Likeness — Founding Team & Cofounder Job Descriptions¶

Six founding seats. The first is the founder's own (CTO / Product). The other five are cofounder roles being recruited. All are equity-heavy with modest cash until we close pre-seed.

These are written to be honest about what the work actually involves, so that the right people self-select in and the wrong ones self-select out.

The team is flat. What matters more than reporting lines is who owns what and where the seams between seats sit — the places where coordination has to be deliberate. The map below labels those seams; the role descriptions that follow detail the substance behind them.

flowchart LR
    CTO["<b>Founding CTO / Product</b><br/>founder seat<br/>stack · UX · product"]
    CEO["<b>Founding CEO</b><br/>fundraising · BD ·<br/>investor relations"]
    COMP["<b>Compliance & Legal</b><br/>2257 · processor posture ·<br/>agreements"]
    ML["<b>ML Lead</b><br/>model pipeline · license<br/>engine · watermarking"]
    TS["<b>Trust & Safety</b><br/>verification · classifiers ·<br/>enforcement · takedowns"]
    CRO["<b>Creator Relationships<br/>& Ops</b><br/>adult industry insider ·<br/>creator bridge"]

    CTO ---|"platform / ML<br/>integration"| ML
    CTO ---|"UX of T&S<br/>flows"| TS
    CEO ---|"processor BD<br/>substance"| COMP
    COMP ---|"2257 +<br/>verification"| TS
    ML ---|"abuse detection<br/>signals"| TS
    TS ---|"creator-side<br/>enforcement"| CRO
    CRO ---|"creator feedback<br/>to product"| CTO

Founding CTO / Product (founder's seat)¶

The Founding CTO owns the technical and product surface of Likeness end-to-end. At scale this would split into separate CTO, head of product, and head of design seats. They're combined here because the founding team is small and the technical-product interface is too tight to delegate.

The CTO owns: - The platform stack — databases, APIs, frontend, infrastructure, deployment, security posture for everything except ML-specific architecture - Product direction — what gets built, in what order, at what scope - The interaction layer — every screen, every flow, every piece of microcopy, until the product is mature enough to bring on a separate design hire - The user experience for both creators and fans, which is where the consent-first ethos either becomes visible or fails to - The technical-business interface — pricing logic, abuse cost tracking, the unit economics models the CEO takes to investors - Recruiting and managing engineers as the team grows

The CTO explicitly does not own: - Fundraising and investor relations (the CEO does) - Day-to-day legal and regulatory work (the Compliance Lead does) - ML model pipeline, fine-tuning, watermarking, or AI-specific abuse detection (the ML Lead does)

The founder comes to this seat from direct CTO experience, with product and UX instincts strong enough to make the platform feel right for an audience that has been failed by every general-purpose tech tool to date. The decision not to lead fundraising is deliberate; recruiting a CEO who can do that job well is the first cofounder priority.

Founding CEO¶

Likeness is a consent-first AI likeness platform for verified adult creators. The CTO and the founding team are building the technical and operational scaffolding. The Founding CEO is the person who makes sure the company has the capital, the partnerships, and the external-facing strategic shape to get there.

This is a deliberately narrow role. You are not the product visionary — the CTO is. You are not the head of legal — the Compliance & Legal Lead is. You are not the head of operations — the Creator Relationships lead is. You own the things those roles can't or shouldn't.

You'd own: - Fundraising — pre-seed close, seed, and the path beyond - Investor relations — updates, reporting, board work if and when it forms - Business strategy that the technical team can't allocate time to — pricing posture, expansion sequencing, geographic rollout - BD and partnerships, hardest first: adult-friendly payment processors, identity verification providers, eventually agencies and creator collectives - The first external-facing relationships the company needs — outside counsel, auditors, processor compliance teams

You probably look like: - Have raised pre-seed and seed before, ideally for an adult-industry-adjacent, fintech, or trust-and-safety-heavy company - Have actual BD reps with high-risk merchant category processors (this is rarer than it sounds) - Comfortable being the business face while a technical cofounder owns vision and product - Have an ethical compass that doesn't bend for the deal — willing to walk from investors who'd compromise the platform's posture - Don't need to be the smartest person in every meeting; need to be the most prepared

If you want a CEO role where the scope is "do whatever's in front of you," this isn't it. If you want a focused role where your fundraising and BD craft is the primary lever, let's talk.

Compliance & Legal Lead¶

Likeness is a consent-first AI likeness platform for verified adult creators. We're building the legal and operational scaffolding that lets adult creators license their own likeness on their own terms — and revoke it. The Compliance & Legal Lead is the person who makes sure that scaffolding actually works.

This is not an outside counsel role. It is a cofounder seat. You sit inside the company, own the consent and recordkeeping infrastructure, manage outside specialists where needed, and treat compliance as a core product feature rather than something we deal with later.

You'd own: - The 2257-style recordkeeping system, performer releases, and AI likeness license framework - The audit posture that keeps adult-friendly payment processors comfortable — the CEO drives the relationships, you provide the substance - Federal and state law tracking on AI likeness and intimate deepfakes — making sure we're over-complying, not catching up - Drafting and maintaining the creator, fan, and collaboration agreements - The takedown and enforcement workflow for unauthorized off-platform use - Coordinating outside counsel on jurisdiction-specific questions

You probably look like: - Adult industry, fintech compliance, or platform trust & safety legal experience - Comfortable making decisions under regulatory ambiguity - Allergic to checkbox compliance, fluent in operational compliance - See sex workers as the customer, not the inventory

If you want a role where compliance is "a slide in the deck," this is the wrong place. If you want to build the version that actually works, let's talk.

ML Lead¶

Likeness trains private likeness models for individual creators, runs all inference on-platform, and never lets model weights leave our servers. The ML Lead makes the AI architecture real and keeps it bulletproof.

This is an ML specialty seat. The CTO owns the broader platform infrastructure — databases, APIs, deployment, the stack. You own the things that require ML-specific judgment, and you partner closely with the CTO at the integration layer.

You'd own: - The image generation pipeline — base model choice, fine-tuning, LoRA training, adapter architecture - The rule engine that license-checks every prompt before inference fires (the CTO owns the request layer; the matching logic is yours) - The security posture for weights — model registry, encryption boundaries, access control, audit logging — designed jointly with the CTO but driven by your read of the threat model - Output provenance — invisible watermarking, perceptual hashing, signed metadata - The cost / latency / quality trade-off curve as inference scales - Face-matching for abuse prevention, on creator outputs and eventually on fan self-insert - Eventually, deliberately, video and voice — but not first

You probably look like: - A senior ML engineer who has shipped image generation systems in production - Fluent in modern fine-tuning, GPU economics, and inference optimization - Comfortable working alongside a technical CTO — not the only senior technical voice on the team - Have opinions about model evaluation; not satisfied with vibes-based quality - Comfortable with the security-engineering posture this work requires

The technical work is interesting on its own. The non-technical context is non-negotiable. We don't need a brilliant engineer who treats the consent layer as overhead. We need a brilliant engineer for whom the consent layer is the point.

Trust & Safety Lead¶

The reason Likeness can exist is that the gray-market alternatives don't have consent, don't pay creators, and don't honor revocation. Our trust & safety operation is what makes us not-that. The Trust & Safety Lead owns it.

This role is operational and policy-shaping. You build the rules, the enforcement, and eventually the team.

You'd own: - Identity and age verification flows for creators and fans - The prompt classifier, output classifier, and human review queue - Hard-block policy: minors, age-ambiguous content, public figures, third-party uploads, nonconsent scenarios - Abuse vector analysis — what users will try, how we catch it, how we ban repeat offenders - The takedown enforcement pipeline for unauthorized off-platform reposts - Hiring and managing the human review team as we scale

You probably look like: - Have built moderation systems before, ideally for an adult or high-risk consumer platform - Know the difference between policy and enforcement - Comfortable making fast judgment calls on hard edge cases - Have the stomach for the work — you will be reviewing categories of attempted abuse you cannot unsee

Trust & safety here is not a cost center. It is most of the moat. If you want to build the operational version of consent infrastructure for an industry that has been failed by every general-purpose platform, this is the role.

Creator Relationships & Operations¶

The premise of Likeness is that the creator is in charge — of their license, their model, their content, their revocation. Creator Relationships & Operations is the person who makes that premise feel real to actual creators on the ground.

This role is the bridge between the company and the people the company exists to serve. The right person for it almost certainly comes from the adult industry. We are not interested in someone who studies the field from the outside.

You'd own: - Onboarding for invite-only creators, including white-glove handling in the concierge phase - Day-to-day creator support — making sure complaints actually move things inside the company - Feedback loops between creators and product, legal, and engineering - Agency partnerships and roster onboarding - Education and documentation for creators new to AI tooling - Eventually, hiring and managing a creator success team

You probably look like: - Worked in the adult industry — performer, agency staffer, platform creator-relations operator, or similar - Have existing trust in the field; people return your messages - Diplomatically blunt; you can tell creators when something can't happen and tell the team when something needs to - See the platform as worker infrastructure, not a tech opportunity

If the platform is built right, you are the most important person on the team for whether creators trust it. We want this seat filled with someone whose presence on the team is itself a signal to other creators that this thing is for real.

All five recruited roles are cofounder seats: meaningful equity, modest cash compensation until pre-seed close, full participation in company-shaping decisions. If any of these read like the work you want to do, the next step is a conversation, not an application.