Co-founder of Cameo Steven Galanis spoke at an HW Venture event last Wednesday. He also shared a video of Danny Green, a Los Angeles Laker, who recorded a personalized video for the school community. Cameo is a marketplace business for personalized video messaging. It is a four year old company that has already reached 1.5 million dollars in revenue. During the event, Galanis discussed his journey while also offering advice to aspiring entrepreneurs. He spoke about his ideas in first creating the business and about his initial process for starting his company. . Galanis said Cameo is a “corporation stemmed from the idea that a selfie is the new autograph.”
“Cameo is a marketplace business where you can book personalized video messages from over 40,000 different athletes, actors [and] celebrities, ” Galanis said. “Cameo is bringing people together and creating joy.”
Galanis explained that most businesses start by trying to solve a problem present in everyday life.
“The problem that we were trying to solve was in the age of social media people are more famous today than they are rich,” Galanis said.
HW Venture speaker event leader Sophia Rascoff ’23 helped plan the event and said that she learned many important lessons from his words of wisdom.
“I learned about the importance of seeing and taking opportunity,” Rascoff said. “Steven quit his job to start his company because he saw an opportunity and took it. That takes a lot of faith, but it also allowed him to start an incredibly successful company and achieve his dreams.”
A shooting guard for the Los Angeles Lakers, Danny Green, gave a Cameo to the students during the event. He gave advice on how to become successful, saying that you should find your Ikigai, a philosophy saying that you should find a balance of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for. He also gave his regards to all the aspiring entrepreneurs.
“Keep working hard,” Green said. “Keep staying encouraged. Use all your resources to the best you can. The best advice I can give you is stay ready, stay prepared.”
