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.
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Appearances
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. Sie würden es schlagen. Also jeden Dienstag hatte ich alle Hände an Cameo. Ich fange mit unserer Mission an. Unsere Mission ist es, die am persönlichsten und authentischsten Fan-Erlebnisse auf der Erde zu erschaffen.
Ich wette, dass jede Person, die für uns gearbeitet hat, diese Mission beurteilen könnte. Unsere Werte, du weißt, rollen den roten Karpfen, act like an owner, kämpfen für Simplizität. Das sind Dinge, die im DNA verbunden werden. Das ist das Wichtigste. Viertens ist das Arbeitsempfehlungsengagement.
Dies kann von Dingen wie NPS betrachtet werden, aber am wichtigsten ist, ob die Leute, die für dich arbeiten, die beste Arbeit ihrer Karriere machen. Wenn sie die beste Arbeit ihrer Karriere machen und ihr habt Produkt-Markt-Fitz und es gibt Leiter, die sie genießen und sie lieben die Mission, Vision, die Werte der Firma, dann was werden sie tun? Sie werden nicht weggehen, richtig?
Und in der Tat, anstatt wegzugehen, werden sie den meisten talentierten Menschen, mit denen sie jemals gearbeitet haben, zu sagen, kommt her und arbeitet in Ihrer Firma. 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 for, you know, once a once a year or twice a year.
You do an employee voice survey, like find out anonymous, you know, one to ten. 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. Und dann, you know, the fifth one. And by the way, these are stacked ranks. 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 communication 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.
Ja, schau, wenn du, wenn du, da war in der Zero Interest Rate Umgebung, richtig? Three guys in a pitch deck could get funded. But at the end of the day, if you find product market fit, if you have something that people want, 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, I never see those people struggle to raise capital. I'm sure it's happened. There might be exceptions, but 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. Right. Andererseits ist es nur Spekulation, weil, schau, es gibt so viele tolle Ideen, die existieren. Und ja, vielleicht hat jemand eine tolle Pädagogik und wir haben das gesehen. Ich habe viele Leute gesehen, die Kameo verlassen und sie waren der Grund, warum wir gewonnen haben. Und sie kommen und dann werden sie gefundet.
Und ich habe viele dieser Karten auch für tolle Mitarbeiter geschrieben. Und vielleicht, wenn du wie ein Weltklasse-Org verlässt, dann sind die Leute auf der Pädagogik bettend. Aber fast immer sehe ich... Those founders ended up struggling two, three years later where they have the money and they haven't found product market fit.
And they're kind of in this limbo where it's like, do I return the money? Do I keep doing what I'm doing? Do I pivot? Product market fit needs to be number one.
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.
Look, for us it's really simple, like 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 People started spending money differently.
Instead of buying cameos, they were going to the restaurant. It was revenge spending. Going to Mykonos and Ibiza. 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, right? 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 you're
when your revenue is dropping by 50 percent and you're incubating a bunch of new things but the core business the core money maker is going down faster than the new things are growing and your you know your opex has increased by three four x right that is not good math right and in fact at that point suddenly you go from being a profitable company and in our case we were burning like six million dollars 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, Als Leitungsgruppe haben wir angefangen zu überlegen, was wir tun sollten, wenn wir alles wegwerfen und von einer Zero-Base-Budgeting-Approach anfangen. Was müssen wir tun, um in der Spielzeit zu bleiben?
Und über drei wirklich schmerzhafte Zähne haben wir die Firma von 437 Leuten bis zu 35 genommen. Oh, did that by exiting business lines and 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 at Twitter, like bringing the headcount down so drastically. But it works because all the best people were working on the biggest problem. Und das war eine wirklich schmerzhafte Lektion, die diese Firma gelernt hat.
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