$100M Without Paid Ads

Welcome to the I Am Charles Schwartz Show. Today, we're diving deep into the billion-dollar playbook with Stephen Galanis, the visionary founder behind Cameo.
From a simple idea connecting fans with celebrities to a unicorn valuation in just four years, Stephen's journey is a masterclass in startup evolution and resilient leadership. In this episode, Stephen pulls back the curtain on how he built a company that generated $100 million in revenue with zero marketing spend.

He shares the game-changing hacker-hustler-hipster framework that revolutionized his approach to building founding teams and reveals the five forever OKRs that transformed his leadership

style.

So, if you're ready to learn how a former options trader built a platform that's changing

how celebrities and fans connect while navigating the storms of hyper-growth and market downturns, stay tuned. Steven's story could be the blueprint your startup needs.
The show starts now. Welcome to the I Am Charles Schwartz Show, where we don't just discuss success, we show you how to create it.
On every episode, we uncover the strategies and tactics that turn everyday entrepreneurs into unstoppable powerhouses in their businesses and their lives. Whether your goal is to transform your life or hit that elusive seven, eight, or nine figure mark, we've got the blueprint to get you there.
The show starts now. All right, everybody.
Welcome back. I'm excited for today's call.
This is an individual who has done things that I don't think anyone else I know has possibly done. We'll get into it.
Thank you so much for joining. Thanks for having me.
So you've done things, and for the audience that don't know who you are, give a quick debrief on who you are, what you've done. I'm always been blown away by it.
I'm so happy to have you on. Tell us a little bit about you.
Hi, my name is Steven Galanis and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Cameo. Cameo is the world's largest marketplace where you can book first lives video messages from tens of

thousands of the most exciting names in pop culture. It's amazing how you've gotten these

people as well. Because there's people I grew up as a huge fan of that I was like, God, I just,

I want to give a happy birthday from him. You know, one of them was a pitcher.
He's a major league

ball player. And I was like, I just want to give a happy birthday from him.
So the idea that you

actually made that happen before we get any farther, thank you for making that dream happen for me. I really appreciate that.
Getting that little birthday wish from him was huge for me. Okay.
So you created something that most people haven't. The idea that to execute this on a lot of the businesses and a lot of things you do executes on ways that most people only dream of.
What are some of the things that you've run into as you've created the success with Cameo that has radically changed your environment? Well, I think there's a number of those, but I think it really starts with a few things. Number one, it's really important that as a founder, you're building in a space that you want to work in a really long time.
And when I was pretty early in my career, founded Cameo, I ended up meeting this founder in Chicago who had sold his company for a billion dollars and was kind of one of the tech luminaries here. And he introduced me to a framework that I love telling founders about, and it's called Ikigai.
And it's a Japanese philosophy and basically imagine a Venn diagram, but instead of two circles, there's four.

And the idea is that, you know, to really be the best in the world at something, you have to be at the intersection of what do you love to do? What does the world need? What are you great at? And what can you get paid for? And, you know, when I think about Cameo and, you know, kind of the ups and downs and, you know, the things that get you through, you know, eight years of building something. And, you know, hopefully I can work on it another 80 years.
Like, I love what I do. You know, being at that EQ guy point, it kind of gives you perpetual energy.
It almost is like Iron Man's heart. And, you know, one thing I see so often is people kind of, you know, founders kind of jumping to the next top thing.
And just in the last eight years, I think about the venture hype cycles that I've seen happen. When we were raising money for Cameo at the beginning, if you weren't doing a micro mobility startup, you know, you weren't getting fun.
This is like the bird and lime craze days. And then it was AR VR.
And then there was blockchain. And then the creator economy got super hot, like right after, you know, companies like us and OnlyFans, you know, really exploded.
And then, you know, everybody was building creator economies. Then it was web three, like the tide came in so hard on the creator economy, and everyone was building a web three business.
And, you know, today, a lot of the founders that were building web three businesses or the investors that had Web3 on their LinkedIn profile or their Twitter bio, suddenly they're all doing AI right now. So I've seen that and it very rarely is sustainable.
And I think oftentimes that's just one of those things like finding your eKey guy you know, I thought your intro here was pretty interesting, right? You're talking about there's this picture that you loved. And that's where, like, I think of all those four buckets, that you're building something that the world actually needs is the one that I think gets ignored too much, right? Like, when there is one of these VC hype cycles, you know, it's all it's all about like, what's going to get funded.
That's how a lot of fund founders think, but ultimately it always comes down to product market fit. Are you building something the world actually needs? So finding that product market fit along with the Iki guide to something that you love is very hard for people.
There's a bunch of people who are like, I like to sit on the beach and want to become a shore erosion technician. Just watch the ocean go in and out.
That's not going to make you money. Or someone says, Hey, you know what? I really love making sandals in the Philippines.
I'm like, well, that's probably not going to hit your six, seven, eight figure goals. How do you find the balance? How does someone find that thing that they love? If they don't know what they love, how do they get to that point? Well, I think, I think it comes back to like, what are you doing in your spare time? Like when nobody's watching, like what are the things that you're doing? And, you know, I think about my career, pre-starting Cameo, you know, avid sports fan.
While I was an options trader, my first job out of college, I started a movie production company, right? So, you know, since kindergarten, my nickname has been the mayor. I've always been somebody that brings people together and connects them and kind of unlocks, you know, whatever experiences, whether it's in Chicago or at Duke or any of the places that I've been, you know, I like the classic guy that like opens the red velvet rope and brings people in.
So I think most, if you were to go to my kindergarten teachers or my college professors or my friends from any era of my life, I don't think, you know, maybe people didn't know exactly what I was going to do, but once they found out that I was doing this, like this just made all the sense of the world. Right.
And it, it brought my love for social media and for fandom, um, you know, and, and, you know, it also solved a problem that maybe everybody doesn't wake up thinking about, but as somebody that, you know, went to Duke in my, along with one of my other co-founders and our third co-founder was an athlete at USC. We had really good friends that played Duke basketball and won national championships or were at USC, played on those Matt Leiner, Reggie Bush era teams.
And, you know, years after selling out the Coliseum or Cameron Indoor, you know, they're basically middle school gym teachers or they're working as parapros at their old high school. Because, you know, the reality is unless you become like a top, top tier player, you're not going to make enough money to sustain yourself.
And I remember, right as we were starting, a documentary called Broke came out. It was a 30-for-30.
And in that, it said that 85% of NFL players go broke five years after playing their last game. And that was a staggering, staggering stat.
And again, it's not the type of thing that problem doesn't necessarily bother everyone. but as an athlete myself, like, you know, stat.
And again, it's not the type of thing that like,

that's that problem doesn't necessarily bother everyone. But as an athlete myself, like all of us, you know, we had our friends that were impacted by this.
This is the era where college athletes couldn't get paid. So, you know, you go from selling out the Coliseum in LA to suddenly like, you know, not being able to make money doing anything if you didn't make the NFL, or if you made it and got hurt or you made it and got cut.

Right.

So I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I, to suddenly not being able to make money doing anything if you didn't make the NFL or if you made it and got hurt or you made it and got cut.

I think it just comes down to you have to have the passion for the problem set that you're doing.

It's so underrated, but it's so critical.

I agree with you.

I'm a former athlete.

I get it.

Once it turns off, you can't feed the bills.

You can't pay the bills on glory from two, three, five years ago.

It just doesn't work that way.

You mentioned that you had multiple co-founders.

And that's something that as people are trying to scale, those relationships are dynamic.

And people don't understand when you have co-founders, there's different type of co-founders.

There's silent ones.

There's ones that are actively involved with you.

There's ones that are operating with you.

How do you find that balance? I've been very lucky with the people I've co-founded things with. Very, very blessed, but there's a strategy to it.
I'm curious, how did you navigate that when you have multiple co-founders, you know, multiple kitchen people in the kitchen cooking with you? How do you find that balance? There's a really smart investor that I like that I met at a, you know, a Duke founder and investor forum they held on campus. His name is David Cummings.
And David is a partner at Atlanta Ventures, backed a lot of the early stage companies that came out of there. And I remember hearing him talk one time and he said that in consumer, he often found that the best founding teams had these three co-founders.
Now, these attributes could all be in one person, could be in two person, could be in three, but he's like, I've never seen a company that doesn't have the hacker, the hustler, and the hipster. The hacker is somebody that finds a new and novel way to make things happen.
In our case, that was like, how do you go from Hollywood or NFL agents, which are the biggest gatekeepers in the world? And how do we cut through the agencies, cut through the noise and go direct to the talent? And it really took a hacker to go and figure that out. And in our case, it was like Instagram DM.
We built an army of people that were DMing celebrities on Instagram and just the sheer volume and getting through. And then once they came on and liked it, we asked for referrals.
That's how we built our business brick by brick. And today we have tens of thousands of talent on the platform, which would be bigger than all of the agencies combined.
So that's number one. Number two, you need the hustler.
The hustler is the person that can build FOMO and hype and get people excited about it. Critical for raising the initial seed capital and getting angels excited about it.
Even more critical, even harder than raising capital is how do you get people to quit their great job to come, the best people, because you really need great people to do it, to come work on your crazy idea before there's product market fit. Because if you don't have that, you're not going to be able to attract it.
So you really need that hustler that can do that. And then lastly, this one's one I think gets forgotten about, but in consumer, it's so important.
You need the hipster. The hipster is the person that's going to see what's cool in the future.
And oftentimes, as the hipster is kind of doing their thing in real time, it seems weird. It seems interesting.
Like in our case, when we started cameo, the Instagram, you know, aesthetic, the highly polished, you know, lights, camera, makeup, that was the in vogue, you know, uh, aesthetic for video content. But one of the things that, you know, we had conviction about was to build authentic over high quality.
So instead of having our celebrities come into a studio and film the videos with the production crew, we're like, the iPhone cam was cool. It's even better.
The Zoom setup I have, it's more authentic. Even though I've got the great lights and the great camera, it's actually more authentic for what we sell.
The selfie style video, them walking around like, oh, what's that? Who's behind them? What do they have? What are they making? What's that boot on there? That's the authenticity that really worked. And as TikTok has risen and promised, that authentic aesthetic actually ended up being the winning one.
And even in our B2B business today, we find that the brands prefer this content that looks like real videos that people are posting as opposed to the Madison Avenue glossy. So this is a long way of saying in my case, our co-founders had each of those attributes, right? Like Devin is very clearly the hipster in the group.
Martin was very clearly the hacker. And I was very clearly the hipster, or sorry, the hustler.
So the nice thing about that is we never stepped on each other's toes. The division of labor was great.
You know, Martin, you go get the talent. Devin, you go build a product.
Steven, you go run the business, right? And that's

how we've been. And I'm very blessed that eight years in, all the co-founders are still at the

company. Obviously, roles have evolved as time's gone on, and we've hired great other people to

come in. But I think at the end of the day, the conviction of the founders and all of us working

on something that is our EQI, that we really care about. It's been critical.
So I think one of the other things that's unique about you guys is the acquisition of either talent and or customers, because I didn't know what Cameo was until I got my first Cameo, until it was sent to me. So I was sitting there and, you know, someone got this for me.
All of a sudden it's this picture and it pops up. I'm like, oh my God, this is...
And I was freaking out and I love the authenticity because it was literally him just sitting on his couch. I was like, oh my God, that's in his house.
And he's saying my name and he's doing... It was just this magical experience.
And then I went from there and I started looking at all the other talent. And I started looking at all the videos and all the other talent.
And I was like, oh, what is this? And it had this idea. That's a different approach than most people have to growing their audience.
So when you're in that environment and you're taking this different approach and you're trying to convert differently, what are some of the ways that you found above and beyond that just, hey, I'm going to buy it for it. And it'd be word of mouth because you said word of mouth is so important of getting new talent in.
What are some of the ways that you have seen that a success to creating this that people could use now to get more clients and get more clientele? Yeah, I mean, look, I think a lot of that had to do with the really unique, a couple of unique attributes of our particular product, right? And the lessons that I have, they worked excellent for us and we understood them early and we really executed well against those. But these lessons may not be true for everybody, whether you're building a marketplace or you're just trying to get your word out in a direct-to-consumer brand.
But really, the Cameo flywheel was simple. Our marketplace, unlike Uber or Airbnb or DoorDash, is particularly unique because our supply can beget their own demand.
Everyone on Cameo is famous. They have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers on TikTok, on Instagram, on X, on whatever platform you care about.
And one of the things they can do that an Uber driver can't do or an Airbnb host can't do is they can post. the people following them are probably the most likely people in the world to buy, right? So that's a really interesting dynamic.
So as we were starting with our marketplace, you know, the classic chicken and the egg, like there's no talent on nobody, there's no customers. We had absolute conviction that if we got the supply side on, then the demand side would follow.
You know, one of the tactics that we did, and now this has become commonplace, but, you know, we were one of the first companies to not ever ask people, hey, don't, don't, like, we never asked people to promote Cameo. We would create a link for everyone.
You know, cameo.com slash Steven would be like my profile. And I would ask you to tweet that out that would go to your page.
And then once you're on your page, you could go browse and see who else was there. But we never asked people to like, go to cameo.com.
We always asked them to go to their unique link. And the value prop made a lot of sense.
You make three times as much as we do for every sale. And we take a take rate.
So we're, we're completely incentivized for you to be as good as you possibly could be. And we've really worked on creating great tools that talent could share their own links out.
So that's number one. Number two, our product is pretty unique in that over 80% of them are bought for other people.
So it's not you buying for yourself and watching it on your phone. It's me buying for you and then sending it to you in a a text message in a group chat, maybe posting it on your Facebook wall back in the way or tweeting it out to you or posting it on my Instagram story and tagging you in it.
And then that created this phenomenon where it was getting shared. So we always say every cameo is a commercial for the next one.
And one thing that we had on there, every video is watermarked. So you see this video, you're like, holy shit, how do I do that? And then you see Cameo.
And then people watch the video, they Google Cameo, they come into our site, and that's really the flywheel. So it's supply side acquisition, talent promoting, user sharing, and then the customer sharing to the recipient, and then the recipient tending to share it on social in their group chat, or just taking their phone out and being, holy shit, look what I got.
There was a lot of that holy shit when I got mine. I was like, holy shit, holy shit.
And then there were the other thing that happened was I literally fell down the rabbit hole. I was like, who else is on here? Who is this? Who is that? What are they doing? What are they going to do? And it really just became this ran down ran down the rabbit hole with it.
People will sit there from the outside and say, okay, well, yeah, I see the end of it. Cameo just started three days ago and magically it has all these people.
We make all this money and dah, dah, dah. They don't see the years of effort.
They don't see the trials and the tribulations. They don't see the lessons.
They don't see the hurdles. They don't see the times where you fell down.
What are some of the biggest lessons that you've had as you've gone through this? And yes, you've got something that's, you USP. When you're into this, what are some of the things you're like, God, I wish I could go back and talk to Steven 10 years ago and say, hey, dude, you're going to run into this wall.
This is how you handle it. This is what's going on.
How do you pivot around it? Yeah. One of the really unique things about Cameo is that we kind of found product market fit almost right away.
We had a we had a really disastrous launch, which I can tell that story in a little bit. But shortly after that, like, you know, first we started just with NFL players.
We thought like there was this big need. And then it really wasn't until we started, Devin, my co-founder one day was like, hey, I think Cody, his roommate, Cody Ko, who has a million followers on YouTube, and people like Cody might do well at it.
Cody tried it. He put it on a YouTube video.
We went viral for the first time. And we really found our product market fit with ex Vine stars, TikTok, YouTube, and then reality TV became big.
And while athletes still probably represent the largest number of people on the site, it's maybe 14, 15% of our total business. So we ended up finding product market fit as we expanded out.
The business kind of worked right away and worked really well for the first four years. I mean, this is a business that went from zero to 100 million top line in four years with no marketing spend.
There's not many businesses in the world that did that. So interestingly, our biggest problems actually happened after massive success, after we became a unicorn.
And it really started when we, basically we were trying to conquer the world. Not just in our core market geographically, which we did.
We found ourselves having Cameo Japan and hiring people in the UK and Australia and all over Europe and South America. And what we also did at the same time was we were thinking about all the ways the town could monetize.
And we wanted to make sure that we had an answer in every space. So broadly, the four ways that talent can monetize their fame on the internet, they can have a subscription business.
So thank OnlyFans Patreon. In 2020, we launched our answer to that called Fan Clubs.
And suddenly, you know, we had some of our best engineers working on, you know, basically all of the same features that you would see on OnlyFans or Patreon, you know subscriptions and MassDM and all those type of products. Secondly, we built a live and calls product, which during COVID, all of the meet and greets weren't happening anymore that you would see at a concert or a comic con.
And we felt like we could fill that in a digital way. It worked a little bit, but then when the world opened up, you know, we built great tech, but there just wasn't the same product market fit to sit online and, you know, talk to someone on FaceTime versus like meeting them in real life.
You know, so we kind of missed on that. Third, you know, physical goods is another thing that people can sell on the Internet.
We bought the world's largest celebrity merch company, a company that really focused on a plus, you know, actors and athletes, you know, think Arnold Schwarzenegger, Matthew McConaughey. and you know we bought that company and we really felt like when the world opened up

merch might be something that was a little easier for talent to sell and you know after that we saw

some big changes in Facebook and Instagram and TikTok's algorithm, which made it a lot harder for talent to promote their own stuff. So we would have eight years of sales data on certain people, and their drops were just making less and less than they ever would, even though they didn't become less popular.
So that was another roadblock we ran into. And then lastly, the B2B side, people can get brand deals and we had Cameo for Business and that team started rapidly expanding.
CMOs and CEOs that had used our product as consumers or during COVID, you know, buying them for all hands or, you know, how many team meetings had cameos in them during COVID. All of a sudden, they're now trying to use it for their marketing content.
You know, this is a really exciting thing. But suddenly what happened to us was, you know, we went from a team of 100 to about 437, but our best people were focused on all different things.
And what often happens in startups is that people forget that if you optimize your core business by 5%, 10%, it's almost always better than building the next thing. And we were certainly guilty and I was guilty for signing off on this stuff of chasing the shiny new object.
And part of that is we found product market fit, you know, so quickly with what we did. And now we had a better team than we ever had.
And, you know, we let that loose and we just got, we overextended ourselves. And, you know, now looking back on it, you know, I think about all the money that we spend and all the, you know, great efforts that we put in.
And ultimately, if the team that I had hired was all working on, you know, that the one thing, right, and just continue to make that better and better and better, what could those compounding games games have been? So, you know, I would say that for me, you know, if I were to come back and look at myself in 2020 or 2021, it would be to really resist like chasing the shiny object and continuing to embrace the grind of just making your great core business as good as you possibly can be. So you talked about, you know, your team went from really, really small.
All of a sudden when, you know, a hundred people skyrocketed up to 400, and I don't care how much training you've had. I don't care how much theoretical academic level training, walking in and having to lead that level of a unit, leading that group takes a special set of skills.
And you have to advance your skills on that on a high level. What are some of the things that you've learned to create a culture, to lead these individuals who are, as you said, attracting the best of the best, that they're willing to leave their business, their current jobs to come work with you.
How have you learned how to lead those individuals? It took a lot of coaching. I was really fortunate throughout that era to be working with a CEO coach named Bing Gordon.
And Bing's kind of a legend in the Valley, one of the founders of Electronic Arts, 30-year GP of Kleiner Perkins, had served on

the board of Amazon from seed stage all the way until probably 22, was, I think, chairman of Zynga and so influential in Duolingo and so many of the great consumer companies of the last 30 years. and Bing introduced me to a framework that has become my poor operating framework as a CEO and something that I like to teach every founder that I talk about when they hit a certain scale.
And he has this concept of forever OKRs. If you're familiar with the OKR philosophy, this is a philosophy that the guys at Kleiner very famously, like people like John Doerr, rolled out to Google and LinkedIn and so many of the legendary tech companies of the last 20, 30 years.
And OKR stands for objective key results. So basically, what it would say, you have some large objective and it might say, you know, I want to grow my talent base, you know, and then the key result would be specific, measurable and time bound.
So I want to, you know, go from 1100 talent to, you know, 1500 talent by November 1st, right? So like having some, you know, specific goal. Bing's idea in, in watching, in his experience, watching, you know, so many great CEOs, whether it's, you know, Mark Pincus or Jeff Bezos or, you know, Daniel Acker, like any of these great CEOs that, that he'd worked with and mentored, he, he basically distilled like what made them great, what separated the, you know, the top 10% from the rest was really people that could nail these five very specific things.
And the idea of Forever OKR is as a CEO, or let's use a head of sales as an example. The Forever OKR of a sales leader is beat planned.
You don't know what the number is going to be today. It might be 2 billion today and 5 billion next year, but it's always beat plan.
As a CMO, your forever OKR is build a legendary brand for your employees and customers. No matter what the product is, that's what you want to do as a CMO.
As a CEO, in Bing's experience, he felt that there were five things on the forever OKR front that every CEO should be thinking about. And really, at scale, every other job that's not these five things are stuff that other people could do.
So the first of these forever OKRs is product market fit, something we've spent a lot of this call talking about. Find it.
And when you find it, continue to make sure you don't lose it. And then as a CEO, thinking about when you have product market fit and you feel like it's solid, at what point do you start finding product market fit on other things? If you don't have product market fit, all of the rest of the things that I'm going to talk about, they don't matter.
So as a CEO, that's where your time needs to be spent exclusively. And especially if you building new initiatives.
You got to be as in the weeds on that as possible to make sure, am I making the right investment by starting this new product or expanding the geography? So product market fits, number one. Number two is build a world-class executive team.
you know at scale you're 437 people, and again, there's 4,000-person companies and 40,000. So this will just exponentially get more important.
And, you know, as a leader, and especially as a leader that was leading a company that's fully remote during COVID, right?

You're not going to be the person that's like in the weeds on every decision.

So making sure that you have a world-class executive team that can come and take your vision and execute it, right? It's like they're the people sitting with the pencil behind their ear, taking notes with what you say, but then, you know, taking the things you're talking about in the exec room and actualizing them on the front line, you got to have a world-class executive team. And then the next natural question is, how do you know that your executive team is world-class? Right.
That was my next question. Well, number one, you do that by meeting world-class executives, right? So if you're like, I want to see what world-class looks like in marketing, go talk to your VCs, go talk to some of your investors.
I guarantee you that some other company in their portfolio has an industry-leading or many industry-leading CMOs. So go talk to those people and see what good feels like.
Go get a coffee with them. And then you start to, over time, you start to get pattern recognition.
You have a bar. Bing would make me do this exercise with him once a quarter, where I would have to rank my executive team five to one.
Five being, this is the best person in the world that could possibly do this job at this stage. Four being their 90th percentile.
Three being their industry average. Two being their below average.
One being, why the fuck do they work for you? And what you do is you take all those scores, you add them up and you divide them by the amount of direct reports you have, and you get to a number that's somewhere between one and five. And most CEOs, when they do this for the first time, end up ranking their executive team 3.5, like the average, that's just where it ends up being.
And what Bing has found time and time again is that a world-class executive team has a 4.25 or higher average. So as you're thinking about the members of your executive team, today's three could potentially get coached up to be tomorrow's four.
But at a hyper-growth company, it's actually much more likely that today's five is tomorrow's three. So constantly you have to think about, okay, where do I up level? Can I continue to bet on this person? What coaching can we get them? And when we became a unicorn, we had a really unique case where every single one of us was doing this for the first time.
And every time we hired someone, we were running the biggest company we ever did. So probably a decision at the time that seemed like a great idea was up-leveling my executive team from this team that was excellent, had built the company, had the passion, had the knowledge.
But we were really bringing that next-level leadership in because we were working on our ultimate goal, which was to ring the bell and to become a private, you know, a public company. And, you know, in that time, we, you know, hired the global head of people away from McDonald's, one of the biggest employers in the world, absolute world-class leader.
We hired, I had a product away from Uber, you know, someone that was responsible for building the driver's side and the rider's side app of the company. A marketplace that's very similar to ours.
We hired the CTO away from the head of engineering at Hulu. The global head of ops from LinkedIn came to be our COO.
like like hulu we had the global head of ops uh from linkedin came to be our coo like at every position we had just built this like all-star leadership team but ultimately um you know what you learn when you hire those people then great people that they worked with in the past want to come work for them right so suddenly you hire the c-suite and then the vps want to come and those vps have their directors and this led to a huge inflection of talent in the past want to come work for them, right? So suddenly you hire the C-suite and then the VPs want to come and those VPs have their directors. And this led to a huge inflection of talent in the company.
Like it was, it was embarrassing, like how stacked our bench was, you know, people three, four down rows down the level were like, you know, insanely high ceiling, great people. And that's one of the reasons that having a great executive team is important because great leaders will get amazing, the best people they ever worked with to come follow them.
So that's the second one. The third is mission, vision, values.
So this is really about alignment, communication and alignment. Does everybody at the company understand what the vision of the company is? Do they know your mission? Do they know your values? Are they living up to it? When you're sitting making decisions, do they have the same rubric? Because there's a common language and a common framework.
And at LinkedIn, where I worked before Cameo, I think every person that's ever worked at LinkedIn could recite the mission, vision, values of the company. They would hammer it in.
So every Tuesday at All Hands at Cameo, I start with our mission. Our mission is to create the most personalized and authentic fan experiences on earth.
I will bet you that any person that's ever worked for us could recite that mission. Our values, roll out the red carpet, act like an owner, fight for simplicity.
These are things that become embedded in the DNA. So that's one that's really important.
Fourth is employee engagement. This can largely be measured by things like NPS.
But most critically, it's like, are the people working for you doing the best work of their career? If they're doing the best work of their career and you've got product market fit and there's leaders that they admire and, you know, they love the mission, vision, values of the company, then what are they going to do? They're not going to leave, right? And in fact, instead of leaving, they're going to tell the most talented people they've ever worked with to come over and work at your company, right? So employee engagement is so critical and, you know, probably the best leading indicator of your employee engagement is, you know, doing something like an employee NPS score.

You know, once a year or twice a year, you know, do an employee voice survey.

Like, find out anonymous, you know, 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us as, you know, as an employer?

You know, ask some specific questions, get feedback.

It's absolutely critical. And then, you know, the fifth one.
and by the way, these are stack ranked. These are in order, right? The fifth one for a long time, people probably thought was the first one, but the fifth one is keep the lights on.
Right. And, and that's, you know, fundraising, it's budgeting, it's, you know, making the hard decisions when you have to, if you need to cut, reduce OPEX.
But those are the five things. And, you know, if you have the money and you have product market fit, and you've got great leaders, and you've got internal communications and alignment, and you've got employees that are highly engaged, like that is the recipe for a, you know, a truly world class organization.
And that is the type of thing that, you know, I strive to do every day. Like sometimes I've fallen short and not been able to execute on all that.
But those are the things I work on every day. I love that too.
Most people will start with trying to keep the lights on instead of starting with product market fit. Most people go into, oh, how am I going to make money? How am I going to do this? How am I going to do that? Instead of focusing so much on part product market fit.
And I love that you said, Hey, if you don't have number one, nothing else matters. Yeah.
Look, if you, if you, there was in the zero interest rate environment, right. You know, three guys in a, in a pitch deck could get funded.
Right. But at the end of the day, if you find product market fit, if you have something that people want, like you're going to be able to find capital.
It's really, really rare that I see founders. I see founders all the time talking, oh, it's so hard to fundraise, blah, blah, blah.
When you have something real and your customers are raving about it and they see it and the VCs, like I never see those people struggle to raise capital. Like I'm sure it's happened.
There might be exceptions, but you know, it's almost always the founders that don't have product market fit that are bitching about how hard it is to fund. And guess what? You have to find product market fit before you raise real capital.
Otherwise, it's pure speculation because, look, there's so many great ideas that exist. And yeah, maybe somebody has great pedigree and we've seen that.
I've seen a lot of people leave Cameo and they were the reason why we won and they come and then they get funded. And I wrote a lot of those checks too for great employees.
And maybe if you leave a world-class org, then people are betting on the pedigree. But almost always I see those founders end up struggling two, three years later where they have the money and, you know, they haven't found product market fit.
And they're kind of in this, you know, in this limbo where it's like, do I return the money? You know, do I keep doing what I'm doing? Do I pivot? Like product market fit needs to be number one. And most people don't even focus on that.
Regrettably. They focus with, Hey, my grandmother had great chocolate chip cookies growing up.
And therefore I'm going to give chocolate chip cookies to everyone and everyone else is going to love it. Instead of going, hey, what does the market really want and how do I meet that market need? Right.
And again, I think that's the single biggest mistake that you can make as a CEO, as a founder. And anytime I've struggled or Cameo struggled, it's when I got away from focusing on product market fit.
And in the times where we've had to come in and save the company or really decided, that's when I'm super, super deep in the weeds of the front lines trying to make it happen. You mentioned some of the struggles and you wanted to give a story about, hey, these are one of those times you had messed up.
We're kind of in the weeds that you just mentioned. Can you talk about one where you're like, oh God, we were really in the weeds at this moment.
We were kind of struggle busing. And this is how I kind of got out of it because everyone is looking for strategies of what works when it's wonderful and everything's happy.
But most people aren't brave enough to sit there and say, hey, there's this one time in band camp that this happened or whatever it is. What is one of those times and how did you get out of it? Look, us it's really simple like as um as i mentioned you know the company got bigger we were working on all these different initiatives and you know suddenly like when the world opened back up and when stimulus checks started and people could the talent could play their games and go on tour and do that and people started spending money differently instead of buying cameos they were going to going to the restaurant.
It was revenge spending. Going to Mykonos and Ibiza.
It's like people used to go to Europe once a summer. And now I feel like you watch Instagram and people are there four or five times.
It's crazy. But people started clearly spending money differently.
And our core business took a big hit in that period. Our core business dropped by over 50%.
Now, when your revenue is dropping by 50% and you're incubating a bunch of new things, but the core business, the core moneymaker is going down faster than the new things are growing. And your OPEX has increased by 3, 4X, that is not good math.
And in fact, at that point, suddenly you go from being a profitable company. And in our case, we were burning like $6 million a month, you know, and that ended up being, and you just kind of wake up and it can happen.
And in our case, it literally happened like that. It happened so fast.
So then at that point, you know, as a leadership team, we started to think about like, what do we actually, if like we had to cast everything aside and we started from a zero-based budgeting approach, like what do we need to do to sustain and stay in the game? And, you know, over three really gut-wrenching, you know, cuts, you know, we took the company from 37, 300 and sorry, 400, 37 people all the way down to 35.

Oh, did that by exiting business lines, and you know, getting out of international markets. But what did we end up doing? Our best people suddenly were for the first time in like five years, all working on the main thing, right? And keeping the main thing, the main thing ended up being absolutely critical to us doing something that, you know, I think Elon has had to do a Twitter, like bringing the headcount down so drastically, but it works because all of the best people were working on the biggest problem, you know, and, and that has been, you know, a really painful lesson for this company to learn.
But as we're rebuilding, you know, it's, it's made my executive team, you know, many of them who were the number three or number four in the old world, like the people that are still here, you know, they, they are so when there is a new shiny object to go chase, right, those there those lessons so it's like this company has grit these are survivors these are people that there were spreadsheet lists and they kept being on the you know right column first left and that's not to say that any of the people that aren't here anymore you know weren't you know awesome they were you know i i tell people all the time if you see cameo on someone's resume like we were as good hiring as any company in the world. But, you know, weren't, you know, awesome.
They were, you know, I tell people all the time, if you see cameo on someone's resume, like we were as good hiring as any company in the world, but you know, this, this rebuild was not for everybody, right? If you were somebody that wanted to build a team, you know, suddenly like you might be a team of one, right. And, and you could be the best person in the world at that role, but maybe there was someone that was willing to just be that CTO that also was willing to code.
And that was for us what ended up being huge. And despite my board and investors telling me that if I made these cuts, we would be a zombie company and there would be no way that we would ever be able to grow again.
You know, last December, our busiest time of the year, we were 30% bigger in revenue than we were the year before with 70% less headcount. And I think it goes to what you said before, number five, keep the lights on.
Do what you got to do to keep the damn lights on. So you've been through the hurdles, you've been through the extremely fast high.
And then obviously the world got crazy with COVID and there was all these things and you've had these huge cutbacks. You know, you cut down to what, almost 10% of your original staff, I think, if I did numbers right.
You crashed that into that. What's the future for Cameo? What's next? What's the future for you as the CEO and the founder in these individuals? What's next? Look, we're really super excited about the future for the business.
We were able to recap the company, which was absolutely critical, you know, four or five months ago. And effectively what that did, it allowed us like reset the valuation.
We had employees that joined at a billion dollar valuation, many of whom are here today. And you think about that, the strike price of their options is here.
And when the valuation, you know, the day we became a publicly traded or the day we became a unicorn, you know, Facebook was a trillion dollar company, right? And Snapchat was worth $120 billion. Go look at Snapchat's valuation today, right? So in the public markets, you know, the valuations contracted so heavily for these companies.
So suddenly, if you're thinking about M&A and any type of outcomes, the multiples changed. I mean, when we raised our unicorn valuation, the marketplace businesses like ours were getting valued 8 to 12x forward net revenue.
We were 75 million net revenue, 12 X multiple, 900 million free,

100 million post. It wasn't even an expensive round.
We had real revenue. Our round was $400 million oversubscribed.
People were fighting. We had investors wiring checks that were bigger than their allocation to try to get in.
People were literally fighting over it. And yet today, right people marketplaces are getting valued on an even a multiple.
So if you're burning money, right, like it doesn't matter what your net revenue is, like you're the markets effectively telling you you're worth nothing. So we got into a point where when you looked at the public market comps of businesses like ours, are, if we had gone to try to sell the company, we probably wouldn't have been able to clear our prep stack.
So that's why I like, you know, taking the tough medicine, bringing the valuation down, you know, doing a recap, it ended up being the thing that, you know, really, I think has given us like a second life. It's been absolutely critical for me to keep my best employees, you know, they need to be incentivized.
And as we as we build a billion dollar company back up, right, I want the people that were here for this ride to be very richly rewarded. And I'll tell you one more thing.
This group right here, the new goal is the 10x evaluation of the company before we double headcount again. In the old world, when we raise, I remember we raised, you know, 12 and a half in our series A and 50 in our series B and 100 in our series C.
And every time you'd read those press releases, it's like Cameo raised $50 million. And now they're going to take headcount from 50 to 175 people, right? Hiring people itself was like a goal.
And part of that is I've always believed fundraising is just a proxy for hiring. People are giving you money so you can hire people on their behalf basically to go and make their money more value, their investment more valuable.
But I love this mindset now that my team has, that's like, we can do this with the people that we have here. And oh, by the way, like we have to have such a high bar that if we're going to add somebody like they, you know, there's only going to be so many seats on this rocket ship.
Right. And we need to make sure that we're incredibly thoughtful and selective of who's coming in.
And it's just a different playbook. It really is.
It's a completely different way of looking at it. And I think some of the things you gave throughout this entire talk are just massively different than most people run into and it'll change their playbook.
I always ask everybody, what are the things that you've learned that a little hacks, a little thing that you do on a routinely basis? Like, Hey, there's this book or there's this a sleep thing or this thing that most people wouldn't know that you've come across that's helped you either with your health or with your business off. What is one of those things you're like, Oh, for me, it's, I have something called a chill pad, which I put on my bed and it keeps me.
So I sleep, I get eight hours like clockwork. I love that damn thing.
What is one of those things that go, oh for me it's i have something called a chill pad which i put on my bed and it keeps me so i sleep i get eight hours like clockwork i love that damn thing yeah what is one of those things that you're like hey it's a supplement or something like that that's like ah every single time i use this it changes my ballgame yeah the my morning routine like i go and do pilates every morning and um and then i go and follow that up with uh with a cold plunge yes and honest to god it's like it doesn't matter like how shitty i was feeling and i'm not someone like i'm very envious i'm like a four hour sleep guy um you know i've done the eight sleep i've done everything like it's just not my mom was like that my girl i go to bed at two i wake up at six like that's how i'm on yeah and but like and could be so groggy, but when it's go time and I'm 7.00 AM, I'm on that reformer. And then, you know, by eight o'clock I'm, you know, in the steam.
And then by eight, 10, I'm in that cold plunge. Like it just literally, it's like, it's like super, it's like plugging the Tesla into a supercharger.
And, um, you know, for me, that's, that's been, you know, absolutely essential, like making sure that the body's feeling well. And look, like, I think all of us are guilty as founders that when things are going really shitty, then, you know, you're, you just let your habits come out the door.
But like it, as we were rebuilding the company, like it was during that time that I kind of refound my like health habits. And like, then, you know, as I was feeling better and I was healthier, like I made better decisions, you know, and that's something that, um, you know, I have a warning sign to myself of,

of if I start all of a sudden I'm not making the gym or I'm feeling things are good. Like that's,

you know, that's the danger, danger, Will Robinson lights at this point.

Love it. How do people track you down? How do people find you? I know people are gonna have a lot more questions.
What's the best way to reach out to you and to kind of connect with you? I, you know, to be honest, I'm not super active on, on, you know, LinkedIn, as far as posting, like I work there. So I'll post big company announcements, but I'm not like the LinkedIn guru making posts.
And I'm not particularly active on X as well. But my handle on Twitter is Mr312, MR312, the Chicago area code.
It's just my name on Instagram and on Twitter and on LinkedIn, but I'm probably most active on Instagram. Gotcha.
The mayor part starts to make sense with Mr312. That makes a lot of sense.
I really appreciate you coming on and sharing the knowledge. There's so many things that I took away from it.
Thank you so much for coming on and being part of this. Cool.
Thanks for having me. Thanks for tuning into this episode.
A massive shout out to Stephen for pulling back the curtain on Cameo's journey. His evolution from options trader to building a platform that revolutionized celebrity fan interactions is nothing short of inspirational.
To all you founders out there, your hunger for innovation and growth is what keeps the show going strong. Want to put Steven's startup strategies into action? We've got you covered.
We've distilled this episode into a power-packed action guide. It's loaded with Steven's frameworks, from the hacker, hustler, hipster team-building model to his five forever OKRs for CEOs.
Grab your free guide at podcast.imcharlesschwartz.com. Remember, as Stephen hammered home, startup success isn't about chasing trends.
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