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
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 Doctor (And 150 Fortune 500s Are Buying)
Your blood pressure spikes the moment the cuff goes on. You are sitting on crinkly paper in a cold room, and the number on the screen has almost nothing to do with the life you actually live. This is the white coat problem, and it is a tidy little metaphor for everything broken about reactive healthcare: we measure people at the exact wrong moment, in the exact wrong place, and then we wonder why
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
Legal AI: Why Lawyers Are Finally Free to Think
Devansh walked into the legal tech market and saw a graveyard of point solutions. Word doc plugins. Document hosting tools. Niche contract reviewers. Each one promising to make attorneys more efficient, and each one adding another tab to an already fragmented workflow.That is the problem Irys was built to eliminate.Devansh, co-founder of Irys and creator of the AI Made Simple newsletter, reaching
Neuro Spiritual Sovereignty - 10 Years and Zero Shortcuts
Most founders obsess over the wrong leverage point.Not the funnel. Not the product. Not the team. The voice in your head running all three.Dr. Dhruva Gulur grew up in Juneau, Alaska, the child of a schizophrenic mother, a father with full narcissistic personality disorder, and a brother struggling silently with addiction. He watched his family fracture in real time and absorbed it all without lang
Podcast DJ: The Cliff Notes for Your Podcast Queue
Most founders aren't short on information. They're short on signal. Kevin, founder and CEO of Snipd, has been quietly solving the problem that every high-volume podcast listener knows intimately: you have hundreds of episodes queued up, a finite amount of attention, and no good way to extract the gold without siting through the banter.In this return visit, Kevin pulls back the curtain on S
Peptides, and the Future of Human Performance
Dr. Ian Ellis, Founder of voafit.com | Precision Dosing, Peptides, and the Future of Human PerformanceThe story starts in an emergency room. Dr. Ian Ellis spent almost a decade watching the same patients cycle through with the same problems, receiving the same treatments, never actually getting better. Just bailing out the pool, he says. That disillusionment became the seed of something bigger.Whe
IRL Events Are the New Moat
★★★★★You can automate your outreach. You can spin up agents overnight. But you cannot automate the moment someone walks into a room and feels seen.Virginia Frischkorn has produced several hundred million dollars worth of live events across 18 years. She is the founder of Partytrick, a platform she describes as having a professional event planner in your pocket. Her user is not the professional eve
The Behavioral Health Crisis Is a Data Problem
The average patient gets seen and disappears. No signal, no follow-up, no data trail. Just a receipt and a co-pay. Lauren Larson, CEO of Videra Health, knows exactly what lives in that gap, and he has spent six years building AI to close it.Lauren came up through HireVue, where video-based AI interviewed 100 million job candidates and surfaced the best ones through behavioral signal, not resume ga
The AI Analyst That Never Sleeps: Burak Karakan of Bruin
Say Hello to Your AI Data Analyst: How Bruin Is Replacing Headcount, Not Just DashboardsThere is a question Burak Karakan wants every founder to ask themselves right now: Do you know where your agents are?Burak is the co-founder of Bruin, an AI data analyst that connects directly to your data warehouse and answers any question in under 90 seconds, right inside Slack, Microsoft Teams, or a clean we
Delightful Procurement: The CFO That Never Sleeps - Alex Yakubovich from Levelpath
Procurement Is Not Boring. It's Just Broken.There is a word that kills deals before they start. A word that makes investors yawn, makes journalists skip the story, and makes founders steer away from the category entirely. That word is procurement.Alex Yakubovich has spent his entire career proving that instinct wrong. As co-founder and CEO of Levelpath, and previously co-founder and CEO of Sco
Your API Keys Are Killing Your Productivity: Mitchell Jones of Lava.so
Mitchell Jones did not set out to build a payments company. He set out to solve a problem he could not stop running into: brilliant people paralyzed by plumbing. The API keys, the secret credentials, the subscription walls, the context switches. Every one of those friction points is a tax on thinking, and Mitchell decided the tax was too high.Lava is his answer. At its core, it is an AI gateway th
The New SEO Is Happening Without You
The theme of Q1 2026 is "I feel behind." Every founder, from the scrappy solo operator to the venture-backed exec, is feeling the same anxiety. Site traffic is dropping. AI chatbots are answering questions that used to send customers to your website. And the brands that wait to figure this out are not just losing clicks. They are losing the narrative.Justin Inman spent nearly a decade at
Enterprise AI for $20 a Month
The dream of AI that actually knows your business has been haunted by two enemies since day one: hallucinations and speed. Everyone building on top of large language models has accepted these as the cost of doing business. Ankit Dheendsa, CTO of Morphos.ai, decided not to.Ankit came on to build something that most of the industry had already written off as impossible: a vectorization engine that d
The B2G Playbook Nobody Talks About (And It's Printing Money)
Most founders spend their careers chasing customers who are already convinced. Nick Lopez spent his learning to find customers who don't even know they need you yet, in a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars that most of the startup world has never touched.Nick is the co-founder and CEO of Prosal, a capture intelligence platform built for federal defense contractors. But before you wri
Do you know where your AI agents are?
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐There is a moment every founder hits. You have spun up agents, handed them access to your systems, pointed them at your data, and watched them go. It feels like progress. It feels like leverage. And then someone asks you a simple question: do you know what your agents are doing right now?The honest answer, for most teams, is no.Jasson Casey has spent years thinking about the gap between the s
AI booked 650 meetings, and almost got a date
There is a moment in every founder's journey where they realize the bottleneck in their pipeline is not their product, not their pricing, and not their pitch. It is time. Specifically, the time between when a prospect raises their hand and when someone, or something, responds.Will Del Principe discovered this the hard way. At 16, he was a solar sales rep dialing through a list of thousands of
Built a $50M+ AI Support Empire by Owning the Edges
Guest: David Karandish, CEO and Co-Founder of Capacity.comIn December 2016, the top-selling product on Amazon was not a toy, a book, or a video game. It was Amazon's Alexa. For most people, that was a holiday novelty. For David Karandish, it was a starting gun.David had just finished one of the most successful runs in the history of vertical search. He built Announced Media, acquired answers.c
From idea to iPhone app
There is a moment in every founder's journey where they realize the map they were given was wrong. The old map said: have an idea, find a developer, wait months, launch, iterate. David Alonso, co-founder of Bloom and ETH Zurich robotics graduate turned mobile app revolutionary, is handing founders a new map. One where the distance between idea and working product is measured in minutes, not mo
When IQ becomes a commodity
Jesse Marble did not set out to build a typical VC firm. Growing up steeped in Colorado culture, watching people chase outdoor adventure, physical health, and something resembling a meaningful life, he kept noticing a gap. We have more technology in our pockets than it took to land Americans on the moon. And yet, by almost every subjective measure, people are not thriving more. They are thriving l
The soft skill crisis costing healthcare billions
There's a moment in every founder's journey where the market stops being theoretical and becomes deeply personal. For Lucas Consoli, co-founder of EmpathEQ, that moment happened in a hospital room, watching his mother in an induced coma for two weeks, his emotional state entirely at the mercy of whichever nurse happened to be on shift. Some had zero empathy. Some brought calm into chaos. T
Medical tourism is a $100B industry
When the Market Is a WhatsApp Group, That's Your OpportunitySome of the best startup ideas don't come from pitch decks. They come from watching thousands of people make high-stakes decisions inside a Facebook group, realizing there is no trusted infrastructure, and deciding to build it yourself.That's exactly what Francesco Hayes did. As co-founder and CTO of Luxxera, he spotted one of
AI didn't take your job. It froze the hiring line. Here's what that means.
There is a certain kind of founder who, after building and exiting a company, does not slow down. They just get quieter about it. Colin McIntosh is that founder. He sold Sheets and Giggles, the irreverently named sustainable bedding brand he bootstrapped into a multi-million dollar e-commerce operation, and then he did what most founders say they will do and almost never do: he kept building, but
Will VC destroy your startup?
There's a place in Denver, inside a buzzing AI builder clubhouse, where the future gets stress-tested out loud every Wednesday night. That's where this conversation happened, and it did not go the direction you'd expect.Carson Vest is an investment associate at Denver Ventures, a generalist fund covering pre-seed all the way to Series B. She sees everything. Hundreds of founders, hundr
Searchable personal memory, now
Josh Gilmer on AI video journaling, founder self-awareness, searchable memory, and the future of personal growthMost founders say they want self-awareness.What they usually mean is they want a cleaner notes app.In this episode of AI for Founders, Ryan Estes sits down with Josh Gilmer, founder of Historic, to explore a wild and increasingly relevant idea: what if the most valuable founder data is n
Speed is killing AI startups
This conversation starts with a blunt idea: most AI companies are moving fast enough to impress people, but not carefully enough to survive themselves. What looks like momentum from the outside can be chaos on the inside, and James Everingham makes the case that the next real layer of AI infrastructure will not be another flashy model. It will be the systems that govern, audit, orchestrate, and pr
The uncanny valley is real
Ryan opens with a founder gut check. Scale sounds sexy, but control is the real addiction. Then Marcin walks in with a real world mirror, because warehouses do not care about your pitch deck, and robots do not care about your assumptions.Sevensense builds the “eyes and brains” for mobile robots, not the whole robot. The story starts in the ETH Zurich ecosystem where robotics talent is dense, labor
Social media is killing your memories
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: social media isn’t preserving your memories. It’s strip-mining their meaning.We built trillion-dollar machines so strangers can watch us live… while the people who were actually there are already scrolling past it.Founders obsess over growth, distribution, scale. Reach. Impressions. Virality.But what if the most valuable product isn’t reach?It’s recall.You host a re
Congrats on the revenue. Sorry about your money.
Most founders are accidentally running a casino.Not a company.They’re bragging about ROAS, celebrating revenue spikes, and somehow… still bleeding cash.Because if you don’t know how much you should be spending, “ads” isn’t a strategy.It’s gambling with better graphics.Here’s the real conflict.AI is about to flood the world with “growth tools” that promise the moon, but they still can’t ask the rig
She exited in 18 months, then walked away to find stillness
If stillness is the source of your best decisions, why is your calendar built like it is trying to kill it?Be honest.When was the last time your biggest breakthrough happened in a meeting?Not a brainstorm. Not a sprint. Not a Slack war.I’m talking about the idea that actually changed your trajectory. The hire you finally understood. The product pivot that suddenly made sense.It probably happened i
AI is quietly stealing your life’s work
What if the most valuable asset in your company isn’t your tech stack, your team, or even your brandWhat if it’s the quiet archive sitting on your laptopIn this episode of AI for Founders, Ryan sits down with Dr. Jonathan Schaffer, a 40-year AI pioneer, professor, and now founder of a privacy-first AI platform called Kind. What unfolds is not just a product conversation. It is a philosophical reck
Stop building. Do this first.
Your startup idea is probably garbage.Not because you are dumb.Because you are in love.And love makes you build… a product nobody wants.Here’s the controversial take: If you cannot survive 10 uncomfortable customer conversations, you do not deserve to write a single line of code.Because validation is not “vibes.” It is evidence. It is bruises. It is getting told “no” until your ego stops bleeding
Most founders pick the wrong tools
Most founders don’t have a software problem… they have a decision problem.We spend weeks “researching” tools, comparing top 10 lists, reading reviews written by people who’ve never run payroll, never closed a deal, never felt the pressure of making the wrong call. Meanwhile, your team is stuck. Momentum dies. And you call it due diligence.Here’s the tension: choosing a restaurant takes five minute
The Algorithm lied to you about music
AI music companies are treating creativity like disposable garbage, and they’re about to hit a wall so hard it sparks the next artistic renaissance.Hot take: Generative AI didn’t democratize music, it cheapened it.Because when anything can make a trillion songs a second, the algorithm stops rewarding artists and starts rewarding… sludge.Here’s the tension.The stats say AI music is everywhere.But c
Are you building a team of AI passengers coasting toward irrelevance?
"Stop hiring AI passengers, they're dead weight. If your team says 'this is what AI thinks,' fire them. Here's why..."Two billion people use AI every day, but they won't pay a dime for it. That means enterprise has to foot the entire bill, and right now, they're hemorrhaging cash on $30/month seats that nobody's actually using. The brutal truth? CEOs spend a y
Everyone is building AI wrong
The best AI companies won't use LLMs. Here's why most founders are building the wrong thing...Everyone's chasing ChatGPT wrappers while the real money is buried inside boring businesses making $100M a year. Cabinet factories. Paint mixers. Ball-bearing manufacturers. They're sitting on decades of proprietary data, proprietary SOPs, chemical formulas, machine configurations, and nob
AI music to heal relationships
Hot take: AI isn’t killing creativity, it’s exposing how emotionally lazy founders have become.Because most people use AI to move faster, not to feel deeper. AI can either make you more human… or quietly turn you into a productivity zombie who panics when the tools shut off.Then I met Ziah Orion from Deep Gem Interactive.And instead of talking dashboards and prompts, we went somewhere unexpected.H
He built a $1M SaaS alone
College didn’t get expensive. It got unnecessary for anyone who wants to make real money in the next 10 years.Because the future isn’t “learn more.” It’s learn fast, get licensed, get paid.America has about 700,000 registered apprentices. That’s roughly 0.4% of the workforce. Basically… nobody.Meanwhile we’ve got over a million electrician jobs open, licensed workers retiring, and data centers suc
I already know you hate taxes
Business owners, I already know you hate taxes.Not the “ugh, paperwork” kind of hate. I mean the kind of hate where you’d rather get dental work at a gas station than explain your P&L.And here’s the part that should scare you a little: taxes aren’t just expensive. They’re sneaky. Most founders don’t overpay on purpose.They overpay because they’re too busy.And even worse, half of you are sittin
Doctors aren’t the problem
Hot take: Healthcare doesn’t have a diagnosis problem. It has a time problem. And that time problem is quietly ruining lives.Most patients get 13 minutes with a doctor. That’s barely enough time to describe symptoms, let alone find the real cause. So you get pills, not answers. Not because doctors don’t care, but because the system doesn’t allow them to.Haresh Patel learned this the hard way. He s
Why your ‘Great Idea’ Is quietly killing your startup
You know that moment when your “vibe coded MVP” finally gets users… and then it starts breaking in ways you can’t even explain?That’s where Mike Vitez shows up.Mike’s a computer scientist who was doing machine learning and building his own big data and clustering algorithms before AI was cool. Then he launched a software company straight out of school, watched the industry evolve from “just ship c
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