347: Steven Galanis on Creating The New Autograph With Cameo

Steven Galanis is the CEO of Cameo, the world's leading marketplace for personalized video shoutouts. He previously helped finance films in Hollywood and spent 5 years as a professional options trader in Chicago after graduating from Duke University. In this conversation, we discuss the original idea for Cameo, how they found product-market fit, the celebrity acquisition process, who makes the most money on the platform, deep fakes and generative media, how they raised more than $65 million, and who is the most requested person not on Cameo. =============================== BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. https://www.blockfi.com/pomp =============================== When the New Yorker magazine asked Mark Zuckerberg how he gets his news he said the one news source he definitely follows is Techmeme. For more than two years and nearly 700 episodes, The Techmeme Ride Home has been Silicon Valley’s favorite tech news podcast. The Techmeme Ride Home is a daily podcast, only fifteen to twenty minutes long, and every day by 5pm eastern its ALL the latest tech news. =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Steven Galanis is the CEO of Cameo, the world's leading marketplace for personalized video shoutouts. He previously helped finance films in Hollywood, and spent five years as a professional options trader in Chicago after graduating from Duke University. In this conversation, we discuss the original idea for Cameo, how they found product market fit, the celebrity acquisition process, who makes the most money on the platform, deep fakes and generative media, how they raised more than $65 million, and who is the most requested person not on Cameo? I really enjoyed this conversation with Steven, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

• 0:51Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:34Anthony Pompliano?

  The next is a new podcast. It's really, really cool. When the New Yorker magazine asked Mark Zuckerberg how he gets his news, he said the one news source he definitely follows is Techmeme. For more than two years and nearly 700 episodes, the Techmeme Ridehome has been Silicon Valley's favorite tech news podcast. The Techmeme Ridehome is a daily podcast only 15 to 20 minutes long, and every day by 5pm Eastern, it's all the latest tech news. But it's more than just headlines. You could get a robot to read you the headlines. The Techmeme Ridehome is all the context around the latest news of the day. It's all the top stories, the top posts, and Tweets and conversations about those stories as well as behind the scenes analysis. The tech meme ride home is like the TLDR as a service.

• 2:18Anthony Pompliano?

  The folks at tech meme are online all day, and I mean all day, reading everything so they can catch you up quickly. So listen to the one podcast anyone who's anyone in Silicon Valley listens to every single day. Search your podcast app now for ride home and subscribe to the tech meme ride home podcast. Lastly, don't forget that I write a letter to over 50,000 investors every morning about business, technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Steven. This was an awesome one. I hope you guys enjoy it.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:23Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. Steven's here. He's got a massive beard, got the cameo hat, ready to rock and roll. Thanks for doing this, man.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. All right. For the few people who are watching this that don't know you, let's go through your background, what you did before you started Cameo.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  So coming out of Duke, I was an options trader for the first five years of my career. So my very first job was clerking at the Chicago Board of Trade in the soybean oil options pit. That's open archive market making. Literally, I was a clerk. So somebody would make the trade, they'd write it on a card, I'd take the due, if I drop it, I'd check it with the other trader to make sure there was no counterparty risk and I'd drop it off at Goldman Sachs's clearing desk. And yeah, that was my first job. The hours were great. The gray rooms only open 9:30, 1:15 and there's nothing you could do before and nothing you could do after.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  So that was a fun first job, you know, traded for a while after that, eventually got patched up. Ended up at the SPX, traded in the CBO and the SPX pit, so open out drive. Options, you know, really enjoyed that. While doing that, I had the opportunity to start a film investment fund. So my uncle would actually produce the movie Lone Survivor, among a bunch of other ones. Irishman was his most recent. And when Lone Survivor came out, I ended up renting a theater for all the guys in the pit to go kind of do a premiere. And at that, a bunch of the guys I traded with were like, Steven, why the hell are you, you know, trading in the pit with us? Why aren't you in Hollywood being a movie producer like drunk?

• 5:05Speaker 02

  So I did what any entrepreneurial, you know, young Greek hustler would do. I stayed in the pit and I started raising 25 Gs a pop from all the guys that probably would have pissed it away. You know, betting on sports. There wasn't crypto at that point to, you know, to be speculating on it at least that much in, you know, 2011, 2012. So this was still, you know, I'll take the under of the first half of a, you know, a college basketball game between, you know, Rutgers and Towson or something like that. So these guys were, were happy to part with their money and tell their wives and their girlfriends that they were investing in movies and television shows. I started doing that. I met my now co-founder Martin.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  We started a film investment fund where we produced a couple of movies and television shows. If you guys are really bored, you can watch Safe, I say, three on Amazon Prime right now. Probably the worst television show ever made, but Amazon Prime just launched it about seven years after the release. So we were catching up on that last night, which was a lot of laughs. Remake of Baywatch in 2013 with GoPros and Dolph Lundgren. This is David Hasselhoff. So if you guys want something fun, go watch that to give it a shout out. Maybe we get some residuals, you know, for all the money we lost on that investment. But anyways, so I ended up at LinkedIn after trading. I'd say one thing that really hit my mind.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  When I was trading, I remember walking into the CBOE for the first time. And this is a place where over forty thousand options traders, you know, worked. And at this point, you know, back, back in the day, every stock had its own pit. You know, Amazon, Apple had their own pits. And suddenly, you know, GE had their own pit. And I walked in, it looked like a dinosaur graveyard. There were only about a thousand open outcry traders left. There were really two pits. It was the VIX and the SPX. The SPX was the biggest. But I remember thinking for trading, it's like all the good times have kind of happened already. And of course, as the new guy, you know, I was hearing stories about what I missed in oh eight with the flash.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  What I missed with the flash crash, what I missed in oh eight, you know, what I missed in, uh, then the two thousand one ninety nine. In trading, all the big stuff had happened already. And I was very fortunate that a buddy of mine, Duke recruited me to come work in LinkedIn. And then when I got the tack, it was totally different. At LinkedIn, all the good stuff was gonna happen. It was about having a mission and a vision and realizing that. And I ended up, you know, having kind of my dream job at LinkedIn, working with amazing people. You know, getting to learn from people like Mike Gamson and Jeff Weiner, you know, how to build culture. Uh, you know, how to work with, you know, people in different offices. It was just a totally, a total game changer for me.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  And we had the idea for Cameo leaving my grandmother's funeral of all places. It's October fifth, twenty sixteen. Martin flew in from LA for the day for my grandmother's funeral. Uh, he was an NFL agent at the time when I went to go work at LinkedIn. He had the idea that if he could sign a sixth round draft pick, that was a big muscular guy with a big personality. He could maybe back into signing the next rock for the next Jason Momoa and turn him into a huge action star. Uh, he signed the guy, he wasn't able to turn him into a movie star. So suddenly he had a big, you know, cash liability, um, you know, by, by backing this guy that he was having to pay for his training. But there was no way he was ever gonna keep the investment.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  And he pulled out his phone and he showed me a video that he'd gotten made for his good buddy, who was pretty high up in Nike's marketing department. He loved the Seattle Seahawks more than anything and become a father for the first time. And he made this video and said, hey, Brandon, this is Cash Marsh from the Seattle Seahawks. Congratulations on having your son Maverick. I hope he gets your athletic ability. And if so, he'll be playing with me on the Seahawks one day. Go Hawks. And this video, I saw the guys, you know, Cash's Marsh's padded up guy, wearing no shirt, driving in Southern California. Just a really compelling piece of content. You didn't know, have to know who Brandon was. You didn't have to know who Cash was. But there was something magical about it.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  And Martin showed me this video and the second I saw it, I had the Eureka moment and it's like, that's the new autograph. And it was so obvious to me that, you know, today, when you see someone famous, you tend, you pick up your phone, you try to take a selfie with them. And if it's not on Instagram, it didn't happen. I grew up in Chicago, you know, nineties Bulls. You saw Ron Harper, you saw, you know, Dicky Simpkins at a restaurant. You're pulling the menu out, you know, they're signing the menu, they're signing your shirt, they're signing your hat. And, you know, that, that menu ends up on your wall and, you know, a house like mine in Glenview, Illinois. Or, you know, I think back to the 98 Cubs season, opening day today, shout out, welcome back baseball.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  But I think back to nine, summer of 98, you know, trying to get Sammy Sosa or Mark Grayson sign something. But you end up with Rod Beck or Glenn Allen Hill and Scott Service. And 20 years later, I shouldn't remember their name, but because they did one thing nice for me one time, you become a fan for life. And, and really, that's kind of what we tried to build a cameo. We tried to build a platform where every time somebody made a cameo, the person who received them becomes a bigger fan of them for the rest of their life. And, uh, you know, fast forward four years, we've now got 40,000 people on the platform. We've done 1.2 million of these. Uh, we call these not candos, we call them magical moments.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Every time we make one, we really feel that, you know, we're, we're making people smile, laugh and cry. We're totally changing an inflection point. We're being an inflection point, it change in their, in their day. And, um, you know, we've just been blessed to, to be off to the run that we're on and, and, um, you know, we think it's early, you know, it's, it's spring training ball still for, for us. We don't even think we're at the top of the first inning yet and how big this could get.

• 11:12Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, before we get into Cam, I got a lot of questions, but I grew up in North Carolina in Raleigh, and so I know Shooter's Bar at Duke there. You got to tell, what's the story with you and Ryan joking around?

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm a Duke. I actually, again, this is another kind of tie to technology and network effect, not knowing that I was doing network effect business back then, but I was a freshman at Duke and one of my really good friends from home is a guy named Zach Maritas, a big crypto guy today. He's the founder of the company called TeamWorks, which is a series C company out of Durham, North Carolina. So, you know, big shock if you knew Zach and I, that we're both running tech companies now. But anyways, so Zach invited me to partner with him and we, in the very early days of Facebook, this is when he still needed a .edu address to come

• 12:05Speaker 02

  on. You know, he was the senior that knew everybody. I was the freshman that knew everybody. We combined forces. We created a company called Spartan Entertainment. We're both Greek. Our dads are both literally from Sparta. And we ended up aggregating over 17,000 college students in this Facebook group. And over, over the course of four years, we came to really dominate nightlife, you know, at Duke certainly. And then we started getting into Raleigh and Chapel Hill by the end of it. But we basically ran Shooter's too. You know, it started with, our first entrepreneurial hustle was taking the most popular bar on campus, which at the time was just a biker bar, really. It was a bar that you would go

• 12:48Speaker 02

  to at the first week of school and the last week of school. And then it was just a kind of a redneck biker bar at the meantime. And we rented it out on Wednesday nights, which was kind of the athletes Friday nights, because at Duke, you weren't allowed to drink 48 hours before your game. So we figured, what, you know, if you had a Friday game or Saturday game, Wednesday was your, was actually your Saturday as an athlete. And we started getting three dollar pitchers and we set up beer pong tables and started having that. And today, if you go to Duke on Wednesday night, our legacy is living strong. I think that's my, that is my legacy to Duke, Wednesday night beer pong at Shooter's.

• 13:28Anthony Pompliano?

  That is an incredible story. All right, so when you start Cameo, what's kind of the first couple of things you guys do? So you see this piece of content, you're like bam, this is, you know, kind of the new autograph. Do you immediately say, we gotta go build a tech platform and kind of build a marketplace? And, you know, what it comes to today, or is there some other idea you start with?

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Well, the first thing I did was, we literally had the idea as I was driving in from, you know, we were downtown Chicago and you'd always wanted to go to Trump Tower because it's a beautiful building I live across. Trump hadn't won the presidency yet, so it was still fine to go to Trump Tower. But anyways, so we go get a cocktail on the roof, we have the idea. I drive him to O'Hare, the second he gets through security, he calls me up and it's basically like, man, this is awesome, this is exciting, we're kind of getting each other worked up. So I'm like, screw it, I'm gonna get on a plane to LA the next day. So I flew to LA the next day and Martin and I kind of dreamed up this marketplace where for X amount of money, you could do Y activity with Z person.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  So the video was one thing, but we thought we could sell autographs or personalized merch or, you know, anything, you know, tweet at me, like, follow me on Instagram, any, anything you met, you know, from Brett Barnes throwing a football with you to anything you could possibly imagine, like, we just felt X amount of money, Y activity with Z person. Martin and I are, neither of us are technical, so the first thing we needed was to part, you know, find somebody that could come build it. And I had a buddy from Duke named Devon Townsend that was the best engineer that I knew, who actually happened to have been an early Vine star as well.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  So Devon, in 2014, him and his best friend Cody, who's now Cody Kell, one of the biggest YouTubers on earth, they decided to quit their jobs at Apple and Microsoft respectively. They went down to Bali, they started messing around on Vine, they spent a year traveling the world and Devon ended up with about a billion loops on Vine and Cody had 3.6 billion loops on Vine. So they had actually become more famous than they were rich. Never able to monetize that at all, but they really understood becoming creator Devon moved back to LA. You know, he started being the first engineer at at different startups. Um, he was at one that was just kind of floundering and I I told him the idea.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  You know, he didn't think much of it, but he was a friend and I think he cut his best friend rate and was uh, we were paying him a hundred fifty dollars an hour or something like that. Uh, before he became a official co-founder. And I think I remember it was like December and we had a seventeen thousand dollar bill. So I was still working at Wicked at the time. Martin's an NFL agent that's losing money and it's a little bit client. So I remember we brought that check over and it's like, shit, we need a, we need a little better deal here and we cut Devon in. Uh, got the hourly rate down, gave him some upside. It was a good trade for everybody uh, involved. And um, and you know, Devon was really the perfect person to build this.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, how many CTOs, how many heads of product on earth were actually influencers themselves? So he he intimately understood the problem. And you know, Devon also brought a discipline that Martin and I did not have. We were like, you know, let's do autograph like. Anything we could think of, it's like, let's build a site that does everything. And Devon was really, he's like, we need to be focused. We need to pick the verticals. So we decided to go with pro athletes first. And we really felt like, again, we're building the the new autograph. And the problem we were trying to solve was, uh, you know. ESPN had released a documentary called Broke and they talked about how eighty percent of NFL players go broke within five years of playing their last game.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  So we were thinking about that problem a lot. And again, that's not a problem that a lot of people like wake up, like try to solve, but it, you know, it's it's certainly. One, as athletes or as people that had been around athletes and it's just something that we were thinking about. And in this gap between fame and monetization was just another big theme we were thinking about. So we decided to focus first just on athletes and and you know, if you're building a marketplace to connect. You know, athletes with their biggest fans and you have no athletes and you have no fans, you better pick, you know. Do you go with the chicken or do you go with the egg? We pick the chicken first. And we really had a conviction that if we can recruit athletes to the platform, they all have Twitter followings, they all have Instagram followings.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  And if we got them on and we kind of made a sample video, we would be able to get them to promote on Twitter, to promote on Instagram, and turn their followers into our customers for free. So that was very much the conviction that we always had in our marketplace, supply could be get demand. When we launched, I'll never forget launch day, it was, it was, it was mid-March. I was in, I literally was in Arizona, it was in Scottsdale trying to get the second person on Cameo. We had one person on at this point, you know, we'd get on a plane, we'd go anywhere if someone wanted to talk to us. And Jason Kepnis, the guy who grew up around me, was also our second baseman for the Cleveland Indians at the time.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Guy works with at LinkedIn, was his best friend, he knew about the idea, Steven, let's go. We get, we packed the bags, we go to Arizona to go pitch Kepnis to get him the hat up. So he, you know, and of course I, I get there to talk to him about it. And immediately he's like, yeah, sure, I'm in, right? It's like, I had like three more days there. So anyways, it was a Tuesday night, I'll never forget, it was about 10 o'clock. And we had built the very first version of the site. And today you go to Cameo, there's 40,000 people, there's a million videos. And literally imagine a Google form that just said, you know, who, like, there was only one talent, so there was no even other profiles. It was like, who's the video for? What's your email? What does it say? That's it.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  And I'll never forget, we, we took the, the Cameo that was the first one that gave us the idea. We had Cashin send a tweet and basically said, hey, I'm on this new thing called Cameo for 20 bucks. I can make a video like this for you, saying anything you want to whoever you want, you know, can't wait to, to hear from you. And he clicks, he clicks Twitter. I was at a restaurant in Scottsdale, the guys were in Venice Beach, so Devin, Martin, my co-founders, Cashin, the only talent on Cameo, were all in Venice Beach at Devin's apartment. Cassius sends a tweet out, there are two dots. There was one in Scottsdale, one in LA. He hits tweet, we expect there to just be a flood and it was crickets. Nobody else came to say.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  And immediately, you know, we're, we're looking and you know, I'm like, ah shit, maybe Google's not working. So I literally, I signed off and the dot in Scottsdale went away. I came back. Then it's like, no, it's not like Google's not working. And then at the same time on Twitter, Cassius just started getting eviscerated. I'm talking, you know, you're a millionaire athlete for 20 bucks. How much is this company paying you? He just given us 25 Gs as our first investor, you know? So he's pissed off, you know, everybody's ripping him on Twitter. He gets pissed off. Hey, screw you guys, I'm out. He leaves, he walks out. Martin's freaking out, our other co-founder, because suddenly his only client is now out money he's given us.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  And now his brand is getting tarnished on Twitter. So he runs after him. And Devin and I are just having a conversation like, wow, you know, maybe, yeah, maybe we shouldn't have left our jobs, you know? Like before we'd sold it and we're now three, four months in, you know, this is the only thing we're doing. And as we're talking, a dot popped up in Renton, Washington, which is where the Seattle Seahawks facility is. And somebody came outside and we're like, wow, you know, I remember literally being on the edge of my, I was on my elbows, like leaning in with my phone on, on, you know, Google Analytics, like, what are they gonna do? What are they gonna do? And this person must've been on the side for two to three minutes. And it felt like two to three hours because we're like, are they gonna buy? What's gonna happen?

• 21:35Speaker 02

  And all of a sudden, the dot just disappears and we were so dejected because it was like, somebody's there. We thought they might buy and they didn't. You know, this is a disaster. I'm gonna try to, you know, get back to LinkedIn. Will they take me back? Like whatever. And then all of a sudden, my phone starts vibrating and I get the message. I get a message in my DM and this guy goes, Hey, uh, hey Cameo, uh, this is, you know, blah, blah, blah. My daughter, Lane, loves Cash's March and it's her birthday on Thursday. I'm trying to buy a video from your service, but the payment processor is not working. So at that point, I'm like, just tell me what to say,

• 22:17Speaker 02

  what's the name, like, we'll get it done. Don't worry about money, you know, go. And, and the guy's gives me the information. I text Cash, no response. I text Martin, you know, he's pissed off at me. They're pissed off. It was Tuesday. The birthday was Thursday. We missed Thursday. You know, it's now the next Wednesday when I finally get this video back. It was the most unenthusiastic video I'd ever seen. Hey, Lane, heard you're big fan. Sorry, missed your birthday. See you out there. Like, it was, it was so bad. I skipped this video. I was cringing. I didn't even want to send it. But I'm like, you know what? Fuck it. Like, it's just good to do. I'm gonna send it. We'll see what

• 22:56Speaker 02

  happens. So we shipped the video and about 30 minutes later, I get a video back. And this dad records his daughter watching the video and she literally started crying. She was so happy. This girl's wearing a Seahawks jersey. Her hair is literally painted blue and green. It's like Seahawks super fan. And she watches this video and she starts crying. And she goes, Dad, how did you do that? And he goes, Daddy's awesome. That's how, like, if we made a commercial for Super Bowl, it wouldn't have been better than this. And he sent it back. And then the second I had that, like, I still get the chills, you know, down my spine thinking about it because the second

• 23:38Speaker 02

  we saw we could make one person feel like that, we had high conviction. We could make millions of people feel like that. And then when we were going to athletes, it wasn't like, hey, join this marketplace where there's, you know, no fans and there's no other talent. It's like, now the question was, we would show it on the video. Don't you want to make your fans feel like this? And people said, yes. And that's really how we got here.

• 24:03Anthony Pompliano?

  So as you're doing that, what was the biggest pushback from the athletes first? Cause you were building this marketplace where you guys focus on the athlete's side. You go to them and I've got to imagine like, yeah, I want to feel, I want my fans to feel that way, but like, who else is on, right? How much can I make? Like all these normal questions. What were the, the big obstacles there?

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, all of them. And I would even go one more. At the time, any type of direct to consumer monetization of fans was like super weird, right? It's one thing for Patreon to do it and you're like a long tail podcaster or musician and you have no other funds and you know, it's not that weird to ask your, your, your followers to support you, but these are like athletes making millions of dollars in that case. And you know, they were worried about their brand. They were worried about selling out. They were worrying about charging their fans for something like this. They were worried that nobody was on it. You know, is, is Cameo even going to be the one, right? Like, you know, early days of platforms, there's no guarantee.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Like at some point you start getting a skate philosophy, but you know, there's seven other companies that had tried this that never got any traction. You know, we found out later, right? So there were, there are people that have been burned. You know, probably the, the one we were hearing the most about at the time was called Thuzio, which was T E Barber, I think was part of it. So, you know, these are like serious athletes and entrepreneurs teaming up, trying to do similar things, weren't able to do it. I think Steve Aoki had founded one with like Dan Gozerian, you know, a few years before we got going. So people had tried it, but what we had pretty high conviction was we really never set out to like build something that LeBron James would do.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  We really felt there was an opportunity with Cameo to help people like, you know, my good friend Lance Thomas of the New York Knicks, who, you know, wasn't the superstar. He wasn't Carmelo Anthony, but he's like the beloved player that gets out of the community. You know, people love him, huge personality. We really felt there was an opportunity for those, to serve those type of people versus. That said, I'd be lying to you if I told you we really found a product market fit with, you know, backup. Quarterbacks, you know, or practice squad, uh, you know, left tackles. We found product market fit one day when Devin walked uh, down to our morning meeting and he goes, hey, Steven, I think Cody, his roommate Cody Co with three million YouTubers at the time.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  And people like Cody, you know, ex-vine stars would do really well on this. And we put Cody in, uh, on a cameo. Uh, he made, he, we actually seeded, uh, we bought him a cameo for a YouTube video that he made that went hyper viral. He decided to launch himself on the platform. He popped off and other similar kind of vine stars popped off. Then that started the expansion into reality TV and comedians. And today, sports is still probably, we're famous for, for sports. We kind of came up as the new autograph, but as our business, it might be 10% now. And, you know, we've really found product market fit for people that are huge personalities or people that are really funny.

• 27:10Anthony Pompliano?

  How did you grow the consumer side? Right? So it, it's kind of, uh, sounds like you just went and did the hard work of recruiting, you know, personality after personality or athlete after athlete. Uh, where do all of the users come? And, and, you know, how do you convince them to actually pay for this stuff?

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Well, just like anytime you're inventing a new, completely new product, right? The best way for, uh, people to know what it is is to like experience it or see it. And, you know, a couple of interesting growth dynamics that we benefit from. Number one, uh, all of our supply, unlike Grubhub or Uber or any other marketplace, you, you, you think about our supply can literally market themselves, right? They have, they're famous. They have Instagram. They have Twitter. They have followings. And their fans are the most likely people in the world to book them. So that was a big thing. Like our supply can be get its own demand. That's really important concept to cameo.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Secondly, we always say that every cameo is a commercial for the next one. So just like I was able to show athletes, once I had the first reaction video, don't you want to make people feel like this? The the customer flywheel was I buy you a cameo, you share it on Twitter, you have 300,000 followers on Twitter. They all see this roast that I get, Michael Rappaport roasting you. They're like, what is that? That's amazing. We had the, we had the watermark there. People started learning. Then they go to the site, cameo, oh my God, look at all these people that are in there. So it's really, it's really the flywheel effect of supply beginning its own demand. And then the fact that every cameo is a commercial for the next one. Eighty-five percent of them are gifts.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  The vast majority of cameos are shared on social, so that's the flywheel.

• 28:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And today you've got what I'll call kind of the the traditional cameo, which is literally, hey, it's my friend's birthday. I buy, somebody sends them the video. You also have these promotional ones and then you've got the roast. Maybe talk a little bit about the different variations of how somebody can buy or what message they can expect.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  So the first one, the promotional cameos is is is actually a product that we've had for a while. Basically, what we found was five percent of cameos that are booked get declined today. Right? So the the talent can say yes or no to anything. When we dug into declines, we found that 60% of decline cameos were actually small businesses looking for kind of cheap influencer marketing. So we went back to our talent and we said, hey, Brett Farves, Waukesha Chevrolet has a Fourth of July sale coming out. You know, they they wanted to book a cameo. I know you didn't want to do it for 400 bucks, but would you do it for 5,000? Would you do it for 10, whatever the number is?

• 29:58Speaker 02

  And we found that the talent we're all with, almost all, would be willing to do to create assets that companies could use for for their own Instagram or their own social media. They just want to do it for more money. So very quietly, we added for, yeah, I think there's five or 600 of our 40,000 talent opted into this today. Where you might see on the, when you go to cameo.com, is this for myself? Is this for someone else or is it for my business? And if you hit for my business, the price changes and it's more expensive. The second That we released that's gotten a lot of fanfare recently is Cameo Live. And Cameo Live is our first static synchronous video conversations.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  So basically, it's literally, well, not basically, it's literally getting on a Zoom with, you know, your favorite talent. And that one is something that's captured the imagination. I think people, when they first saw Cameo, they always assumed for the future, you know, Fish Time is obviously something that they're gonna get into. But frankly, until COVID, we really resisted that because we felt that the coordination needed, like it was so much logistically harder to say, you know, hey, Stephen, what are you doing at four forty-two central time, right? Like pick up your phone for this thing. And then frankly, like Devon as Allen always believed that like fan conversations are just kind of awkward, right?

• 31:22Speaker 02

  It's like, you know, a lot, and this is why Cameo works, because when you go run up on somebody that's eating at a restaurant, like they freeze, you freeze, you don't know what to say, like we've all kind of been there. So we, we really had a pretty high conviction that synchronous wasn't gonna be a thing. But as Zoom became so prevalent, you know, since COVID, like the talent was excited about it, you know, now that my mom and her friends play their card games on Zoom, it's like everybody's using it. So at this point, it became a very natural extension. And I think we have about a hundred talent that we're testing with Cameo Live. And so far, yeah, the feedback's been incredible. Uh, the feedback actually has been, we, we launched ten-minute Zoom calls because

• 32:07Speaker 02

  we felt like thirty minutes would be awkward or if it was weird, you want to pull the cord. But what we found is like every one of the conversations, basically, people are like, I want to stay on longer. The talent in Japan are having fun, they're staying on. So that's, um, that's a product that we're excited about. And then, uh, and then our third product, we have is, is called Cameo Direct. And Cameo Direct is in the app, it's our texting product. So if you, there are talent that have enabled you to actually text with them and have an ongoing conversation. So that's, you know, that's super interesting. And, and we think all of these are, are parts of building out that equation for X amount of money, being able to do Y activity with Z person.

• 32:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Walk me through the funding of the company and then we'll get into some of the questions that people send in, but how have you kind of funded this?

• 32:57Speaker 02

  It started, uh, Martin and I, you know, bootstrapping it. So my money from LinkedIn was going into Devon's pocket at the hundred fifty an hour best friend rate. Yeah, I, I, I don't know if that was actually best friend rated or not, but I give a shit about it sometimes too. But, uh, so it started there. We, we bootstrapped it for about five months. Uh, while I was at LinkedIn, every single person that I worked with, like there's, I had one quarter while I was still at LinkedIn when I was working on this at the same time. And honestly, I was probably the worst employee at the company that last year. Uh, Martin would call me in the middle of the day. I'd miss like a sales call. Like I just, I just remember. But I was so distracted and all the, like the people that I worked with, all I got it right away.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  And now about five or six of them are working for us, which is kind of funny. Uh, the people that sat within like 10 feet of me while I was at LinkedIn, but you know, we, we were basically going to, uh, build a billion dollar company while staying on our, our, our fat salaries and our free lunches at LinkedIn. And, um, and then I remember, uh, the big turning point for me actually happened. LinkedIn gives Christmas Eve through the first week of the year off for all employees. And I went to Nicaragua with about 10 people that I worked with. And we were sitting on a hot tub in Nicaragua on New Year's Day. And this guy, Will Hearn, who was a buddy of mine, worked in another offices like Steven.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  This idea is so big, like if somebody else builds it and becomes a billionaire and you stay at LinkedIn and never like take a shot, you live with yourself. And honestly, nobody had ever asked me that question, but the answer was so obviously no, that I never went back. I wrote my next play letter, which, you know, it's kind of funny. You can go on my LinkedIn profile and actually see my next play letter. And I, I shared the letter that I, I sent to my team and I actually never went back to work. That was, I never went back. I, I went right to Los Angeles after I, you know, got Martin and Devon and I'm like, we need to burn the. And just try this and I'm not asking you guys to quit your jobs yet, but I'm going to do it.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  And I just felt like that momentum was needed. So, you know, for me, I kind of needed that kick in the ass and um. And, you know, very shortly after I decided to go full time, that's when like, you know, friends and family were. Wanting to bet, you know, I'd never asked anybody for anything. I was always the ultra connector, the helpful person. So now when I had something that I was gonna do, that's when people were like, okay, let me get money, let me get money. But the one that was most life changing was. Exactly three months after me leaving LinkedIn, this guy Mike Jameson, who was. The top of the global sales org in LinkedIn, just cold called me in the morning. He's like, Steven, I've been hearing what you're up to.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  Give me a call. And I called him back and uh, on the spot, you know, led a five hundred thousand dollar, you know. Angel investment that, you know, he's like, I think this is awesome. I think this should be built here in Chicago. Frankly, if he didn't give me the money, Cameo would have never been able to be built in Chicago. And once he came in, it was just a series of fortuitous events. Um, you know, the second day of this guy named Jackson Jen. Uh, his, his VC career, just graduated Notre Dame, who was an associate at Chicago Ventures. He got locked in the merchandise part in Chicago. Couldn't figure out how to uh, he couldn't figure out how to get out. And uh, of the building, he was locked in because he's working after eight, the elevator shut down.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  And he saw me and my team working, came in, met us, thought Cameo was the most amazing thing ever. Next morning, he goes to uh Ezra Galston, who was at Chicago Ventures at the time, and Big Trip Look at as well. And Ezra, um, literally is like, Jackson, you know, you're just falling in love with the first entrepreneur you've ever met, you know, like. A million people have tried this. It's not gonna work. It's not gonna be built here, whatever. And Jackson's like, Ezra, you need to take a meeting with Steven. This is different. And uh, Ezra met me. He put in a hundred K on the spot. So Chicago Ventures now is their first venture investment. And then frankly, since then, every one of our rounds has been preempted. We've, we've never made a pitch back. Like this has been incredible.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  You know, Ezra ended up leaving Chicago Ventures to start his own fund called Starting Line. He ended up co-leading the round with Chicago Ventures and Origin Ventures in Chicago, the seed round to all of our early money cap at the Midwest. And then Lightspeed ended up leading our Series A, Jeremy Liu, who famously was the first money in Snapchat. Saw a cameo at a party, asked for the intro, sent an email that was basically like, Steven, cameo is genius. I don't know where you are in the world, but we're having breakfast tomorrow. We ended up meeting, had a, I was 10 seconds into my pitch deal. He goes, Steven, I've been looking for a business like this for 10 years. Basically like, shut the fuck up. I get it.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  And, and I flew to Los Angeles from San Francisco to LA that day. I met another Lightspeed partner named Nicole Quinn in the LAX airport. I was just texting her today because I passed the coffee shop we met. We had a meeting there. I walked her on the plane, basically. She came to fly up to Chicago the next week. Our Series A was done. And then, and then about four months after that, Connor Perkins came in and led, you know, a $50 million series B under the company. So again, we've been really blessed because these investors, they've had a high conviction because they've been customers. They've bought them. They've received them. They understand the power.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  And then when they learn more about the business, there's only two things you have to really believe to understand how big Cameo could get. Number one, you have to believe that there are more famous people on earth today than any time in history, right? Like just think about quarantine. Tiger King comes on and Carol Baskin goes from somebody nobody had ever heard of, or I guess a million people on Facebook had heard of, to someone that can make a quarter of a million dollars, right? In, in a month time, Cameo, it's unbelievable. And, and then you have all these other people just popping up on TikTok every day, on SoundCloud, on YouTube, on Instagram. So as there's more content, as content is exponentially increasing, the amount of fame in the world is exponentially increasing.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  So there are more famous people than ever. And then secondly, people today are more famous now than they've ever been at any point in history. Last summer, Bill Nacek released his song Old Town Road. You know, he now has tens of millions of followers and even if he's a one hit wonder, he now has a platform upon which he can monetize forever. So within a post Cameo world, in a post-social world, your fifteen minutes of fame is something you can live on the rest of your life. Think back twenty years ago when Chumbawamba created Tubthumper, and he knows where they are today, right? Because they didn't have social, they didn't have a platform, so there's no stickiness. So all those millions and millions of people around the world that love their work, it's just not, it's not around anymore.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  And, you know, even on the sports side, you're a North Carolina guy, and I was talking to Danny Green about this last week. You know, he played on those teams with Tyler Hansbrough, and Hansbrough was, you know, the best, maybe college basketball player since Christian Laettner, just absolute legend. And because he wasn't like, because he did it, you know, ten years too early, he only has twenty-one thousand followers on Instagram.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  Right? And then Zion Williamson had two point one million followers before he played his first game. So the people coming up are more famous than the ones that came before. And all you have to believe is that this is just an area under the perch. Like, there's more fame in the world, and then people are more famous in magnitude than ever. And because of the way these platforms work, the wealth distribution, it's like the power laws are crazy. You know, on YouTube, the top three percent of creators makes ninety-seven percent of all the ad revenue. TikTok didn't have any way to monetize creators until I saw today they announced a two hundred million dollar fund to basically, you know, almost put people on retainer to just keep making content for them.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  Spotify, the top one percent of musicians streaming make like ninety-nine percent of the revenue. The same is true in pro sports. The same is true when you think of endorsement deals. There's five people in the NBA that have two deals, right? So when you look at all this, people are more famous than ever before, and the gap between fame and monetization is just getting wider and wider and wider. It was just the perfect storm for a business like Cameo to come, to allow people to monetize their fans in a way that is brand positive. It's value prop in the fame economy is that you're getting paid to become more famous. When you get a cameo from someone, you like them more than you liked them before, and you got paid to do that. It's the ultimate.

• 42:01Anthony Pompliano?

  So I got a ton of questions from people, many that you and I both know pretty well. Ian Borthwit, who is the influencer marketing guy at SeatGeek and is very, very deeply entrenched in the influencer world, said, "Will Cameo go real world? Like, at some point, will it actually be you can pay to have somebody show up for an appearance?"

• 42:21Speaker 02

  I mean, it's funny, you know, in the COVID world, that's the last thing in the world we're thinking of. But if you look at what we're doing with Cameo Live right now, we are building the mechanisms for bookings, right? Like, the first step is like coordination of calendar. When are you available? How do we do it? Will you show up, right? Then adding location, it's something harder. It's something that we've strayed away from because frankly, I think that asynchronous conversation, or even us being on Zoom together right now, is probably like 95% as good as us being in person, but it might be like 1% of the

• 43:02Speaker 02

  effort of, you know, you coming out to Chicago and like us sitting down somewhere, right? But think about how much effort saved. So for us, I do believe that Cameo Live, aka live experiences, meeting people in real life is something that will happen, assuming the world gets back to normal one day. There's just a, it's very logistically difficult. And, you know, tell us, there's just a million things we can do, you know, that really tech enables first, that kind of give you like almost the same experience without having to worry about the logistics, the location and safety.

• 43:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes sense. Who's the most requested talent that's not on Cameo?

• 43:43Speaker 02

  For a long time, it was, you know, funny, Ian, that's the first question. For a long time, it was David Gerbick, actually, who he's famously done a lot of stuff with at SeatGeek, giving away cars, all that. He's a big vlogger, for those of you that don't know who David Gerbick is, really funny. You know, a lot of people think he might be the next David Cameo, like he's that talented.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  The most requested person recently has been like The Rock.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  You know, that's, that's the one that, you know, everybody would love to, to get on the platform on the customer side. But, you know, people like Taylor Swift, people like Bieber.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Aren't, are, are requested, but not as much as the Dobricks of the world, the Shane Dawson's historically of the world. The Casey Neistat's. So we, we have a really interesting dynamic where the majority of users on Cameo, like the people coming to the website are actually like 18 to 24. But our purchasing demographic is actually older. 20, 25 to 34, 35 to 44, 45 to 54 and 55 to 64. And then 65 plus all buy more than 18 to 24 because, you know, disposable income and, and who can afford it? You know, for someone like my dad getting, you know, Jerry West to, to wish his buddy happy birthday for 400 bucks.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  Like, that's like the bargain of the lifetime. But for, you know, someone that loves Jake Paul, getting, paying 200 bucks to him is like, man, am I going to go to Coachella? Am I going to do that? Like the trade offs are different. So we've found that the, a lot of the people want the, the digital talent. That's probably the people that get requested the most. And I'm sure if I look at the last three months worth of data, I'm sure Joe Exotic would probably be the most requested person we don't have.

• 45:39Anthony Pompliano?

  We got Carol Baskin. I saw that people were real hyped when she came.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, she was, she was there for a while. And it's kind of funny because I reached out there like immediately after Tiger King. And basically she, they told me to have to off and, and, you know, it's kind of funny that now she's just been this superstar on Cameo.

• 45:57Anthony Pompliano?

  How'd you get her? What, what, what finally got him across the line?

• 46:02Speaker 02

  Honestly, I don't, I don't even know. Somebody on the team.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  Got through to the charity and she's doing all for charity. I mean, she raised, I think in her first two weeks, she did like a quarter of a million bucks. And it's all going to Big Cat Rescue. So, you know, what, you know, in a world where all these parks are closed and, I mean, what an awesome way to be raising, raising bucks.

• 46:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, Sherwin Pichvar asked, who are the top 10 in earnings? So maybe not exactly go through the top 10, but just who are some of the people who do the most volume?

• 46:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a couple of art types of people that do really well. Historically, last year, the top broker was Gilbert Gottfried. So again, comedians do extremely well. I think this year, last I saw Kevin from The Office, Brian Baumgartner was kind of the top of the heap. He's doing great. A lot of these viral stars from Netflix shows like Jerry Harris from Cheers have done extremely well. The Real Housewives is a vertical have done incredible. So the Sonia Morgans of the world do really, really well. Hall of Fame Athletes is another place where we do really well.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  So Brett Favre has consistently been, you know, a top earner on the platform. The Bachelor franchises has been, something like Chris Harrison or Lance Bass. You know, boy bands have done good. Nostalgia is a, is a hole does really well. And when I think of the product market fit for Cameo, if you were to take out a $1 bill and you're to look at the back of the pyramid, right? I think Cameo has great product market fit, the second you have your 15 minute span, all the way until you become the most famous person on earth. And then at some point, for some people, that, that curve goes, the, basically the, the gap between fame and monetization that we talked about, like, that those curves just inflect.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  And there's actually a point where you become more rich than you are famous. It's like, Michael Jordan would ne- would probably never do Cameo. He, he, we've heard him turn down $10 million for a golf outing. I knew that Paul McCartney turned down like $7 million to play someone's wedding before. These are things we've just heard, being in the industry and all that stuff. So I think there's a point where that curve inflects. But then the thing that's kind of cool about Cameo is Cameo is also someone, somewhere where you can go when you were the most famous person in the world and you're not a Right? So retired NFL players, if you've got a gold jacket, you're on camera. Almost every Hall of Famer is on.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  When you're talking about the Ray Lewis's in the world, the Brett Favres, um, you know, it's, it's amazing. Emmitt Smith just joined today, right? So it's like the people that, you know, you expect to be there are increasingly there, which is exciting. And, you know, a lot of people get caught up in the, the three to 500 people on earth that might be at the eye of the pyramid that are more famous than they are rich. Or more rich than they are famous. And, and frankly, if those people were on, they'd probably be priced at a point where most people wouldn't be even be able to afford it. So while everyone says they might want Taylor Swift, like Taylor Swift might need, you know, five grand or 10 grand. How many of those could she actually be? So I think we haven't built a product yet for

• 49:25Speaker 02

  the super A plus list. And, um, we think we can build a massive business without them. We think that there's the problem of people being more famous than they are rich, literally doesn't exist for those people. So we want to focus on building great product for the people we have product working fit for it. And the thing that's kind of cool is like, as we've gone along, people like Snoop Dogg, who are some of the most famous people in the world. Or, you know, Tyra Irving or Pete Alonso, like these guys now are just seeing cameo. I think it's really cool and dope or Maluma. Big reggaeton star who's now the most famous person in Instagram terms that we've ever gotten on. And those people come on the platform and they're seeing other interesting people. They see the impact.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  And, and then when you start getting more and more of those people, then, then others come on like that. Vincente Fox, the president of, ex-president of Mexico is on the panel now. So you start looking at that. And then if you're Tony Blair, if you're, you know, Georgia, you're Bush or Obama, suddenly it's like, wow, okay, cool. My peers are there. So this business is built brick by brick, relationship by relationship. It all starts with having a very high NPS product for both the customers and the fans.

• 50:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Josh Elman wants to know, what's the weirdest place that people like to record?

• 50:44Speaker 02

  The toilet. I think that's always funny. Dwight Howard went viral earlier this year for literally being on the skater and making a cameo. We spoofed it for April 4th. We actually,

• 51:02Speaker 02

  we did a fake product launch. We called it Cameo Now. And the whole idea was like the second you book this celebrity, their front-facing camera would just turn on and we'd catch them like wherever they are. You know, it might be like Lindsay Lohan blending a smoothie and just looking up. But we've had some fun with that. I think that's probably the weirdest. We haven't had, trying to think. Yeah, that's, I think the toilet is just probably the funniest, but you know, especially the Tiger King is like you get a Doc Antle one. He's like literally with the lions and they're there. I mean, the tigers and the lions. So watching Cameo is pretty annoying.

• 51:43Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think about deep fakes or like generative media? And is that an advantage coming down the pipe for you guys? Is that something that you guys have to kind of fight against? And kind of just what's the thoughts there?

• 51:54Speaker 02

  If Cameo is the new autograph, it becomes inevitable that there will be, just like in the analog world, right? There are autographs and there are forgeries, not as old as time. There's big dead speed scrolls out there, right? So forgeries have always been a thing. And I think if Cameo truly is the new autograph, there will be, you know, forgeries in the digital world as well. And I think deep fakes are just scratching the surface of that technology. At scale, I believe that the cameo video, like that watermark will be just, that will be the certificate of authenticity in the digital age. And I think again, you know, some people, well, couldn't they, if they, you know,

• 52:39Speaker 02

  put the watermark on the deep fake, like the technology will be there, but I think we will develop a core competency around authenticity and our value, our, our mission at Cameo is to create the most personalized and authentic fan experiences on earth. So authenticity is always going to be something that I think is a core competency for our business. And we're going to have to continue to iterate technologies going fast. Deep fakes, you know, there's crazy things happening. But I think when people come to Cameo.com or in our app, they know that what they're getting is real and that's important.

• 53:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So you obviously have a lot of pride and a lot of your early investors have pride in having built the company in Chicago. Maybe talk a little bit about the Chicago tech scene. Eric Carr said, basically, he wanted to know about your favorite places to eat, but I figured we'll talk about the tech scene instead.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Sure. So the Chicago tech scene is, was, was and has been extremely important to Candy's growth.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  I truly believe that if I had built, I really don't believe that this business could have been built in San Francisco. I don't believe that this business could have been built in LA, even though that's the obvious place where it was built. I think if we were getting built in LA, that depending on which angel investors had come in, there's so many vested interests in entertainment there that, you know, if you took money from this person, then these people wouldn't work with you. There's just so much ego around the entertainment business. So the fact that we were able to raise all of our money very quietly in Chicago, it kind of gave us the opportunity to be like, it's like a plant that gets watered and nurtured and, and all that happened.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  And once we had this strong foundation, then when the press kind of learned about it and Hollywood kind of learned about it, we'd already got to a point where like we had hit some escape velocity. And one thing that's really interesting about Chicago, while it's not known as a tech hotbed, like Chicago is famous for its marketplace businesses, right? Like literally the Board of Trade and, and the CBOE, like there's 150 year legacy of building great marketplaces in Chicago. You know, that's why Groupon came out of here. That's why Grubhub came out of here. Riz.com and SpotHero were some, you know, other marketplaces where those founders really kind of took me under their wing.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  And, and, you know, the, the best businesses in Chicago have been marketplaces. And, and as somebody that was building a marketplace, like. To have people like, you know, Matt Maloney or, or, you know, the CEO of Grubhub. I mean, in 2017, I remember we're on the phone and he's like, Steven, I built the biggest marketplace since ever been built in Chicago. You're building one that will be way bigger than mine if you don't fuck it up because you were, because you were selling bits. I'm selling bits, sorry, you're selling bits, I'm selling apps. Meaning, nobody cares about how many pizza parlors I have on Grubhub in New York if I'm in Los Angeles. Your talent is global, their fans are all over the world, and location isn't a variable.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  And, you know, hearing things like that from people like him as an entrepreneur, it gives you confidence that you start to realize like, wow, I'm on to something. And, and I think, you know, the, the presence of people like Mike Gamson, who, you know, very quietly like gave me the, everything I needed. And then 1871, the tech incubator in Chicago, you know, it's one of those things that, you know, the critics will say like, hey, you know, Chicago loves to pump its chest about having the world's best incubator, but who's really come out of there? All it takes is one Cameo to come out of there. And for us, if we ring the bell and it really works, that like, that was the greatest investment the city and the universities and everybody could have ever done.

• 56:34Speaker 02

  Because if Cameo wins, it can literally be one of those tentpole companies that could transform the whole ecosystem. And, and the, the biggest thing that Chicago lacks, it lacks, you know, that steady parade of exits and winners and, you know, billion dollar companies exiting, you know, early employees, uh, having their equity and their options that they took, like turning into cash, like, people at Cameo in many ways, like because they haven't seen, they don't look around like in the valley where they see their friends were early at this company and it changed their lives, right? And in, in Chicago, you know, my employees are look like they're sitting on gold mines and a lot of times they don't know it because they, they don't see other people that have been successful.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  And that's one of the reasons it's been personally important to me to build this company here to make sure that, you know, The next me, like when I was twenty one years old, I remember telling my mom, Mom, if I didn't have the trading job, I would have to go to New York, I'd have to go to LA and have to go to San Francisco. There is literally nothing for me to do here unless I want to work at Groupon. And, and frankly, like, my hope is that the next me, the twenty one year old version of me, that's at, you know, Michigan, or at Northwestern, or at University of Illinois, or at Wisconsin, they're in the, they're in the Midwest. They look at companies like Cameo and they feel like they can come work at one of those. They don't have to go to the Valley to go work at a Facebook or Google. They can go work at a homegrown one.

• 58:04Speaker 02

  But, but more importantly, they can see people that look like them, that grew up like them, that went to the same schools that they went to. That, that fucking, you know, hit it. And I think if you see that, that, that's really the most important thing. And Chicago really fosters that. And, um, you know, it's interesting now, our headquarters was sold, uh, by the landlord. Uh, we've, we are now fully distributed and we've actually decided that we're not going to go back to office. We're going to stay fully distributed. Out of that now, that doesn't mean Cameo is no longer a Chicago company. It doesn't mean that it's an LA company. It doesn't mean that it's a New York. It means that if you are talented and you're out there and you want to work for Cameo, you don't have to live in Chicago and you don't have to live in LA.

• 58:49Speaker 02

  Talent is evenly distributed around the globe, opportunity is not. So the fact that we can go fish in multiple ponds now, I think that can help us avoid some of the pitfalls that Chicago companies tend to have, namely a lack of executive bench. You know, there are very few people that have, have kind of been there, done that. So now the fact that, you know, we can bring in great people if they're in the Valley, they're in New York, they're in, uh, Seattle, they're in Austin, Texas, like wherever they are, they can come work for us. But the early people were here and, and if this wins, then those people win and then those people become the next founders or the next angel investors. And you just need that flywheel going and,

• 59:31Speaker 02

  and all it takes is one. So those people that, you know, talk about eighteen seventy one and say, Nobody, nobody's come out of it. We're all the logos. I mean, look at any venture firm, right? If you're a venture, in a venture portfolio, you might make forty bets. Maybe only one or two of those are really gonna work and everything else goes to zero. So if you're looking at a stage before venture founded, these are just entrepreneurs with an idea that have nothing that are coming there. Yeah, of course, ninety nine point nine businesses, percent of businesses suck, right? And people are gonna be there and they're gonna play entrepreneur and they're gonna, you know, come every day and try and dream, but like, I love that that place exists and, and I hope that, you know, Cameo's ultimate success is the validation for that because that place

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

  exist, that the fact that that place existed, that kept me home in Chicago and had me build the company here. And without that place, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have been.

• 1:00:26Anthony Pompliano?

  People can't argue with the results, man. And I learned a long time ago that there's nothing more fun than winning. And if you could do it with the people that you grew up with or the place that you grew up in, uh, it's kind of just a middle finger to everybody who tells you you can't do it.

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  But the winning is the most important thing, right? Um, I mean, I remember when Techstar Chicago turned us down because they're like, this business can't be built in Chicago. You're gonna have to go to the coast. All your money's gonna have to go to the coast. That's what everybody said, but at the end of the day, like, I will always, I have to win. That's the most important thing. Cameo has to win. So if there was ever a point where like, where I physically am, like if it was better for me to go to LA, I'm there in a second, right? But it's important for the ecosystem that Cameo wins because if Cameo wins, Chicago wins.

• 1:01:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Couldn't agree more. What's the biggest lesson you've learned running the company over the last couple of years?

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  The biggest lesson I've learned running the company over the, the value of, uh, the value of mentorship and coaching, right? Like as an athlete, you know, I played hockey, uh, my whole life, played football, played baseball, played through college and hockey. One of the things that I always, you know, Looked at was the difference between like having an exceptional coach and a shitty coach is so different. And you know, for a company like Cameo, I'm running this business with like a bunch of my friends. Who essentially, we're all doing this for the first time, right? We're all first time founders, first time executives. Every one of my senior management is, is basically running the biggest team that they've ever run.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  Uh, but you know, what we lack for in experience, like, you know, we've picked up a lot, you know, in four years of running a hyper growth business. You know, it's like, like we're running so fast and sometimes when we brought people in, we outgrew them. But the one thing that I've just learned is that by continuing to invest in your co-founders and your, and your key executives and your early employees. You know, who have, like, one of my CEO coaches called the vampire one, right? They're kind of, they got to spend time with the founders. They, they're, they're missionaries that are not mercenaries, right? Later, like, people that joined Cameo before, you know, we had raised any money, right? Those are the true, those are true believers. Now, other people will believe as they come to have it.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  But, you know, sometimes like at this point, there's people that are joining Cameo because it's like, oh, well, this is the next billion dollar business. And, you know, I come here and I can make a lot of money, but we're really a mission oriented place. And I think, I think everybody talks about how, you know, you can't win without the best team. And, you know, LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner, every, all hands used to say, you know, talent is our number one priority. And as CEO, you've learned how true that is. You've got to have the right talent there. But I think one thing that I've learned is that every time I've hired for resume over kind of potential. Uh, I've found that, uh, that ultimately like that didn't work out for us.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  And the best hires we ever made are people that are in stretch roles, that are curious, that have a lot of grit, they want to get better. And by surrounding them with world-class coaches, like, you know, for me, Bing Gordon, uh, has been the guy for me that's just changed my life. You get world-class coaches around, you know, you and your team like that, that, I mean, that pays dividends like you employees.

• 1:03:52Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the biggest obstacle for Cameo moving forward?

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  The biggest obstacle is team building. Again, it's like just finding great, you know, hiring great people, developing great talent. It always, you know, in a world where we're distributed now, like, we were famous for the culture that we built in the offices. You walked into Cameo, like, towards Chicago, you just felt special. And now, we're, we have, I like to joke, we have one hundred thirty-four offices around the world. And, you know, we're, we're back in a hiring spree, and we're, you know, we're gonna grow from one hundred thirty to two hundred people in the next six months. And, you know, how do you maintain culture, you know, via Zoom? And how do you build trust with people you don't know? And it's

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  very specifically for us, it's like, you know, we do wanna hire some of these, you know, senior execs. And Bing Gordon, my CEO coach, I asked him, I'm like, Bing, what's, what's a Hall of Fame, what is a Hall of Fame executive team look like to you? And he goes, the best advice I ever got about how to build a Hall of Fame executive team came from Ray Bork, the Hall of Fame hockey player. Because Ray Bork, you know, for those of you guys that don't know, he played nineteen years on the Boston Bruins, won a Stanley Cup in his twentieth season with the Avalanche. Yeah, I think he got traded halfway through the season. So, Hall of Fame player, best defenseman of his generation, had never lifted the Stanley Cup. And Ray Bork told Bing, he goes, to win the Stanley Cup, you need one or two grizzled

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  little vets that want one last case of glory, that have been there, but maybe they never lifted the Stanley Cup before, so their flame is burning blue, but they have all the experience. You need three to five, like, you know, one or two lines of otherworldly rookies that are too stupid to know what they're up against, but are gonna play unbelievable hockey. But then, like, the most important thing is you have a core that runs two to three lines, you see, six to nine, you know, A-plus players who are at the peak of their career and are gonna play the best hockey for the rest of their lives. Or, in the case of the management team, for the next six to nine years. These are the people that, you know, forever are gonna be known as, I was ex-Cameo, I was the one that helped ring the bell, right? And,

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  and it's not just, you know, it's not just hiring the biggest resume at everything. Team building is so important, and that, to me, made sense. So for us, it's finding, you know, Someone on the operations side and someone on the tech side that have been there, done that, they've seen the scale, but they either they either raised the Stanley Cup one time early in their career, want to do it one more time, or they've maybe been the number two, or they've been they've seen scale, but they haven't been the reason why they won, and we need to get a couple of these people on the scene.

• 1:06:41Anthony Pompliano?

  That is an awesome answer. Bitcoin and crypto, what are your thoughts or experiences?

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  So sure, Radloff and Zach Meritas and some others, Ezra laughed about this. So I was making a lot of money in college. Zach and I were making cash, you know, shooters taking $5 cover from everybody. And Zach told me, he's like, hey, you know, I'm setting up a couple of these mines and, and, you know, I'm gonna do Litecoin or something like that. This is probably 2012 I was trading. And I'm, at the time, I'm an options trader. I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? I had no idea. I was just like, you know, he's like, just give me 10 Gs. Zach's like, give me 10 Gs. Like, we'll split this, you know, we'll split

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  these computers. They're starting selling all this stuff. And I'm just like, you know, no. And then there's a guy named Dan Romero, who, you know, was at Coinbase. Dan was literally my across the hall neighbor freshman year, college I do. And I'm watching him and all these guys, and they got this Coinbase thing. And Dan was always my like, he was always that, that friend that like was playing with the future. Like, when we were in college, he's the one messing on Twitter. I'm like, why are we on, you know, why are we on Twitter? He always just kind of like, like, they talk about for what's next, like, go look at the smartest people in the world and what are they messing around with on the weekends?

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  Like, Dan was always like, he's somebody I should have dropped and followed more, and I shouldn't have decided Dan's doing it. He's pretty damn smart. And I trust him. So I ended up not getting into any crypto. I've never bought any Bitcoin. I've never bought, I've literally have never touched it. And I I can feel the bubble coming when my mom and her friends were buying it. Uh, and I think they did pretty well. They bought it and it kind of felt like it was going up and up and up. But at some point it's crashed and it's just been there. Uh, look, I believe it's the future. I'm a huge fan of crypto. Um, I am, uh, also as someone who is a professional option trader for five years, I have not traded a single option.

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  Since I left trading and not because I don't care about the market. I know how much edge the professionals have. So for me, if I can't have, if I can't have an edge, if I can't have the most information, if I can't have the best technology, I'd rather not play the game at all than like feel like I'm getting in front run by anybody. So I that's my claim to fame. I've never owned any type of crypto.

• 1:09:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So there's people, obviously they come on all the time that are in that position, but there is nobody who comes on and says, Dan Romero was their neighbor at freshman year in college. You know, Ryan Radloff, like all these guys who, uh, for those that don't know, those names are very big in the crypto space. And you've never touched it.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  Never touched and Ezra Goldston from Starting Line, you know, he, when he quit Chicago Ventures, he literally, you know, he had made a lot of money in crypto and, and he left his venture fund. And he basically was like, Steven, I will personally lead your seed round, like, like me personally, I'm gonna raise a fund I haven't raised. So like Krip and Zach has turned his, you know, server money, that 10 grand, you know, that turned into 25 grand into Cameos, friends and family. And, you know, he's done pretty, I'm sure he's gonna do pretty well on that. Let's fuck it all up here. But, uh, but that's, yeah, I've never, I've never traded any crypto.

• 1:10:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I love that.

• 1:10:17Speaker 02

  And I had all the information about it too. And I, and I believe the thesis. So that's the other thing. It's not that I'm a, it's not that I'm agnostic and it's not that I'm a disbeliever. I just believe that if I cannot be it's the same reason I have not traded one single option since I did it professionally for five years. If I can't be all in, I'm all in.

• 1:10:38Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a fair point. I'll ask you two questions to wrap it up. Uh, what is the most important book that you've ever read?

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

  I read a book a week. I would actually go back to seventh grade on the book called Ender's Game. And that was the book that really turned me on to reading. And before that, I didn't get it like, you know, I'm a reader. So I was always like a storyteller and I love history and I was, I was a history major. But when I read Ender's Game, that was the one that really turned me on to, to, to reading for, for life. And, you know, at this point, there's so many great ones. I mean, as a CEO, I think, uh, Hard Thing About Hard Things is just incredible. Um, you know, I, I'm looking, learning my book very now.

• 1:11:32Speaker 02

  Another one that I, I think was just, you know, transformative for me, like I loved Alan Strug. Um, you know, I, I just finished, like, I've read all Gladwell, you know, the Gladwell books, like, those are another funnel. And I think the tipping point, um, you know, which I think was his first one, that to me really, like, as I think about how you build viral loops and how you build things that stick and how you build trends, like, that was one I've been thinking a lot about. Uh, there was a book I read early, uh, about category creation that a good friend Scott Segal gave to me, that's called, uh, Play Bigger. Um, that was another one that everything we did, uh, as we started thinking about the

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  name and cameo, the look, the breadth, it was all category creation and we, and, and that was really influential. I mean, I, I've been reading a book a week since I was in seventh grade. So I'm happy to, you know, go toe to toe with anybody on, uh, what's there, come to my bookshelf anytime and I'm sure I can figure a couple of good ones out.

• 1:12:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Play Bigger is a highly, highly underrated book. That one is fantastic.

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. Scott Segal for that, he gave me that tip at what?

• 1:12:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, second question, a little bit more fun, and then you get to ask me one to finish up, is, uh, aliens believer or non-believer?

• 1:12:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, I I think the universe is pretty damn big. Um, I think that it's crazy to think that there's nobody else out there. So I'm gonna bet the field and I'll bet that there's something out there with the right, you know, recipe of life, uh, are there other humans? I would bet that there's other humans in the world somewhere, uh, it's somewhere in the universe. I like literally, you know, I one hundred percent, there is other types of life. But I believe that there's literally human beings like you and I that are somewhere else. Maybe we'll meet up, maybe we won't. We'll have to bet on you on today.

• 1:13:37Anthony Pompliano?

  We, I've never had anyone say that. That is, that is pretty good. Uh, you get to ask me one question to finish up. What do you got for me?

• 1:13:46Speaker 02

  Um, all right, so I, for new hires, I I always ask a series of three questions. But one of them isn't relevant, so I'm only gonna ask you two.

• 1:13:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:14:00Speaker 02

  Number one, what is one interesting thing about you that nobody, none of your listeners know? So it wouldn't be on your Twitter, it wouldn't be on your LinkedIn. And second, what's your death row meal?

• 1:14:11Anthony Pompliano?

  What is, wait, what was the second question?

• 1:14:12Speaker 02

  What's your death row meal?

• 1:14:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Death row meal, uh, McDonald's for sure. Um.

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  What for McDonald's again?

• 1:14:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I'd go make chicken sandwich with a, a large fry and a McFlurry.

• 1:14:26Speaker 02

  For you?

• 1:14:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Nah, I go M and M's. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, but you you like this, I, uh, every Saturday, I basically, uh, either go McDonald's or Domino's. And, you know, everyone gets all mad, so I think you gotta go local, but come on.

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  Well, that's, now that's important. I. You know, and somebody asked the question we didn't answer about best food in Chicago. I have a very contrarian take that Domino's Pizza is the best pizza in Chicago. And people ridicule me for it all the time, but I will stand by it. But if you actually want to know good eating, I run an Instagram food blog that I'm not as active on anymore. But it's off the bone, O F F D A B O I B on Instagram. And it's all food you you can eat with your hands. So it's basically big pieces of meat. You know, from some of the best steak houses in the world. So if you're into that type of thing, check it out on Instagram. You can see what I eat, my rice or that. Anything I put on, I stand by.

• 1:15:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I love that. The fact that you say Domino's is the best in Chicago. I know you get a hard time for that. Because people give me a hard time in New York. Like, what do you mean? It's how is that possible? Look, man, it's just consistent. You know what you're gonna get every time.

• 1:15:42Speaker 02

  Every time. I'm with you.

• 1:15:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Most interesting thing, um, I don't know, I'm like pretty transparent about everything. So the hard part is like that people wouldn't know. I would say.

• 1:15:52Speaker 02

  I'll give you an example. So you don't know about me. In 1988, I was Chicago's best looking baby. I literally won an award in the Chicago 2020. So there's got to be something like that in your life that I hope, you know, is is equal that, you know, you can be proud of maybe never told anybody.

• 1:16:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you start? Do you start the interview with new hires with that fact? Is that is that how you just immediately?

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I got more where that came from. But that's, you know, that's one that really blows people's mind.

• 1:16:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that one's pretty good.

• 1:16:23Speaker 02

  It's hidden under the COVID.

• 1:16:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that one's pretty good. Uh, trying to think what, uh, if we go like way back when we were younger.

• 1:16:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, this one's pretty funny. The day that I met my now wife, uh, we'd go to a coffee shop and, uh, playing, uh, football. I basically have this finger that I tore a ligament and, uh, you know, waited like eight months to go get it fixed and they couldn't fix it fully. And so somehow in the middle of the conversation, I was like, look, you gotta chill out. Like, I can't get married.

• 1:16:58Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, you know, the kind of I got what I deserved amount.

• 1:17:01Speaker 02

  Well, that's awesome. I saw the finger poking out. I was gonna ask you about it.

• 1:17:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I feel like like weird stuff like that. I grew up with four brothers.

• 1:17:12Speaker 02

  You need to make an OnlyFans for your finger.

• 1:17:16Anthony Pompliano?

  You you have brothers and sisters?

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  I've got a little brother.

• 1:17:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so.

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  And big shout out, big shout out to my brother. John came up with the name Cameo.

• 1:17:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, really?

• 1:17:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, I love.

• 1:17:27Speaker 02

  And he's he's actually a big crypto guy, so he made me listen.

• 1:17:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, so I've got four younger brothers. And so if you grew up in a family with just boys, you'll get this. But, uh, probably the things that people don't know are like just the all out brawls my brothers and I had as kids like. I've got brothers with staples in the back of their head, like all kinds of crazy stuff where people are just like, wait a minute, when you were 12, like you guys are putting each other in the, you know, in the doctor's room and in the hospital like, yes, like that is literally what happened.

• 1:17:55Speaker 02

  Iron sharpens iron, right?

• 1:17:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. All right. Where can we send people? Cameo.com. What's what's your Twitter account?

• 1:18:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, come see us at Cameo.com. We are at Book Cameo on Twitter, unfortunately, because at Cameo has been squatted by Cameo Wood for years. Her name is Cameo, and she won't give it up. I've offered her a lot of money. If you guys want to, maybe we could start like a GoFundMe with some, you know, crypto. Maybe we can have a compelling thing. Or if you guys just want to do what I like to do, just just tag. Anytime you buy Cameo, just tag at Cameo anyways. And that's always a lot of fun. Uh, I'm at Mr. 312, M R, then the number 312, Chicago's area code on Twitter. So, uh, this is a lot of fun and, you know, hope you guys all enjoy, uh, Cameo.

• 1:18:47Speaker 02

  And if you got special requests of people that we need on, tweet it at Book Cameo or at me. And, uh, we'll do our best to get others for you.

• 1:18:57Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, everyone. That is, uh, Chicago's prettiest baby from 1988. Sign it out. We'll do this again soon, man. Thanks.

• 1:19:05Speaker 02

  Awesome. Thank you.