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Steven Galanis

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27
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2019-06-28
most recent
2019-06-28
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1
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  1. “But we're extremely excited to start leveraging the international with us. And when we think about all the different businesses we can build at Camia as we're fulfilling that core equation of for X amount of money, you can do Y activity with the person. Right now we're sitting in Chicago whiteboarding out all the billion dollar businesses we think we can build on top of this, whether it's just expanding the core product, whether it's creating a B2B microendorsement marketplace, whether it's becoming the world's largest talent agency, whether it's brokering events both online or offline or maybe becoming the next Netflix, if we have all the talent, why couldn't we start creating our own content on a much larger scale? It's so endless the types of things that we can do. And we're, like I said, we're at the top of the second inning and we're just going to start it. Stephen, as I said, I had so many great things, both from Nikki.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Think having it back and being that first person that you call when things aren't going right. So many founders are so worried about putting on the show for their investors and always making it rosy. But I think one of the things that my investors have really appreciated with me is if I need help on something, I leverage them, whether that's interviewing a key hire, opening up a key relationship or making an introduction, leverage your investors. They're there and Mike Amson, when he wrote his first check, he said with my money comes my most valuable resource, my time. And I've taken him up on that probably more than my fair share. And it's been the great fortune of cameo to have exceptional people that are willing to give me their time. That has really been key to my growth as a CEO and helping me scale up this business is growing exponentially.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “One of my core ones early is it's better at part of something but all and nothing. And I think that that is so critical when you think about developing your relationship with your co-founders or investors. Look, when we started the company, Martin and I had 50% each when we recruited Devin, our co-founder to come out and build the platform. You know, we had to come in him in. And as we took on investors from Mike Amson to Azure to Nicole, every time we own less percentage of the company, but that pie has gotten bigger. And I think having part of something is so much more important than having all and nothing. So I really tell founders always that talk to me, don't worry about dilution, don't worry about cutting the right person in. Worry about making sure you have the best people around you in the world that could help you fulfill your dream.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Creating the marketplace where frex amount of money, you can do Y activity with Z person. So while today we're focused on sending text messages to people and getting video in response, in the future, that could be any interaction both on the online, offline, or virtual world. So that might be having Brett Favre show up at your dinner via Hologram. That might be having you sending a video response to talent and getting a sound or voice or something else back. So we're literally the second inning of this and we're just going to go.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I just read blitzcaling, but I read Hoffman. It's amazing if you're a founder in this hyper-growth stage, you got to read it.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “He was the first investor in the company or one of the first investors in the company. So, you know, hopefully when it's all said and downhill, he'll have a nice little payday there.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “There's a book called Play it Bigger that I highly recommend any founder out there read that was very fundamental to us thinking about category creation, which is something we did from the very beginning. When we went to market, we recalled powermove.io, powermove.io would not have been the company that candio became. Branding was”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “To be honest, it was extremely affordable compared to what people are paying for Facebook ads. And we had the added benefit of when we did that, just the fact that we put a billboard up in Times Square, that started getting covered in all the big tech blogs in Chicago. That ended up turning into PR for us. So I would challenge any founder to find non-traditional ways and to even go back to things that used to work in the past that maybe you're being overlooked.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So cameo by definition is proof that you're wrong on that. We found a new hack. So as I mentioned, our inventory walks, talks, and has thousands of followers on their own, if not millions. And the hack that we made was we created a link where each talent could tweet out or do Instagram swipe ups to turn their viewers into our customers. The genius of cameos that we don't spend any money on marketing. We grew the business 1,300% last year because every single cameo is a commercial for the next one. But I would challenge any consumer founder out there to try to find a new marketing hack that allows you to do something different. We've just started doing things like putting billboards up in Times Square with our top reaction videos, which might seem like an insane use of capital, but”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “At a party in Maladu, and Jeremy Lou sent me an email and said, I don't know where you are, but we need to have breakfast tomorrow for those next three weeks. Lightspeed got to know me in a way that would make any founder envious. It was their absolute conviction that we were creating the next platform to change pop culture that made them the perfect partner for me, despite a situation where we had multiple term sheets out there.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Two things. Number one, it is very critical to have investors that have absolute conviction about what you're doing. When you're fundraising, it should never be you convincing VCs or any investor to invest in the business. You want to find that investor that seeks you out and has so much conviction about what you're doing that they spend their time convincing you to take their money. We've been blessed to have that through all of our rounds of financing. Our first round came from an inbound phone call from Mike Gamson, the number two at LinkedIn, and probably the person more than anyone who's been responsible for Cambion's early success and my ability to build my dream company in my hotel in Chicago. Ezra, when he found Camio as a referral from Jackson Jin, a VC who had been, who was 21 years old at the time and had been at Chicago Ventures for all of two days. Ezra had absolute conviction about what we were doing, and that extended to when Jeremy Liu and Nicole Quinn discovered that.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “A product that the talent loves just as much as Instagram or just as much as Snapchat or any other product that they use.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “A marketplace, so very obviously chicken and the egg problem, just like any other marketplace. I had very high conviction, as did my co-founders, Devin and Martin, that this was a product that there would be instationable customer demand for. We saw Brandon's reaction. And actually, when we launched the site, the very first time we ever sold a cameo, this father purchased a video and filmed his daughter's reaction and sent it to us. It was the very first time that we'd ever seen one of these reaction videos that were so famous for. The 16-year-old girl started crying. And we had absolute conviction that if we could make one person happy like that, we could make billions of people happy at scale. But the bigger question was, could we create a product that was so fun that talent would do this for free, but they'd get paid. And we had to make sure that we could build a product that enabled talent to make these videos at scale and to Devon brilliant co-founder and CTO's credit.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Simplicity is literally a core value of our company. The only product that we sell right now is the same product we went to market with two years ago. All we're trying to do right now is to get all the talent. We have over 8,500 talent on Cambodia today. We believe there's over 5 million in the world. So for us, before we get into finding other Y activities to build out our equation, we are much more focused on getting all the talent. So it makes prioritization really, really simple. Once we have it.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “In our case, we don't have a choice. Of the first five Talent on Cameo, two actually came from abroad. So we have literally been an international company from day one before we'd send anybody over to the UK. We were already doing 30% of our business internationally because our talent, if you think of cameo as Amazon or you think of it as an e-commerce marketplace, every one of our SKUs walks the talks and has hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Messing with Facebook Messenger and chat thoughts on that platform that evolved to Telegram. We had done over 10,000 videos before we built our first app for the talent on the platform. Today, the way the product works, it's like a mix between Tinder and Snapchat. So when you order a cameo from Cameo.com, the message comes up on the talent's phone. They can swipe right, swipe left. If they swipe right, a teleprompter opens up, records the video, sends it off, and they get paid and the customer gets their video. that everybody loves today, this product that got named one of time genius 50 companies on earth, it probably will be something that we look back at and are embarrassed by in a year from now or two years from now as we evolve and continue to make this a more dynamic experience. So don't fall in love with your product, fall in love with your mission.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I was speaking at a Veneta Kellogg School of Business last night, and I heard another founder say something that really resonated with me, and I think it'll tie in well to this. And she said that it is so important as an entrepreneur to fall in love with your mission, but not fall in love with your product. The amount that that's going to help evolve to become that billion dollar business, it's crazy. And if you get too tied into the way you're doing things now, it will never work. So for an example, when we started, when we launched Cameo, we launched with one person, a football player named Cassius Marsh, the only thing that you could do was request a video from him. There were no videos to watch. There were no demos, nothing. And in the very earliest days, we literally had a very simple web page, and you could enter in your name, your email address, and the message you wanted for the talent. We then emailed the talent, told them to record a video and email it back. So V1 of Cameo was as low fidelity as it got. As we started iterating, we eventually started.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “One thing I've really learned is it's so important to have, and this is right now versus Mrs. Right. At different points of the startup's history, there's certain people that are the perfect people you need at that point. And sometimes you can make a really senior hire, but if they don't have the people under them that they need to be successful, they're not going to be successful. They'll get frustrated. So we've been really fortunate to hire hungry, humble, helpful, smart, no ego people. And that's, again, what's made the culture so great. Every time you make a hire, the culture gets better or worse. So, you know, right now I'm very focused on hiring well at scale.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “World at I try to power myself from those jobs as quickly as possible and get better people than me to take my place there.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “As a founder, that is, I think, always one of the toughest transitions from founder and a CEO. In the early days, you're so in the weeds and you were doing everything hands-on. At the beginning, I secured every talent I was on the platform. I onboarded them. I was customer service until maybe four months ago, if you called the customer service line on Instagram and still went to my cell phone. I answered the emails. I did everything. Today, I've been working to hire better people than me at every single job that I used to do, except for my true core competencies. So at this point, I focus on four things exclusively. One, setting the strategic vision of the company, two, hiring my executive team. Three, keeping the lights on through fundraising. And four, being the public face of the company, media PR. Those are the types of things that I feel that I have a unique ability to be best in the world at. And anything that I feel like I'm not best in.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I was so distracted that three months that I was doing both, I really was doing my core job pretty poorly. And to be fully honest, it wasn't until I was sitting in a hot tub in Nicaragua with a few of the guys that I worked at LinkedIn with, all of whom were also obsessed with the idea. There was very high conviction among the people that I worked with and my manager that this could be something. But we were planning to sit at LinkedIn and build this billiard dollar company while collecting our paychecks and getting our nice 401k stock options. But at the end of the day, it wasn't until my buddy Wilhelm asked me the question that changed my life and will said, Stephen, if somebody else builds this company and becomes a billionaire and you're still sitting at LinkedIn, could you live with yourself? And I looked at him and the answer was so obviously no that my farewell letter and my teammates the next day and I never showed up back to working LinkedIn.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “In the case of cameo, it took me about three months to develop the conviction that I needed to go for it. When I saw that first video, something changed in my brain chemistry and I became obsessed with the idea. When I dropped Martin off at the airport, I called him the second he got through security. We talked for the next two hours on the phone. And then I was so jazzed up. I booked a flights to LA the next day, went out to him. We spent a weekend hacking together the original concept of cameo, which is to create a marketplace where for X amount of money you could do Y activity with Z person. Three more months went by and I was probably the worst employee at LinkedIn for my last quarter there. I would miss customer calls because my co-founders would call me and we'd have some big ideas. I would jump on a plane to Seattle or to whatever event. I remember taking their early trip with a LinkedIn colleague, Sean Fox, and we went to Arizona to spring training to try to sign up. One of our buddies who played in Major League Baseball.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “And love the Seattle Seahawks more than anything on Earth. He had just had his first son, and Martin Cassius Marsh, this player, to send a 10-second video saying, hey, Brandon, it's Cassius Marsh from the Seahawks. Heard about your son Maverick. If he gets your athletic ability, he'll be playing for the Seahawks one day. Go Hawks. And he sent this video to Brandon. And Brandon, who's worked with Michael Jordan and LeBron and Kairi is some of the biggest athletes on Earth, he put it on Instagram and he said it was the best gift he ever got in his life. And that really made his thing if Brandon”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Well, it is the most important thing just taking that first step. When a young entrepreneur comes into me today in 1871 or to come meet the office of Cameo, the very first thing I'll ask them is, have you quit your job yet? If they haven't quit their job, I tell them to weave and let me know when they have. Because if they don't have conviction in themselves of what they're doing, there's no chance they're going to win and it's really not worth my time or anybody else's time. Nobody else can make you take that first step. In our case, Cameo's founding story is really fascinating. Martin and I had the idea for Cameo leaving my grandmother's funeral in October of 2016 while driving in the car. He flew in for the day to Chicago for my grandmother's funeral. He showed me a video of a player named Cassius Marsh that he was reping as an NFL agent. And when he showed me this video, the context was his good buddy brandon was very high up in Nike's marketing department.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I think that 3% of the world's population has that sick gene in their head, their personality makes them an entrepreneur. When you're an entrepreneur, there's literally nothing you can do to be happy in any other job, no matter how amazing the place is. And you can never be your best self unless you are running the show. I'm one of those 3% of individuals that suffers from the entrepreneurial bug. And it makes me great, I think, at what I do now. But it also made me maybe not the best employee at other places despite maybe having talent.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Trading at the Chicago Board of Trade while doing that has started a film investment fund where we produced movies and television shows. That's how I met my co-founder Martin Blenka. And after that found myself at LinkedIn, which was honestly the best place to work and a place that was really fundamental to me getting exposed to the world of technology and building my own tech company.”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I've had a long history working as an entrepreneur. For me, that journey started at college. I graduated from high school in 2006, so I was the first generation to be like a true digital native on Facebook. Everything from my senior year of high school through my senior year at college was actually on Facebook. My very first business was a business called Spartan Entertainment, where we created a Facebook group that ended up running all the nightlife at Duke University, where I ended up going. So by the time I was done, we had 12,000 undergrads in this Facebook group, and we could send a message and get people to come to a party off of that. We built other businesses like a hot dog stand, a t-shirt printing company, and probably most famously a company that allowed students to store their luggage for when they went home for the summer. And we would bring it back to them at the end of the day. So my entrepreneurial journey started there. Afterwards, I ended up”

    2019-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cameo's Steven Galanis on Why You Must Fall In Love With Your Mission Not Your Product, How To Extract As Much Value From Your Investor Base As Possible & Should You Really Hire For 6 Months Ahead of What You Need? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source