Episode 1
Season 3
Cameo: the unicorn company that connects fans directly with more than 40,000 celebrities
Steven Galanis
Co-founder & CEO, Cameo
“I want to be the worst person at the company, as quickly as possible. You do that by hiring people that are better than you at the thing they do specifically”
About the speaker
The Greek-American Steven Galanis is the co-founder and CEO of Cameo, the application that connects directly fans with more than 40 thousand celebrities. One of the first supporters of the app is the top American rapper Snoop Dog, while the list includes Rockstars such as Alice Cooper, NBA players such as Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, and actors from famous productions such as "The Lord of the Rings". By 2021, Cameo has secured $ 100 million in funding, nearly doubled its staff, and reached $ 100 million in sales. Steven talked about the value and influence of the image of celebrities, the huge investment deal with which Cameo's value exceeded $ 1 billion, and of course shared useful tips for young entrepreneurs, as he learned from a young age in Chicago.
Show notes
What makes an entrepreneur outlier?
Its the fact that you can see a future and you act on it. Also is to be enthusiastic about your idea and keep this enthusiasm, even the very hard or very good times.
Transcript
Intro-Steven Galanis
I've always been a big believer. I've been saying this since we were a ten-person company that I want to be the worst person at the company as quickly as possible. And you do that by hiring people that are better than you at the thing that they do specifically.
Intro-Panagiotis Karabinis
Καλώς ήρθατε στην 3η σεζόν του “Outliers” από την Endeavor Greece. Το podcast αφιερωμένο στους επιχειρηματίες που μετασχηματίζουν ολόκληρες αγορές και αλλάζουν το αφήγημα της επιχειρηματικότητας. Κάθε εβδομάδα μιλάμε με τους ανθρώπους πίσω από τις πιο επιτυχημένες start up σε Ελλάδα κι εξωτερικό. Μέσα από το δικό τους ταξίδι και τις ευκαιρίες που βλέπουν στον κλάδο τους ανακαλύπτουμε τι κάνει έναν επιχειρηματία outlier. Είμαι ο Παναγιώτης Καραμπίνης, διευθύνων σύμβουλος της Endeavor Greece. Στο σημερινό επεισόδιο, καλεσμένος μας είναι ο Steven Galanis, συνιδρυτής και CEO της Cameo. H Cameo είναι μία εφαρμογή που επιτρέπει σε fans να ζητήσουν προσωπικά μηνύματα από τους αγαπημένους τους celebrities, αλλάζοντας δραστικά τον τρόπο που εκείνοι αλληλοεπιδρούν με το κοινό τους. Μέσα σε μόλις τέσσερα χρόνια, η Cameo έχει καταφέρει να ξεπεράσει το ένα δισεκατομμύριο δολάρια σε κεφαλαιοποίηση, να σηκώσει περισσότερα από 165 εκατομμύρια δολάρια από κορυφαίους επενδυτές όπως η Silicon Valley Bank, η Kleiner Perkins, η Lightspeed Venture Partners, η e.ventures και άλλοι, ενώ έχει πάνω από δύο εκατομμύρια χρήστες στην Αμερική. Ο Steven μας μίλησε για τα μαθήματα που έχει πάρει από την επιτυχημένη πορεία της Cameo μέχρι σήμερα, τα πλάνα του για διεθνή επέκταση αλλά και τις επόμενες υπηρεσίες που σχεδιάζει η υπηρεσία. Ο Steven μένει μόνιμα στο Μαϊάμι και βρέθηκε στην Αθήνα για τις καλοκαιρινές του διακοπές. Κάναμε τη συνέντευξη από κοντά στα αγγλικά.
Panagiotis
Γεια σου, Steven.
Steven
So great to be here.
Panagiotis
Thank you for joining us.
Steven
Thanks for having me.
Panagiotis
I'm sure you must be getting tired of explaining everyone what Cameo does, but can you give us a brief outline of what Cameo does?
Steven
Well? First off, I never get sick of it. It's kind of… it's my baby. So just like you would never get sick talking about your baby, I'd never get sick talking about Cameo. Cameo is a marketplace where people can book personalized video messages from over 50.000 different athletes, actors, celebrities around the world.
Panagiotis
You are Greek. At least that's what we get from your last name. You're Steven Galanis.
Steven
Yeah, I am Greek. I'm from Chicago, but my dad was born in Sparta. My mom's family is from Tripoli originally, but came over in the 1890s, so I'm actually third generation Greek-American on my mom's side and I'm first generation on my dad's side.
Panagiotis
Cool, do you do you speak any Greek?
Steven
Not... not much. I can understand I can order at a restaurant, but I was always very busy with sports, so I didn't get to go to Greek school. I would… Greek school was always on Wednesday and Saturday, and I would make every other class. I probably have the Greek education of a kindergartener.
Panagiotis
Okay. Speaking about the education, tell us a little bit about your background. You went to Duke. I know that you've worked in at LinkedIn. I am curious to learn a little bit how everything plays along into building Cameo.
Steven
Sure, so in college I went to Duke University in North Carolina. I was a history major. I think I became a history major largely because, you know, every summer I would come back to Greece and, you know, see everything and my parents were really big about bringing me here. We'd go see my yaya and pappou in Sparta. And every summer we would go to one or two other countries, and it just created a love of history for me. I also studied business and economics in... At Duke, I started my first company, which was called Spartan Entertainment and it was me and another Greek from Chicago, named Zach Maurides that started a party promotion business. So in the early days of Facebook, when you needed a .edu email address to get on the network, we had over 17,000 college students. And we started all these different types of businesses under the guise of Spartan Entertainment. So that was my first full race, so my entrepreneurial journey started in college.
Panagiotis
Amazing. You also work on movie production. And you also work at LinkedIn. Can you tell us a little bit more about these two steps?
Steven
Sure. Even before that, I was an options trader. So if you ever watch CNBC and you see the guys with the jackets that are doing the hand signals, that's what I did. So for my first five years, I was an options trader at the Chicago Board of Trade. While I was doing that, my uncle is a big movie producer in Hollywood. “Lone Survivor” was a big movie that he did. And I rented a movie theater out for all the traders to go and see my uncle's movie. And then at that... When that happened, all these guys are like “why are you here, trading with us? And why aren't you in LA?” You know, being a movie producer. So I ended up raising money, and this was the first time I did fundraising. My uncle made a bet with me and he said if you can raise half $1,000,000 for this movie or 1/4 of $1,000,000, I'll make you a producer on it and it was a television show actually. We were filming in South Africa. It was called “Saf3”. Dolph Lundgren. It was a Baywatch remake and Dolph Lundgren was going to be the new David Hasselhoff of this show. So I told the guys about it and in one day I ended up raising $1,000,000.
Panagiotis
Wow.
Steven
That's the first time I knew really I could fundraise.
Panagiotis
OK.
Steven
And we produced the show, and it played for two seasons.
Panagiotis
Was it successful?
Steven
I think it's the worst show ever. So nobody, nobody should ever watch this show. Don't watch it. It is on Amazon Prime now, but nobody should ever watch it. It's terrible.
Panagiotis
We're definitely gonna watch it now. You know that.
Steven
Yeah.
Panagiotis
And then you went to LinkedIn.
Steven
Yeah, so the movie production stuff was happening, while I was trading. And then, you know, one really interesting thing about trading, and many of you guys that are making pivots to tech have probably experienced this in your own businesses... When I started trading, all the people were like “oh you missed all the good times”. Right? “You should have been here in '08. You should have been here for the flash crash. You should have been here in '01.” So trading was always about how great it was and how shitty it was today and… Tech has been a complete opposite. And I remember when my buddy, Arthur, who now is at Cameo our chief business officer... He had taken a job at LinkedIn. He called me and he said “you gotta get over to this place”. It's amazing. So he recruited me to LinkedIn. I was blown away from day one. Mike Gamson, who at the time was the global head of sales at LinkedIn, #2 at the company… I'll never forget my first day at LinkedIn. We walk into the office and this was a culture that Reed, you know, Reed and all these guys established, Jeff Weiner, but I'll never forget as long as I live. I walked into the Linked, on the very first day of work, and Mike Gamson gets on stage and there's 36 TVs around the world. And this is before people were, like, doing a lot of streaming. But LinkedIn always kind of had that culture. And Mike Gamson gets on stage and he says “welcome to LinkedIn. Two years from today, none of you will be doing the job we just hired you for. We know that, we support it and we literally have the profile data to prove it. Your job in the next two years is to figure out what's your dream job and our job is to give you the skills that you need to get that next job, whether it's internal or external”.
Panagiotis
OK
Steven
And here is the kicker. He said “when you're ready for your next job, whether it's internal or external, all we ask is you find someone better than yourself to take your place”.
Panagiotis
Amazing.
Steven
And that was the culture in LinkedIn, and it was so different than when I was trading. When I was trading, if I told my old bosses, “hey, this is great, but I want to do this”, they'd fire me that day. Because you can't be thinking about another job when you're playing with other people's money. But at LinkedIn, we were having this culture, you know, these career conversations from the beginning, and for me it was so transformative. And it's something… this next play culture is something I've tried to bring to Cameo. And I make people understand that “hey, we're doing this right now together, but, you know, hopefully some of you guys, are going to start your own company”, that “I hope when you're ready to start, I'm your first check”. Right? “Other of you, want to pivot your career within the company” and this is the magic of that culture. So I've tried to bring that to Cameo.
Panagiotis
Tell us a little bit more. How is it to build a successful B2C company?
Steven
Sure. So I'm not the full authority on this, but I can tell, at least from my story, what really worked to build a great consumer company. Because consumers are so fleeting, right? Like in a B2B business, you can be an industry insider. You can see a problem. You know the pin point. You have your... But consumer, like, you're trying to invent the future; like, that's a whole different animal. The best framework I've ever seen on… First, it starts with the founding team; 100% even more important than the idea. And in my founding team, in Martin and Devin and in Steven, I think we had the perfect people to go tackle this issue. So Martin was a NFL agent and movie producer. But he wasn't the biggest agent and he wasn't the biggest producer. If he was, you know, Jerry Bruckheimer, he would have never had time to come and work on this. My other cofounder, Devin, who led product and was our founding CTO... Devin, was a Vine star, so he was an influencer. He was someone that was more famous than he was rich and had over a billion loops on Vine. So I mean, imagine everybody's trying to build these creator products today. But, like, Devin was a real creator that had a real problem and he was trying to solve a problem that, four years earlier when he was a Vine star, he wished something like Cameo existed. And I'm just the ultimate connector. My nickname since high school or since kindergarten has been “the Mayor.” I just bring people together. That's what I do. I'm a force of nature and the best framework I've heard about early stage founding teams in consumer... A guy at Atlanta Ventures told me this; and he said “what you need is the hustler, the hacker and the hipster. You need all three of these people in your founding team. You need the hustler who can go and get the word out about what you're doing. Build excitement. You need the hacker that can find a new and novel way to use existing systems and to create strategic advantages for you. And then you need the hipster to know what's going to be cool in the future.” And me, Martin and Devin, if you sat and all of us were in here, you would find that you have the hustler, the hacker, and the hipster 100%. As far as getting our marketplace started, we had the classic cold start problem just like any other marketplace. The chicken and the egg. What do you build first? The supply side or the demand side? People should always focus on the harder side to build. And for us that was the celebrities.
Panagiotis
Of course.
Steven
One of the things we realized though that was interesting was in our market supply can be get its own demand, the town. Famous, they have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, so if they could come on to Cameo, they could turn their followers and our customers for free. And we did that by giving everybody their own link. Now a lot of these creator economy startups, the link in bio is like completely standard. But at the time, this was a pretty revolutionary thing. So we gave them their own account and we just said “hey Cameo.com/, you know, Panos, send a tweet out.” Your followers would come and book you and then that got the word. Secondly, we realized earlier that these were mostly gifts. So you buy for me. I get the video, I'm going to share it on my Twitter, on my Instagram. And then there's the watermark. So every Cameo became a commercial for the next one. So that really started our flywheel and really helped supercharge our growth and allowed us to not spend a dollar on marketing for the first four years of the business. The other thing that I thought was really important, we made an early decision not to change our take rate for any talent. So we didn't. We never have negotiated. Every single person on the platform is on the same deal.75% for them, 25% to us. And that was really important because even in the early days there were big people that would say, “hey I'll come on for 8.020” or “I'll come on for 8.515”. And while that might have allowed us to go faster in the short term, in the long term, it slows you down if you have to negotiate with every single person what the take rate is. So I think keeping the take rate consistent was a big part of our success. And then...You know, lastly, allowing these celebrities to set their own price was a counterintuitive thing that ended up being really important. Because I realized early that if I price somebody at something and they weren't comfortable doing it, they wouldn't do the video. So I never wanted them to say this isn't worth my time. So by definition, right, if they set their own price, then of course it's worth their time.
Panagiotis
Absolutely. And there are 40,000 people right in the app right now, and I'm sure the prices are...
Steven
It goes from people are $0.00 and the most expensive is 2500.
Panagiotis
Do you see any major changes in the product? What are your plans in terms of the product offering? Well, there's always things happening under the hood and the product, but we're actually working on 2 new products right now. So kind of our second and third product. The first is called Cameo Fan Clubs. So one of the things we've learned is that as talent promote on Instagram on Twitter, the algorithms can decide like what percentage of their audience actually see any piece of content. And we realized this was a problem last year when Snoop Dogg put our television commercial on his Instagram. He has 55 million followers and only 280,000 people saw it. So, we are trying to give talent the control over their distribution. So, by our Cameo Fan Club product will be something where you can follow somebody on Cameo and then, every time they send a notification out, you get notified as the users you see every single time that they do. There will be a subscription on that as well. So, we think that's a good product and then the next one we're building is called Cameo Calls. Cameo Calls is a virtual meeting greet product. So now you can have a FaceTime for two minutes with Snoop Dogg or with whoever you love. And then, you get to take a picture with them and then they meet the next fan.
Panagiotis
Incredible. You went through an explosive growth during the pandemic, right? And you hired like 200 people within 12 or 18 months?
Steven
Yeah, that's crazy.
Panagiotis
How? How is that working out? How is affecting culture? How are you leading this?
Steven
So, a couple of big things happened during COVID. Number one is, you could imagine for my business, as those of you that are new to it… Think about this. Every single athlete, actor, musician on Earth was out of work last year, right? Everybody had to stay home. Just like we did. And this was really affecting their take-home pay. They were making no money and they really missed their fans. So what we did was we allowed an outlet where they could meet up with their fans and they could keep working and earn money and everything like that. So it just exploded the business, 5X last year. We also completed a big fundraise recently. We raised $100 million. So what I ended up doing was using this opportunity to fortify the company, rebuild the executive team. So we hired COO. We hired CTO. We hired Chief People officer, hired a new SVP of marketing and then, like about 15 other, like, critical key positions; just hired a chief, a head of product of VP product from Uber, who we're really excited about. And of course, then those people come in and they have their staff that they want to build up. So really quickly the company went from 125 to 300, and we did this fully distributed.
Panagiotis
Incredible!
Steven
So next week, I'm going back to Chicago and I'm meeting all these people for the first time.
Panagiotis
Wow!
Steven
I was just… We were talking about this before the recording started. Two weeks ago, I was in San Francisco for our marketing offset. It was the 1st in person gathering of them. Of the 30 people, I'd only met 5 in real life. So it's… I walked in the room and, I wouldn't have known that they worked for me. That's how crazy it is. Because even as CEO now, they all see me on all hands and things like that. But I'm not interviewing everybody anymore and that was a big... I used to interview every person until last year and then all of a sudden, you know, I have to trust the execs to hire great people and, you know, you have to make sure that the culture, that the mission, the vision… That's coming through; even when it's not on the wall because there's no walls.
Panagiotis
Yeah.
Steven
So I mean there… there's a lot, I think. I think the biggest thing is you have to figure out as CEO how to serve; firing yourself from jobs that you did all the time, right? I've always been a big believer. I've been saying this since we were a ten-person company that I want to be the worst person at the company as quickly as possible. And you do that by hiring people that are better than you at the thing that they do specifically. So I'd say that's a thing that I see a lot of CEO struggle. My CEO coach is a guy named Bing Gordon. He's actually spoke at Endeavor before. Legendary investor Kleiner Perkins. And he gave me a framework that I found really helpful that I'd love to share with everybody here.
Panagiotis
Please do.
Steven
And he has this framework that he calls forever OKRs. OK, so there's certain things that no matter what the year is for a CEO to be a Hall of Fame CEO, they have to do these five things, these five things. The first one is product market fit. You have to find product market fit. You have to expand it. You have to keep it. You can't lose it. If you lose product market fit, none of the other stuff works. Second is build a world class executive team. Here is an exercise that we do quarterly, where we rank all of our… I rank all of my direct reports on a scale of one to five. Five being best in the world, 4 being top 10%, 3 being industry average, 2 being below industry average, 1 being “why do they work for you?” If you take the score and you average them up and you want to be…As a CEO, you want your executive team to be a 4.25 or higher on average. So last year, when we started working, we did the exercise and I ranked my team at three out of five. So we spent the whole year trying to uplevel that team. Now some 3s through coaching you can make 4s, but more often today's 4s are tomorrow's 3s. So you constantly have to be looking at the talent that you have in there. On top of that, for you to really be a world class executive, for you to be a five, one of the things you need to be doing as an exec is that you're growing future. If you're the CFO, like, my hope is that if you're a 5, there's future CFOs that you're building, that you're mentoring, that you're bringing in, so they're hiring people better than them. So if I'm hiring people better than me, and they're hiring people better than them, again, it's upleveling culture. Third is communication and alignment. So important; especially in a fully distributed company. Does everyone know the mission, the vision, the values? How are you telling those same stories that are foundational? So that's absolutely critical, and especially in a distributed world, making sure that people know how to work, they know how to do it the Cameo way. That's something I think a lot about. Fourth is employee engagement. Largely, this is this feeling. Do your employees believe they're doing the best work of their lives at your company? If they believe that, if the product has product market fit, if they're learning under leaders that they love, if they're working at a company with the vision and mission that they're aligned with core values that speak to them, they're not going to leave. And in fact, not only are they not going to leave, they're going to recruit the most talented people that they've ever met to come work with them there. So that's #4. And then the fifth one. And it's funny. This is the fifth one and it's the… It's the 5th most important. Fundraising, right? Keeping the lights on. So I got through the $100 million fundraise. Now it's “how do we stretch that money? How do we invest?” most importantly; and I think so often people have it backwards, right? They think fundraising is the most important. It is the fifth most important. Product market fit is the most important. And these are staggering.
Panagiotis
OK.
Steven
Product market fit, quality executive team, communication and alignment, employee engagement, then fundraising. Keeping the lights on.
Panagiotis
You recently reached a milestone. You reached a unicorn status. You raised $100 million in a recent round. How does it feel? You've hit a really significant milestone. How does it feel and what was the process like?
Steven
It's definitely a special moment. I think any entrepreneur… When you start, the dream is to build a billion-dollar company, right?
Panagiotis
Exactly.
Steven
You almost can't even imagine building a 10 billion or 100 billion. So a billion is like... and that's still extremely rare and extremely hard, but that was the first target. And Devin, my cofounder, has a really good framework for this. He always says that, you know, “don't worry about building a billion dollar company or not. What you should do is look at within your cohort”. So when Cameo was one-year-old, we were in the top 1% of one-year-old companies. Then at year two, we're in the top 1% of two-year-old companies and year three, we're the top. And this is all in hopes of building a Hall of Fame company one day.
Panagiotis
Yeah yeah.
Steven
Like you know, a Facebook or a Microsoft or Amazon. These are Hall of Fame companies that if one day there was a museum of the best tech companies in the world, you know, these are the companies that would be in that museum. They'd be in the Hall of Fame. So we're hoping to build something like that too. You know, to be honest, when the $100 million hit the bank, it's weird… I actually think that, like, raising a Series A or series B, in many ways, is a bigger milestone, because there's so many more companies that are there for us. It was kind of the next check of the box. Like, if we're going to be a publicly traded company, you have to kind of hit this milestone. So I didn't... You know, I remember when we closed the Series A and Lightspeed came in. I remember, like, I'm not an emotional person, but I literally cried after that. Because, you know, for 2 1/2years, I've been working my ass off and that was this validation that this thing was gonna have a shot. So for me, like, I think some of those milestones were bigger. This was just kind of the next thing, but raising money fully remote was super interesting, right? I raised $100 million and about 80 million of that is from people I've never met in real life to this… to this day.
Panagiotis
Zero meetings, zero physical meetings.
Steven
Zero.
Panagiotis
Jesus Christ. And that's impressive. That's impressive. It is important, right?
Steven
But I do think that this is really exciting. Now people have done this. And our series C took a year. You know, despite how much... cause the market was going crazy; like, nobody knew when COVID was gonna wear off. Is this a fad that we're going up 5X or is this really like a sustainable thing? So it took us... We started our fundraising process… It came inbound in April of 2020. So right when COVID had… People were trying to invest, but they were trying to get a discount, right?
Panagiotis
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Steven
And we were profitable at the time too. So I'm like… We're profitable. We're not going to take money. So I I turned down $125million around last summer.
Panagiotis
Of course.
Steven
That no, you know, people didn't know about it, because it didn't happen. But that was a gut-wrenching decision to... You know, people always say, like, “the best time to raise money is when you don't need it”, and here we were profitable. I had this offer, but I really believed that the business was underpriced and I said no. And we raised money at the perfect time. This year for our business, we were able to get some of the best people in the world around the business. So it really worked out.
Panagiotis
And I get being emotional, right? I mean, you're building something that matters. It's really important what you're doing and the impact that Cameo has right now. You're changing the way that celebrities connect with their fans. You're testing the course of fame actually. I would be very interested to know your thoughts on, you know, where fame is going, how celebrities are going to change the way they interact with their fans. Tell us a little bit more about the impact that Cameo has.
Steven
The number one: Cameo makes people happy, right? That's... If there's one thing that we've really become famous for it's these reaction videos. So if you, guys, haven't seen a Cameo before, try buying one. Go give it to somebody, and then the second that you have them, go film them while they watch the reaction. It's... It's like... It moves people in a way that very few other products do. As far as how celebrities changing... Celebrities change in three major ways. Number one: There's more famous people today than they've ever been before. And you look at TikTok. You look at YouTube, SoundCloud. New stars are being manufactured every single day. So the pure number of famous people on Earth is exploding. And a lot of people are talking about the creator economy now. There's 50 million people on Earth today who say that they want to be full-time creators.
Panagiotis
Yeah.
Steven
If you look in, at least, in the US, I don't know how it is in Greece, but if you interview Gen Z kids, kids in high school right now, and you ask them what jobs you want to do when you grow up, the number one job is to be an influencer. They want to be a TikTok star. They want to be a YouTuber. That's number one. More than doctor, lawyer, entrepreneur, copper, robber, right? So the pipeline is very strong. Secondly, people are more famous today than they've ever been in absolute numbers. You look at The Rock. He’s got 250 million followers on Instagram.
Panagiotis
Crazy.
Steven
Cristiano Ronaldo. When Michael Jordan was playing with the Bulls, when I was growing up, he was the most famous person on the planet. But he could only get his word out based on what was the newspaper writing about him or what was in the magazines today. You know, The Rock can do an Instagram story and 300 million people know what he ate for breakfast. So this direct channels now. And the fact that people are more famous than ever. That is a really really big change. And then, there are… Fame lasts longer today than it ever does. This is not intuitive. People think that it's more fleeting than ever, but the truth is, once you aggregate a following on Instagram on TikTok, on Twitter, people don't unfollow you that often. So, if you have a 15-minute of fame in 2021, it can last for 15 years. So those are the three main ways that I think fame has changed. And ultimately, all of those macro things are expanding the time for Cameo. They're making... There's more famous people than ever. They're more famous than they have ever been, and they can stay famous longer, which is all good for us.
Panagiotis
And that was my next question. How do you stay along the way with a celebrity? Like, I mean, they're riding a wave, right? And for some is a few years, for some others are more. How does... How does Cameo affect their fame? How do you stay connected with this? How do you follow the celebrity?
Steven
So, I believe that there's really three types of fame right now. There's nostalgic. So people that were famous and... This is our business too; people that were famous. So, someone like Dennis Rodman, right? He was the most famous person in the world. He isn't anymore. But you know, if you grew up a Chicago Bulls fan, like, hearing from Dennis Rodman's was awesome. So, nostalgic. Now people that are relevant right now. We all know who those people are. And then one that I think is really interesting is next. So people that are on their way up. So for Cameo our value prop to talent is the talent is getting paid to become more famous and more beloved. So what this ultimately allows us to do, it allows us to ride that wave with them all over. So we're great when they're just starting out and building their fanbase. When they're the most famous person in the world, they can monetize a ton, but we can also help them monetize when they're not in movies anymore, they're not playing on their sports teams anymore. So this is a way for them to go. So we think we have a really good solution for people on all phases of their life cycle.
Panagiotis
Amazing. And what's next? What are the plans ahead? I mean, now you're in a completely different game. What are you planning?
Steven
International expansion is a very big deal for us. We actually... We haven't announced this yet, but we're in process right now of translating the app in a bunch of different languages.
Panagiotis
Nice.
Steven
So, last year we sold Cameos in 178 countries and we have talent in 138 countries right now, but the app is only in English. So now we're going to be rolling out Spanish 1st and then after that, French and then you know, we'll continue down the line of different markets that we saw. But we're really excited to get international going and we have a couple bets that we're going to be making and... like moonshot bets. Like, right now, the European markets in Latin America. These are markets that we've kind of been playing in, and it's not crazy to think: OK, this has been in the UK for a few years. Like, let's get it in Germany, let's get in Greece. Let's get in these places.
Panagiotis
But you probably have already consumers.
Steven
We have consumers there now, but there's some big 10 markets, especially in Asia, that we've been thinking a lot about. And we finally feel like we have the right investors like... SoftBank was a big part of this. Getting them in and... Headline Ventures who led around, who's really got a great global platform. You know, we've been really thinking about “hey, what would it look like to get this in Japan” and “what would it look like to get this in South Korea? What would it look like to get this in India? What would it look like to get this in Brazil?” So these are some of the big moonshot bets you'll see us taking in the next couple years.
Panagiotis
Speaking of geographical expansion, what are your views on Greece? Are you…? Do you have any plans of building anything here? And what do you think of the Greek ecosystem? Are you at all connected? Would love to hear your thoughts.
Steven
Well, I'm getting connected through you. So thank you for that. That's why I was very excited to be part of the Endeavor Greece family. So we're... I'm looking forward to learning more. As far as, you know, the market for Cameo, obviously it's a smaller market. There are not that many Greek speakers in the world. But Greeks love their athletes. They love their musicians, they love their, you know, actors and actresses. So we want all of them on. And it's funny because when I go home, my mom and her friends are always, like, “Why is this Greek singer not on Cameo yet?” And it's not that they wouldn't join. We just haven't really made the effort to do that. So, you know, I'm excited to meet a lot of the people that are in this ecosystem and see who can be helpful and where we can help in any way with their businesses and trade some ideas. And hopefully, we can get everybody on in this market that needs to be on.
Panagiotis
We close every interview with one same question to every guest. What do you think makes an entrepreneur outlier?
Steven
I think it's the... For it's two things. It's number one, it's the fact that an entrepreneur can see a future and they can act on it. And they can go and not be stopped and be that. I know and Batman that talked about the unstoppable force that meets the immovable object. That's kind of an entrepreneur and it's seeing the future and then figuring out, like, “what do I do to”, like, “incrementally build steps to get there?” When I started Cameo, right, imagine me telling you about this idea the early days. “Hey, I have a marketplace where you can book personalized video messages from, you know, all the athletes on Earth and all the musicians”, but we had none of them, right? So it's this idea to have it to continue the enthusiasm and then to start with one person, then two and three and four and five, and be just as excited when there's no traction, as when you have global traction around the world. So I think that's what makes an entrepreneur or an outlier.
Panagiotis
Steven, thank you so much. We're inspired and excited to see the future.
Steven
Thank you for having me again.
Panagiotis
Ακούσατε τον Steven Galanis. Συνιδρυτή και CEO της Cameo. Ευχαριστούμε που ήσασταν μαζί μας σε αυτό το επεισόδιο του Outliers. Η παραγωγή έγινε από το The Greek Podcast Project. Για να μη χάσετε κανένα επεισόδιο της σειράς, κάντε εγγραφή μέσα από το site μας στο Outliers.gr ή σε όποια άλλη πλατφόρμα ακούτε τα podcasts. Είμαι ο Παναγιώτης Καραμπίνης. Τα λέμε στο επόμενο επεισόδιο.
MoneyReview Writing
Can you imagine your favorite singer or actor you were in love with, in your teens, or even the athlete you used to admire, creating a personalized video message exclusively directed to you? The Greek American entrepreneur Steven Galanis has not only thought of it, but he has literally made it happen by creating Cameo –a startup founded in 2016– that has already evolved into a unicorn with a $ 1 billion market Cap.
