A couple fraternity brothers who ended up becoming really famous on something called Vine.

These two guys, Devin Townsend and his best friend, Cody Kolajesik, who now is one of the biggest YouTubers in the world.

At the time, there was no way for them to monetize despite having 4 billion views.

So I realized that the Internet was starting to create a class of people that were more famous than rich.

So we really felt with Cameo, if we could create a platform that helped talent get paid to become more beloved and get paid to become more famous, that could actually be a way for them to monetize their social in a way that was brand positive.

So that's what we started doing.

Cody ended up buying a cameo and he put it in one of his YouTube videos.

And then he also announced that he was joining the platform too.

And that was the first moment that we popped.

The amount of fame in the world is exponentially increasing, but at the same time, the underlying business models that support it.

The record labels don't have more money than they used to.

So for us, the story was the rise of the long tail.

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Let's get started.

Here's Ben.

Hey there everybody.

Welcome back to Lead the Team.

Lead the team Nation.

You're going to love this today.

Today we've got Stephen Galanis, who is the co founder and CEO of Cameo.

Yes, that Cameo.

Cameo is the platform that connects celebrities, athletes, influencers, actors and musicians to fans through personalized videos.

They've reached a $1 billion plus valuation and an employee headcount of over 400.

Stephen.

Welcome to Lead the Team.

Ben.

Thanks for having me.

I got to give you and the Cameo crew a quick shout out.

My dad turned 75 a few years ago.

We're big Alabama people.

We, we went to Alabama we one of my dad's football heroes is John Hannah, who lives on a farm in like southern Alabama somewhere.

Got on Cameo, got him a personalized message and John Hannah spun some stories, talked about my dad, I mean, gave him a great little birthday treat and we had a great time with it.

So thank you.

That's amazing.

And that's what this business obviously is all about.

I always like to say we're creating magical moments and we're manufacturing happiness at scale.

And the thing that's so cool about that, like, no matter when you think, oh, him, my 75 year old dad, it's like, what the hell am I going to get him?

But like to find like a player from his era that he loved watching that could tell him Roll Tide and tell some good stories.

Like, that's what it's all about, man.

It was great.

And he was obviously the.

John was sitting in like his old lazy boy chair on his farm, recording this message, talking about life on the farm.

He invited my dad down to visit the farm, which he did not do, but just had the invitation.

That's awesome.

Like great.

Come on dad and visit me.

Oh yeah.

Anyway, thank you for that.

I will dive in a little more on that the listeners to get a little personalized flavor of what.

What a.

It's a cool company, but it's a fun one for multiple generations to enjoy.

So let's dive into your leadership a little bit here.

Stephen, when.

When have your leadership skills been tested most?

Derek Cameo.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think for us one of the, one of the crazy things as you talked about, we had this idea it had been the fastest growing consumer marketplace business in the world in both 2018 and 2019.

Coming into Covid and then when Covid hit, like if there was not many businesses better well positioned to kind of take advantage of the big macro trends than we were.

If you think about every single athlete, actor and celebrity on the planet was not working at the same time, which literally has never happened.

Like there were no leagues were shut down the game, there were no games.

There were no concerts, nobody was filming.

Like literally no matter what you did is a.

As a talent, you didn't do that.

And one thing people don't realize is if pro athletes get paid per game.

So when they didn't get, when they weren't playing, they weren't getting checks.

Musicians get paid per gig, comedians get paid per show.

So it's not like you or I that were able to still collect and work remote.

Like they basically couldn't do Anything.

So suddenly we had this massive supply side interest in coming onto the platform.

And it was kind of at this time that cameo went from this like really cool hot thing to something that was just like in the zeitgeist.

And like everyone you could think of had just kind of joined at once.

And then at the same time you told a great story about this cameo you got for your dad.

My mom's a two time cancer survivor so I remember Mother's Day 2020.

Like I couldn't see her.

Like she's immunocompromised.

Like I'm traveling a ton.

So what do you do?

You go and you.

We had to find a way to like send digital love to people.

And for all the missed birthdays, for all the missed anniversaries, for all the missed job promotions, a cameo became a really cool, fun way to show someone you loved them, to give them that hug but without being able to see them in real life.

So that was, that was it.

So anyways, so we, the business increases exponentially at that point.

Like in 2020 we grew 500% in revenue in one year.

Just to put in perspective.

Yeah, that's like a roller coaster.

Like a rocket ship taken off or maybe more like a bronco on a ranch.

Like how do you ride that thing?

This thing was ripping.

And at that point when we're like our board of directors was looking at the opportunity that happened.

So number one when we looked at like when we took it looked at our early investors in the company.

These are the same people that were the first checks in Snapchat and YouTube.

This is LightSpeed and Kleiner Perkins, some of the best venture capital firms in the world.

And we were ahead of all the other major platforms in revenue.

Year one, year two, year three, year four.

And when you looked at the size of prize of what it became by this point, Facebook is now a trillion dollar company and Snapchat was $126 billion at the time we became a billion dollar company and our whole board was like, hey, we have something.

We're building a hundred billion dollars plus company right now and we need to make sure that we future proof this thing and build the right team that can take this thing public and really like have it live up to the destiny it wanted.

So we spent a lot of 2020 recruiting kind of the best all star cast that money could buy.

We hired the CMO away from TikTok in 2019.

I've heard of those.

The global head of people from McDonald's.

We had our CTO had led all engineering efforts at Hulu.

Our head of product was, was a top product leader at Uber.

So like you name it, our global head of ops, the global head of Ops at LinkedIn came and joined as our CEO.

So when you name it, like in every single position, we kind of had built this all star team.

But the tough thing, as we mentioned earlier, Ben, was we were doing this remotely.

We're doing this all remotely.

And the company had gone from 100 people to 337 in the space of about eight months.

Right.

No one knew anybody.

Nobody knew anybody.

Yeah, nobody knew anybody.

So really, when I think about the toughest period that I had, I personally that really tested my leadership.

I think a lot about the period surrounding George Floyd and then kind of everything that happened after that.

At a company like ours, one thing that's really, really important is that we're a marketplace.

We're paid speech, we're not free speech.

We believe that everybody should have a place on Cameo.

Just because you don't like somebody, it doesn't mean they shouldn't be on the platform.

But what ended up being really tough in that era for us was there was a huge sensitivity towards, among different employee groups of, of who should be on the platform, who did we want to associate, associate ourselves with.

And for the first time ever, we really got into a case where, I Remember Donald Trump Jr.

Joined Cameo, right?

And we had about a third of the company that actually wanted to like, resign.

They, they were refusing to send emails out, they didn't want to merchandise on the site.

And this was such a tough period because when you're remote and when you don't get the opportunity to like go grab people by the water cooler and talk to them, that ended up, I just found that to be like an extremely challenging period.

Having everybody kind of aligned the vision on the mission, vision and values that had brought us to that point.

But getting to a point where you have this like, highly tenured team that like knew everybody to a team that if you looked at it, 70, 80% of it was new within six months.

And they all brought their own ideas and, and kind of agendas to the company building and that I personally found that to be an extremely, extremely challenging time.

Wow, what an interesting challenge.

So you have celebrities of different political and different voices all across the spectrum.

And then you have employees who want to feel grounded in the mission.

And.

Yeah, so what is the conversation like when someone says, Look, Donald Trump Jr.

Or maybe only even on the other side of the spectrum, like I don't agree with them.

Why in the world should I try to help them connect with people and spread their message if I disagree?

Yeah.

And look, we're a very mission driven company.

I'm a mission driven leader at Cameo.

Our mission is to create the most personalized and authentic fan experiences on Earth.

We all don't like the same things.

I could be an.

I could be.

I could be War Eagle.

You could be Roll Tide.

You could be.

Okay, Auburn, Alabama, Republican, Democrat.

Yeah.

Like, look, anything.

Chicago Bears, Green Bay packers, like, you name it.

Right.

But.

But what I tried to always do is come from first principles on this and say, okay, we have three rules on the platform.

No nudity, no inciting violence, and no hate speech.

And because we are a marketplace of notorious people.

And by notorious, I just mean that they're notable.

Some people on our platform got famous for doing things that, like, there's porn stars on our platform.

They're not allowed to be naked on Cameo.

But they, but, but there was demand for them.

And, and I don't judge what you do off of our platform.

I judge what you do on our platform.

And this was one of the, like, very bedrock.

The very, very bedrock tenets of how we built the company and thought about who would come on and everything like that.

And then secondly, on Cameo vs Twitter or Instagram or Snapchat, you can only make a video if you get booked.

Right.

So somebody literally had to come to the site, find you, put their credit card in pay, and then you had to make the video.

So it's not giving a platform in the same way.

Gotcha.

Yeah, interesting.

I think about it on a lot of different scales here, but say you've got to run an organization of 50,000 employees.

They're going to run the gamut.

You're going to be doing deals.

Like, I worked for Honeywell years and years ago for 10 years.

And I mean, they provide stuff to a lot of different governments, a lot of different social entities.

And some people disagree with those in a lot of ways.

And I think in the past, long past, we just kind of ignored the political discussion.

Yeah.

Altogether our disagreement.

But now it's.

I think it's a lot harder for leaders to navigate that.

And so it sounds like, I think.

I think we were at a period in that time, too, where activism, not just in the workplace, but outside.

Like, it was pretty unprecedented.

I think about.

People are locked up at home.

You have George Floyd gets murdered.

You have this huge outpouring into the streets of people that had.

They were they were scared, they're frustrated.

They were.

They were lonely.

And all of a sudden that's.

It's hard to divorce that from the workplace when it's the thing that you're thinking about outside of it all the time.

And, and again, everybody would, no matter where you stood on any of these issues, they.

Everybody brought it to work at that in that era.

And I think that that's, I think as a leader, it's so important that for number one, it starts with who you hire, right?

And a cameo.

When I think about the people that I want to work with and that I've seen be successful at this company, it's hungry, humble, kind, curious, learning machines who love to win.

That's always been our archetype here at Cameo.

We have, we have core values that we really espouse, and we need to make sure that as we're promoting people, they're.

They're meeting that bar and they're coming in.

Our first value of Cameo is roll out the red carpet.

And what does that mean?

Anyone that interacts with our brand should feel like they are getting escorted down the red carpet at the Oscars.

Like, whether you're a customer, whether you're a talent, whether you're someone interviewing to work here or press, that's how we want it.

So it's, it's kind of this, like, this exponentially impactful openness and bringing people along and making sure.

And this is one of the things when you start hiring, like in tripling the size of the company in a very short period of time, especially remotely, which, again, was really hard for everybody.

But the tough thing about it is, but you, you sometimes, like when you're, when you're in, when people are coming to work for you in the remote world, right?

They might have five, six zoom interviews, right, to get the job.

So maybe they've talked to your team for two and a half to three hours total, and then all of a sudden, they show up to work one day remote, and by the first, by lunchtime of the first day, they spend more time with the team now than they did before.

And that's a.

And the tough thing about remote culture especially is that all culture becomes so local, right?

You might be at a thousand person company, but 10 people you're on zoom with regularly.

That's the culture.

So if you have one of those people that comes in and it isn't at that cultural bar that you want, it pollutes everybody's experience of those 10 people.

And then those 10 people touch other People.

So I've just found it to be, I found that to be a really, really challenging time.

And as we were refining, who do we want?

What are the, what's the talent that we need to win?

What leadership values do we espouse as a leadership team?

And then what are we expecting for the people under that, to me was, that was a very challenging period.

And I think at the end of the day, as we've had to like remake the company and so much has changed, up, down, left, right.

Like we've really tried to start with those, those attributes of the types of people that we want and build back around that.

So is your philosophy, hey, we went through this crazy remote time and now we want to bring people back into one office?

Or are you embracing the keeping, keeping it remote, stay remote, work like at scale.

Every company becomes distributed.

Even if, let's just say your whole company is in Charleston and you have a thousand people, whether you're in one building and like 10 floors, if you're on the 10th floor versus someone on the second floor, you almost might as well not be in the same place.

Like, I worked at LinkedIn before Cameo, and I remember like going to LinkedIn's campus or Google's campus or Facebook's campus and buildings everywhere, all spread throughout Snapchat, had places all throughout Venice.

So if you get big, you're going to be distributed.

So you have to have that.

That said in our case, right, we had originally, before COVID we had about 80% of our company in Chicago at HQ and about 20% in Los Angeles and nobody anywhere else.

No one in New York, no one San Francisco.

By the time we woke up and the second vaccine was out, we had people in 38 states and 13 countries.

Right.

And that, and that is really, really tough.

So at that point, my best people aren't concentrated in those two cities.

Right.

And we had opened a New York office as well.

One of my best engineers is in Idaho.

I'm not going to go and tell him he needs to move to Chicago or la because he's proven to do a great job for me for years.

Remote.

So what we've, what we ended up doing was we closed our LA and New York office and we kind of doubled down on HQ in Chicago.

And what we, we allow everybody at the company, if they want, they can fly to Chicago for one week a month.

We'll pay for your flight, we'll pay for your hotel to work out of hq.

And when we do off sites, everything, everybody meets here.

Now when we were remote.

We're doing offsite in Denver.

We're doing offside in Scottsdale.

But now everything centralized in Chicago.

So it's kind of that we call it this hub and spoke model.

Nice.

So you've taken the point.

So.

So we have hq, and it's like the grand meeting place for people to come, and you're making it available for them, but doesn't mean they got to be in HQ every day being watched, per se.

Totally.

And part of it, too, is, like, for when you're.

If you're a new hire at Cameo, though we are exclusively hiring in Chicago right now, and you're in person.

So for new people coming in, that's it.

After a year, if you've proven to do your.

You're somebody that, like, we all trust that nobody, then, yeah, that will get more lenient on how often you're coming in.

Very, very cool, man.

I love how you all have grown.

It sounds like you've had a lot of flexibility as a leader, and it's.

It's fueled your success with this.

Now, y'all, I got.

I got to tell the audience here.

I get on with Stephen, and you never guess this guy is, like, leading $1 billion valuation company.

He's just.

You're just a very relaxed, friendly person.

And I was doing.

In our research.

Turns out it seems like looking at your background, the seeds of Cameo and what this could become seems like a natural evolution, a little bit of, like your days at Duke.

And so I'm wondering if.

Because it.

I don't want to put words around, but it seems like you understood the ability of connecting people across various areas and preferences early on, and there was a lot of value in that.

Can you kind of walk us through a little bit of just sort of quickly where this all kind of came from and where you realize you had this.

I guess it's like a superpower for connecting people, meeting people, leading the party.

I guess maybe before you were leading the team.

Is that right?

I call it.

There's a Japanese framework, like leadership and principle, that I love.

It's called ikigai.

I don't know if you've ever heard it.

Yes, it is.

Probably one of my favorite things that I've learned is I've continued my leadership journey.

And for those of you that aren't familiar, ikigai, imagine having a Venn diagram, but instead of two circles, there's four.

So you got left, right up, down.

And the Japanese believe that to be the best in the world at something, you have to Be at the intersection of what do you love to do?

What does the world need?

What are you great at?

And what can you get paid for?

And if you find your ikigai point, it kind of gives you, like, like, unlimited energy.

It kind of gives you, like, I always like to say what I did when I teach iki.

It's like Iron Man's heart, that, that, this thing.

And when you're in your zone, like, the only way you can be the best in the world is, is to.

Is to be able to do something that you can be authentically do.

Like, I am a wear my heart on the sleeves type of guy.

I am.

No, like, of course my life has changed.

I've had different experiences.

But, like, the core essence of me, if you met me in kindergarten or you met me yesterday or today, like, I'm the same person.

I sense that.

And that's one of the things that I think has allowed me to recruit so many great people, especially in the early days.

Like, you have an idea like Cameo, and it's, hey, there's this marketplace and we've got.

We're going to have famous people and they're going to make videos and people are like, well, who do you got on the platform?

Well, nobody yet.

And then, and then they're like, I've got me.

Yeah.

Like, we got nobody on the platform.

So like, to take that idea and recruit people and get them to quit their great jobs to come work for you when you have nothing, right, you've got to be able to do that.

So I think that's really important.

Secondly, I go back to my family.

So I don't want.

Before you get off of ikigai too much, how early in life did you discover that and when did you start?

Did you kind of fill in the holes afterwards?

Oh, this has been happening.

I didn't learn about the ikigai concept till I was probably, I don't know, 30 years old.

I was a couple years into starting Cameo.

I was sitting at.

I remember exactly where I was.

I was at Chicago Ventures, one of our seed stage VCs.

They were having one of the, like in Chicago.

Like, Chicago's not necessary.

It's a good business town.

But it's not necessarily known for, like, having big tech companies.

And one of the most successful outcomes was a company called Field Glass.

They sold for over $1 billion.

And Jay, the CEO, came and was the keynote speaker to all the, like, seed stage entrepreneurs at Chicago Ventures.

And he rolled this concept out.

When I first heard it, I didn't really get it.

And then like I heard it again and all of a sudden it just like, I'm like, yes, that's it.

That's the concept.

That's the framework I was looking for.

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And so you, you started putting your, your past into that model.

Like, okay, that makes sense.

And then how did, so once you learn about it and said, hey, I'm going to start really taking moves, making moves like this.

What, what did you change after you understood the, the concept and the framework?

Well, there, there's so much that you change, especially as a leader.

And look, I, as we were building that leadership team, I was just talking about one thing to keep in mind was like, I had never, like, I'd been an entrepreneur, I'd had small businesses, but I'd never like, like people managed people like that before.

Like, I had never, you know, what, like what am I, what am I?

How do I manage?

The 30 year veteran of Chief Global Chief People Officer McDonald's.

What am I supposed to like, I'm her manager now, that is.

Or a guy like my old CEO who's the global head of ops at LinkedIn.

I worked at LinkedIn.

He was seven levels ahead of me there.

And I remember Jeff Wiener, the CEO of LinkedIn, and Mike Gamson, the global, had a sales at LinkedIn.

They were two early investors in my company.

And as we were scaling up, they're like, hey, you need.

And they literally name this guy and they're like, you need somebody like this who was so instrumental in us scaling up.

And I ended up not just finding my version of him, I hired him, he came to work for us and like, and basically it's like they're not trusting.

It's not that my experience is something that's going to like change them, but it's, it's your instincts, it's your values, it's your principles.

It's.

I saw the world in a certain way that nobody else saw it to go and like have this insight to have this business and to make it work.

And, and that's something that no matter if they're four years experience or they're four years experience, you, you have to, in a leader, in a leader, you have to be able to inspire.

When I've talked to people, like I remember talking to Mike Gamson at LinkedIn and I was like, what is the number one trait you look for in a leader?

And he said, inspiration.

Inspiration.

Because you, you, you need to like, you need to have that idea and you need to like, be able to rally people and get them to like when they're in the shower and they're thinking about their day, like they're, they're, they're, they're figuring out how to make your dream become a reality.

And so when did you need to inspire them and what did you do and what's the, what was the result?

Look, some things worked really well, some things didn't.

One of the, I think one of the big critical mistakes that I made at that era was we were growing so fast and it was all remote.

And many people will talk about like when you bring in a senior leader to like a younger team that's worked together, having organ rejection happens.

In fact, like, I remember, like organ rejection.

I'm saying I remember.

I remember as we were really starting to ramp up hiring in 2020, I remember one of our board members talking about how the stats are in venture backed, high growth, venture backed companies.

One third of new hires will not make it a year, and one half of senior executives will not make it a year.

Right, that's, that's big.

So typically what people do is when they're adding like a big gun hire like that, maybe you add one or two and then you like, you let them, you let the organization kind of recalibrate to like how that is there.

One of the mistakes that I made in, in this, in this era was we had always done a really good job in injecting, ingesting talent and getting them to like mold to the way that we work.

And I brought I think too many senior leaders in at one time that all suddenly in the leadership room, they, they all were kind of learning the business together, figuring it out.

There's personal dynamic issues that, that couldn't be solved because we're all remote and nobody was, nobody was seeing each other in person.

And, and to me, like I had some, some very big failures in that time as a leader, bringing people together where I think very often I had at that in that era.

There were times where I felt like the, the sum of the parts was better than the whole Right.

Like individually you would look, hey, they're great, they're great, they're great.

And this happens, right?

Like, so Alabama lost to Vanderbilt this year, right?

It's like every single, every single person on that team, right?

Like, like there might be one guy on Vanderbilt that could start for Alabama, but they played like a team that came together.

Right.

And as a Dukey, you could, you could talk about any loss that we've had in the same way.

Right?

And, and, and that, and that to me is like, that was a big learning.

And the other thing too that I think I learned a lot during that period was I.

We built the company by giving like really smart, talented young people with little experience, like huge leeway in slack to go figure it out.

And then when we started hiring for resumes as we got bigger, like some of the best people I ever hired, I can think of one in particular that was critical to our business coming in.

And she was a bartender before, but she just really had great EQ skills and ended up being excellent at our talent on the talent side of the business.

But when we were, when all of a sudden you're a billion dollar company, you have 400 employees, that resume doesn't get out of the stack.

So you're not finding the people that maybe have a high ceiling, but a broken resume because you can go poach people from Uber and Airbnb and Google and the biggest companies in the world.

So that's something that like I love home.

I love home growing talent.

I love taking people, bringing them in our program and turning them into like what we need the business to be and for them to like grow and become the best version of themselves.

And sometimes when you're really kind of like high flying, like in 2020, we got ranked, we were the number one most consumer promising consumer Internet company in the world.

Like by the information that like you get that type of accolade, right.

And all of a sudden the influx of people that are at companies that just ipo, they want to come work with you and help you get there.

Yeah, it's interesting.

So, so many interesting growth challenges.

But what I'm hearing today is a lot on, hey, building the team.

So you've, I mean, man, when you throw out like your senior executives or from brands that are iconic.

Yeah.

But the flip side of that is you're also trying to hire a little bit more outside of the box.

Like the bartender.

Yeah.

How are you thinking about that for your next billion dollar valuation?

Because you guys are going to get big.

It gets Harder size limits flexibility or it can.

Yeah.

I, I'll tell you like another kind of learning that's very related to this is I, as I think about, as I think about like somebody that's like at like managing a tens of billions of dollars publicly traded company, kind of like C suite executive at that level, very often times they have a tough time kind of scaling down because they, they have so much infrastructure around them.

Right.

Like the COO needs their VP and the VP needs their OPS people.

And it just all said one hire, you might need like they're great, but you might need five to ten people around them just to like have them have the same level of, of, of, of effectiveness that they had in places with more infrastructure.

So.

And then the other kind of challenge too, when you bring in like really great senior execs, oftentimes that comes at the expense of like high ceiling, promising young leaders that got you to that point to begin with.

So then what happens is you bring the boss in and that person either gets inspired by them and like looks at this as a great opportunity to learn to further their own skill set, or what happens, they get pissed off and they leave.

And then suddenly, if that senior leader doesn't work out, you lost your high potential.

A leader that was on the rise and the person that you brought in doesn't work.

So look, I've seen it happen both ways at the company, but that's something that can't be overstated as you're thinking about how do you stack talent, how do you build the right density at the company to do what you need to do.

Some interesting directions to take this, but I've got some notes about early on in Cameo, when you were getting going with this, when did you know what was one of the pivotal decisions that you made or a defining moment that really helped, helped you, I guess, see the bigger vision of what's possible.

Yeah.

So I want to talk about a little story that happened before we had the idea, but it involved the people that I'm going to talk about to answer your question.

So at Duke I had a couple fraternity brothers who ended up in kind of the 2015, 2016 era, becoming really famous on something called Vine.

I don't know if you remember Vine.

It was seven second videos and these two guys, Devin Townsend, who ended up becoming my co founder at Cameo, and his best friend Cody Kolajesic, who now is one of the biggest YouTubers in the world, Cody Ko.

He's got 10 plus million followers.

Cody and Devin got on this App fine.

They started traveling the world and they ended up having billions of loops.

At the time, there was no way for them to monetize.

So despite having 4 billion views, like, they literally were both working.

Like, one was at Apple, one was at Microsoft, like, that they had like real day jobs.

And I remember going to Las Vegas for the Mayweather Pacquiao fight, and I met up with the guys there and I took a picture that Cody ended up posting.

And now at this point, I didn't know about turning your notifications off or something.

He took a picture and his social following was so big that when he tagged me in that picture, my phone that was fully charged up overheated and died in my pocket because there were so many likes and comments coming in on this picture.

And at that moment I'm like, whoa, like, there's something really interesting here.

Like, like the nature of fame is changing.

And like, just from my, my, my days at Duke, like, I have a lot of friends that are in the NBA, that are in the NFL, but I'd never seen anything like this, right?

So.

So I realized that the Internet was starting to create a class of people that were more famous than rich.

They had all the followers, but they didn't have a way to monetize it.

And that was really, really interesting.

So as we started with Cameo, and as a football guy, you'll appreciate this, ESPN had a dead 30 for 30 called broke.

And in it they talked about how 80% of 85% of NFL players go broke five years after playing their last game.

And I saw this happen with classmates of mine at Duke.

We won the 2010 national championship in basketball.

And one of the guys on the team who ended up playing in the NBA for years but didn't make it right away, I remember him like calling me, I'm six months into my first job out of making $35,000 a year or something.

And he asked if I could Western Union him $300, right?

And this is a guy that had just sold out Cameron Indoor for four years.

And like, and I just like, man, that's, it's like crazy to me that there's so much demand for these guys, but they weren't able to monetize.

So we really felt with Cameo, if we could create a platform that helped talent get paid to become more beloved and get paid to become more famous, that could actually be a way for them to monetize their social in a way that was brand positive.

So that's what we started doing now when we launched the Platform we're starting with people like, and I love them.

I'm going to give shout outs to people that I love.

Cassius Marsh.

He was a backup defensive end for the Seattle Seahawks.

Our first investor, our first talent.

Love cash.

Lance Thomas, my.

One of my best friends from college.

I was in the NBA D league at the time.

Like on his way kind of up, down to the, to that.

Dad Lewis, execute quarterback, one of my old roommates.

Third backup quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers.

I think those are the people we launch.

And you can imagine, like there's not that much demand for, for those guys.

So we had this idea, it was cool.

It's puttering along.

But then one day Devin calls me up and he's like, hey, because we just started with football players.

And he goes, hey, I think Cody my.

His roommate with 10 million followers on YouTube and people like Cody might do well on this.

Cody ended up buying a cameo from dad Lewis, this football player, and he put it in one of his YouTube videos.

And then that.

And then he also announced that he was joining the platform too.

And that was the first moment that we popped like, I think, I think the business went from like 8,000amonth to 38,000amonth in like the course of like, him posting that one video.

And that's when we started to realize, like, wow, it's not just athletes like YouTube, reality TV stars, musicians.

And today, like, we really run the full gamut.

And so what, what's the big learning from that, from that story that you take away and share with people?

You know, to me it's, it's that when I think about, like, why, how the world is changing in like, in the big macro trends, there are more famous people today than there were yesterday, and there's going to be more famous people tomorrow than there are now.

Think about all the, Just think about podcasting.

All these podcasts that come on, someone can say something stupid on the streets of Nashville and have the third biggest podcast in the world monthly.

You're talking about.

Yes, right?

And TikTok is creating new fame every single day.

SoundCloud, if you're, if you're a rapper, you don't need to get signed to a label to like, get distribution.

You can get on SoundCloud and if your, your music's good enough, it's YouTube.

So the amount of fame in the world is exponentially increasing.

But at the same time, the underlying business models that, that support it.

The record labels don't have more money than they used to.

The Movie studios and the cable television stations, their, their models are like exponentially.

They're like existentially being challenged in the NFL or in sports.

The top 1% of, of athletes make 99% of all the endorsement revenue.

Everybody else is in that broke bucket where they're really getting in trouble.

There's a long tail of people that.

Yeah, so, so for us it was, the story was the rise of the long tail, right in that like Devin, my co founder, had 25,000 followers on Instagram.

But those 25,000 people from his vine days, they loved him just as much as Justin Bieber's most rabid fans loved him.

He just had less.

So that was a really interesting insight for us that somebody's D listener is somebody else's favorite person in the world.

Wow.

So good.

I think I'm, I'm just dissecting this on what, what about you and what you had learned up to that point helped you identify or helped you say, hey, I'm, I'm, I'm seeing this world and this world and there needs to be something in the middle.

And that's, that's me and my Ikigai.

Yeah, it, it comes back to, it comes back to like, like kind of the founding story of Cameo.

We're at my grandmother's funeral.

My, my now co founder, other co founder Devin, or sorry Martin, was a movie producer and NFL agent and he was working with my uncle.

My uncle had produced movies like Rambo, Conan, Lone Survivor, the Irishman.

So he's done a bunch of like big like kind of action movies.

And Martin had this idea that if he signed a big defensive lineman with a personality, maybe he could sign the next Conan the Barbarian or the next Rambo, like and he could backdoor into signing the Rock or Jason Momoa.

So that was his idea.

So he ends up signing this pointer, Cassius Marshall.

He's.

When you have a backup player in the NFL, like as the agent you're paying for their training, you're flying up to see them, but they're bringing in nothing.

You make 2% of like a non guaranteed rookie contract.

Like all the money needs to come from off the field income for these guys and nobody wants to.

Nobody.

No brands, like want to do a brand deal with a backup player.

It's just they want the superstar, they don't want the backup player.

So Martin was finding it really, really challenging to find off the field income for this guy.

And he ends up like, we're, we're driving, I'm driving him back to the Airport.

He flew in for the day from my grandmother's funeral.

And he's telling me this story and he goes, stephen, this guy's so.

He's got so much charisma, but I just can't get a deal for him.

And then, and then he pulls out his phone and he shows me just a video that he had made just to, like, show off his charisma and his swagger and this aura about him.

And in the video, he was congratulating a guy who is high up in Nike's marketing department, that's from Seattle.

On becoming a father, he makes this video.

Cassius is all tatted up, no shirt on, flat brimmed Seahawks hat, driving in Southern California.

He goes, hey, Brandon, it's Cassius Marsh from the Seahawks.

Congratulations on your son Maverick.

If he gets your athletic ability, I know he's going to be playing for the Seahawks one day.

Go Hawks.

So this guy who was so close to, like, Lebron that he named his kid Maverick after Mav Carter, LeBron's business partner, he posted this video on Instagram and said it was the best thing he'd ever gotten.

And that was such an insight to me, where I'm like, wow, personalization and authenticity, like these videos.

That's the new autograph.

That was the insight.

Yeah.

Wow, light bulbs and y'all, I hope you can see him.

Hope you can see Stephen telling the story.

Man's on fire for this.

So you've identified it and you grew it and you saw this opportunity.

And a huge congratulations to you guys on this and navigating all the obstacles and your huge scaling.

We're putting taking the vision forward now, five years down the road.

Where do you think this is all headed?

So at this point, Cameo has 70,000 of the most interesting people in pop culture on the platform across the world.

We have talent in over 170 countries in the world.

We have customers in about 200.

If you're not in North Korea or Cuba, like, like we've sold cameos, or in fact, we sold cameos in Antarctica each of the last three, four years.

Like, it's.

This thing's kind of gone all over the place.

But that said, it's so early in where we think it could go.

I believe that there's over 50 million people in the world that could be on the platform, and we have 70,000 right now.

And the reason I believe that is I'm really, really excited.

We've been doing the long tail for a while, but, like, I think the long tail can is so much more than the level we've got.

For example, in my town, the town I grew up in.

And I'm actually going to speak at my old high school after this interview today, which is kind of exciting.

Go back to the burps.

But we had a really famous high school football coach in our town.

And if I could have got Coach Noel to make a cameo for my buddy, who I have given the best man speech for a couple of years and have him, like, call him a certain phrase that he did in film room one day, you know, that like, all of us, like, 20 years later still laugh about, like, this one film session and this thing that he called him.

And if I could get Coach no to do that, that would be better than any celebrity I could go do.

So I think, like, when I think about pastors, I think about firemen and cops, like soldiers.

There's so many people that are inspirational on the platform, and I want to really open it up and allow anybody the opportunity to come on.

And if you make great videos and people see them, you can be on the platform.

So it's, like, available for everybody at all levels.

And it sounds super niche in terms of you're into this one thing at this level in your community.

There's.

There's an opportunity there.

And every.

Every company, there's a restaurant.

If you ever come to Chicago, I'm going to bring you this restaurant called La Scarola.

It's the classic, like, red sauce Italian place that you go in, and the walls are just covered with all the famous people that have ever been there.

Right.

Like, everybody.

Every town has that type of restaurant.

And when people ask me who should be on cameo, I'd say, like, if you made the wall of La Scarola or you made the wall of whatever that place is in Tuscaloosa or in Durham, like, if you're on that wall, like, you should be on the platform because you're there.

There's people that admire you.

They said to me that's.

And we call this concept Cameo X.

And you'll be hearing more about it later this year.

But we're really excited to, like, broadly talk about opening this platform up and seeing what happens, because we shouldn't be the arbiter of, like, who can make your day.

In fact, like, I know my mom.

It was just her birthday the other day.

If my brother had made a cameo for her, that would have been better than me.

The Kenny G one that I got her, that's her favorite artist.

Oh, so good.

So I noticed you guys are hiring for enterprise?

Yes.

Because you've been a B2C operation.

What is the B2B world look like for Cameo?

So five years ago, I get a call from Brett Favre.

Brett had been one of the early stars at Cameo, and he kept declining this request.

He was 400 bucks because his jersey was four, so he had two zeros.

And he kept declining this request from a car dealership in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

It was a Chevy dealership.

And he goes to me and we're kind of like, hey, Brett, like, what's going on?

Like, you keep declining this.

He's like, stephen, I don't have a national car deal, but.

And I would love to support a small business in Wisconsin, but I don't think a business should pay the same price for a cameo if they're going to use it as, like a commercial on their socials, as I would do for a fan.

So I'm like, all right, Brett, like, how much would you do this for?

And he's like, shit, I don't know.

I'll do it for ten grand.

So I get this number and I'm like, yeah, right.

I'm going to call this dealership up.

There's no 400, but it's 10,000.

Yeah, yeah.

So I call this guy up this dealership.

I think he's going to rip my head off.

What are you talking about?

It's 400 bucks.

But then he's like, to my surprise, he did it because he's like, man, a couple of years ago, we tried to get Brett to come film a live spot on the lot, but his agents, like, you need.

You need to take a private jet and fly that jet from Hattie, Wisconsin to Hattiesburg and bring him back.

And there's production and film crews, and it's like a day of his time.

So that was going to be like a six figure cost to like make this spot.

And instead, for 10 grand, in 30 seconds of Brett's time sitting on his couch in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, he could make a commercial for this, for this Labor Day sale that was coming out.

And the dealer was loving it.

So that was one of our first insights, that there was a corporate use case for Cameo as well.

And today Cameo for Business is kind of the emerging growth engine of our company, where we have thousands of the most recognizable brands in the world that will book us to source talent that end up making their TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat ads.

So basically what you can do is you can pay to get on demand user generated content from notable faces that influence the demos you're looking for.

And we're currently hiring for a VP of sales on that in Chicago.

So if anyone listening, since Chicago, they love sales and they want to.

This would be a fun one, y'all.

Yeah, yeah.

By the way, this is a great job.

And it's, it's such a cool.

It's, it's, it's so cool what we're doing here.

And like where the puck's going, where.

The skate to where the puck is going.

And man, I can sell.

I love that Brett Farm story.

That's terrific.

Are you, are you thinking about college?

Like the NIL deals and things like that?

Are you guys able to participate in that or is it still.

Yeah, we are.

But you know what, it's been really interesting if you go back and look at the original New York Times article.

When NIL got announced, Gene Smith, the Ohio State athletic director, was leading the committee and they asked him, if you watch, if you read the article and you watch the interview on it at the press conference, they're like, all right, like, now what are you going to tell all your Ohio State athletes now?

That this is the law of the land?

And he goes, we have 300,000 alumni, Ohio State alumni around the world.

Like, I'm going to tell them all to join cameo.

That's like literally.

So we were like always in the first article about nil.

Like, that was the obvious use case.

And if you think about like the people that I mentioned starting it, all those people, they might not have big, big, big NFL players, but they were legends at Duke, they were legends at ucla, they were legends at USC or Bama.

And even if they don't, even if they don't make it to the pros, like that guy, that was a critical piece of the national championship team.

Like, everyone in Tuscaloosa is going to remember that guy forever and they love to hear from him in the same way.

Like you talked about the story of the cameo from.

For your dad.

Right?

Like, there is a real care.

So.

But the one thing I'll tell you that is the NIL stuff is so top heavy right now.

So like if you're a Shadow Sanders or you're a Travis Hunter or a live Dunn, these people are making millions of dollars.

And then if you're not those people, like, it's, it's tough.

So.

So we're still like, we're still.

We have not like nailed NIL in the way that I thought, to be honest, like I, I really expected like the second that that came out, it should have just been a no brainer for everybody to join.

But like our business is one where you kind of have to be on the ground and recruit.

So I think we may, well, you may see out of us in a couple years is a, is a real ground game, like a real campus ambassador program.

We go find the kid at Alabama that's a manager of the football team or a kid at Duke that was on the baseball team, but he just knows everybody and like turn them into campus reps to go get that.

Find young Stephen.

Exactly.

Find the Duke, Young Steven.

Exactly.

There.

Every campus has that person.

Right.

And you just like.

And they're not that hard to find.

Yeah, you can ask around and figure out who it is.

Who's the guy that's on the parties.

Last question here.

What is the, what's your legacy going to be 10 years down the road?

Like, what do you hope it's going to be looking back over your shoulder in terms of the impact you've made?

Like, there's two things I think, I think number one, every business is hard in its own way, but one thing that gets us all out of bed is like we put smiles on people's faces at scale.

So I think that Cameo's legacy, especially with social media, is TikTok going to get banned?

Is there misinformation?

Like, Cameo is just this place where it's like, it's good vibes, it's love, like it's a happy place.

And that to make a happier, healthier Internet in that way, that's something that I think on a global scale is super important to me and exciting to me.

And then from a personal leadership legacy standpoint, you and I both like football.

We've used a lot of football analogies here.

One thing I really think a lot about is kind of like the equivalent of like the coaching tree.

So people that work for me that go off and start other companies.

Okay.

And to this day, like Cameo is eight years old.

We've had multiple people leave to start billion dollar companies.

We have probably eight or nine that have been able to raise venture capital and start scaling.

And the Cameo Alumni Network is something I'm incredibly proud of.

Like people that came into through our program, they took our values.

One of our board members, Bing Gordon, calls these golden processes.

A golden process is what is the thing?

Like you're a new, you're a new hire at Amazon or your new hire at Cameo.

What do you learn?

What do you learn from Monday to the end of the day, Friday, your first week, that's just, hey, this company's different.

And one of the things we do.

If you're an engineer at Cameo, everybody ships code on their first day.

Everybody ships code on their first day.

We want you.

Hey, get on the board.

Get in there.

Like, don't worry about it.

Like, and like, we have so like our corporate values.

One of.

One of our alums that just exited for a billion dollars, not just billion dollar valuation, sold the company for a billion dollars run through walls.

One of our core values is.

Is.

Is his core value at the company.

Right.

So I love to see that and, and as a leader or just like as a coach, right?

Like if you're Nick Saban made Kirby Smart and all these other.

The Indiana coach, now all these guys, that to me, like, of course I'd love to ring the bell with Cameo.

I want this platform to be what it deserves to be or what it could be.

And I feel a lot of burden all the time of making sure we live up to our potential.

But the one thing I'll tell you is at the end of the day, it's so gratifying to see people that came work for you to go off to their own dreams and for it to.

Those lessons they learned at your place are ones that they're espousing and benefiting from as they build their own.

What a legacy, y'all.

Check out Cameo.

What fun.

And enjoy this interview.

Stephen, thanks for coming on.

Lead the team, sir.

Thanks, Ben.

This is a lot of fun.

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