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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Finding Peak with Ryan Hanley · How I Built a $1B Business – Cameo CEO Steven Galanis · 6 Mar 2025 podcast

You know, you could have the best ride up ever, but that doesn't mean the, you know, the come down is going to be anything but Rocky, but like, you know, 99.9% entrepreneurs. go through major, major adversity at some period. And you know, sometimes the sector that you're in is the hottest thing in the world.

And then other times, you know, nobody wants to touch it with the 10 foot pole, especially on the venture side. So ultimately the way that I've always looked at it is if you find the thing that is your key guy point, it allows you to keep going on regardless of what's going on around you.

And then the last thing that I think is really important, and this is, you know, when you asked me the first question, Ryan, like, do I regret you know, being in the professional world versus being an entrepreneur, as long as you're learning, you don't regret it. Right. But the big thing is like I see too often and I've been guilty of this myself.

Like I mentioned, hey, maybe if I just in two years of trading, I kind of got what I needed out of that and I would have been ready for the next thing. But I stayed for five. Right. And ultimately, I think I think that's so important, whether you're in a role and thinking about a promotion or at a company. Should I stay? Should I leave? Are you learning? Are you growing?

And if you're not, you should find something else.

Totally. And that's really what the whole premise of the Yuki guy is. you know, framework means to say, like, if you found that thing, then you are going to put the time and the effort because you love it. You're great at it. You know, you're, you're inspired by it. Like all those things, like you can get, you can make money doing it. Right. That's, it's so important.

Well, I will tell you that those are the three that have stood the test of time. The other core values have been altered at different points, but those three along with run through walls, which is no longer a core value, but still like very much an ethos of Cameo are really the pillars upon which we built the company.

So the thing that's kind of cool, I mentioned there were like four kind of OG core values at Cameo. We have six now, but each one of the founders and then Arthur Leopold, who was our first employee founding COO, each one of us had kind of a value that we brought to the table that became the bedrock and foundation of our culture.

So starting with, you know, fight for simplicity, starting with Roll Out the Red Carpet.

was the one that came from me like the whole idea with roll out the red carpet is any single person that interacts with our brand whether they're trying to interview for a job or they're a talent on the platform or a customer like the way that they should feel after interacting with cameo is like they were just escorted down the red carpet at the oscars and like they're the star of the show and you know the red velvet rope is there and everyone they want to meet behind it and

And like we're lifting that red velvet rope up and introducing them to everyone they ever wanted to meet. Like that is us to a T. And you know, when we think about that from an employer employee perspective, you know, we always talk about like your first day at Cameo should be the best day of work you've ever had in your life. And then your second day should be better than the first.

And like, that's such a ingrained part of our ethos. And when we think about things like roll up, like the return to office policy that we just did. You know, we're giving a $10,000 raise to all of our Chicagoland employees to come do that. We lived up to our value of roll out the red carpet there, right? Like, I don't know of another company on the planet that's doing that.

I totally think that people were asking more out of them if they have to come in and their peers don't. So like, why should we not compensate them for that and do that in a really generous way? So roll out the red carpet, number one. Number two, act like an owner is actually one that was a LinkedIn value link. I worked at LinkedIn right before, so did Arthur.

And this was one that we stole, but we really liked, you know, it's this idea that like every single person, like you mentioned earlier, you know, being in that role, but you don't really love it. So like, you know, you're remembering baseball cards. Like if you act like an owner, like,

you're the CEO, if you're the janitor or you're the COO of the company, like you're going to act like a CEO for your role. And we really believe in that. And you know, part of the, you know, part of putting our money where our mouth is like every single employee at the company has options in the, in the company. So like literally they are an owner. I've always felt that that was really important.

And, and on top of that, it's, it's just this whole idea of like, you know, like for the owner, the job's never done, right?

So it's like, you know, you're never just gonna go say this is good enough, like you should really own your work and feel like you're, like you're named the, you know, Stephen Golanus or the Ryan Hanley, like, you know, money back guarantee is like stamped onto the work that you're doing. Fight for Simplicity is a really interesting one. That came from Devin, our co-founder.

Devin ran product and engineering for most of Cameo's history. Today, he kind of oversees all creative and runs design. And the idea with Fight for Simplicity is to build something globally scalable, It is so hard to to do that if you have like all this complexity, like different buttons, different skews, et cetera. So what we're always trying to do is like, you know, how do we delete?

How do we streamline? How do we make this as easy as possible? Because if you make it as easy as possible, it actually allows it to scale. And, you know, fighting for simplicity

often means very difficult trade-offs, but cutting it all the way down, and that's something that I think that we're pretty proud of as far as the core product that we built, what the whole universe of things we could have done was, but focusing for, we're nine years in to this per-size video product.

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