on, was not without its major crises throughout its development. And we get into those, dig deep on the leadership philosophy that Steven and his founding team have used to navigate those crises and what has consistently allowed them to bounce back and be one of the most successful marketplace businesses of our age. Wonderful, wonderful conversation. You are going to love it. If you're watching this on YouTube, please like the video. Subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. If you're listening on Apple or Spotify, subscribe, leave a rating and review. It's incredibly meaningful to me. It's telling those platforms that more people should watch this show, and it helps connect us with more audience members, helps us grow the show. And then if you have questions, comments, et cetera, YouTube is where we capture those, and we pull off those questions in future episodes when we do our Q&A show. So love you guys for being here. Love you for listening to the show. With that, let's get on to this absolutely tremendous conversation with Stephen Galanis.
--:-- Host: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Steve, it's great to have you on the show, man. I appreciate you making the time.
--:-- Guest: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Host: Yeah, there's a part super early in your story that I'm interested in because I think it's something that happens to a lot of entrepreneurs. And I just want to take you back. In college, you start this Spartan Entertainment. You're building this big community. So far as I think I saw that you're nicknamed the mayor and all this kind of stuff, which is awesome. So very entrepreneurial. And then your first job out of college is actually kind of going back into the corporate world, right? Like a trader for large finance. I'm interested in, because I see this a lot in entrepreneurs' journeys, where early in life or college, they have this pull to build their own business, and it's almost like we have to try the other side. Was it a feeling like you needed to try corporate life, or why not roll your kind of entrepreneurial spirit right into an entrepreneurial endeavor right out of college?
--:-- Guest: Yeah, that's a great question. Half of you asked it. But one thing I know a lot of you that are listening probably can empathize with, the entrepreneur that was finding every excuse to be entrepreneurial even before college was over or while it was going on. I can't tell you how many successful founders I know that were running the nightlife at their school. And I think it is a very similar skill set. But in my particular case, I had built the moat of my business in college, which had gotten really big. And there's a little background. So Spartan Entertainment was a company I started with my co-founder, Zach Moritas, who's now running a really successful software company in the Triangle in North Carolina called Teamworks. The two of us started this business where we used Facebook in the OG days. This is still when you needed a .edu email address to even get on Facebook to eventually aggregate a group of 17,000 college students at Duke, North Carolina, NC State, Elon, and the surrounding communities. This became the dominant force in nightlife in that area. In that generation, by my senior year, we were throwing 17 recurring events a week. I'm getting paid cash every single time somebody's coming in the door. It was a great business. But what ended up happening was right at that point, because I was the first grade that had Facebook all through college, eventually once people started graduating, they needed to get rid of the .edu limitation. So they ended up opening it up. And then suddenly the bar owners and the venue owners, like anybody could kind of create Facebook events. It didn't just have to be college students. So we kind of lost our edge, if that makes sense. That said, the network that we built was pretty enduring. In fact, the signature party that we started Wednesday night, beer pong and shooters still goes on today. And I'm about to have my 15th year reunion. So this thing is going about almost 20 years strong now, which is pretty funny.
--:-- But really to answer your question, I think you also have to go back to that time period. I graduated in 2010, which was right in the middle of the financial crisis. So you could imagine that maybe if I graduate three years earlier or three years later, you're sophomore year, junior year, you're interning on Wall Street or at a consulting firm and then you're going to go work there. And there was this whole cohort of people that were walking around Duke at that time that like maybe otherwise would have been at a Goldman or maybe otherwise would have been at a McKinsey that ended up starting companies like Coinbase and Plaid and Airtable. These are guys that were all the same age as me in that cohort from Duke in that era was pretty incredible about the talent and founders that came out of it.
--:-- But one thing that I feel really confident about is that the time that I spent both trading and at LinkedIn were things that really did shape me professionally. Now, I think in both cases, I probably, especially trading, if I'd done two years of it versus five years of it, I would have been better off. But at the same time, I don't have regrets because I learned a lot. I made a lot of the connections that ended up being those that were my early investors or early employees of the company. So I don't have any regrets, but I do tell people that I always knew I was going to start a company. It just took me like nine years to find a really good idea.
--:-- Host: Yeah, I actually, when I'm talking to younger people or whatever come up and whenever you have a public platform like this, people seem to assume that you have all these answers. And sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. So I'll get questions asked and stuff, and I'll tell them, look, I think for some people, and probably my guess would be the majority of people, actually taking that time, if you have an entrepreneurial bent or that is ultimately your goal, taking that time to go into the corporate world in some capacity and getting a feel for that side of business. Because there are a lot of really good lessons that you can learn, and also you can learn a lot of things that you don't like. Right. And I find that my most successful entrepreneurial endeavor was actually the result of building. I'm not going to say solely, but building against aspects of the business that I didn't like or I disagreed with and then building off of those. And I wouldn't have had that if I hadn't spent about a decade of my life in different kind of corporate endeavors. Does that play with you? Does that sound right? And maybe what should someone be considering if they have a similar entrepreneurial bent that you have when they're coming out? Like, how do you make that decision? Should I just press into more entrepreneur or whatever? We'll start from the top on this.
--:-- Guest: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a deep believer that entrepreneurs are born not made. I think you can become more entrepreneurial by hanging, working at startups or being around other entrepreneurs. But most entrepreneurs that I know, they were entrepreneurs in kindergarten. They were the ones with the lemonade stand or they were flipping baseball cards or pogs or like whatever the fuck it was.
--:-- Host: Like pogs. Oh, my God.
--:-- Guest: I just see that over and over and over again. In fact, there's a personality test we used to make everybody take in the OG days at Cameo. It's called 16 Personalities dot com. And only three percent of the human population has what's called the entrepreneurial archetype. And this is someone that's forward looking. It's someone that's not deterred by failure. They're resilient. And those are just skills that are absolutely needed. One hundred percent.
--:-- Now, one thing that I'll tell you is that entrepreneurs can be fostered by being around other entrepreneurs. And one thing that we've done and I take a lot of credit and I take a lot of pride in is we've always openly wanted to hire future founders, people that know they want to be an entrepreneur. They want to get their feet wet. And I think there's probably over 10 people that have left Cameo over the years to become venture backed CEOs, including two that became unicorns. Which is something I'm a college sports fan. I love thinking about coaching trees and the CEO tree and the alumni tree of Cameo has really spawned some incredible founders that have come through and tried to do things from pet insurance to NFTs to marketplace for art or different things in the creator economy. So we've kind of run the gamut. But I think that's super important.
--:-- And then the last thing that I'll mention is that if you are an entrepreneur and you know eventually you're going to start a company, but I really would say this is true for anybody in any job. It's critically important to find the thing that's your ikigai. This is a Japanese philosophy that I really love. For those of you not familiar, imagine a Venn diagram with four circles instead of two. And basically you're trying to find the intersection of what are you great at? What do you love to do? What does the world need and what can you get paid for? And if you find the intersection of those four things, you kind of get what I call like the Ironman heart. It's like that perpetual motion machine. It keeps you going through the good times, through the bad times. You could have the best ride up ever, but that doesn't mean the comedown is going to be anything but rocky. 99.9% of entrepreneurs go through major, major adversity at some period. And sometimes the sector that you're in is the hottest thing in the world. And other times, nobody wants to touch it with a 10 foot pole, especially on the venture side. So ultimately, the way that I've always looked at it is if you find the thing that is your ikigai point, it allows you to keep going on regardless of what's going on around you.
--:-- And then the last thing that I think is really important. And this is when you asked me the first question, Ryan, like, do I regret being in the professional world versus being an entrepreneur? As long as you're learning, you don't regret it. But the big thing is, I see too often, and I've been guilty of this myself. Like I mentioned, maybe if I just did two years of trading, I kind of got what I needed out of that. And I would have been ready for the next thing, but I stayed for five. And ultimately I think that's so important, whether you're in a role and thinking about a promotion or at a company, should I stay? Should I leave? Are you learning? Are you growing? And if you're not, you should find something else.
--:-- Host: Yeah, I completely agree with that. I also think one, just to build on top of that idea, even if you're at a job that's not your dream job, or maybe you aren't necessarily, it's not your ikigai, I think oftentimes we then down throttle how much effort we put into it. We're like, oh, well, I'm an administrator in this company, and it's not what I want to do. I want to be over here. And then we spend half our day memorizing baseball stats because we can do our job in the first hour. I mean, that was like my career at American Express. And so I'll actually ask people, yeah, I get it. You don't love this thing, no doubt. But are you giving 100% to it to even see what you're capable of? And I think a lot of times we get into these positions and if it's not what we see ourselves doing for 10 years, we downshift and coast. And that just kills all our momentum.
--:-- Guest: Totally. And that really what the whole premise of the ikigai framework means to say is like if you found that thing then you are going to put the time and the effort because you love it. You're great at it. You're inspired by it. You can make money doing it. That's so important.
--:-- Host: Yeah. Now, do you think I want to go back and double click on this idea of you having multiple successful startup founders coming out of your culture? And I saw that you have six core values. I'm going to read all of them, but there's three I would love for you to kind of expand upon. But I'm going to read all six for the audience quick here. Number one, roll out the red carpet. Two, act like an owner. Three, challenge assumptions. Four, embrace innovation. Five, fight for simplicity. And six, make it memorable. The three I would love for you to maybe expand upon in whatever way you see works, because I think they're topics that to me are kind of a little different and I think very interesting. Are one, roll out the red carpet, two, act like an owner, and three, fight for simplicity. Those three ideas immediately caught me as differentiators from what I've seen in other kind of corporate core values.
--:-- Guest: Well, I will tell you that those are the three that have stood the test of time. The other core values have been altered at different points, but those three along with run through walls, which is no longer a core value, but still very much an ethos of Cameo, are really the pillars upon which we built the company. The thing that's kind of cool, I mentioned there were like four kind of OG core values at Cameo. We have six now, but each one of the founders and then Arthur Leopold, who was our first employee founding COO, each one of us had kind of a value that we brought to the table that became the bedrock and foundation of our culture.
--:-- So starting with fight for simplicity, starting with roll out the red carpet. That was the one that came from me. The whole idea with roll out the red carpet is any single person that interacts with our brand, whether they're trying to interview for a job or they're a talent on the platform or a customer, the way that they should feel after interacting with Cameo is like they were just escorted down the red carpet at the Oscars and they're the star of the show and the red velvet rope is there and everyone they want to meet behind it. And we're lifting that red velvet rope up and introducing them to everyone they ever wanted to meet. That is us to a T. And when we think about that from an employee perspective, we always talk about your first day at Cameo should be the best day of work you've ever had in your life. And then your second day should be better than the first. And that's such an ingrained part of our ethos. And when we think about things like the return to office policy that we just did, we're giving a $10,000 raise to all of our Chicagoland employees to come do that. We lived up to our value of roll out the red carpet there. I don't know of another company on the planet that's doing that. I totally think that people were asking more out of them if they have to come in and their peers don't. So why should we not compensate them for that and do that in a really generous way? So roll out the red carpet, number one.
--:-- Number two, act like an owner is actually one that was a LinkedIn value. I worked at LinkedIn right before, so did Arthur. And this was one that we stole, but we really liked. It's this idea that every single person, like you mentioned earlier, being in that role, but you don't really love it, so you're remembering baseball cards. If you act like an owner, you're the CEO. If you're the janitor or you're the COO of the company, you're going to act like a CEO for your role. And we really believe in that. And part of putting our money where our mouth is, every single employee at the company has options in the company. So literally they are an owner. I've always felt that that was really important. And on top of that, it's just this whole idea that for the owner, the job's never done. So you're never just going to go say this is good enough. You should really own your work and feel like your name is stamped onto the work that you're doing.
--:-- Fight for simplicity is a really interesting one that came from Devin, our co-founder. Devin ran product and engineering for most of Cameo's history. Today he kind of oversees all creative and runs design. And the idea with fight for simplicity is to build something globally scalable. It is so hard to do that if you have all this complexity, different buttons, different SKUs, et cetera. So what we're always trying to do is how do we delete? How do we streamline? How do we make this as easy as possible? Because if you make it as easy as possible, it actually allows it to scale. And fighting for simplicity often means very difficult trade-offs, but cutting it all the way down. And that's something that I think we're pretty proud of as far as the core product that we built. What the whole universe of things we could have done was, but focusing on, we're nine years into this personalized video product.
--:-- Host: How do you have a framework or maybe just expand on the philosophy a little more? Cause I think a lot of people struggle with this. I think they struggle with it with all their work. Creators struggle with this. Entrepreneurs struggle with this. I think we all want to add in features or complexity into the product as a show of value. And it is a very difficult conversation oftentimes to stay focused on this idea of simplicity. So how do you cultivate that inside the company and really stay on target?
--:-- Guest: Well, of course we want good ideas to get surfaced. And it's funny, I was in a product review yesterday for this product called Broadcast DMs that we're rolling out. And one of the ideas that we had, so imagine an algorithmic list social feed. So basically if you follow anyone that follows you on Cameo, Ryan, you could send them a mass message that appears in a one-to-one DM thread and start having a personal conversation with them. So we're really excited about that. One of the killer features we're thinking about is the ability for the talent to actually own, not rent their audience. So right now, you're following on Instagram, you're following on Facebook, you're following on Twitch or YouTube, the platforms own your followers. You just kind of rent them. But what if we actually gave you radical ownership and you could take anyone that followed you and export their email or their phone number, their birthday to a CSV and use that in whatever direct to fan rails you think is best to go cultivate your network. So we were talking about this yesterday and we were really thinking about, okay, if we were to do this, what are the critical things of information? You want the name, you want the email, you want the phone number, you want the zip code, you want their birthday. But do you really need email and phone number? So it's just constantly, because every time there's another field, you're going to have drop off. So we ended up getting to a really elegant solution where three of those six things that we said were critical are what we decided to move with in an MVP. And then later you can always add more information on or complete your profile in a deeper way.
--:-- Host: Have you had any, that's not the right way to ask the question. This idea of radical ownership of your audience is so much different than most platforms, as you just described. Why are you willing to do that when your peer kind of social platforms are unwilling to do that? What is the thought there? And what would be the concern of other platforms not to do this?
--:-- Guest: Well, number one, the business model. Our business model is really different from TikTok and Instagram and Snapchat. We do not have an ad-based revenue model. So for those platforms, they monetize on DAUs, MAUs, and basically selling their user data. The talent or the creators make the content for free, and then they sell ads against it to advertisers. So they are always going to be an advertiser centric model and the talent, the deal they basically make with the talent is, hey, use our platform, you're going to get famous, but then we're going to sell, and if you get really famous you can make money doing other shit. That's basically how it works. The revenue share that comes from any of that on TikTok or YouTube, it does not, you cannot support yourself unless you are like the biggest person in the world on the platform. So that's kind of what happens. Then you sell merch, you go on Cameo, you have a subscription on Patreon or OnlyFans. That's how you monetize.
--:-- For us, the talent are the Fort Knox. Our business model has always been talent centric. The talent make more money than we do for everything. So for us, if we can provide the best tools in the world, the best rails in the world for talent to directly monetize their fan base and nurture it and cultivate it and strengthen it, then I think we win in the long term. But it's impossible to go from a TikTok or YouTube business model where they have a hundred percent gross margins basically on this ad product and they don't have to give anything to the talent or they give almost nothing, versus our model where the talent are making 75% to begin with.
--:-- Host: Yeah. Yeah, I get that. It's also such a direct relationship as well. And so personal. I mean, that to me, it definitely changes that aspect of it. And I guess I want to pivot into, and maybe this is the right time or the wrong time, but I'm so intrigued by the Brett Favre story. And not in this, you can do any kind of just preamble into how it happened. I'm not so interested in the how. I'm interested in your mindset and philosophy to act, to actually execute and to go see him. And then kind of tell that story for us. Because the thing that happened, whatever the controversy, that's less interesting to me, but probably important. But to then go and do what you did, I was like, this is the kind of guy that if I did want to work for somebody, this is the kind of thing that I would want to see out of the person that I work for. So I love that story.
--:-- Guest: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Let's take it all the way back. This is December 2018. We're right in the middle of Christmas season, which is our busiest time of the year. I think literally this was like Thanksgiving weekend. Brett Favre had joined Cameo earlier that year, and at this point is the biggest person on the platform, an American legend and Hall of Famer. And just getting Brett on had really started to be a halo for us to get Snoop Dogg and other that kind of level talent onto the platform. So we were really just hitting this big tipping point at that point. We had closed our Series A maybe six months before. And all of a sudden we get, actually, I think we closed the Series A like six weeks before this happened. And all of a sudden I get a frantic text message from this guy named Sean Finnegan, who was extremely important to us in building this business. And Sean was working with Brett on a lot of his social stuff. And he goes, "Stephen, we got a problem." And I go, "What happened?" Some alt-right group had tricked Brett Favre into making a dog whistle anti-Semitic video where basically the script said something like he was talking about the shout out goes to the families of the USS Liberty, which was this ship that Israel bombed of the US in like the 1970s. It's a very esoteric reference in history and Brett just thought he was doing the shout out for veterans. And then this group took that and put it on 4chan and they'd made a bunch of little dog whistle references that I wouldn't have caught or I don't think anybody reasonably would have caught. And suddenly they were making it look like Brett was advocating for these proud boy like groups, these alt-right kind of neo-nazi type groups. And this became a massive, massive story.
--:-- First things first, we always want to make sure our talent's safe. As I mentioned, the talent are our Fort Knox. Without the talent, we can't do what we do. We can't manufacture happiness. So the biggest fear at that point was, holy shit, if Brett loses his Wrangler jeans ad and he leaves the platform and he never comes back, that will put a cap on whoever could go and join Cameo because suddenly he becomes the cautionary tale and every single agent is going to be like, "Yeah, not worth it. I don't care how much you make. You just threw everything else away." So this is really existential at the time.
--:-- So what we immediately do is we kind of let our talent base know that this happened. We were super transparent. We immediately built this kind of early AI bot on Slack that would basically, we went to the Southern Poverty Law Center and got this list of all these hate words and different hate groups. And then it would basically flag, we called it Nazi bot at the time. It would basically flag anything and then let our talent team know, "Hey, there's something fishy about this request or this reference." And then what we did was, I needed to make sure Brett stayed and he felt safe. And I had heard that the 96 Packers, the Super Bowl champions were having a reunion. Maybe it was 97. They were having a reunion up in Milwaukee, signing autographs and everything. So me and my chief of staff at the time, Adam Ostrom, we drove up in a huge snowstorm from Chicago to Milwaukee. We waited in this big ass line. There were hundreds and hundreds of people there. And we got to the front line and said, "Hey, I'm Steven from Cameo, Adam from Cameo." We talked to Brett. We told him how much we appreciated him. And we were there for him. And by the way, I didn't want to have that conversation. But you know what he said to me? He looked me straight in the eye and goes, "Steven, wasn't my best day, but it wasn't my worst day. I love how Cameo makes people feel. And just thank you for being there and stepping up." And honestly, that's one of those little moments that kind of saved the company at the time. And what we didn't realize was even though that was as bad of a press cycle as you can kind of get, a lot of people found out about Cameo from that. And instead of the platform dying, we had the biggest month we ever had. And that really started accelerating the flywheel of our business. And the rocket ship really started igniting at that point.
--:-- Host: Was there anyone inside the organization that didn't think making that trip, getting in front of Brett? Like, was there any pushback or was everyone kind of like, this is our Hail Mary pass. Let's go.
--:-- Guest: I mentioned like run through walls was that value that's not there, but that's just how we built this business. Cameo is built by very gritty people building the business brick by brick. And when some insurmountable obstacle came in our way, we busted through it. And that's something that, even as we're rebuilding our culture right now, that's the thing that, and by the way, that run through walls, what is that? I mentioned we hired a lot of entrepreneurs at this company. And what are entrepreneurs?
--:-- Guest: They're run through walls type of people. So that's not the only crisis. I'm sure you've had many minis, but fast forward, COVID hits. You guys just absolutely go bananas. It becomes this way to communicate and deliver messages. It's also right. I mean, I remember this time and there's cameos everywhere. And it's become a cultural icon to a certain extent. And then there's a downturn.
--:-- Host: And just reading through all of my material and doing research and digging into the story, so incredibly impressed with the decision to kind of, knowing that you had to down throttle and how painful it would be. I would love for you to talk us through that time because you've come out the other end now, this being a second major crisis, you know, come out the other end in a very good place. And this is another moment where, just like with the Brett Favre incident, I think people who don't have their head on their shoulders or maybe don't have the values that you guys have, they fall apart. And you didn't. And I'd love you to take us through that time and kind of how you led your company through that period.
--:-- Guest: Yeah, it was a really, really difficult, tough time. But let's start even going into COVID because I think it's a really important part of the story. So coming into COVID, I mentioned like this Brett Favre thing happened. And when you look at the first four years of our business, we became a unicorn on the exact four year anniversary of launching. And that was at a time where there were no AI unicorns popping up pre-revenue. Our business went from 300,000 to 4 million to 20 million to 100 in its first four years. This is just the classic rocket ship.
--:-- Guest: For us, one of the things that happened — and we got called a COVID darling a lot — but people don't really know that in 2018 and 2019, we were the fastest growing consumer marketplace in the world at that time, too. So coming into COVID, we had this huge momentum. We had just raised our Series B from Kleiner Perkins and Churning Group and a lot of incredible investors. This thing was ready to launch.
--:-- Guest: When COVID hit, initially, we didn't know how that was going to deal with our business. The whole world shuts down. The first week of lockdowns, our business went down by 50%. We had an emergency board meeting that Sunday night about whether we were going to need to do layoffs. We didn't know how long this was going to go on. So me and the founders, we cut our salaries to zero. We got rid of benefits like Uber to work and gym memberships. We did everything we could to avoid laying people off and took some costs out of the business.
--:-- Guest: Then the next week, it rebounded and shot out like a cannon. In 2020, we grew about 500% in revenue. So suddenly this thing is full speed ahead. As I like to describe it to people, that period was like playing Mario Kart when you hit the star — you go 10 times faster, you can bump into shit, and you just keep going. But then at some point, that star fades off. For us, that was when the second vaccine came out.
--:-- Guest: If you think about why our business accelerated during COVID so much, you mentioned that this was becoming a new way to communicate. Your mom is living across the country, so you couldn't see her for Mother's Day. You sent her a Kenny G to tell her how much you loved her. You're literally sending digital love. Think about the missed weddings and birthday parties and life events. A Cameo is such a great way to do it.
--:-- Guest: But on the supply side, for the first time in history, every athlete, actor, celebrity in the world was out of work. Even those with annual salaries — if you're an MLB player or an NBA player, you get paid per game. When the games weren't happening, they weren't getting paid. So this was a massive supply side tailwind. There was more availability, people were on their phones and at home. It was the perfect storm for our business.
--:-- Guest: Our leadership team knew that at some point that was going to end. But at the same time, we just raised a hundred million dollars. We were building up to try to future-proof the business and ultimately take it public. If you remember that period, this was SPACs and direct listings. Coming into 2020, Cameo was named the most promising consumer internet company in the world by The Information. We were humming on all cylinders. We hired a public company ready management team. The team went from 100 people who were all in person in Chicago and L.A. to about 400 people fully distributed across 38 states and 13 countries. We were building international, starting new business lines, doing all these things to diversify our base.
--:-- Guest: Then all of a sudden, the second vaccine comes out. When people got their second shot, organic traffic to our site dropped by 65%. The core business, which was never built on paid marketing — always built on virality and talent promoting and customer sharing — just had 65% less people coming into our store. And OpEx had tripled. So suddenly, we went from being a profitable, break-even business to burning six million dollars a month. It happened in under 90 days.
--:-- Guest: When that happened, our leadership team knew we had to take costs out of the business. It was a falling knife — we didn't know how far it was going to go. Over the next 18 months, which were probably the worst 18 months of my life, we had to tear the company down to the studs. We went from over 350 all the way down to 32 people. When we got to that third round, our board was talking about, "Hey, if you go that deep, you're a zombie company. There's no way you can grow again. You guys are dead." But I was just like, "I can't go and look at my team again if we're not profitable. We have to get to profitability."
--:-- Guest: Happy to report that last year, we were breakeven for the first time. This is a company that was burning over $50 million two years ago. It was an absolute wild ride. Some of the lessons from that — my biggest regret is in the first riff, we laid off 25% of the company, and we should have gone deeper. We absolutely should have gone deeper. My naivety and trying to save people's jobs ended up costing more jobs in the long term. It's something I deeply regret because if we could have done that in two swoops versus three, there's so many great people that aren't here anymore that I wish were here.
--:-- Guest: But I'm so grateful to those that stuck it out. You mentioned, Ryan, that culture is what kept people here. When you lay off 300 people, these are awesome people. Suddenly they're at new companies and great jobs, and they're calling the people that are still there like, "Hey, the water's warm over here. What the hell are you doing?" I remember Mackenzie, my now chief of staff, came up to me late in that year and said, "Stephen, I kind of feel like it's 2 a.m. at the bar. It's closed, and we're the only losers left on the dance floor. What's going on here? What are we trying to do?"
--:-- Guest: This is where having a product that makes people happy every day, having a mission and core values and teammates that they love and leaders that they're inspired by — that's what kept people together.
--:-- Host: How did you handle that? How did you keep your shit together during that as one of the individuals that everyone's looking at through this hard time, which people may understand logically, but there's almost no way to fully rationalize emotionally? How do you, as a leader, maintain your discipline, your perseverance, drive through those incredibly tough times?
--:-- Guest: I think there's parts I handled better than others. One big learning I took from that is in the ride up and the initial crash down, I was probably the most positive person on the ride ups. I was the Pied Piper. No matter how excited anybody was, I was more excited. Then when shit was going bad, at the beginning, my expectations were so high that my tolerance for missing plan or things not shipping when we needed to — I was just so pissed off all the time. I was more mad than anybody.
--:-- Guest: So one of the things I've been really working on myself through coaching is to be more of the emotional ballast of the company. When things are very exuberant, that's where I want to pull them back. When things are really shitty, that's where I want to pull people up. I've been working on that a lot. But at the end of the day, you have to be putting a brave face out to your company. You have to have conviction in what you're doing.
--:-- Guest: In that period, I leaned on some amazing entrepreneurs that were part of my YPO forum and other people that came up when I did. We spent so many nights on the phone with each other talking through the issues we were all going through. My dad was a longtime finance leader at a multi-billion dollar company. I remember him saying, "Man, that 18 months, you got like 30 years worth of experience."
--:-- Host: Well, the worst part — I shouldn't say the worst part. My guess is years from now you will look back at that moment and the success you have coming in the future will only have been possible because of that accelerated maturation process. Both of those incredibly hard situations were different — one's a PR issue, one's an internal operations and sales issue. Those types of experiences, I think you almost have to have them. You don't want them to happen. You don't wish for them to happen. But I look at some of the worst moments of my career, whether inflicted by a decision I made that wasn't right or just something that happened that I had to address. Those are the things you talk about — not "oh yeah, we hit this goal" — you tell the stories about how you overcame these things because it's ultimately what shapes you.
--:-- Guest: Yeah, I think that's a great point. One thing I was really worried about culturally — as we went from 100 to 400 in 12 months, it had been such a winning team that had literally had the Brett Favre issue. Of course, in any business, you've got your minor lumps. But in many ways, Cameo just kind of worked from the beginning. We found product market fit right away. The first thing we ever sold ended up being the thing that we did. It had the name, had the space. It was this company that had everything.
--:-- Guest: When we started hiring people at that pre-IPO level that were leaving public companies to come work for the next one that was going to be public, the resumes of people we were hiring were way better. They went to better schools. They had better resumes. We started hiring for resumes and experience over what got us there — giving really smart young people with no business having that responsibility, giving them the shot to be great. That was one of the periods where I really felt organizationally, my spidey sense was like, "I don't know how much resilience or grit this group of people has."
--:-- Guest: Obviously, as layoffs started, we really found that those that remained — the 32 that cut down from the mid 300s — those people have been through hell with us. That's why when it came to the return to office, I'm like, "Of course I'm going to roll out the red carpet for these people." I know we need to be in the office, but I love these people. I want every one of them to be here for 10 years. Part of the reason I want people back in the office is because this group of people creates magic when they're together. I don't want to do anything to force somebody to get another job. These are people that, when push came to shove, every single time in those spreadsheet exercises kept being on the green list versus the red list. And by the way, there's so many people on those red lists that I would kill to still have at this company. But we had to do what we had to do.
--:-- Host: Yeah, I think you made a really good point about cultural hiring over resume hiring. I've also found, and I'm interested in your take on this, I found often when you find someone who is talented, smart, driven, but maybe doesn't check the resume boxes, but you can tell there's real potential there — the ideas you get from those individuals tend to have real upside because they're not thinking in the box. They haven't spent enough time in the box or even around the box to believe that you can only do things that are in the box. They're like, "Hey, there's this thing over here that we can take from and integrate." All of a sudden you start to see this mashup of ideas because their inexperience actually allows them to think bigger, if that makes sense.
--:-- Guest: Ryan, I got a framework from my CEO coach who's now my board member, Bing Gordon — legendary long-term partner at Kleiner Perkins, founding board member of Amazon for 20-plus years. He and I are both hockey players, and he gave me a framework on team construction that I think is so valid. He went back and looked at all the Stanley Cup champions in the last 25 years and found that they had a mix of three archetypes of players.
--:-- Guest: Every great Stanley Cup winning team first had two lines of guys — six players who are at the peak of their career, going to do the best work of their life right now. Then you also have a group of another six that are young, dumb, hungry, stupid — they're playing out of their minds, they don't even understand what's at stake. They're rookies, second year in, but they're workhorses and they're going to do the best work of their life later, but they're playing out of their mind right now. Lastly, every team needs this — you have to have the grizzled old vet that still has the blue burning flame that wants to lift the cup one more time. Maybe they've had a hall of fame career and never won the championship. They become the people that everyone rallies around. At Cameo, we've had a really good mix of those types. That's a framework and archetype for team building that at least resonated with me.
--:-- Host: Yeah. And then your job becomes — and I'm going to position this in a question form — your job becomes managing those, or creating an environment for those personalities to mix so that you can pull from their respective viewpoints and everyone feels heard, understood, and has access to all those ideas. Is that kind of the idea? You become kind of in service of those groups to make sure they mix in the proper way.
--:-- Guest: That's how they draw it up. But in retrospect, that's probably the single thing that I fucked up or got wrong most in the buildup, especially in the heyday. When we were building this executive team, we were preparing to be a public company at some point in the next two to three years. We went and hired the best of the best. Our head of product was one of the top product leaders at Uber. Our CMO led Hims & Hers, which was the hottest brand out there. Our COO was the global head of ops at LinkedIn. Our chief people officer was the global head of people at McDonald's. Our CFO was the one everybody thought was going to be the next great to take somebody public. We built this all-star team.
--:-- Guest: But the problem was — and I remember at the time, one of my board members told me something. She said, "Steven, you've been Michael Jordan this whole time, but now it's time to be Phil Jackson." The Last Dance had come out. What she was asking was, "You need to now be the person that just brings all these people together." I don't know if it's because it was remote. I don't know if it's because I brought in six senior executives all at the same time and everybody's fighting to be number two. But the whole was worse than the sum of the parts. That group of people I could not — and this was my failure — I couldn't bring that group together to make a cohesive, high functioning, high trust management team. That is the regret I have from that period of time.
--:-- Guest: As we've torn the company down, I realized that consensus-based management or trying to get everybody on the same page — that's not it. I just had to step up more and be like, "This is the direction we're going. Figure it the fuck out." I actually needed to become Michael Jordan again and not be Phil Jackson. A lot of the management books will tell you it's all about being the maestro and creating the culture. But as a CEO at the end of the day, I ran the company. We as founders, we control the board. You can't really look at anybody else on the bad things. That starts and ends with us, with me and my co-founders. Ultimately, I didn't do a good enough job in that period.
--:-- Host: I think there's also a part to it that is knowing what your strengths are. There are certain aspects of business, having founded multiple companies now, that I know — this thing that may be in a leadership book is bullet four on the leadership list — I'm just never going to be good at that thing. It's just never going to happen that I'm going to be that guy. I'm East Coast. I grew up in the woods with gun-toting crazy parents. I'm just a straight shooter. Every time I'm in a company, the HR people have to back up and say, "You're too straightforward. You can't say those things to people. They won't hear it." So I now know that, but figuring that stuff out is just so important.
--:-- Guest: Well, let me — I think that's a really important point. I also think that period of time was a very weird period. You had the Great Resignation. You had all these startups where Series A companies had more money than Series C companies. There was so much craziness going around — quiet quitting, people wanting to only be remote or only be in office. It was chaos. Then you had employee activism and woke-ism to the point where as a leader, you're trying to foster a culture that's inclusive for everybody. We're trying to build diverse teams, have different leaders with different perspectives. But at the end of the day, captaining sports teams my whole life and having other businesses — aligned teams have always been the ones that have won. It hasn't been the dream teams. It's been the ones that are aligned, that have shared core values. That doesn't mean I don't care about diversity. It doesn't mean I don't like bringing in different perspectives. But it means that at the end of the day, everybody's got to be pulling on the same rope.
--:-- Host: Steven, I could talk to you for another three hours about business. This has been absolutely incredible. I want to be respectful of your time. Cameo is an enormous platform. I don't think we need to do a shout out of where people can find more of you. But are you creating any content? Do you have a newsletter? Do you do anything like that that you'd like people to go chase your ideas? Because I think the way you approach business is brilliant. If you're sharing that anywhere, I'd love for the audience to be able to follow along.
--:-- Guest: Well, stay tuned. This is a plug for the soon to be launched Zeitgeist podcast. I'm going to be interviewing the top founders and marketers in the world that have shaped pop culture and hearing the story behind the brands that are influencing pop culture. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. We've got a really killer season one lineup. Look out for that probably in the next three months. We'll get the first episode out.
--:-- Host: Tremendous. I'll get with your team, and when that comes live, I'll make sure we get it out to the audience here so we can push people over to the podcast. Again, man, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate the hell out of you.
--:-- Guest: Thanks, Ryan. Appreciate it. Thanks, bud. You'll be good.
