Icon

Careers

Mission

Make anything go viral.

What we do today

Help brands get winning ads with AI.

info

Values

Please understand and agree with our values before applying:

  • A players only. Only A players can hire A players. We'd rather hire 1 A player and pay an above market amount (that someone is very happy with) than hire 3 B players and pay average.
  • In-person working (New York City). No remote/hybrid.
  • Drive. You're hungry to do what it takes for us to win together. You likely have a massive chip on the shoulder or a deep sense of craftsmanship. Work is a key part of your identity / fulfillment in life.
  • Grind. We work/text on weekends and at night. It's ok to send messages at 3am. Someone is either up or they're not (and it won't wake them up). It's ok to call people as well if there's an emergency (and something is breaking).
  • Urgency. Do in a day what usually takes weeks. Run through walls to get things done. Respond in minutes (or seconds) instead of hours.
  • Shameless. Be extremely annoying if it means winning. Check-in on things 10x daily. Double (or quadruple) text if someone hasn't responded. Call them too.
  • Fast firing. If someone isn't an A player, we part ways quickly. Please be okay with this. We do paid trials to help derisk this.
  • Mission-driven. "Make anything go viral" as a mission sounds fun to you.
  • Wear many hats. No job is not your job.
  • EV-based decision making. No buying IBM because it's safe.
  • Customer-first, not team-first. It's our job to make things move fast. We dropped the ball if a customer feels like we did.
  • Flat company org. Titles reflect scope. No political promotion games.

Perks

  • $1500/month to live near NoMad office (15m walk or 10m subway).
  • Free food (in-office).

Deck

Deck

Founding Engineer (product)

  • Having product sense is great
  • No product managers
  • Next, GraphQL, Hasura, Postgres
  • Technical founder, early stage eng experience is great

Software Engineer Intern (product)

  • Any quarter/semester works

Founding Product Designer

  • Own design

Founding Brand Growth

  • Uncapped commission available
  • GTM, AE, BDR, agency experience is great

Founding Creator Growth (Talent Manager)

  • Talent manager, creator agency experience is great

Founding Research Engineer (generative video/audio)

  • Apply (SOTA) models to make AI-generated video + audio perform better
  • Technical founder, early stage eng experience is great

Research Engineer Intern (generative video/audio)

  • Any quarter/semester works

Founding Operations

  • You're creative (+very hardworking)
  • IB, consulting, ops experience is great

Founding Agency Partnerships

  • Uncapped commission
  • Agency partnerships, agency experience is great

Founding Tech Partnerships

  • Uncapped commission
  • Tech partnerships, agency experience is great

Anything

Kennan Davison

Kennan Davison

CEO, Founder
Kennan Davison
Kennan Davison
Kennan Davison
Kennan Davison
Kennan Davison
Kennan Davison
Kennan Davison
CPO, Chairman, Founder at Skio (CEO 2021-2024, $10M+ ARR in 3 years, profitable).
Previously: Pinterest, Hulu, Wieden+Kennedy (ad agency), League of Legends Challenger (Top 200 North America, 100M+ players globally), Y Combinator S20 (solo founder), Columbia (transfer, dropout).
Yunyu Lin

Yunyu Lin

Founding Board Member
Yunyu Lin
Yunyu Lin
Yunyu Lin
Yunyu Lin
Yunyu Lin
Yunyu Lin
Head of AI at Ramp.
Previously: CEO, Co-founder at Cohere (AI CX / LLMs, acquired by Ramp), Nuro, Facebook, Y Combinator S20, Duke (dropout).
Kevin Jin

Kevin Jin

Engineering
Kevin Jin
Kevin Jin
Kevin Jin
Kevin Jin
Kevin Jin
Kevin Jin
Kevin Jin
Kevin Jin
Kevin Jin
Kevin Jin
Previously: CTO at Kalder, Compound Labs, Robinhood, Rippling, Impira, Flexport, Google, Tesla, TSM, Vanderbilt.
Founders Fund

Founders Fund

Icon Investor
Founders Fund
Founders Fund
Founders Fund
Founders Fund
Founders Fund
Founders Fund
Founders Fund
Peter Thiel's Founders Fund is a venture capital firm. Its partners have founded and funded companies including PayPal, Palantir, SpaceX, Anduril, Flexport, Airbnb and Stripe.
Ron Shah

Ron Shah

Icon Investor
Ron Shah
Ron Shah
Ron Shah
CEO, Co-founder at Obvi, Co-host at Chew On This, Managing Partner at Gaas for SaaS.
Roman Khan

Roman Khan

Icon Investor
Roman Khan
Roman Khan
Roman Khan
Roman Khan
Roman Khan
President, Founder at Peak21, CMO at Raycon, CMO at Know Beauty, CMO, Co-founder at Linjer, CMO at Nutrition Kitchen.

Story

Kennan Davison

Kennan Davison

CEO, Founder
Kennan Davison
Kennan Davison
Kennan Davison
Kennan Davison
Kennan Davison
Kennan Davison
Kennan Davison
CPO, Chairman, Founder at Skio (CEO 2021-2024, $10M+ ARR in 3 years, profitable).
Previously: Pinterest, Hulu, Wieden+Kennedy (ad agency), League of Legends Challenger (Top 200 North America, 100M+ players globally), Y Combinator S20 (solo founder), Columbia (transfer, dropout).
Hi there, I'm Kennan!
Growing up, my dream was to be a pro gamer: this felt within reach in high school once I ranked top 200 North America in League of Legends (out of 100M+ players globally).
Despite this, I needed to support myself so I went to college and started learning to code. Coding came naturally (especially with 100 hour weeks) and I was soon skipping class to work at places like Hulu and Wieden+Kennedy (ad agency). Realizing that being paid to work full-time (vs. paying to go to school) sounded quite nice, I dropped out after 1 year to join Pinterest.
After Pinterest, I started a company called Skio which does subscription management software for brands on Shopify. In just 3 years, we've partnered with 1000+ brands (Liquid I.V., Milk Bar, Polaroid, Barstool, Unilever, KraveBeauty, Boba Tea Protein), reached $10M+ ARR (+profitable), and built an amazing team of 50.
With advancements in generative AI (video specifically), I saw an opportunity to help brands bring their stories to life exponentially faster and make marketing much better (hence Icon).
I love learning how we can help better. Feel free to reach out anytime at kennan@icon.me.

Why us

Track record of things that can't be faked

Icon is the best team helping brands get winning ads with AI.

Our CEO/Founder (who is writing this, sorry for writing in 3rd person) brings experience from Skio, Pinterest, Hulu, Wieden+Kennedy (ad agency), League of Legends (Top 200 North America, 100M+ players globally), & Y Combinator S20 (solo founder).

At Skio (subscription management software for brands on Shopify), he was CEO/Founder of the company from 2021 to 2024 helping grow revenue from $0 to $10M+ ARR in 3 years (w/ 90% margins) and a team of 50 (on $8.4M raised). Skio is profitable and still growing >100% YoY.

Our tech investors include Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Kevin Hartz (A*, Eventbrite), Max Altman (Saga), Alex Botez (Chess), as well as founders & executives of OpenAI, Ramp, Flexport, Pika, Karat, & Cognition.

Our D2C investors include Ron Shah & Ash Melvani (Obvi), Roman Khan, Nick Shackelford, Jimmy Kim (Sendlane), Kevin Lee (Immi), Justin Mares (Kettle & Fire), Steph Liu (Levitate), Sara Du (Alloy), Jason Wong, as well as founders of Eight Sleep, Yotpo, Siena AI, Replo, Novel, Parker, GR0, DCL Logistics, Aftersell, Platter, Openborder, Prescient AI, Daasity, & more.

Our team has also worked with 1000+ brands like Liquid I.V., Milk Bar, Polaroid, Barstool, Unilever, Bulletproof, 100 Thieves, Vega, KOS, KITSCH, True Botanicals, mindbodygreen, Transparent Labs, GHOST, Wild One, OpenStore, The Nue Co., Immi, DRMTLGY, Boba Tea Protein, KraveBeauty, Glamnetic, Doe Lashes, Magic Mind, Remedy Organics, & Siete Foods.

Focused on helping brands get winning ads

Icon is focused on helping brands get winning ads vs. also juggling the underlying AI tech.

We believe our approach is fundamentally better because we're free to choose the best technology partner for a specific job.

To illustrate this, maybe one AI-video partner specializes in face closeups while another partner specializes in body movements (where face doesn't matter as much).

If we built all underlying technology in-house, it would create a fundamental conflict of interest where we can't offer a competitor's tool (that might be better) without losing revenue.

What they're saying

Backbone
"Manual ad creation was limiting our testing potential. Icon's swipe system lets us scale to thousands of variants without the production headache."
Maneet Khaira

Maneet Khaira

CEO, Backbone