Icon

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.

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 above market than hire 3 B players and pay market.
  • In-person working (New York City). No remote/hybrid. Private chef, barbell gym, & pool.
  • 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 also ok to call people at 3am (be considerate though).
  • Speed. Do in a day what usually takes weeks. Run through walls to get things done. Respond in minutes (or seconds) instead of hours.
  • Shameless urgency. Be extremely annoying. 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 and drive urgency. If a customer ever feels like we dropped the ball, we did.
  • Flat company org. Titles reflect scope. No political promotion games.

Founding Engineer

  • Having product sense is great
  • No product managers
  • Next, GraphQL, Hasura, Postgres, Devin (AI Software Engineer)
  • Technical founder, early stage eng experience is great

Founding Creator Growth (Talent Manager)

  • You're annoying in a good way (+very hardworking)
  • Talent manager/agent, creator experience is great

Founding Operations

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

Founding Brand Growth

  • Uncapped commission (20% of year 1 ACV)
  • GTM, agency experience is great

Anything

Team

Kennan Davison

Kennan Davison

CEO, Founder
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, League of Legends Challenger (Top 200 North America), Y Combinator S20, Columbia (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.
Max Sidebotham

Max Sidebotham

Engineering
Max Sidebotham
Max Sidebotham
Max Sidebotham
Max Sidebotham
Previously: CTO, Co-founder at Tare, Skio, Robinhood.
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.

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 founder/CEO (who is writing this, sorry for writing in 3rd person) brings experience from Skio, Pinterest, Hulu, League of Legends (Top 200 North America), & Y Combinator.

At Skio (a subscription platform for Shopify), he was founder/CEO of the company 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 team also has creators with significant followings. As an example, Fred (@asxpliu) on our team has 3.3M followers across all platforms which gives us firsthand perspective that helps us build the best product (we also have a much easier time getting in touch with any creator).

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

Backbone
"Choosing creators can be slow and uncertain. Icon uses key signals to connect you with the right creators faster."
Maneet Khaira

Maneet Khaira

CEO, Backbone
"Partnering with the right brands can be difficult. Icon matches you with brands that match your following, resulting in more repeat deals."
Alexandra Botez

Alexandra Botez

Pro Chess & Poker Player
@missbotez (4.7M followers)