'All Celebrities Are Gig Economy Workers': Cameo's CEO On How He Plans to Disrupt the Entertainment World
Jun 22 2020
"Fight for simplicity" is a guiding principle at Cameo, a marketplace platform that launched in early 2017 out of Chicago but is increasingly rooting itself in Los Angeles. No surprise, then, that the company's premise isn't too complicated. Celebrities with over 20,000 Instagram followers – which occasionally stretches the limit of what one might consider a "celebrity" – can set up a Cameo account and list a price at which they will record a short, personalized video for customers. Caitlyn Jenner currently charges $2,500. Former NFL MVP Brett Favre asks for $300. Someone who goes by MeesterMario requests a humble $5. Whatever the number, Cameo keeps 25% of the transaction and the talent does what it wishes with the remainder.
<p>To date, Cameo has sold over 1 million videos, with a peak of 69,000 in the week before this year's Mother's Day. The company currently has 130 employees – 80 in Chicago, 40 in L.A., 10 distributed elsewhere – and expects to generate $100 million in bookings in 2020.</p><p>Cameo has raised over $65 million, most recently a mid-2019 $50 million Series B led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Playa Vista-based The Chernin Group. The private company does not publicly share its market value, but following that Series B, PitchBook pegged its post-money valuation at $300 million. Since then, however, Cameo has reached profitability, chief executive Steven Galanis says, boosted in part by tailwinds associated with the pandemic.</p><p>Galanis moved from Chicago to L.A. in May this year. A native Chicagoan, he attended Duke for undergrad then returned to the Windy City, where he worked in finance, film production and at LinkedIn before founding Cameo. He has been running Cameo's Chicago office while his two co-founders Devon Townsend and Martin Blencowe have been holding things down in L.A. </p><p>Now based in what has become the informal live-in headquarters for Cameo's leadership at a house in the Hollywood Hills, Galanis took some time out to chat with <em>dot.LA </em>about his decision to move out west, what he's looking forward to in the city, and his plans for Cameo.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-youtube">
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</p><p><em>This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity</em>.<br/></p><h3>Why did you decide to move to L.A.? </h3><p>When the pandemic set in and shelter-in-place orders started, one panic moment I had was not being able to travel. Last year I took over 150 flights, and, like, 60 red-eye flights from L.A. to Chicago. I was living in Chicago but really I was living on airplanes. In a world where you can't travel, I felt I could be most impactful in this period in L.A., and now I'll be here indefinitely.</p><p>L.A. is the best place for me to be for Cameo right now. I've been focused on being <em>the</em> tech company to work for in Chicago and I think that's mission accomplished in many ways. Now my objective is to make Cameo that place in L.A. I think it's so simpatico with the king industry of the economy here, which is entertainment. </p><p>The <em>Hollywood Reporter</em> put out a list with the <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/hollywoods-top-innovators-15-people-shaping-future-entertainment-1292439/item/inovators-2020-list-eric-shanks-steve-myers-1292460" target="_blank">15 people disrupting Hollywood</a> and I think I was the only one on the list who wasn't living here. If you can be disrupting Hollywood without even being in L.A., imagine how much we could get done if I were living here.</p><h3>You've been able to raise a lot of money really fast. To what do you attribute your success? </h3><p>It's a couple things. Number one, in the very early days, being in Chicago was pretty helpful to us. If we'd started in L.A., I think there are so many vested interests in the entertainment world that might've snuffed us out early. But there was huge demand for a hot consumer social company that dealt with entertainment and celebrities. It's very classically an L.A. business, and some early investors even told us we would never be able to build this in Chicago – that it has to be in L.A. or New York. But I think it actually helped us get started.</p>
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Cameo CEO Steven Galanis
<p>The other thing is that our product creates magical moments. It's so visceral, how happy you make the person. On the talent side, our value proposition is that you're getting paid to become more famous. It's similar to back in the day when you'd go to a concert and buy the merch and you'd become a living, breathing billboard for that person. Cameo is in many ways the 2020 version of that. I think the other thing that's happened is our product NPS (net promoter score) is over 80 – one of the highest in the whole world. Users become such fans and that started the consumer-side network effects, which turned early- and late-stage investors into big customers of ours. When you have investors using your product and telling stories about it, that's a good sign.</p>
<h3>What are your plans for growth? </h3><p>We've been really fortunate that the pandemic has been really accretive to our business. One thing <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/24/business/media/new-model-celebrity.html" target="_blank">I said to the </a><em><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/24/business/media/new-model-celebrity.html">New York Times</a></em> a couple weeks ago was that at their core, all celebrities are gig economy workers. They get paid per concert, per game, per show. So in a world where all productions have stopped for the indefinite future, we are excited to be able to provide talent with a meaningful revenue stream that helps them to get paid to become more popular. </p><p>The business grew by about 1000% from the week pre-COVID to a peak around Mother's Day. We tend to do well when Hallmark does well; it's seasonal. So we're thinking about how to take these tailwinds from COVID, shelter-in-place, and social distancing, where people want to send love remotely. Part of that is to stay innovative, so we recently launched Cameo Live, which is basically Zoom chatting with celebrities. </p><p>And the other lasting thing is how do we take all these people using the service and lock them into the ecosystem and create a more sticky experience that's based on engagement, not just on revenue. We think there's a lot of cool innovation on our product roadmap coming in the next few years and I think that'll be a good story to watch.</p><h3>What are your hiring plans? </h3><p>During the pandemic we've decided to move to a fully distributed team but we'll have legacy centers of gravity in Chicago and L.A., especially as we expand our presence with me here.</p><p>Cameo became profitable in April, which is a rarity for tech companies, and we were profitable by a substantial amount in May, which means we haven't burned cash since February. We're profitable and we have a majority of the Series B funding left so we're extremely well funded. We could go raise more capital but we're much more focused on building a killer team. Everyone on product and all our designers are in L.A. Historically our talent team had been in Chicago but we're looking to hire more people in L.A. for our talent team, which is basically working with or recruiting celebrities. We're also looking to add talented marketers and I think most of our hiring will be in L.A. despite the fact that we're distributed. Even within L.A. you usually need multiple offices so we think being distributed will be great and this house and our sublet in Venice will be great assets as we continue to grow.</p><h3>On a personal level, what excites you most about being in Los Angeles?</h3><p>Well, the weather's a lot better here than in Chicago, especially in the winter. I'm from Chicago. I went to Duke then moved right back, so I spent 10 years establishing myself there. It's not to say that my work there is finished for the rest of my life, but it's an exciting challenge for me personally to make new friends and establish myself in a place I've been coming to for a long time but never called home.</p><p>Devon surfs every morning so I've spent a lot of time in Venice, but I'm not a surfer; I don't really go to the beach. To me that L.A. wasn't my cup of tea. So I've been enjoying my time in the Hills. And I think downtown has a lot going on. There's a lot of cool stuff emerging there and I'm looking forward to exploring that more.</p><p>Plus my girlfriend's really excited about all the hikes we can go on. I've never hiked before – you live in downtown Chicago, you don't go hiking.</p><p>Oh, and plus I'm excited about the best tacos in the world.</p><p>--- </p><p><em>Sam Blake primarily covers media and entertainment for dot.LA. Find him on Twitter @hisamblake and email him at samblake@dot.LA</em><br/></p>From Your Site Articles
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Cloud-based data security platform Open Raven announced Tuesday that it raised a $15 million Series A round four months after it emerged from stealth to announce seed funding.
The round was led by Kleiner Perkins as well as existing investors like Upfront Ventures, bringing its total capital raised to $19.1 million.
<p>Open Raven is also backed by former Goldman Sachs Chief Information Risk Officer Phil Venables, who is also on the company's board of directors; RSA's former chief strategy officer Niloo Razi Howe; and another cybersecurity firm, Signal Sciences, whose CEO Andrew Peterson also calls L.A. home.</p><p>The company said in a news release that the new capital will be used to accelerate Open Raven's growth by expanding key functions in engineering, customer support, sales and marketing. The company also announced that Bucky Moore, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, also joined the Open Raven board of directors.</p><p>"The transition to the cloud and out of physical data centers means that data stores change more quickly than ever before – leaving numerous unanswered questions," said Dave Cole, co-founder and CEO of Open Raven, in a statement. "Security and cloud infrastructure teams are wondering, 'what AWS accounts don't we know about?' 'Is there any data at risk right now?'"</p><p>Cole was a former chief product officer for Crowdstrike and Tenable Network Security. His co-founder is Mark Curphey, who founded SourceClear and previously worked at Microsoft.</p><p>Cole told dot.LA in February that the company aims to combat the ever increasing number of data breaches that have sucked up consumer data with open source tools.</p><p>The platform maps all cloud data stores, identifies the data within them, pinpoints significant exposures and lets teams fix them before they become security incidents, according to Open Raven. It also allows for real-time monitoring.</p><p>Their security product is free — though users can opt to pay for a higher-powered version — and created to be friendly for those who aren't trained in data security, Cole said. Open Raven uses a 3D map that helps visualize their systems so users can clearly see where data is and whether it's secured.</p><p>"We're giving organizations the ability to take charge of their data and explore their environments from any angle in order to truly understand their risk of cloud data breaches," Cole said in a statement Tuesday.</p><p>A Gartner Inc. report found that by 2022, 75% of all databases will be on a cloud platform. The sprawl of data across cloud environments is not the scenario that more traditional data loss and breach prevention tools were designed to control.</p><p>"Today's data security problem bears little resemblance to the historical challenges that drove the creation of the last generation of products," said Moore. "Unlike legacy solutions...Open Raven solves for modern complexity with a platform purpose-built for the massive data exposure issue."</p><p>The company said Tuesday that its "Open Raven Community Edition" is now generally available and delivers real-time data leak monitoring to proactively uncover cloud data that's exposed before they become security incidents.</p><p>The platform shows every Amazon Web Services account and asset, for example, from every angle in a global 3D map that makes it easy for security teams to maintain compliance and prevent data mishaps, Open Raven said. </p><p>Open Raven's "preview edition" of its platform has been deployed since February at "numerous global organizations" in industries including automotive, gaming, financial technology and software, the company said.</p><p><em>__</em></p><em>Do you have a story that needs to be told? My DMs are open on Twitter </em><a href="https://twitter.com/latams" target="_blank"><em>@latams</em></a><em>. You can also </em><em>email me at tami(at)dot.la</em><em></em><em>, or ask for my Signal.</em>
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