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

Our leadership team knew that at some point that was going to end, but at the same time, like we just raised a hundred million dollars and now we are, you know, we're building up to try to future proof the business and ultimately take it public. If you remember that period of time, this is specs, this is direct listings.

You know, coming into 2020 Cameo was named the most promising consumer internet company in the world by the information. And we are just like humming on all cylinders. We hire a public company ready management team. We hire kind of the best of the best.

The team goes from 100 people who are all in person in Chicago and LA to about 400 people that are fully distributed across 38 states and 13 countries, right? And we're building international out. We're starting new business lines. We're doing all these things to try to diversify our base. And then all of a sudden the second vaccine comes out. Like when people got their second shot.

And organic traffic to our site ended up dropping by 65%. So the core business, which was never built on paid marketing, was always built on virality and talent promoting and customer sharing, like just 65% less people came into our store and OpEx at three X, right? So suddenly, you know, we went from being profitable, breakeven business to burning $6 million a month.

And it happened in like under 90 days. When that happened, all of a sudden, our leadership team was like, we have to take costs out of the business. It was a falling knife. We didn't know how far it was going to go. Over the next 18 months, which were probably the worst 18 months of my life, we had to tear the company down to the studs. We went from over 350 all the way down to 32 people.

You know, when we got to that third one, this was basically like, you know, our board was talking about, Hey, if we go that deep, you're a zombie company. There's no way you can grow again. You guys are dead, blah, blah, blah. But I was just like, I can't go and look at my team again if we're not profitable. I'm like, we have to get to profitability.

And, you know, happy to report that last year, you know, we were breakeven for the first time. And, you know, this is a company that was burning over $50 million two years ago. And it just was an absolute wild ride. And some of the lessons from that, you know, my biggest regret is in the first riff, we ended up, you know, laying off 25% of the company. And we should have gone deeper.

We absolutely should have gone deeper in that, you know, our... you know, my naivety and, and like trying to save people's jobs ended up costing more jobs in the longterm.

And it's something that I, I deeply regret because if we could have done that in two swoops versus, you know, versus three, there's so many great people that aren't here anymore that I, that I wish were here, but you know, I'm so grateful to those that stuck it out and stuck around. And, and, you know, you mentioned Ryan, like that culture is what kept people here because by the way, like,

When you lay off 300 people, these are awesome people. And suddenly they're at new companies and great jobs. And they're calling the people that are still there like, hey, the water's warm over here. Like, what the hell are you doing? I remember Mackenzie, my now chief of staff, came up to me late in that year. And she's like, Steven, I kind of feel like it's 2 a.m. at the bar. It's closed.

And we're the only losers left on the dance floor. Like, what's going on here? What are we trying to do? And, you know, I, and this is where like having a product that makes people happy every day and having a mission and core values and teammates that they love and leaders that they're inspired by, like that's what kept people together.

Yeah, I think there's parts I handled better than others. But one big learning that I took from that is in the ride up and the initial crash down. I was probably the most positive person on the ride-ups. I was the Pied Piper. No matter how excited anybody was, I was more excited.

And then when shit was going bad at the beginning, my expectations were so high that my tolerance for missing plan or shipping when we needed to or things not getting done, I just was so pissed off all the time. And I was more mad than anybody.

You know, so one of the things that I've been really working on myself through coaching that I've tried to do better is to be more of the ballast of the emotional ballast of the company. So when things are very exuberant, like that's where I want to pull them back or where things are really shitty. That's where I want to pull people up. Right. So I've been working on that a lot. But, you know,

At the end of the day, you have to be putting a brave face out to your company. You have to have conviction in what you're doing. And in that period of time, I leaned on some amazing entrepreneurs that were part of my YPO forum and other people that kind of have come up when I did.

And we spent so many nights on the phone with each other, talking through the issues that we were all going through at that time. And it was just... you know, I know it's funny. My dad was like a longtime finance leader at a multi-billion dollar company. And I remember him saying like, man, that 18 months, you got like 30 years worth of experience with that.

Yeah, I think that's a great point. You know, one thing I was really worried about culturally, like as we went from 100 to 400 in 12 months, it had been such a winning team that had literally had, you know, like we had, you know, we had the Brett Favre issue.

We, you know, of course in any business, you've got your little minor lumps, but like in many ways, like it kind of cameo just kind of worked from the beginning, right? We had, we found product market fit right away. The first thing we ever sold ended up being like the thing that we did. You know, had the name, had the space, like just it kind of was this company that had everything.

And when we started hiring people in that pre IPO level that were leaving public companies to come work for the next one that was going to be public. Like we had, you know, the resumes of people we were hiring were way better. They went to better schools, you know, they had, you know, they had, you know, better resumes.

And we started hiring for like resumes and experience over kind of what got us there, which was giving like really smart young people with no, that had no business, like having the responsibility, giving them the shot to be great.

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