AI for Founders with Ryan Estes
AI for Founders is a podcast where over 47,000 founders learn to build and scale their businesses with artificial intelligence. Hosted by Ryan Estes, a Denver-based investor, creator, and founder, the show features real strategies from top operators and AI visionaries. Topics include AI-ready data, zero-dependency workflows, founder-led distribution, and tools driving revenue for fast-growing companies. The podcast is aimed at both technical and non-technical founders who want to work smarter and stay competitive.
Episodes
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, right after seven years at Meta across Singapore, London and Tel Aviv. The paycheck was gone and so was the
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 of an AI content engine we've ever done. Ryan kicks things off with a new installment of his
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 run from home with one person. It needed no degree, no certification and no pile of cash. And it had
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 headquarters in Santa Clara to look at molecule design, sat in a room full of tenured scientists from Stanford and
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 the AI photo apps arrived and made logging fast, which was great until he found the research: photo esti
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 attorney by training. Her grandfather spent 30 years as a judge, then became a mediator in r
"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 every agent on a network. Meanwhile, carriers like Berkshire Hathaway, Chubb, Travelers and AIG have been
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. Then a colleague walks in and says the thing nobody wants to hear: they were not qualified.So Ryan too
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 in early detection is watching. Shlomi Madar is watching too. He just is not building the same thing
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 stopped relating around round two. Your family cannot parse the question. Your team needs you to alread
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 in the woods and carrying them home in her Smurf boots, fifty at a time, to the ongoing horror of her gra
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 the kind of week that either produces a business or produces a burnout, and the whole episode is really a
8.3 billion faces, zero infrastructure: the AI likeness market nobody is serving
Sixty percent of the faces training AI were never askedKatrien 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.She had spent the previous year running AI KAT, making AI-generated video ads for clients like Capital.c
Insure Your AI Agent. This PhD Built the Policy
Insurance for AI agents: what happens when the machine screws upIn 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 artificial intelligence. Berkshire Hathaway. Chubb. Travelers. AIG and WR Berkley followed. Regulators approved
Chronic Insomnia. Almost None Get Treated. Colin Lawlor On The Sleep Data Gap
Everything you believe about hustle culture is quietly destroying your brainColin 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 hormone.That is the whole thesis of this episode. Sleep is not a soft topic. It is a measurement problem, a
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 signed up for exactly none of it.Dan Novaes wants to change the math.He is the co-founder and CEO of Mod
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 letters, records that have to exist by law whether or not anyone has the energy left to write them. Two hours,
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, analysis, first drafts, scaffolding. All of it collapsed toward zero.What he found on the other side of t
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 touch. You are shifting attention left and right and none of it compounds. It is disorienting. And then,
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 years writing code, six times as a founder, and who now backs more than 150 startups alongside his wife Deb
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 revenue. Toyota. Lexus. EA Sports. British Airways. He sat on a global board and drove agile transformati
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 thirties and, in his words, he felt ninety-five years old. He could barely walk. Everything hurt. And every d
Your Doctor Gets 18 Minutes. Netflix Gets 1,095 Hours. This CEO Is Fixing The Gap
The Other 8,760 HoursYou 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 business case for Lirio, and Marten den Haring has been building against it since 2019.He is not a healthcare li
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 FoundationMike 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 a few months ago, he did something most experienced technical leaders refuse to do.He wen
The $0 Fix That Makes Claude 10x Smarter For Your Business
Rob Collie spent 30 years inside the machine, and AI still scared himHe 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 account, sold more than 92,000 copies. If anybody had a right to shrug at the next wave, it was Rob Collie.Then
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 number."What he started instead is Gruve, and what he came on the show to argue is the most unco
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 Kindling Solutions, is bigger than a build in public check in.Ryan walks through his whole panel hosting
$7,500 AI Team Replacing an Entire Growth Department
Your Website Is About to Become a Line ItemMatt 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 over year in Q1 2026, with orders from AI search up nearly 13x. Loftie's post-purchase survey went from 1
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, founder and CEO of Paradox Machines, an AI-enabled data services company helping mid-market and pri
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 checking. Anthony Eden watched that pattern from inside one of the world's most secretive private equity sh
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 in, and books your fishing guide for the morning. That is not science fiction. That is already running
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 announcement:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rich--sassy-wealth-strategies-launches-qiretreat-a-china-exp
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 work in London when a friend's comment about lithium in Cornish mine water sent him down a rabbit hol
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 Movota (sold to Bertelsmann AG), Score:Plug (acquired by Spil Games), VFR.ai, and Data+. His newest cre
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 it without a dollar of venture capital.Eric is the co-founder of Cora, a website optimization and monito
$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 industry: Webex before Cisco bought it, SuccessFactors before SAP bought it, then a decade helping run T
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 Kindling Solutions, back for another round) and Ryan trade war stories from the two weeks that turned b
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 been stuck in third gear for a decade.Todd is the CEO and co-founder of AI Squared, formally AIAI Hold
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 decides everything a founder builds. Gaurav Agrawal, Vice President of Engineering at Collective Health, has s
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 he calls his personal content machine: a chain of Notion databases, AI agents, and approval triggers tha
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 challenges: we often measure people at isolated moments instead of continuously, then
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 Global Chief Data Officer at eBay and Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Blue Shield of California. Now
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 basically peanuts, and is frequently built in China. He has put real money behind that thesis, about $25M
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 their hands on millions of real leasing calls from one of the largest apartment owners in the country, po
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 the horror story Logan Brown tells founders to wake them up. Then she hands them the antidote.Logan walked
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 large that if you sliced it off on its own it would rank as roughly the fourth biggest economy on earth
"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 psychology, not computer science, and that turns out to be his unfair advantage. After stints at
Agent Memory Is the Next Great Moat
What if the dumbest thing your startup does this year is hire?In Zurich, a six-person company is serving Fortune 500 clients with a rule that sounds like heresy: no human in the company can be assigned a task. The software literally locks them out. Every task goes to an agent first, and the agent decides when a human's judgment is actually worth the interruption.That company is Salfati Group,
What it do!? The Jujitsu Secret That Scales Companies Without Force
Two purple belts walk back onto the mat after years away, and the guy who is slow, mindful, and refuses to break a sweat starts sweeping and submitting the meatheads who are gassing out around him. That is not a jujitsu story. That is the whole episode.This week Ryan Estes and Jason Katz, co-founder of Kindling Solutions, skip the warmup and go straight into the thing every founder feels but rarel
The $18 Billion Backdoor: How One Aussie Founder Plans to Eat LinkedIn Alive
The inbox is dead, and the people who keep emailing it the hardest are the ones killing it fastest.David Connors has watched this happen up close. He sold his recruiting automation startup, Automately, to Sequoia Capital, spent two years inside the firm building tools so its investors and founders could answer one maddening question, "who do we actually know at company X," and walked out
Stop Getting Paid for Hours. Start Getting Paid for Outcomes.
She didn't get maternity leave. So she rewired the entire way she worked, and accidentally redrew the map of what her career was worth. In 2020, Ashley Gross was just another marketer pulling 80 hours inside a 40-hour job, operating on the oldest visibility hack in the book: be the first one in, be the last one out. Then she became a mom with no leave on the table, and the math stopped working
35x More Profitable Than Marketing | JP Grace from Endear
The salesperson of the future never forgets you. The only question is whether that feels like care or surveillance.JP Grace has worked the floor. Publix bag boy, Breckenridge coffee shop, the whole tour. Now he's the CTO of Endear, the retail-first CRM powering one-on-one selling for brands like Reformation, Untuckit, Jones Road Beauty, AG Jeans, and Boll & Branch across more than 2,000 st
"Intensity Is a Bulldozer" The Leadership Trait Everyone Praises and Nobody Survives
The wall you built to protect yourself is the same wall your team can't get past.Most founder advice is about adding. Add a growth loop. Add a framework. Add another seven habits. Tyler Dickerhoof showed up to AI for Founders to argue the opposite. The thing standing between you and the company you want is usually something you are spending enormous energy to keep hidden.Tyler is the founder o
What It Do: 6 Parameters That Separate Cinematic AI From Total Slop
Everyone thinks the magic is in the prompt. It is not. The magic is in everything you build around the prompt.That is the thread running through this build in public session, where the conversation goes deep on what it actually takes to make AI video that looks like a real person, sounds like a real person, and does not collapse into that plastic, uncanny mush we have all learned to scroll past. T
Ship A Full App In 5 Minutes, Not 5 Weekends
Every founder has a graveyard. Half-finished apps, abandoned prototypes, that "killer tool" you vibe-coded over a weekend and never touched again. Mariam Hakobyan, Co-Founder and CEO of Softr, thinks she knows exactly why those projects keep dying, and it is not your discipline. It is the chains. AI handed everyone a hammer and called them a carpenter, but it never removed the hard part.
"We Don't Use AI" Will Be the Flex of 2026
Two fifteen-year-old rock climbing buddies from Long Island made a pact in a surf lineup: build one-of-a-kind experiences for causes they cared about. That idea died. So did the loyalty app before it, and the apparel company after it. What survived was the thing nobody planned, an agency born from following opportunity instead of forcing a vision.Justin Abrams and Mike Rispoli have been failing fo
The Physicist Building a Compiler for the Real World | Hugo Nordell, Encube
Some of the smartest engineers alive are designing the physical world with software older than their interns. Brake discs, axles, medical devices, aircraft, all built on tools that can take twenty minutes just to open a file, and a knowledge base that walked out the door when the industry shipped its expertise overseas. Hugo Nordell saw this up close. Trained as a theoretical physicist, seasoned i
Why Posting on LinkedIn Is Dead (And What Top Founders Do Instead)
That is the dirty secret of LinkedIn for most founders. You scroll, you cringe at the textbook-perfect ChatGPT posts, you maybe drop a like, and you log off feeling exactly as broke as when you opened the app. Ali Hafizji, founder and CEO of Wednesday Solutions and the builder behind Chime at getchime.co, has been quietly running a different playbook. He went from under 5,000 LinkedIn followers to
AI Just Closed 40% of Your Tickets Without You
Your IT team is drowning. Every "how do I get access to..." Slack message you fire off is making it worse. And while everyone in 2026 is busy debating whether AI is coming for the C-suite, Tom Bachant has spent the last four years quietly automating the layer of work that actually keeps companies running. The help desk. The ticket queue. The Jira dashboard you've been ignoring for th
$1.6 Billion of Equity On-Chain. Here Is Why.
Picture St. Louis, 1849. Two men with a bottle of champagne and a brutal choice: go north for beaver pelts, or go south chasing gold in California. Joris Delanoue does not even blink. He picks the gold. Not for the metal. For the belief.That single line tells you everything about this conversation. Joris, co-founder and co-CEO of Fairmint, has spent the better part of two decades pushing into fron
Tiny Brands Are Outranking Billion-Dollar Companies. Here Is the Hack.
Everything you know about getting found online is about to be obsolete. For two decades, founders chased one algorithm. Backlinks, page speed, keyword stuffing, the whole exhausting machine. Then a handful of chatbots quietly took the wheel, and now they decide which businesses get recommended and which ones get ghosted. SEO is bleeding out. Google traffic is leaking. And a huge slice of buyers no
The Founder Is the Bottleneck. Here's How to Clone Your Judgment.
You are the smartest person in your company. That is exactly the problem.Every founder hits the same wall. The strategy lives in your head. The taste lives in your gut. The thousand tiny judgment calls that make your company yours live nowhere anyone else can reach them. So your team waits. They wait on your approval, your context, your answer to a question you have answered nine times already. An
Your Face, Voice, and Data Are Fakeable. Here's What Isn't.
Everything you trust online is about to break, and André Ferraz built a company to catch the people breaking it.Picture a 12-year-old kid riding his bike through Brazil when a stranger points a gun at his face to steal it. That kid grew up with two computer scientist parents, an early love of code, and a peculiar fascination not with building systems but with breaking them. Three decades later, th
Data agents you can trust in production. | Pradnesh Patil from Altimate AI
Pradnesh Patil spent years as a product leader at Fortune 500 companies bringing in millions in revenue, and every single quarter the same thing kept happening. He would walk into leadership meetings, present data, get hit with the question "why is this number different from last week," and then watch the opportunity window close while his data team spent two months trying to figure it o
Your Vibe Code Just Handed Hackers Your Database - Punit Bhatia, Founder of Fit4Privacy
When Punit Bhatia walks into a founder's office, the building is usually already on fire. Someone configured the CRM, blasted thousands of cold emails, scaled the AI agent stack overnight, and is now staring at a complaint, a regulator, or worse, a trending news story. The problem was never the AI. The problem was the speed without the guardrails.In this conversation, Punit walks Ryan through
The AI EA Flex
Will Ruben spent more than a decade at the companies that taught the internet what attention looks like. He led ranking and recommendations across Instagram during the era when Reels stopped being a feature and started being the entire product. He worked on Coinbase's Web3 Wallet. He scaled consumer products for billions of people. And then he walked away from all of it to solve something almo
Jazz Fusion in the Agentic Era
When Tim Freestone first logged into ChatGPT on November 23, 2022, he turned to his wife and said, "Okay, this is a thing." Two and a half years later, he's the Chief Strategy Officer at Kiteworks, a PE-backed unicorn protecting how data moves in and out of the world's most regulated companies. This episode is part jazz appreciation, part AI philosophy, and part hard-earned playb
One Problem, Forever
The Stealth Decade That Built a CategoryMost founders ship in six weeks and pivot in six months. Sameet Gupte and his four co-founders did the opposite. They put pen to paper in 2007, built in stealth from 2009 to 2019, and only then incorporated EvoluteIQ. No customers. No revenue. Just five operators with a thesis that everyone else in automation was solving fragments of the problem instead of t
Quit Code to Grow Lettuce
In a market obsessed with AI multiples and overnight unicorn exits, Bryce Nagels is making a different bet. The CEO and co-founder of Planteva Farms is building what he calls a "halo company": high asset, low obsolescence. The kind of business that doesn't get wiped out when the next model drops, and actually gets stronger every time AI improves.Planteva specializes in propagation. T
"Your Code Is Worthless" A Top VC Just Told Us Why | The Trillion-Dollar Founder Personality Type Nobody Talks About
Jim Ferry has spent his career on the investor side of the table at Volition Capital, a Boston-based growth equity fund that writes Series A and B checks into capital-efficient companies between $1M and $10M in revenue. He's seen thousands of pitches, sat on dozens of boards, and watched the rules of building a defensible business get rewritten in real time over the last 24 months.The throughl
Healthcare's AI Operating System | AI Won't Replace Your Doctor. Here's What It Will Do Instead.
In 2017, while most founders were still debating whether chatbots had a future, Punit Singh Soni was studying speech models with the patience of someone who'd already seen what came next. He wasn't a healthcare guy. He'd run games at Google, built mobile apps, sat in the social team. But he understood one thing the rest of the industry was about to learn the hard way: AI was about to b
Is AI Slop Killing SEO? | From Zero to Indexed in Two Weeks: The Real SEO Timeline
Most founders treat SEO like a slot machine. Pull the lever, publish a blog, pray to the algorithm gods. Kaelan Donadio, co-founder of Nina (trynina.co), walked into the studio and dismantled that fantasy in the first sixty seconds. Your blog posts aren't bad, he says. They're invisible. Google literally cannot find them, and no amount of ChatGPT-generated content is going to change that u
Your Next Co-Founder Should Be AI
Most founders are still asking how to use AI. Dave Sifry is asking something stranger: what if the org chart itself is the product?Nine companies in, Dave is running what he calls a Meta Factory, a system that spawns entire businesses with AI co-founders at the helm. Two of those companies are already live. One is cashflow positive. And the AI CEO, not Dave, is the one deciding to plow the money b
Stop Doing Your Own HR
Most founders don't think about HR until HR thinks about them. And by then, it's a letter on the desk demanding $38,000 and a lien notice attached for good measure.This week on AI for Founders, John, the founder of CogNet HRO, walks through the quietly catastrophic world of multi-state payroll, the surprise tax bills no one warns you about, and why a guy who spent fifteen years running thi
Synthetic Relationships, FTW
Rebecca Liao spent her career advising the most powerful people in the world. Clinton's campaign. Biden's transition. The Pentagon's policy halls. And then one day she realized something brutal: she didn't want to give advice anymore. She wanted to build.Now she's running Saga AI Labs, a company quietly rewiring how brands acquire customers. Forget influencer budgets. Forget CP
The Real IP Is How You Think
Most founders are racing to build on top of the foundation models. Dan Pratl is doing something stranger and more interesting: he's betting against them. Or more precisely, he's betting against the assumption that the artifact, the output, the polished deliverable, is the thing that matters. Dan thinks expertise itself is the scarce resource of the AI era, and he's building Quadron to
The Asset Class Quietly Making Millionaires
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐The Anti-AI Asset: How Nathan Jameson Builds Fortress Wealth in a Market Obsessed With HypeNathan Jameson sits outside Philadelphia with a human skull (replica) on his desk and a fundamentally different worldview than the founders currently torching runway chasing the next model update. While Silicon Valley places hundred-x bets and watches whole categories get absorbed in a Tuesday release,
The Searchable Life: When Memories Get a Database
Bob Matteson grew up around a father who quietly carried a piece of history with him for decades. The dad attended Game 6 of the 1945 Cubs vs. Tigers World Series. Bob never knew. The story surfaced only after his father passed, dug up secondhand from his mother. That single missing thread, a baseball game his dad never spoke about, planted the question that would become a company: what happens to
The Truth About Lying to Your Doctor
Stephen Rouse didn't set out to pick a fight with Google, OpenAI, Amazon, and Microsoft. He just noticed something broken. Every founder in his orbit was tracking their body through a circus of apps that refused to speak to each other. A Whoop on the wrist. A Garmin for skiing. MyFitnessPal for food. Epic MyChart for labs. Strava for runs. Six logins, zero clarity. Meanwhile, the 21st Century
Fix the Thing 70% of Americans Are Ignoring
The Will You Don't Have Is Already Costing YouMost people think estate planning is something you do when you're old, wealthy, or both. David Rosati spent 15 years as a corporate and M&A lawyer watching that assumption wreck families. The paperwork gets avoided. The conversations never happen. And then someone dies, and suddenly everything that should have been simple becomes a courtroo
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