Steven Galanis
speaker
239 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Steven Galanis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Finding Peak with Ryan Hanley · How I Built a $1B Business – Cameo CEO Steven Galanis · 6 Mar 2025
podcast
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, that's a great question. Happy you asked it. You know, one thing I know a lot of you that are listening, you know, probably can empathize with, you know, the entrepreneur that was, you know, 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, you know, 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 Maritas, 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 like grade that had Facebook all through college. Eventually once people started graduating, they needed to get rid of the dot 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, you know, 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's going about almost 20 years strong now, you know, which is, which is pretty funny, but you know, really to answer your question, like, 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 know, you could imagine that, you know, maybe if I graduate three years earlier or three years later, you know, you're a sophomore year, junior year, you're interning on Wall Street or whatever. at a consulting firm, and then you're going to go work there.
And, you know, 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 in a McKinsey that ended up starting companies like Coinbase and Plaid and Airtable.
You know, these are guys that were like all the same age, you know, 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 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 had 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 nine years to find my really good idea.
We'll start from the top on this.
I'm a deep believer that entrepreneurs are born not made. I think you can become more entrepreneurial by being, you know, hanging, working at startups or being around other entrepreneurs. But, you know, most entrepreneurs that I know, like, they – They were entrepreneurs in kindergarten.
They were the ones with the lemonade stand or they were flipping baseball cards or pogs or whatever the fuck it was. Yeah, pogs. Oh my God. I just see that over and over and over again. You know, in fact, there's a personality test we used to make everybody take in the OG days of Cameo.
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 like openly wanted to hire like future founders, like people that know they want to be an entrepreneur. They like.
want to get their feet wet and i i think there's probably over 10 people that have left cameo over the years to become you know venture-backed ceos including two that became unicorns right which is which is something you know i like think i'm a college sports fan i love thinking about like coaching trees and and you know like the ceo tree and the alumni tree of cameo has has really spawned some incredible founders that have that have come through and and you know try to do
Things from pet insurance to NFTs to, you know, marketplace for art or, you know, different things in the creator economy. So like we we've kind of run the gamut, but you know, I think, I think that's, 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 like 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 iron man heart, right? It's like that perpetual motion machine. It keeps you going through the good times through the bad times.
Showing 1–20 of 239 · page 1 of 12
Next →