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AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

aiforfounders.co 198 Episodes Aug 19, 2026

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

Psychedelics Might Be The Most Important Founder Technology Of This Decade
Psychedelics Might Be The Most Important Founder Technology Of This Decade Aug 19, 2026 01:00:54 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
Two Purple Belts on Scaling Startups With AI, Stoicism, and Cold Plunges Aug 17, 2026 00:26:27 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
The $9 Billion Warning Every Founder Scaling Past $1M Needs To Hear Aug 16, 2026 01:01:26 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
From $80M To $1B: The Scaling Lesson That Now Applies To Every AI Workflow Aug 16, 2026 00:56:18 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
He Sells Oxygen Systems Nationwide: The Zero-Funding Hardware Playbook Aug 15, 2026 01:00:08 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
Your Doctor Gets 18 Minutes. Netflix Gets 1,095 Hours. This CEO Is Fixing The Gap Aug 12, 2026 00:52:36 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
Vibe Coding Your MVP Is a Time Bomb: AI Workflows for Founders Who Want to Ship Twice Aug 11, 2026 00:41:28 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
The $0 Fix That Makes Claude 10x Smarter For Your Business Aug 10, 2026 00:59:15 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%
Tokenomics Will Wreck Your Margins: The AI Model Routing Workflow That Cuts Spend 50% Jul 27, 2026 01:03:34 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?
Tokens Go to Zero, Energy Goes to Zero: What Do You Build When Intelligence Is Free? Jul 25, 2026 00:36:03 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
$7,500 AI Team Replacing an Entire Growth Department Jul 24, 2026 00:55:57 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
Your AI Agents Are Burning You Out: The Sustainable AI Workflows Founders Actually Need Jul 22, 2026 01:00:33 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

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