How an Almost Rockstar Built Her Own Tech Playbook

Cameo Doran didn’t take the leap into entrepreneurship with perfect clarity. In fact, when she launched her business, she changed the company name four times. Nothing felt quite right. Every decision felt heavy. She’d spent two decades building a career in tech—but when it was finally time to build something of her own, the weight of every tiny detail threatened to slow her down.

“I was surprised by how much the minutia dragged me down,” she says. “Even though I’d run operations before, I’d never had to do all of it. And it just felt like everything was hard.”

But Cameo is no stranger to doing hard things. Her dad—an experimental, self-taught entrepreneur—once mailed her boxes of gold so she could make earrings in her college dorm room. She sold enough of them to pay her tuition. Years later, when her job at a restaurant chain imploded, she stood at the front door and handed layoff checks to every employee—including herself. And when that life collapsed, she chased a dream instead. She tried to become a rock star. Toured the western U.S. as a lead singer. Got some traction. Signed with a lawyer. Didn’t make it.

For years, she didn’t talk about that chapter. It felt like failure.

“I thought I should’ve been successful. And because I wasn’t, I carried shame. But eventually I realized—how many people never even try?” (Give them a listen here!)

After that, she didn’t know what came next. She hadn’t worked a “real” job in five years. Then her brother, an early-stage founder himself, pulled her into a fledgling SaaS company. She started as a glorified admin. But Cameo doesn’t stay on the sidelines for long. She quickly took on product and operations work, helped lead the team through the early chaos, and earned co-founder status along the way. No outside capital. Just a team trying to figure it out.

Eventually, she left. It was all family, and the stress wasn’t sustainable. She handed her shares back, joined a consultancy, and spent the next 10 years building a reputation in Salt Lake’s tech scene. She ran product for hundreds of software projects. Led agile transformation before it became a buzzword. Took a detour through a high-growth SaaS company. Got recruited back. Then worked her way up inside a consultancy that did major enterprise transformation—including a stint supporting VP-level leaders at Ford.

But she never stopped wondering what it would look like to build something on her own terms.

She just didn’t expect the break to come as a layoff. “I was the first VP to get cut,” she says. “And I wasn’t prepared.”

What followed was 18 months of learning in public. The stress. The indecision. The things she didn’t expect to be hard. She changed her mind constantly. Changed her company name. Changed it again. And again. But underneath it all, she had something most early founders don’t: deep experience, a serious network, and clarity on how she wanted to work.

“I’d been wanting to break out on my own for years,” she says. “And I knew exactly what I wanted to fix.”

She launched Cameo Labs, a consultancy that helps mid-stage companies build better software—not by stretching retainers or overpromising scope, but by focusing on fast, iterative development and alignment. She’s been vocal about the waste she sees in traditional product orgs. The misaligned incentives between agencies and clients. The way most corporate software gets built—slowly, wastefully, and without clarity.

“I’ve worked with startups and Fortune 500s. And I’d say more than half of software gets wasted,” she says. “Not because engineers are slow—but because executives don’t know what actually matters.”

Now, with AI redefining how software gets built, she’s leaning into the moment. “This might be the most exciting time to work in tech since the printing press,” she says. She wants to reshape how teams think about experimentation. Rethink how they use people’s capacity. Help them build things that actually matter.

It’s not about raging against the machine anymore. It’s about refusing to recreate it. “I think most people leave jobs not because of the work—but because they’re building things they don’t believe in for people who don’t care about them.”

She’s not doing that anymore. Not at Cameo Labs.

She’s building what she wants, the way she wants. And she’s doing it with clarity, purpose, and none of the shame.

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