The Exchanges

Q while you were dropping customer calls at LinkedIn. Very funny to hear. In terms of kind of responsibilities, as you've scaled immensely at Cameo in a short, short space of time, this one's from Abby, so you've got her to thank. How have you dealt with letting go of responsibilities And what kind of preparation and advice would you give to those maybe expanding their teams in the same position?

A As a founder, that is, I think, always one of the toughest transitions from, you know, founder to CEO. In the early days, you're so in the weeds, and you are doing everything hands-on. You know, at the beginning, I secured every talent that was on the platform. I onboarded them. I was customer service until maybe four months ago. If you called the customer service line on Instagram, it still went to my cell phone. I answered the emails. You know, I did everything. You know, today I've been working to hire better people than me at every single job that I used to do, except for my true core competencies. So at this point, you know, I focus on four things exclusively. One, setting the strategic vision of the company. Two, hiring my executive team. Three, keeping the lights on through fundraising. And four, that being the public face of the company, media, PR. Those are the types of things that, you know, I feel that I have A unique ability to be best in the world at, and anything that I feel like I'm not best in the world at, I try to fire myself from those jobs as quickly as possible and get better people than me to take my place there.

AI assessment note: “I try to fire myself from those jobs as quickly as possible”

Q the C-suite, I do want to maybe slightly switch tacks in terms of kind of the product itself. I often see founders spending years perfecting the first product release, but when we spoke before, you said, don't let great get in the way of good enough. Again, a little bird tells me you have a fun story here, but what did you mean by this, and what's that fun story?

A I was speaking at an event at Kellogg School of Business last night, and I heard another founder say something that really, you know, resonated with me, and I think it'll tie in well to this, and she said that it is so important as an entrepreneur to fall in love with your mission, but not fall in love with your product. The amount that that's going to help evolve to become, you know, that billion-dollar business, it's crazy, and if you get too tied into the way you're doing things now, it'll never work. So for an example, when we started, when we launched Cameo, we launched with one person, a A football player named Cassius Marsh. Uh, the only thing that you could do was request a video from him. There were no videos to watch. There were no demos, nothing. And in the very earliest days, we literally had a very simple webpage, and you could enter in your name, your email address, and the message you wanted for the talent. We then emailed the talent, told them to record a video, and email it back. So V-One of Cameo was as low fidelity as it got. As we started iterating, we eventually started messing with Facebook Messenger and Chatbots on that platform. That evolved to telegram. We had done over 10,000 videos before we built our first app for the, for the talent on the platform. Uh, today, the way the product works, it's like a mix between Tinder and Snapchat. So when you order …

AI assessment note: “V-One of Cameo was as low fidelity as it got.”

Q while you were dropping customer calls at LinkedIn. Very funny to hear. In terms of kind of responsibilities, as you've scaled immensely at Cameo in a short, short space of time, this one's from Abby, so you've got her to thank. How have you dealt with letting go of responsibilities And what kind of preparation and advice would you give to those maybe expanding their teams in the same position?

A As a founder, that is, I think, always one of the toughest transitions from, you know, founder to CEO. In the early days, you're so in the weeds, and you are doing everything hands-on. You know, at the beginning, I secured every talent that was on the platform. I onboarded them. I was customer service until maybe four months ago. If you called the customer service line on Instagram, it still went to my cell phone. I answered the emails. You know, I did everything. You know, today I've been working to hire better people than me at every single job that I used to do, except for my true core competencies. So at this point, you know, I focus on four things exclusively. One, setting the strategic vision of the company. Two, hiring my executive team. Three, keeping the lights on through fundraising. And four, that being the public face of the company, media, PR. Those are the types of things that, you know, I feel that I have A unique ability to be best in the world at, and anything that I feel like I'm not best in the world at, I try to fire myself from those jobs as quickly as possible and get better people than me to take my place there.

AI assessment note: “I try to fire myself from those jobs as quickly as possible”

Q kind of Cluster it into a beautifully, uh, defined, uh, chapter of the episode, so to speak, but I couldn't, so I'm calling it Harry's Ask Me Anything Round. Uh, so I'm too intrigued on these ones. First, with a company like Cameo, there's always investors looking to invest. Question from one of your investors, Ezra Galston, how do you approach investor selection, and what's your advice to founders here?

A Two things. Number one, it is very critical to have investors that have absolute conviction about what you're doing. When you're fundraising, it should never be you convincing VCs or any investor to invest in the business. You want to find that investor that seeks you out and has so much conviction about what you're doing that they spend their time convincing you, you to take their money. We've been blessed to have that through all of our rounds of financing. Our first round came from an inbound phone call from Mike Gamson, the number two at LinkedIn, and probably the person more than anyone who's been responsible for Cameo's early success and my ability to build my dream company in my hometown of Chicago. Ezra, when he found Cameo as a, as a referral from Jackson Gin, a VC who had been, who was 21 years old at the time and had been at Chicago Ventures for all of two days. Ezra had absolute conviction about what we were doing, and that extended to when Jeremy Liu and Nicole Quinn discovered us at a party in Malibu, and Jeremy Liu sent me an email and said, I don't know where you are, but we need to have breakfast tomorrow. You know, for those next three weeks, uh, Lightspeed got to know me in a way that, you know, would make any founder envious. It was their, their absolute conviction that we were creating the next platform to change pop culture that made them the perfect partn…

AI assessment note: “it is very critical to have investors that have absolute conviction about what you're doing”

Q What motto or quote do you frequently revert back to?

A So one of my core ones early is it's better at part of something than all or nothing. And I think that that is so critical when you think about developing your relationship with your co-founders or investors. Look, when we started the company, Martin and I had 50% each when we recruited Devin, our co-founder, to come out and build the platform. You know, we had to cut him in and As we took on investors from Mike Amson to Ezra to Nicole, every time, you know, we own less percentage of the company, but that pie has gotten bigger. And I think having part of something is so much more important than having all or nothing. So I, I really tell founders always that talk to me, but don't worry about dilution. Don't worry about cutting the right person in, uh, worry about making sure you have the best people around you in the world that can help you fulfill your dream.

AI assessment note: “one of my core ones early is it's better at part of something than all”

Q uh, more macro, really, on the consumer space. I'm terrified by the lack of Free and open distribution in consumer with kind of inflated cash on the traditional channels, making it pretty unaffordable for startups to acquire customers. Would you agree with my fear here that we're potentially in a consumer downturn, and how do you feel about this lack of free and open distribution? Please prove me I'm wrong.

A Well, Cameo, by definition, is proof that you're wrong on that. We found a new hack. So as I mentioned, our inventory walks, talks, and has thousands of followers on their own, if not millions, and The hack that we made was we created a link where each talent could tweet out or do Instagram swipe ups to turn their, their viewers into our customers. The genius of the cameo is that we don't spend any money on marketing. We grew the business 1300% last year because every single cameo is a commercial for the next one, and it's really through the social networks of our recipients and the talent that they follow that the word's gotten out about this. So in our case, anecdotally, we know that Facebook is getting more expensive and Instagram is getting more expensive, but you know, I would challenge any consumer founder out there to try to find a new marketing hack that allows you to do something different. We've just started doing things like putting billboards up in Times Square with our top reaction videos, which might seem like an insane use of capital, but to be honest, it was extremely affordable compared to what, uh, to what people are paying for Facebook ads. And we had the added benefit of when we did that. Just the fact that we put a billboard up in Times Square, that started getting covered in all the big tech blogs in Chicago, and that ended up turning into PR for us. So I …

AI assessment note: “Well, Cameo, by definition, is proof that you're wrong on that.”

Q the art of the start. We mentioned kind of the founding days for you there, and I always think the biggest reason people fail is because they never actually start. And when we chatted before, you said to me that this is the most common question you get from young entrepreneurs, and I know you have a fun backstory here, but how do you think about actually starting your startup?

A Well, it is the most important thing, uh, just taking that first step. When a young entrepreneur comes into me today at the office of Cameo, the very first thing I'll ask them is, have you quit your job yet? If they haven't quit their job, I tell them to leave and let me know when they have, because if they don't have conviction in themselves of what they're doing, you know, there's no chance they're going to win, and it's really not worth my time or anybody else's time. Nobody else can make you They would take that first step. In our case, uh, Cameo's founding story is really fascinating. Martin and I had the idea for Cameo leaving my grandmother's funeral in October of 2016. While driving in the car, I was taking him back to the airport. He flew in for the day to Chicago for my grandmother's funeral. He showed me a video of a player named Cassius Marsh that he was repping as an NFL agent, and when he showed me this video, the context was his good buddy Brandon was Very high up in Nike's marketing department and loved the Seattle Seahawks more than anything on earth. He had just had his first son, and Martin got Cassius Marsh, this player, to send a ten-second video saying, hey, Brandon, it's Cassius Marsh from the Seahawks. Heard about your son Maverick. If he gets your athletic ability, he'll be playing for the Seahawks one day. Go Hawks. And he sent this video to Brandon, a…

AI assessment note: “the very first thing I'll ask them is, have you quit your job yet?”

Q the C-suite, I do want to maybe slightly switch tacks in terms of kind of the product itself. I often see founders spending years perfecting the first product release, but when we spoke before, you said, don't let great get in the way of good enough. Again, a little bird tells me you have a fun story here, but what did you mean by this, and what's that fun story?

A I was speaking at an event at Kellogg School of Business last night, and I heard another founder say something that really, you know, resonated with me, and I think it'll tie in well to this, and she said that it is so important as an entrepreneur to fall in love with your mission, but not fall in love with your product. The amount that that's going to help evolve to become, you know, that billion-dollar business, it's crazy, and if you get too tied into the way you're doing things now, it'll never work. So for an example, when we started, when we launched Cameo, we launched with one person, a A football player named Cassius Marsh. Uh, the only thing that you could do was request a video from him. There were no videos to watch. There were no demos, nothing. And in the very earliest days, we literally had a very simple webpage, and you could enter in your name, your email address, and the message you wanted for the talent. We then emailed the talent, told them to record a video, and email it back. So V-One of Cameo was as low fidelity as it got. As we started iterating, we eventually started messing with Facebook Messenger and Chatbots on that platform. That evolved to telegram. We had done over 10,000 videos before we built our first app for the, for the talent on the platform. Uh, today, the way the product works, it's like a mix between Tinder and Snapchat. So when you order …

AI assessment note: “when we launched Cameo, we launched with one person, a A football player”

Q uh, more macro, really, on the consumer space. I'm terrified by the lack of Free and open distribution in consumer with kind of inflated cash on the traditional channels, making it pretty unaffordable for startups to acquire customers. Would you agree with my fear here that we're potentially in a consumer downturn, and how do you feel about this lack of free and open distribution? Please prove me I'm wrong.

A Well, Cameo, by definition, is proof that you're wrong on that. We found a new hack. So as I mentioned, our inventory walks, talks, and has thousands of followers on their own, if not millions, and The hack that we made was we created a link where each talent could tweet out or do Instagram swipe ups to turn their, their viewers into our customers. The genius of the cameo is that we don't spend any money on marketing. We grew the business 1300% last year because every single cameo is a commercial for the next one, and it's really through the social networks of our recipients and the talent that they follow that the word's gotten out about this. So in our case, anecdotally, we know that Facebook is getting more expensive and Instagram is getting more expensive, but you know, I would challenge any consumer founder out there to try to find a new marketing hack that allows you to do something different. We've just started doing things like putting billboards up in Times Square with our top reaction videos, which might seem like an insane use of capital, but to be honest, it was extremely affordable compared to what, uh, to what people are paying for Facebook ads. And we had the added benefit of when we did that. Just the fact that we put a billboard up in Times Square, that started getting covered in all the big tech blogs in Chicago, and that ended up turning into PR for us. So I …

AI assessment note: “Cameo, by definition, is proof that you're wrong on that.”

Q Not at all, but I want to kick off today with a little bit about you. So tell me, Stephen, how did you make your way into the world of startups and, and come to found the feature on Ellen's show in the form of Cameo?

A I've had a long history working, uh, as an entrepreneur. For me, that journey started at college and Um, I graduated from high school in 2006, so I was the first generation to be like a true digital native on Facebook. Everything from my senior year of high school through my senior year of college was actually on Facebook. My very first business was a business called Spartan Entertainment, where we created a Facebook group that ended up running all the nightlife at Duke University where I ended up going. So by the time I was done, we had 12,000 undergrads in this Facebook group And we could send a message and get people to come to a party. Off of that, we built other businesses like a hot dog stand, a t-shirt printing company, and probably most famously, a company that allowed students to store their luggage for when they went home for the summer, and we would bring it back to them at the end of the day. So my entrepreneurial journey started there. Afterwards, I ended up trading at the Chicago Board of Trade. While doing that, I started a film investment fund where we produced movies and Television shows. Uh, that's how I met my co-founder, Martin Blencoe. And after that, I found myself at LinkedIn, which was honestly the best place to work. And, uh, a place that was really fundamental to me, uh, getting exposed to the world of technology and building my own tech company.

AI assessment note: “I've had a long history working, uh, as an entrepreneur. For me, that journey started”

Q kind of Cluster it into a beautifully, uh, defined, uh, chapter of the episode, so to speak, but I couldn't, so I'm calling it Harry's Ask Me Anything Round. Uh, so I'm too intrigued on these ones. First, with a company like Cameo, there's always investors looking to invest. Question from one of your investors, Ezra Galston, how do you approach investor selection, and what's your advice to founders here?

A Two things. Number one, it is very critical to have investors that have absolute conviction about what you're doing. When you're fundraising, it should never be you convincing VCs or any investor to invest in the business. You want to find that investor that seeks you out and has so much conviction about what you're doing that they spend their time convincing you, you to take their money. We've been blessed to have that through all of our rounds of financing. Our first round came from an inbound phone call from Mike Gamson, the number two at LinkedIn, and probably the person more than anyone who's been responsible for Cameo's early success and my ability to build my dream company in my hometown of Chicago. Ezra, when he found Cameo as a, as a referral from Jackson Gin, a VC who had been, who was 21 years old at the time and had been at Chicago Ventures for all of two days. Ezra had absolute conviction about what we were doing, and that extended to when Jeremy Liu and Nicole Quinn discovered us at a party in Malibu, and Jeremy Liu sent me an email and said, I don't know where you are, but we need to have breakfast tomorrow. You know, for those next three weeks, uh, Lightspeed got to know me in a way that, you know, would make any founder envious. It was their, their absolute conviction that we were creating the next platform to change pop culture that made them the perfect partn…

AI assessment note: “it is very critical to have investors that have absolute conviction about what you're doing.”

Q And then final one, Stephen, what do the next five years hold for you and for Cameo? Paint that picture for me.

A Well, we're extremely excited to start leveraging the international with us, and, you know, when we think about all the different businesses we can build at Cameo, as we're fulfilling that core equation of for X amount of money, you can do Y activity with Z person. Um, you know, right now, we're, we're sitting in Chicago whiteboarding out all the billion-dollar businesses we think we can build on top of this, whether it's just expanding the core product, whether it's creating a B to B micro endorsement marketplace, whether it's becoming the world's largest talent agency, whether it's, uh, brokering events, both online or offline, or maybe becoming the next Netflix. You know, if we have all the talent, like why couldn't we start creating, you know, our own content on a much larger scale? It's so endless, the types of things that we can do. And, you know, we're, like I said, we're at the top of the second inning and we're just getting started.

AI assessment note: “whiteboarding out all the billion-dollar businesses we think we can build”

Q No, I do totally agree. Can I ask, what was harder, actually, in the beginning days to scale? Was it the talent side or the consumer consumption side?

A We have a marketplace, so very obviously, uh, chicken and the egg problem, just like any other marketplace. In ours, I had very high conviction, as did my co-founders, Devin and Martin, that this was a product that there would be instatiable customer demand for it. We saw Brandon's reaction, and actually when we launched this site, the very first time we ever sold a cameo, this father purchased a video and filmed his daughter's reaction and sent it to us. It was the very first time that we'd ever seen one of these reaction videos that we're so famous for. The sixteen-year-old girl started crying, and we had an absolute conviction that if we could make one person happy like that, we could make billions of people happy at scale. But the bigger question was, could we create a product that was so fun, That talent would do this for free, but they get paid. And we had to make sure that we could build a product that enabled talent to make these videos at scale. And, you know, to Devin, my brilliant co-founder and CTO's credit, we had built a product that, that the talent loves just as much as Instagram or just as much as Snapchat or any other product that they use.

AI assessment note: “But the bigger question was, could we create a product that... talent would do”

Q The final element, though, that we speak about is that you mentioned kind of the subsequent effect that kind of being in Times Square had on branding and really kind of category creation with Cameo. So my question to you here, what do you think you did so well to make this happen? What would you advise founders looking to... Create a category in the same way almost.

A There's a book called Play It Bigger that I highly recommend any founder out there read. That was very fundamental to us. Thinking about category creation, which is something we did from the very beginning. When we went to market, we were called PowerMove.io. PowerMove.io would not have been the company that Candio became. Branding was absolutely critical because we needed to make a brand that was at once successful enough that anybody could be part of it, but also cool enough that some of the top influencers in the world We have no problem repping our merch or, or, or being on this website. Um, and I want to tell a story about, uh, the very, very early days of Canada when Martin, Devin, and I were first hanging out in Devin's apartment. The first real week that we spent working on this full time, we hired a branding firm out of Miami called vanilla shake and vanilla shake put us through this full branding exercise where we were doing name and category creation. And one question that they asked that really stuck out at the time was, The answer to this question has actually become the vision of the company was they asked us if your company was a person at a party, who would that person be? And we have a story that today we refer to as the red bell of a rope, uh, that all of our employees here on the first day. And this answer to this question literally has set the vision of the …

AI assessment note: “There's a book called Play It Bigger that I highly recommend any founder out there read.”

Q Not at all, but I want to kick off today with a little bit about you. So tell me, Stephen, how did you make your way into the world of startups and, and come to found the feature on Ellen's show in the form of Cameo?

A I've had a long history working, uh, as an entrepreneur. For me, that journey started at college and Um, I graduated from high school in 2006, so I was the first generation to be like a true digital native on Facebook. Everything from my senior year of high school through my senior year of college was actually on Facebook. My very first business was a business called Spartan Entertainment, where we created a Facebook group that ended up running all the nightlife at Duke University where I ended up going. So by the time I was done, we had 12,000 undergrads in this Facebook group And we could send a message and get people to come to a party. Off of that, we built other businesses like a hot dog stand, a t-shirt printing company, and probably most famously, a company that allowed students to store their luggage for when they went home for the summer, and we would bring it back to them at the end of the day. So my entrepreneurial journey started there. Afterwards, I ended up trading at the Chicago Board of Trade. While doing that, I started a film investment fund where we produced movies and Television shows. Uh, that's how I met my co-founder, Martin Blencoe. And after that, I found myself at LinkedIn, which was honestly the best place to work. And, uh, a place that was really fundamental to me, uh, getting exposed to the world of technology and building my own tech company.

AI assessment note: “a place that was really fundamental to me, uh, getting exposed to the world of technology”

Q the art of the start. We mentioned kind of the founding days for you there, and I always think the biggest reason people fail is because they never actually start. And when we chatted before, you said to me that this is the most common question you get from young entrepreneurs, and I know you have a fun backstory here, but how do you think about actually starting your startup?

A Well, it is the most important thing, uh, just taking that first step. When a young entrepreneur comes into me today at the office of Cameo, the very first thing I'll ask them is, have you quit your job yet? If they haven't quit their job, I tell them to leave and let me know when they have, because if they don't have conviction in themselves of what they're doing, you know, there's no chance they're going to win, and it's really not worth my time or anybody else's time. Nobody else can make you They would take that first step. In our case, uh, Cameo's founding story is really fascinating. Martin and I had the idea for Cameo leaving my grandmother's funeral in October of 2016. While driving in the car, I was taking him back to the airport. He flew in for the day to Chicago for my grandmother's funeral. He showed me a video of a player named Cassius Marsh that he was repping as an NFL agent, and when he showed me this video, the context was his good buddy Brandon was Very high up in Nike's marketing department and loved the Seattle Seahawks more than anything on earth. He had just had his first son, and Martin got Cassius Marsh, this player, to send a ten-second video saying, hey, Brandon, it's Cassius Marsh from the Seahawks. Heard about your son Maverick. If he gets your athletic ability, he'll be playing for the Seahawks one day. Go Hawks. And he sent this video to Brandon, a…

AI assessment note: “the very first thing I'll ask them is, have you quit your job yet?”

Q No, I do totally agree. Can I ask, what was harder, actually, in the beginning days to scale? Was it the talent side or the consumer consumption side?

A We have a marketplace, so very obviously, uh, chicken and the egg problem, just like any other marketplace. In ours, I had very high conviction, as did my co-founders, Devin and Martin, that this was a product that there would be instatiable customer demand for it. We saw Brandon's reaction, and actually when we launched this site, the very first time we ever sold a cameo, this father purchased a video and filmed his daughter's reaction and sent it to us. It was the very first time that we'd ever seen one of these reaction videos that we're so famous for. The sixteen-year-old girl started crying, and we had an absolute conviction that if we could make one person happy like that, we could make billions of people happy at scale. But the bigger question was, could we create a product that was so fun, That talent would do this for free, but they get paid. And we had to make sure that we could build a product that enabled talent to make these videos at scale. And, you know, to Devin, my brilliant co-founder and CTO's credit, we had built a product that, that the talent loves just as much as Instagram or just as much as Snapchat or any other product that they use.

AI assessment note: “the bigger question was, could we create a product that”

Q The final element, though, that we speak about is that you mentioned kind of the subsequent effect that kind of being in Times Square had on branding and really kind of category creation with Cameo. So my question to you here, what do you think you did so well to make this happen? What would you advise founders looking to... Create a category in the same way almost.

A There's a book called Play It Bigger that I highly recommend any founder out there read. That was very fundamental to us. Thinking about category creation, which is something we did from the very beginning. When we went to market, we were called PowerMove.io. PowerMove.io would not have been the company that Candio became. Branding was absolutely critical because we needed to make a brand that was at once successful enough that anybody could be part of it, but also cool enough that some of the top influencers in the world We have no problem repping our merch or, or, or being on this website. Um, and I want to tell a story about, uh, the very, very early days of Canada when Martin, Devin, and I were first hanging out in Devin's apartment. The first real week that we spent working on this full time, we hired a branding firm out of Miami called vanilla shake and vanilla shake put us through this full branding exercise where we were doing name and category creation. And one question that they asked that really stuck out at the time was, The answer to this question has actually become the vision of the company was they asked us if your company was a person at a party, who would that person be? And we have a story that today we refer to as the red bell of a rope, uh, that all of our employees here on the first day. And this answer to this question literally has set the vision of the …

AI assessment note: “There's a book called Play It Bigger that I highly recommend any founder out there read.”

Q starting your startup and saying, have you left your job? I'm totally with you. You have to be all in. Someone the other day said to me, Harry, that is Excludes a large element of the population. You have families, you have mortgages. You can't expect that of an entrepreneur necessarily in the early days. Was I wrong to suggest that then, and how would you respond to that person?

A Well, in the case of Cameo, it took me about three months to develop the conviction that I needed to go for it. Uh, when I saw that first video, something changed in my brain chemistry, and I became obsessed with the idea. When I dropped Martin off at the airport, I called him the second he got through security. We talked for the next two hours on the phone, and then I was so jazzed up. I booked a flight to LA the next day, went out to him. We spent a weekend, uh, hacking together the, the original concept of Cameo, which is to create a marketplace where for X amount of money, you could do Y activity with Z person. Uh, three more months went by, and you know, I was probably the worst employee at LinkedIn for my last quarter there. I would miss customer calls because my co-founders would call me, And we'd have some big ideas. I would jump on a plane to Seattle or to whatever event. I remember taking an early trip with a LinkedIn colleague, Sean Fox, and we went to Arizona to spring training to try to sign up one of our buddies who played in Major League Baseball. I was so distracted that that three months that I was doing both, uh, I really was doing my, my core job pretty poorly. And to be fully honest, it wasn't until I was sitting in a hot tub in Nicaragua with a few of the guys that I worked at LinkedIn with, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I looked at him, and the answer was so…

AI assessment note: “In the case of Cameo, it took me about three months to develop the conviction”

Q starting your startup and saying, have you left your job? I'm totally with you. You have to be all in. Someone the other day said to me, Harry, that is Excludes a large element of the population. You have families, you have mortgages. You can't expect that of an entrepreneur necessarily in the early days. Was I wrong to suggest that then, and how would you respond to that person?

A Well, in the case of Cameo, it took me about three months to develop the conviction that I needed to go for it. Uh, when I saw that first video, something changed in my brain chemistry, and I became obsessed with the idea. When I dropped Martin off at the airport, I called him the second he got through security. We talked for the next two hours on the phone, and then I was so jazzed up. I booked a flight to LA the next day, went out to him. We spent a weekend, uh, hacking together the, the original concept of Cameo, which is to create a marketplace where for X amount of money, you could do Y activity with Z person. Uh, three more months went by, and you know, I was probably the worst employee at LinkedIn for my last quarter there. I would miss customer calls because my co-founders would call me, And we'd have some big ideas. I would jump on a plane to Seattle or to whatever event. I remember taking an early trip with a LinkedIn colleague, Sean Fox, and we went to Arizona to spring training to try to sign up one of our buddies who played in Major League Baseball. I was so distracted that that three months that I was doing both, uh, I really was doing my, my core job pretty poorly. And to be fully honest, it wasn't until I was sitting in a hot tub in Nicaragua with a few of the guys that I worked at LinkedIn with, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I looked at him, and the answer was so…

AI assessment note: “I was so distracted that that three months that I was doing both”

Q In terms of kind of that willingness to move fast, one, another area that you really move fast was kind of opening up internationally very, very Quickly. What's been the biggest learning curve when expanding internationally? You mentioned kind of the challenge in terms of culture scaling. What's the challenge in terms of creating new offices, and what advice would you give to those maybe looking to do the same?

A In our case, we didn't have a choice. Of the first five talent on Cameo, two actually came from abroad, so we've literally been an international company from day one. Before we'd sent anybody over to the UK, we were already doing Is Amazon, or you think of it as an e-commerce marketplace, every one of our SKUs walks and talks and has, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, some of whom happen to be abroad. So in our case, we were always an international company, and, uh, it was Matt Maloney, the CEO of Grubhub, who on a call about a year ago told me, he said, Stephen, everybody's pat you guys on the ass about how great this company is right now, but you need to wake up every single day with the mindset of, I'm running a underperforming global company, and since that phone call, um, that's what I've been doing, and sending Abby over to the UK was a first step. Uh, Martin, our co-founder, is going out there, uh, permanently in the next couple weeks, and we need to go fast as hell, because for us to win, we need to get all the talent. You know, imagine how big this could be in Bollywood, or how big this could be in, uh, Korea with K-pop, or in Brazil, or in Mexico with telling novellas. Everywhere in the world, there are different people that people like, and for us to be the ubiquitous platform we aspire to become, We have to get everybody. So in our case, we d…

AI assessment note: “In our case, we didn't have a choice.”

Q You mentioned the element of kind of the C-suite there and building that kind of team of leaders around you. I think a really interesting one for me, which a lot of early scaling founders asked me and struggle with is the element of role allocation. How did you prioritize the roles you hired for with scale? Which roles were they? And kind of what was the thinking behind that?

A One thing I've really learned is it's so important to have Mrs. Right now versus Mrs. Right. Every different points in the startup's history, there's certain people that are the perfect people you need at that point, and sometimes you can make a really senior hire, but if they don't have the people under them that they need to be successful, they're not going to be successful. They'll get frustrated, so we've been really fortunate to hire, um, hungry, humble, helpful, uh, smart, no ego people, and, you know, that's, again, what's made the The culture's so great. Every time you make a hire, the culture gets better or worse, so, you know, right now, I'm very focused on hiring well at scale.

AI assessment note: “it's so important to have Mrs. Right now versus Mrs. Right.”

Q You mentioned the element of kind of the C-suite there and building that kind of team of leaders around you. I think a really interesting one for me, which a lot of early scaling founders asked me and struggle with is the element of role allocation. How did you prioritize the roles you hired for with scale? Which roles were they? And kind of what was the thinking behind that?

A One thing I've really learned is it's so important to have Mrs. Right now versus Mrs. Right. Every different points in the startup's history, there's certain people that are the perfect people you need at that point, and sometimes you can make a really senior hire, but if they don't have the people under them that they need to be successful, they're not going to be successful. They'll get frustrated, so we've been really fortunate to hire, um, hungry, humble, helpful, uh, smart, no ego people, and, you know, that's, again, what's made the The culture's so great. Every time you make a hire, the culture gets better or worse, so, you know, right now, I'm very focused on hiring well at scale.

AI assessment note: “One thing I've really learned is it's so important to have Mrs. Right now”