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

And that was one of the periods where I really felt like organizationally, my spidey sense at the time was like, I don't know how much resilience or grit this, you know, this group of people have. Right. And, and obviously, you know, as layoffs started, um,

you know like we really found you know we we really found at that point like the those that remained the 32 that like cut down all the way from the mid 300s like those people like they've been through health with us right and that's why you know when it came to the return to office i'm like of course i'm going to roll out the red carpet for these people i know we need to be in the office but i love these people i want every one of them to be here for 10 years and you know part of the reason i want the people back in the office is because

This group of people creates magic when they're together. Right. So I don't want to do anything to force somebody to get another job. Like these are people that, you know, when push came to shove, like every single time in those spreadsheet exercises kept being on the green list versus the red list.

And and by the way, there's so many people on those red lists that I would kill to still have at this company. Right. But, you know, we had to do what we had to do.

So, right, I got a my CEO coach who's now my board member, Bing Gordon, kind of like legendary long term partner, Kleiner Perkins, like founding board, like board member of Amazon for 20 plus years. He one time, like we're both hockey players and he gave me he gave me a framework on team construction that I think was so valid.

He had basically went back and looked at all the Stanley Cup champions in the last 25 years, and he found that they had a mix of three archetypes of players, and You'll see where I'm going with this when we come and talk about how that applies to the company.

But basically, he's like every great Stanley Cup winning team first had kind of your two lines of guys, like six players who are at the peak of their career and they're going to do the best work of their life right now. Then you also have a group of another six that are young, dumb, hungry, stupid, but they're playing out of their minds. They don't even understand what's at stake.

They're rookies, they're second year in, but they're just workhorses and they're gonna do the best work of their life later, but they're playing out of their mind right now. And then he goes, lastly,

every team needs this you have to have the grizzled old vet that still has the blue burning flame that wants to lift the cup one more time maybe they've had a hall of fame career and they never won the championship and like they become the the the people that rally around this and you know at cameo we've had a really good mix of of those types but that's a framework and archetype i like for team building that at least resonated with me yeah and then your job becomes and i'm

That's how they draw it up, but in retrospect, that's probably the single thing that I fucked up or got wrong most in the build-up, especially in the heyday. When we were building this executive team, we're preparing to be a public company at some point in the next two to three years, and we went and hired the best of the best. Our head of product was one of the top product leaders at Uber.

Our CMO led Hims and Hers, which was the hottest brand out there at that point. Our COO was the global head of ops at LinkedIn. Our chief people officer was the global head of people at McDonald's. Our CFO was the CFO that everybody thought she was going to be the next great one to take somebody public. So we built this all-star team. But the problem was...

And I remember at the time, my, one of my board members told me something. She's like, Steven, you've been Michael Jordan this whole time, but now it's time to be Phil Jackson. You know, like the last dance had come out and, and really like what she was asking was like, you need to now be the person that just brings all these people together. And I don't know if it's because it was remote.

I don't know if it's because I brought in six senior executives, like all at the same time. And everybody's kind of fighting to be number two, but like, The sum of the parts, the whole was worse than the sum of the parts. Like that group of people I could not, and this was my failure and it costs, you know, it costs the company time. It costs the company money.

It costs a lot of people, their jobs. And this was my failure. I couldn't bring that group together to make that a cohesive, you know, high functioning, high trust management team. And that is the regret that I have from that period of time. So.

And as we've torn the company down, I realized that like the consensus-based management or trying to get everybody on the same page, like that's not, I just had to step up more and be like, this is the direction we're going, like figure it the fuck out, right? So I actually needed to become Michael Jordan again and not be Phil Jackson.

So I think like a lot of the management books will tell you it's all about being the maestro and creating the culture, but like, you know, as a CEO at the end of the day, like, Hey, I ran the company, you know, we as founders, we control the board.

You can't really look at anybody else on the bad things, you know, at the end of the day, like that, that starts and ends with us, with me and my co-founders. And ultimately I didn't do a good enough job in that period.

Well, let me, I think that's a really important point. I also think that that period of time was a very weird period, right? You had the great resignation. You had all these startups have, you know, series A companies had more money than series C companies.

You had like, just, there was so much craziness going around, quiet quitting, you know, people wanting to, you know, only be remote or only be an office. Like it just, It was just chaos. And then you had, you know, employee activism and woke ism to the point where, like, as a leader, you're trying to foster a culture that's inclusive for everybody.

You know, we're we're trying to build diverse teams. We're trying to build, you know, have different leaders with different perspectives there. But at the end of the day, like, I don't know, the captaining sports teams my whole life and having other businesses.

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