One of Chicago’s most successful startups is recommitting to working in-person.
Celebrity engagement platform Cameo opened a new global headquarters this week at 620 N. LaSalle.
Moving into the seventh floor of the old eight-story Sports Authority building at LaSalle and Ohio, where the handprints of some of Chicago's most famous athletes are imprinted on the outside, the just-under 10,000-square-foot office gives Cameo a new flagship location with which to grow its Chicago base.
“We finally felt like the time made sense to establish a more permanent headquarters where our employees that want to work out of an office can come to every day and our employees that are remote can come to meet with their teams," Cameo CEO Steven Galanis told the Chicago Business Journal.
Chicago still remains very much tied to Cameo’s identity.
"When you say 'Cameo,' Chicago is one of the first words that comes up — this company that’s been disrupting Hollywood from the middle of the country," he said.
The Chicago-area team has more than 50 full-time employees and includes roles dedicated to talent acquisition and management, Cameo for Business, marketing, engineering, data and more.
Still, the company has not been immune to challenges, laying off 25% of its workforce earlier this year in order to "right-size" the business.
Galanis added that Cameo is prioritizing hiring in Chicago because “this is where the base is.”
This will be Cameo's first Chicago office since moving out of its old headquarters in Fulton Market when it went completely remote with the onset of the pandemic in early 2020.
“I was one of the first CEOs in Chicago to take the company fully remote after Covid," Galanis said.
The company's workforce looks much differently today than it did pre-Covid, when around 70% of the company was in Chicago. Now it's 22%.
“Prior to that, people could only work for Cameo if they were in Chicago or L.A.,” Galanis said. “We started to see a lot of our employees move during that period, and we have fewer employees in Chicago today than we used to pre-Covid even though the company is three times bigger than it was."
The company recently hired a new chief operating officer, and in March 2021 Cameo announced a $100 million funding round, bringing the company’s total funding to more than $165 million at a valuation of just over $1 billion.
