Icon raises from Founders Fund after hitting $5M ARR in 30 days — targeting the fastest 0-to-$100M record

on too but fantastic yeah we can see you no this great too yeah we can see you cool so uh kenin Davidson is here uh from icon uh big announcement today can you break it down for us what are you announcing and give us a little back story on your product uh what you're building how it's going just yeah from the top sounds good um yeah so we we just announced a second round from Founders fund um I'm the founder of Icon and basically what we're doing is we're helping Brands make uh much much better ads with uh this thing we're calling the the AI ad maker and high level what we do is we we take someone's like big Content Library and then we turn it into hundreds of ads cool uh uh do you have any good like case studies or examples from companies that Ridge wasn't Ridge Sean Frank was on the show less than two weeks ago uh and I think he was one of your guys' super early Partners yeah yeah we we built a lot of um icon with with Shan and then Ron and oby and a lot of other folks in the community um basically what we're doing is we're tackling like nine different problems at once so we help with script writing um in that script writing we're we're helping you like Target a specific audience sure um and then once you have that script where we're taking your library and then matching it with that script scpt so you don't have to do that by hand um on top of that we also do analytics we help you like keep an eye on competitors like um we help you even like launch ads on on many different channels there's there's all these pieces to the ad making puzzle that we're we're taking on and it's very manual today so we're we're solving that do you like competitive markets previously you started skio subscription management within Ecom is deeply competitive uh I'm actually a co-founder of this company rora and uh rora was running on some other subscription management platform but I actually messaged the CEO just before this Brian Keller and he said we're switching over SK is just a far superior platform than the others let go so great great review for SK but my my big question is is you clearly love competition because to go into subscription management Dominate and then and then come in and do icon which is a very obvious idea and many people are you know trying to tackle it but it's very difficult to do well uh is competition something that you're sort of seeking out in some way because you just know you can do it better yeah definitely I as you said skio was a really competitive space there's there's at least 10 subscription ups and yeah we we tackled it with one like a really like engineering first culture um but to also just like a really like playful personality I think we we really like try to be real um with our customer um rather than corporate and I think that resonates really well with the community and um we're we're bringing a similar approach too to tyom we we're working seven days a week we're really like pouring our heart into this and I think it resonates really well with um with the type of customer we're going for can uh can you break down uh in terms of where AI lives within the the ad stack there's so many places from generate a script generate an AI voice over generate a deep fake of a ugc customer or even the CEO or something like that to AI assembly and picking which Clips go where a lot of these could be done uh programmatically or deterministically a lot of them could be done with AI approaches what do you see working well where's the highest leverage point to inject AI yeah so I think a really common mistake is is thinking AI is just going to generate the ad and then you're not going to have to do anything at all really the way I see us is um basically cursor for ads where we're trying to like take the editor the creative strategist anyone involved in the ad making process and just make them a lot faster like remove the work they don't want to do right so um with the script writing previously right um I'm sure everyone knows this but um you can you can get some writers block when you're trying to like pump out 100 ads a week right so um one of the things we're doing is we're looking at your previously ran ads we're we're looking at trending like Concepts on the internet and then we're like doing all of that behind the scenes and helping you steer that like you're able to write in first or third person you're able to like say don't talk don't make a medical claim or something like really it's up to the user and as as a result you're just a lot quicker is there some sort of concept of like temperature I remember in like the early gpts like you can kind of turn up the temperature get a little bit crazier because I feel like I could I could immediately imagine any of the llms kind of just like rep paraphrasing the same value prop again and again again but maybe some of the value is actually hey let's let's think of new ideas that then we can test and and and that's where like the real Alpha is going to come hey we never thought to make this type of claim it's not a medical claim we didn't cross any lines but we never really knew that that was what the customer wanted do you have some sort of way to dial that in yeah yeah so it you're able to use our thing called ad gbt um very similar to chat gbt but but for ads and um the key thing with it is you can really like just steer it in the direction you want to go um there are people who want like 100 permutations of their winning ad that's a really common use case we also have people who want to like just like do 100 different concepts at once right so it's really like pick your own adventure sort of thing and we we just help you do that a lot quicker got it uh I have a question so for the Last 5 Years The Meta on The Meta ads platform has just been meta is really good at like finding you the right customers so you should focus on Creative that's part of the opportunity that you have with icon is there a world you do you imagine a future where meta tries to almost like move up the stack and and get into the area that you're in obviously you're no you're you're not afraid of of competition uh but you know how do how do you think about sort of meta getting into this game uh yeah yeah there's definitely some stuff that's more uh in the pocket but what I can say here is that we're we're going to be like platform agnostic right so um you you can run ads on meta you can run run ads on Tik Tok like like imagine 10 different platforms right like I don't think meta is going to like want you to like run a Tik Tok at or or different platforms at of course we can't roll that out right but there are like five of those like misalignments I'd say um for meta to to be doing something like this and the other four I have to keep in the pocket but I'm pretty excited to to partner with them and yeah just see where this goes awesome well you have to come back on when you can share on that I yeah yeah I I mean any anytime I have an AI founder on I have just a bunch of questions like uh you know what's hot what's trending like mCP does that mean anything is that legit and real um what other like uh what other kind of like foundational developments are you watching for the the give me a deep seek take give me a scaling take give me whatever you got yeah I wanted to bring this up in a few of other trends of thoughts earlier um one of the things that we're really like approaching this with is like we want to like pick the best like like uh model for the the problem right so one of the things we do is like ugc like ugc lip syncing right sure I'll be really candid it's not quite there yet um in terms of replacing like normal ugc that's why we're taking existing content and repurposing it right but we've definitely got our eyes on it I'd say hey Jen um Tavis there's like 10 players in this space and we're just going to like partner with the best one and we we use a combination of them today already so um that that's kind of the way to like think about icon we're we're taking like the best voice vendor we're taking the best um like video like ugc vendor um the best like writing right like we're we're using a lot of like claw underneath but like with like a lot of code on top right so yeah it's really pick yeah how do you think about you know cost uh reduction at uh at kind of the infr Slayer you yeah you said you've gone from Z to 5 million in AR in 30 days you're extremely profitable uh sounds like you know costs aren't a big issue at the moment you know you guys are running pretty efficiently but uh presumably it will only get better so it sounds like you're in a good spot yeah yeah I think another thing um that's that's really fun about this is there's a lot of people in the space that are are uh basically like operating on like 90% margin and they're they're really charging a lot for what they're doing and part of the reason we're we're being so disruptive here is we're charging like 10% of what they're charging right and I want to like pass the savings to um the customers as the the costs get better underneath right I think companies either going to have to like adapt with their pricing or they're going to die that makes sense uh what What's the actual you're you're going for the record uh to beat every company ever on the one to 100 million AR record which is less than 12 months do you know the actual day are you just are you just going to do it in 12 months 12 I'd like to hit it in in nine months um like not leave it too close but I we'll have to see is there a scenario where at the last on the last day you have to bump prices like 30% just to hit the mark or you or you think there's enough customers out there at the the current pricing that that you can get in front of because I feel like e-commerce is very uh the top e-commerce Founders and CMOS are all talking to each other there's almost like you know uh Sean Frank and and Conor McDonnell have their podcast I think I think like you know probably uh an important acquisition channel for you guys but um yeah you seem pretty confident uh we we love to you know do a check-in call in maybe six months uh you know and see where we're at throw the gauntlet down I want to see let's do it yeah part of the reason I'm doing this is it really like pressures me in the the team in a good way I think like I I don't want to like let everyone down so keeps me working pretty hard um but yeah if you think about it right like we we've got a business plan that's a th000 a month it's only 8,300 customers we need to get to 100 million right and like that keeping the numbers a bit more private but we're more than a thousand already so I yeah we see six to nine months from now yeah 8,300 customers these are businesses I mean meta has what like a million businesses probably advertising at a significant level yeah it's it's not insane insane penetration to get there so good luck I I love that amazing well we'll let you get to your next meeting I know you got to jump uh but thanks so much for calling in please let me know when you have uh news or announcements next and we'll bring you back on yeah congrats on the progress in the new round talk to you soon bye cheers by bye cool should we move on with more timeline Jordy let's do it let's run through a couple well elad Gil has reported the Dropbox has converted from Delaware to a Nevada corporation uh lots of people talking about the risks of being in Delaware uh interestingly I I don't know exactly what triggered this we should get the Drew hon the Dropbox founder on to talk about like how he's thinking about his business because Dropbox was one of those companies came out of YC I believe yeah yeah YC company got to unicorn almost decorn status was super legit goes public really big but then just kind of stays they hired 300,000 people right no that's docy side that's a different company they they they the the name uh yeah wait did you conf it no no no no do Dropbox no no no no it's Dropbox uh I mean Dropbox has a fascinating engineering culture they hired Guido van rossom for a while do you know who Guido van rossom is creator of the Python programing language be clear Dropbox still has I think more employees than x really uh yeah I mean they were they were one of the hottest startups then have been kind of a a what do they call it like a store value type company or you know if you bought you bought $1,000 a Dropbox 5 years ago it's still $ thousand today or something the stocks been kind of flat but yeah uh but I mean it's a it's it's it's a fascinating founder story of you know building a multi-billion dollar company and not many people can say that they've done it so I wrong I was wrong X has 2,800 employees drop Dropbox has 2200 okay uh they've been uh getting 22 2200 and what do sign have because Dropbox acquired hello sign which is a docu sign competitor has 6,000 let's go hit the size gong for that head Count's still cool a lot of people says hey you shouldn't you shouldn't celebrate head count you know it's not a real metric I'm a job Creator I'm a job Creator job creation Doc is going to get the craziest uh corrupt bargain from Trump be like well you're employing half of America like what do you want docu sign's going to decide whether or not there's tariffs or taxes they're just going to write the policy and it's going to get ironed in because they're creating so many jobs every every politici there should be a Founder that comes out and and says my entire mission is to create jobs I if if we have 0.

001% uh you know profit margins that and we can add you know I will just keep you know dividing that 0.

01% as many times as possible to just get each incremental employee um Dropbox fantastic story you you know the story of their viral growth too they were very very early at at being very intentional about distribution baked into the product so uh when you would sign up for Dropbox they would give you like you know one gig of space to store files in the cloud but then if I referred you you would get an extra gig of space and I would get an extra gig of space and so it went super viral on college campuses and and they really did a good job of that like that like you know viral uh viral marketing model that so many companies tried to copy in like after Dropbox was successful but uh it it gets harder and harder over time but it makes a ton of sense it's the same Gmail model that worked um anyway uh speaking of legendary uh Silicon Valley startups changing uh things around uh Asana CEO Dustin moskovitz is retiring what did the stock do and I mean young guy down down 24% really oh but I mean but it was like a crazy day in the market still no no no but that's it was very clearly because of him because of him it's tough but I mean what an interesting as a CEO you want your stop to stock to drop tremendously when you announce your retirement because that is your market value I wonder I I wonder how much of his net worth was in a versus Facebook because he was a Facebook co-founder and so you're looking at a trillion dollar company even if you got 1% you know you're in the multi-billions I'm sure there's delution and sales and stuff but still it's like there's so many there's so many things where you know it's it's a it's a big big shoes to fill yeah when you're on your second company and your first one's Facebook but uh I don't know I used this SAA for a while nice product and uh you know Dustin come on the show now that you're on retired let's talk about what you want to do with all that money now that you're retired we'll get you we'll get you a nice watch on bezel we'll get you an a sleep we'll get you a nice wander vacation every once a while in the chat uh there was some Rolex leaks around their new 2025 model allegedly introducing a land dweller Trey says it's perfect watch for VCS really why yeah well obviously they just mostly dwell on land um if you're enough of a size Lord you start to be more of a sky dweller that's great but uh takes a little bit okay um do we have our next call in for the this stream I know we are going uh we're supposed to be going live at 100 p.

m. I I I don't like doxing the the guests too frequently hey there we go hey