PODCAST · business
AI for Founders with Ryan Estes
by aiforfounders.co
AI for Founders is where 47,000+ founders learn to build and scale with AI. Hosted by Ryan Estes, a Denver investor, creator, and founder, the show breaks down real strategies from top operators and AI visionaries. AI-ready data, zero-dependency workflows, founder-led distribution, and the tools driving revenue for today’s fastest-growing companies. If you’re a technical or non-technical founder who wants to work smarter, scale faster, and stay competitive, this podcast is your weekly unfair advantage.
Episodes
-
How Gelu Sulugiuc Built AI Workflows That Beat Bloomberg by 47 Seconds | Financial News Systems
Forty-seven seconds. That’s how far ahead Gelu Sulugiuc’s machines finished when IBM dropped disappointing numbers: a clean headline with revenue against the FactSet estimate, published before a legacy terminal had typed a word. In trading, forty-seven seconds is the difference between catching a...
-
From AI Aware to AI Native: The 5-Rung Ladder Every Founder Must Climb to Automate Their Business - Joe Esteves - Maine Pointe
What if the most valuable thing your highly paid experts do has nothing to do with their computers? That question kept Joe Esteves up at night. As CEO of Maine Pointe, the supply chain and operations consulting firm ranked #1 by Consulting.us, he kept walking into project rooms full of…
more -
AI Relationship Coach That Sends You Back to Real Life - Lior Illouz - Bonds
Lior Illouz once walked fifteen meters, turned around, and walked fifteen meters back. He did it for four hours a day, four days straight, without speaking to anyone. Somewhere around the hundredth turn, a memory from second grade surfaced that he didn’t know he still had. That was Thailand…
more -
Why AI art takes more effort, not less, and the founder content workflow that proves it
Jason Katz can make a 12-minute YouTube video, from research to final cut, in under an hour of his own time. The secret isn't the software he built. It's that a machine interviews him first. This What It Do opens with cereal, takes a detour through the Bible, and lands on the most practical tour…
more -
I built a $120K business in 60 minutes with Claude Code (live, no edits)
What if the business you're saving for retirement could go live before your coffee gets cold? In this episode of AI for Founders, Ryan Estes skips the interview and does something riskier: he builds a real business, live, in one hour, with every stumble left in. The rules were strict. It had to…
more -
He quit venture capital to build an AI workforce for patients: Eric Marton, Agentic Healthcare
Eric Marton spent 25 years learning exactly how broken American healthcare is, from the inside, at the top. Health system executive. Private equity. Partner at two venture funds. The kind of career that ends in board seats and boat drinks. Then he took a portfolio company up to NVIDIA…
more -
Scaling a hardware startup with zero VC intros | Kostas Koukoravas
Kostas Koukoravas came out of lockdown about ten kilos heavier, having taken up baking like half the planet. So he did what a former Microsoft product manager does. He started logging his food. MyFitnessPal first, which meant weighing everything and then typing it in, which meant quitting. Then…
more -
97% of lawsuits never see a courtroom: Mo Tregenza's AI workflows for settling founder disputes fast
Did you know that winning a lawsuit can be a worse bet than a Vegas table? Morgan "Mo" Duffy Tregenza thinks so, and she has the courtroom miles to back it up. Mo grew up in Telluride, Colorado, the daughter of a zoologist, back when mining and ranching families still shaped the town. She's an...
-
"The agent did it" won't hold up in court: Santosh Kaveti on AI agent accountability for founders
Congress wants a roll call of your AI agents. Could you produce one by Friday? In early September, Reps. Josh Gottheimer and Mike Lawler introduced the Stop Rogue AI Act. The bill would have NIST write standards for tracking and logging AI agents, including a live, machine-readable inventory of...
-
Hiring is an operations problem, not an HR problem: Shar Broumand on automating recruitment
Ryan Estes has a confession. He is terrible at hiring. Not incompetent. Worse. He is charmed. Put him in a room with a candidate and forty-five minutes later he is quietly in love with a person's mind, their weird hobbies, the way they think about problems that have nothing to do with the job.…
more -
15 beagles, 4 cancers, 94% accuracy: my favorite AI workflow in health tech
Thirteen days from now, the FDA convenes a panel that has never convened before. On September 23, 2026, the Molecular and Clinical Genetics Panel sits down to vote on Grail's Galleri test, the first multi-cancer early detection test ever to reach an FDA advisory committee. Every founder building…
more -
How to automate a board of advisors for $29 a month
Nobody warns you that traction is the lonely part. Broke and scared has company. Everybody has been broke and scared. What nobody prepares you for is the 11 PM decision, three years in, revenue real, team growing, and not a single person left who understands the shape of the problem. Your friends...
-
Why your AI-designed brand is invisible, and the 3-step fix
Everyone got the same tools. Almost nobody got taste. Jacqueline Schmidt grew up two subway stops from tigers. The Bronx Zoo was her backyard. Her favorite exhibit was the sloth, which she went back to visit twenty-five years later and found out had died. She spent summers collecting salamanders…
more -
The 10-minute morning routine that replaced an entire project management stack
Five days. Twelve-hour build sessions. One founder describing himself as delirious. Jason Katz opens this one by announcing he has AI psychosis, and he is only half joking. Five straight days inside Claude Code, shipping, prototyping, handing off to his dev team, and coming back for more. It is…
more -
8.3 billion faces, zero infrastructure: the AI likeness market nobody is serving
Sixty percent of the faces training AI were never asked Katrien Grobler woke up on the 29th of December and saw a word written above her bed. Not metaphorically. She describes seeing the name in her mind's eye, getting up, and telling her team they were pivoting that day. The word was Twinnin.…
more -
Insure Your AI Agent. This PhD Built the Policy
Insurance for AI agents: what happens when the machine screws up In January 2026, something happened that almost nobody in tech noticed and everybody in tech should have. The biggest names in commercial insurance walked into statehouses across America and asked permission to stop covering...
-
Chronic Insomnia. Almost None Get Treated. Colin Lawlor On The Sleep Data Gap
Everything you believe about hustle culture is quietly destroying your brain Colin Lawlor called in from Berlin at nine at night, three days after leaving San Diego, wearing the accumulated fatigue of a Heathrow layover. He runs a sleep company. He was tired. He knew exactly why, down to the...
-
The consent economy
Every time you unlock your phone, somebody makes money. It just isn't you. Forty to sixty hours a week. That is what the average person spends on a smartphone, which works out to somewhere between a third and half of your waking life. Big tech built trillion dollar fortunes on that time. You…
more -
From Apple to Animals: The Pivot That Built a 6 Continent AI Company in 30 Months
Everybody says the problem with veterinary medicine is burnout. Yannick Bloem thinks the problem is paperwork. A veterinarian finishes a full day of consults. The animals have been seen. The owners have gone home. And then the second shift starts: SOAP notes, discharge summaries, referral…
more -
Psychedelics Might Be The Most Important Founder Technology Of This Decade
Niko Skievaski has been raising venture money since 2013. He co-founded Redox, the healthcare interoperability company that became one of the largest data networks in American health tech, and he watched AI arrive and compress the parts of the job that used to force him to slow down. Research,...
-
Two Purple Belts on Scaling Startups With AI, Stoicism, and Cold Plunges
In the beginning, the seeds are everywhere and nothing is talking to each other. That is the exact feeling Jason Katz describes at the top of this What It Do check-in, and if you have ever built anything from zero, your stomach just dropped a little. You are running six initiatives. None of them...
-
The $9 Billion Warning Every Founder Scaling Past $1M Needs To Hear
Brett Hurt has sold companies to IBM, taken one public on NASDAQ, and watched ServiceNow absorb his last one. He is telling you, on the record, that none of it made him happy. That is not a humble brag. It is a warning shot, and it lands differently coming from a man who has spent forty seven…
more -
From $80M To $1B: The Scaling Lesson That Now Applies To Every AI Workflow
Your best people just got twice as fast. Congratulations. You have a problem. Ross Barnes has seen this movie from the projection booth. Twenty-five years in tech and advertising, ending as Global CTO of a WPP agency he helped scale from 15 people to more than 1,500 and from $80M to over $1B in...
-
He Sells Oxygen Systems Nationwide: The Zero-Funding Hardware Playbook
Necessity Built the Company. Gratitude Kept It Alive. Brad Pitzele was collecting diagnoses faster than he could treat them. Autoimmune arthritis first. Then melanoma, caused by the very drugs prescribed to manage the arthritis. Then late-stage Lyme disease on top of both. He was in his late...
-
Your Doctor Gets 18 Minutes. Netflix Gets 1,095 Hours. This CEO Is Fixing The Gap
The Other 8,760 Hours You see the person responsible for your health for somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes, once or twice a year. Netflix gets three hours a day. One of those two relationships has enough data to know you. It is not the one keeping you alive. That asymmetry is the entire…
more -
Vibe Coding Your MVP Is a Time Bomb: AI Workflows for Founders Who Want to Ship Twice
The Smartest Model on the Planet Will Still Build You a House With No Foundation Mike Vitez has been shipping software since before the word "agentic" meant anything. Ten years leading projects. A computer science background. Fifty plus products across three continents, by his studio's count. And…
more -
The $0 Fix That Makes Claude 10x Smarter For Your Business
Rob Collie spent 30 years inside the machine, and AI still scared him He was there in 1996, a fresh Vanderbilt grad walking into Microsoft. He led the business intelligence work inside Excel. He was a founding engineer on what became Power BI. He wrote three books about it and, by his own…
more -
Tokenomics Will Wreck Your Margins: The AI Model Routing Workflow That Cuts Spend 50%
Tarun Raisoni built a data center company to roughly $400 million in trailing sales without taking a dollar of outside capital, sold it to a Fortune 500 for $217 million, then walked away from the boat and the fishing rod to start over. His answer for why is four words long: "exits are just a...
-
Tokens Go to Zero, Energy Goes to Zero: What Do You Build When Intelligence Is Free?
Every animal on earth runs on four drives. Humans have a fifth. The question is whether AI feeds it or buries it under a pile of chat windows. That is the cold open Ryan Estes is bringing to a Denver AI panel next Wednesday, and it is why this week's What It Do with Jason Katz, co-founder of...
-
$7,500 AI Team Replacing an Entire Growth Department
Your Website Is About to Become a Line Item Matt Hassett spent seven years making byloftie.com beautiful. Now he is fairly sure that beauty is depreciating. Not because the design is bad. Because the customer is changing shape. Shopify says AI-driven traffic to its stores grew roughly 8x year…
more -
Your AI Agents Are Burning You Out: The Sustainable AI Workflows Founders Actually Need
Fourteen terminal instances. Fifty-two tabs across three browsers. Six customers, a dozen half-finished workflows, and a Friday morning where your brain simply refuses to boot. That's not leverage. That's a slow-motion crash dressed up as productivity. This week, Ryan sits down with Ilan Man,...
-
AI Agents Just Unlocked $7 Trillion in Invoices Nobody Could Finance
Trust is the most expensive thing in business, and nobody bills you for it until it is gone. Four nine-figure receivables frauds hit the industry in a single year, and every one of them traces back to the same quiet failure: a lender who built a relationship, got comfortable, and stopped…
more -
How This AI Hospitality Agent Is Transforming Guest Communication Across 60 Hotels
It is midnight in a mountain town. You have been driving for nine hours, your kids are asleep in the back, and the hotel lobby is empty except for a bell on the counter and a sign that says "ring for service." Nobody comes. Now imagine instead a human-sized hologram greets you by name, checks you...
-
The $50 Million Exit Trap Nobody Warns Founders About
The happiest day of your founder life might be the emptiest. The wire hits, the champagne pops, and 90 days later the divorce papers get filed, the workouts stop, and you are staring at an earn-out agreement wondering why you hate the company that just bought yours. The official launch...
-
He Predicted the Lithium Boom in 2016. Everyone Called Him Crazy.
When China cut off rare earth exports, the American car industry came within two weeks of shutting down. Two weeks. That is not a hypothetical, that is the world we live in now, and Jeremy Wrathall saw it coming a decade ago. In 2016, Jeremy was a mining engineer and investment banker walking to...
-
Soccer League With ZERO Human Players
Somewhere on a server right now, a striker who does not exist is deciding whether to cut left or right. Nobody scripted the choice. Not even the man who built him. That man is Tal Melenboim, a serial entrepreneur with more than twenty years of exits, patents, and AI ventures behind him, including...
-
Stop Making AI Human: The Contrarian Take Every Founder Needs
Your website is lying to you. Right now, while you read this, visitors are hitting a broken form, bailing on a checkout button they can barely see, and bouncing off a page designed for someone else entirely. Eric Schneider built a company to catch every single one of those moments, and he built…
more -
$250K and 3 Months to Build What Used to Cost $2 Million and 18 Months
A 6-person team just built in 3 months what took 18 months and $2 million the last time around. That's not a productivity story. That's a story about the ground shifting under an entire trillion-dollar industry. Tim Lidman knows consulting from the inside. He grew up in the collaboration…
more -
What It Do: The 90% Rule - Why Finishing Is the Least Fun Part of Building Anything
Jason Katz popped his LCL three weeks ago scrambling out of a leg entanglement, and honestly, that injury is the whole episode in miniature. You get excited, you move fast, you stand up into a hold you did not see, and something structural gives. In this What It Do check-in, Jason (co-founder of...
-
He Buys Companies, Keeps Every Employee, Then Deploys Nobel-Nominated AI
Most founders think the endgame is IPO or bust. Todd Furniss built a company that offers a third door: sell to someone who keeps your entire team, hands leadership three to five year employment agreements, and then drops patented AI into your operations like a turbocharger into a truck that's…
more -
800,000 Lives, 210 Engineers, One Bet: Inside Collective Health's AI Push
The same artificial intelligence saved one insurer a billion dollars and cost another two billion. Same tool. Opposite outcomes. The only variable was who the machine was actually working for. That single tension is where this episode opens, and it turns out to be the question that quietly…
more -
What It Do: First-Time Founders Build Product. He Built a Distribution Robot.
Two founders sit down on a Friday with the World Cup playing in the background, and within ten minutes one of them casually reveals he has built a version of himself that works while he sleeps. That is the hook, and it is not hype. Jason Katz, co-founder of Kindling Solutions, walks through what…
more -
800,000 Lives, 210 Engineers, One Bet: Inside Collective Health's AI Push
The same artificial intelligence saved one insurer a billion dollars and cost another two billion. Same tool. Opposite outcomes. The only variable was who the machine was actually working for. That single tension is where this episode opens, and it turns out to be the question that quietly…
more -
AI Heart Health Assistant Trusted by 150+ Leading Organizations
Your blood pressure spikes the moment the cuff goes on. You're sitting on crinkly paper in a cold exam room, and the number on the screen may say more about the moment than your everyday life. It's the classic "white coat effect," and it doubles as a metaphor for one of healthcare's biggest...
-
The Self-Driving Car Of Men's Fashion
A stranger gives you ten seconds. Before you open your mouth, before the pitch, before the handshake, they have already read your shirt and filed you away. Zoher Karu thinks that ten seconds is a data problem, and he left one of the biggest data jobs in tech to go solve it. Zoher spent years as...
-
40,000 Models, One API Key, And A $25M Bet On Open Source
Every month your inference bill climbs, and you tell yourself it is the cost of doing business. What if it is actually a tax on what you do not know? In this episode, the founder of Featherless makes a blunt case: the best model for most of what your startup does is open source, often runs for...
-
He Analyzed Millions of Calls. The Move That Closed Deals Was a Laugh.
There is thirty billion dollars a year in lost rent sitting in empty units across America, and that vacancy quietly erases roughly half a trillion dollars of property value. Everyone assumed the fix was price, amenities, or a slicker chatbot. Then Nick Deveau and his co-founder Ben Epstein got...
-
AI Law Firm: The Logan Brown Playbook
Time kills deals. So does the fine print you never read. James Charles sold the fastest-moving makeup palette in history, did a reported $100 million in revenue, and reportedly walked with around $2 million, because somewhere in a contract he did not read, the math got decided for him. That is…
more -
America Spends $5 Trillion On Health. This Is Where It Leaks.
The real villain in American healthcare is not the insurance company. It is the hold music. The United States burns an estimated $350 billion a year on administrative waste, $266 billion of it from sheer complexity and $84 billion from fraud and abuse, and that sits inside a healthcare economy so...
-
"We're AI-First!" No You're Not. Here's the Test.
A CEO told Justin Watt his company was ready for AI. "We've got our data architecture together," he said, giddy. Justin asked to see it. The guy pulled up an Excel file. The filename? Data Lake. That moment is the whole episode in miniature. Justin Watt, co-founder of Switchboard, studied...
We're indexing this podcast's transcripts for the first time — this can take a minute or two. We'll show results as soon as they're ready.
No matches for "" in this podcast's transcripts.
No topics indexed yet for this podcast.
Loading reviews...
ABOUT THIS SHOW
AI for Founders is where 47,000+ founders learn to build and scale with AI. Hosted by Ryan Estes, a Denver investor, creator, and founder, the show breaks down real strategies from top operators and AI visionaries. AI-ready data, zero-dependency workflows, founder-led distribution, and the tools driving revenue for today’s fastest-growing companies. If you’re a technical or non-technical founder who wants to work smarter, scale faster, and stay competitive, this podcast is your weekly unfair advantage.
HOSTED BY
aiforfounders.co
CATEGORIES
Loading similar podcasts...
Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does AI for Founders with Ryan Estes have?
AI for Founders with Ryan Estes currently has 236 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is AI for Founders with Ryan Estes about?
AI for Founders is where 47,000+ founders learn to build and scale with AI. Hosted by Ryan Estes, a Denver investor, creator, and founder, the show breaks down real strategies from top operators and AI visionaries. AI-ready data, zero-dependency workflows, founder-led distribution, and the tools...
How often does AI for Founders with Ryan Estes release new episodes?
AI for Founders with Ryan Estes publishes regularly with 236 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to AI for Founders with Ryan Estes?
You can listen to AI for Founders with Ryan Estes on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts AI for Founders with Ryan Estes?
AI for Founders with Ryan Estes is created and hosted by aiforfounders.co.
URL copied to clipboard!