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

We immediately built this kind of like early AI bot on Slack that would basically, you know, we, we went to the Southern poverty law center and got this list of all these like hate words and different hate groups. And then it would, it would basically flag, uh, we called it Nazi bot at the time. It would basically flag anything and then let our talent team know,

Hey, there's something fishy about this request or this reference. And then what we did was, you know, I needed to make sure Brett stayed and he felt safe. And I had heard that the 96 Packers, the Super Bowl champions were having like a reunion. Maybe it was 97. They were having a reunion up in Milwaukee, like, signing autographs and everything.

So, like, me and my chief of staff at the time, Adam Ostrom, we drove up in a huge snowstorm from Chicago to Milwaukee. We waited in this big-ass line. There were hundreds and hundreds of people there. And we got to the front line and, you know, hey, I'm Steven from Cameo, Adam from Cameo. We talked to Brett. We told him how much we appreciated, you know, him. And we were there for him.

And, you know, by the way, we were – I didn't want to have that conversation like that, you know, but you know what he said to me, he looked me straight in the eye and goes, Steven, wasn't my best day, but it wasn't my worst day. I love how Cameo makes people feel. And, you know, just thank you for being there and stepping up.

And honestly, that's one of those little moments that kind of saved the company at the time. And what we didn't. What we didn't realize was even though that was as bad of a press cycle as you can, you can kind of get a lot of people found out about Cameo from that. And, you know, instead of the platform dying, like we had the biggest month we ever had.

And that really started, you know, just accelerating the flywheel of our business. And the rocket ship really started igniting at that point.

I mentioned run through walls was that value that's not there, but that's just how we built this business. Cameo was built by very gritty people building the business brick by brick. And when some insurmountable obstacle came in our way, we busted through it. And that's something that it's really, even as we're rebuilding our culture right now,

Like, that's the thing that, you know, and by the way, that run through walls, like, what is that? I mentioned we hired a lot of entrepreneurs at this company, right? And like, what are entrepreneurs? They're run through walls type of people.

Yeah, it was a really, really difficult, tough time. But, you know, let's start even going into COVID because I think it's a really important part of the story. So coming into COVID, I mentioned like this Brett Favre thing happened. And, you know, when you look at the first four years of our business, like we became a unicorn on the exact four year anniversary of launching. Right. And

And that was at a time where there were no AI unicorns popping up pre-revenue. Our business went from $300,000 to $4 million to $20 million to $100 in its first four years. And this is just the classic rocket ship.

And for us, one of the things that happened, and we got called a COVID darling a lot, but people don't really know that in 2018 and 2019, we were the fastest growing consumer marketplace in the world at that time, too. So coming into COVID, we had this huge momentum.

We had just raised our series B from Kleiner Perkins and churning group and a lot of like incredible investors that joined the cap table. And like this thing was like ready to launch when COVID hit. Initially, we didn't know how that was going to deal with our business, right? The whole world shuts down.

And in fact, the first week of COVID, the first week of lockdowns, our business went down by 50%. And we had an emergency board meeting that Sunday night about, Hey, like what, like, were we going to need to do layoffs? Like, what were we going to need to do? We didn't know how long this was going to go on. So like, I remember me and the founders, we cut our salaries to zero.

We got rid of like a lot of these benefits that we had like, Ooh, you could Uber to work back in the day or like gym membership or like, well, if everything's shut down, like we're not going to need any of those things. So we just basically did everything we could to avoid laying people off and took some costs out of the business.

And then basically the next week, like it rebounded and then it just shot out like a cannon. And, you know, in 2020, we grew about 500% in revenue, right? So suddenly, you know, this thing is like full speed ahead.

And as I like to describe it to people, that period of time was like playing the game Mario Kart when you hit the star and you can kind of go 10 times faster and you can bump into shit and you just keep going. And then at some point, like that star just kind of fades off. And for us, that was when the second vaccine came out.

And if you think about why our business accelerated during COVID so much, you mentioned that this was becoming a new way to communicate. Your mom is living across the country, so you couldn't see her for Mother's Day. You sent her a Kenny G to tell her how much you loved her and wish her a happy Mother's Day. So you're literally sending digital love.

And you think about the missed weddings and birthday parties and life events that happened, and a cameo is such a great way to do it. But On the supply side, for the first time in history, every athlete, actor, celebrity in the world was out of work.

And none of them, even those that are like, if you're a pro, if you're an MLB player, you're an NBA player, you have an annual salary, but you get paid per game. So guess what? When the games weren't happening, they weren't getting paid. So this was a massive supply side tailwind for us.

And, you know, there was more availability, they were busy and it just kept people were on their phones and at home. And it just, it was just the perfect storm, you know, for our business.

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