Story
Kennan Davison
Founders Fund
Ron Shah
Roman Khan
Founders Fund
Ron Shah
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 is founder/CEO of the company having helped 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., Bulletproof, Milk Bar, Barstool Sports, Unilever, 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.