Careers
Mission
Crack the formula to going viral.
What we do today
Help brands create winning influencer ads with AI.
Help creators make money doing brand deals with AI.
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. "Cracking the formula to going 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.
Founding Engineer (generative video/audio)
- Apply (SOTA) models to make AI-generated video + audio perform better
- Technical founder, early stage eng experience is great
Founding Creative Strategist
- Make the best video ads using anything (AI video, real video, truly anything)
- Coordinate engineers to build you software/AI to make this easy for you
- 10k+ hours optimizing thumbnails, copy, viewer retention curve, etc
- Experience at a results-driven creative agency (e.g. Narrative, TubeScience) or YouTube channel (e.g. MrBeast) is great
Kennan Davison
Yunyu Lin
Kevin Jin
Kennan Davison
Yunyu Lin
Founders Fund
Ron Shah
Roman Khan
Founders Fund
Ron Shah
Story
Kennan Davison
Why us
Track record of things that can't be faked
Icon is the best team helping brands create winning influencer 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), & Y Combinator.
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, Eric Wei & Will Kim (Karat), Alex Botez (Chess), Kevin Hartz (A*, Eventbrite), Max Altman (Saga), Reilly Opelka (Tennis), as well as founders & executives of OpenAI, Ramp, Flexport, Pika, & Cognition (Devin).
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 creators & brands partner with AI
Icon is focused on helping creators & brands partner with AI 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.
Another weakness of building underlying tech is one will inherently make lots of money from fake AI actors. Icon's mission is helping human creators win so this would be a conflict of interest for us.
Focused on helping human creators win with AI
Icon's mission is helping human creators win with AI and every decision we make is guided by this commitment.
The future of content will inevitably have fake AI actors. Despite this, we believe human creators augmented with AI will win (especially if we're helping).
An example of our mission guiding our decision-making is Icon not partaking in building underlying AI tech (which inevitably will make a lot of money from fake AI actors). This inherently helps us stay more focused on human creators.
What they're saying
Maneet Khaira
Ron Shah
Tim Chen
Alexandra Botez
Fred Liu
Reilly Opelka
Maneet Khaira
Ron Shah
Alexandra Botez
Fred Liu
Maneet Khaira