AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

aiforfounders.co
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated weekly

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.

  1. 9 hr ago

    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 hole that would change his life. Everyone thought he was insane. Lithium? In Cornwall? The county famous for pasties and Poldark? But Jeremy knew two things most people didn't: the energy transition was going to need staggering amounts of critical minerals, and the West had voluntarily handed its supply chains to China because digging in the dirt wasn't glamorous enough for Wall Street. Ten years later, Cornish Lithium employs 100 people, has raised institutional capital from the National Wealth Fund, TechMet, and EMG, and holds the patents on one of the only lithium extraction technologies on Earth that China does not own and cannot switch off. The company is reviving a brownfield china clay pit at Trelavour, mining land that has been worked for 275 years, going deeper into rock nobody else bothered to look at. Cornwall itself has been mining for 4,000 years. The Bronze Age started there. Now the AI age might too. This conversation covers the two-week near-collapse of the US auto industry, why President Trump is invoking the Defense Production Act for minerals, how a $200 drone made the $2 million tank obsolete, why Jeremy handed the CEO seat to oil and gas veteran Jamie Airnes while keeping his hands on the wheel as Executive Chairman, and the outdoor clothing store failure that taught him to stick to his knitting. Plus: why he thinks Elon gets his billion robots, and why every single one of them needs what comes out of the ground in Cornwall. https://cornishlithium.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremy-wrathall-ba7891b/ ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ _ #1 AI Founder Newsletter! - ⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠ Build your audience for life! - https://inboxalchemy.co/ If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job! - https://ainativestudent.com/ Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous! - https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd⁠ Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist! https://taelor.style/ Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent! - https://gethowdi.com/

    He Predicted the Lithium Boom in 2016. Everyone Called Him Crazy.

  2. 1 day ago

    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 creation is Lega.bot, the first autonomous AI soccer universe: more than 20 teams, thousands of agents, each player with its own DNA, playing real 90-minute matches with outcomes nobody controls. Not a video game. Not fantasy soccer. Not generated highlight clips. A living league that runs 24/7, forever, launching right after the World Cup ends and the four-year soccer depression sets in. Tal walks Ryan through how he manages seven-plus simultaneous ventures without losing the plot, why he shares developers across projects and throws "founder dating" parties so his portfolio teaches itself, and why he bootstrapped the entire thing rather than pitch investors a dream they could not see yet. He also drops the line of the episode: every big unsolved challenge in your project is hidden value your competitors have not discovered. If you are suffering, you are early. https://lega.bot/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/tal-melenboim/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ _ #1 AI Founder Newsletter! - ⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠ Build your audience for life! - https://inboxalchemy.co/ If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job! - https://ainativestudent.com/ Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous! - https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd⁠ Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist! https://taelor.style/ Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent! - https://gethowdi.com/

    Soccer League With ZERO Human Players

  3. 2 days ago

    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 monitoring platform that tracks every button, form field, and component on your site, learns how real humans (and bots) actually behave, then rewrites the experience to convert them. One early customer added $20K per week in revenue, a figure Eric shares on air. Cora's bigger bet, full adaptation, reshapes the entire visual site per visitor persona, and Eric says his statistical models point to a 24X lift on yearly revenue, converting 75 to 85% of visitors instead of the classic 3%. These are Cora's own numbers, and they are audacious on purpose. But the product is only half the episode. Eric is one of the most distinctive builders in the Denver AI scene, a fine arts grad turned interaction designer turned bootstrapped founder who writes his product requirements documents from his shower, phone in one hand, coffee somewhere nearby, kids ages two and four safely on the other side of the door. He ships edgy demos weekly, open sources his utilities, controls Claude with tonal frequencies for fun, and still insists the most important product skill in the AI era is saying no. The conversation runs from the early days of the AI Clubhouse meetup (ten people and warm PBR) to a group now drawing 100 to 150 attendees a week, from AI on college campuses to humanoid robots doing blue collar jobs within three years, per a founder friend of Eric's. And it lands on the take that gives this episode its spine: stop training AI to act human. Make AI more AI. Make robots more robot. https://getcora.io/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ecschneider/ ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ _ #1 AI Founder Newsletter! -> ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠ Build your audience for life! -> https://inboxalchemy.co/ If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job! -> https://ainativestudent.com/ Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous! -> https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist! -> https://taelor.style/ Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent! -> https://gethowdi.com/

    Stop Making AI Human: The Contrarian Take Every Founder Needs

  4. 8 Jul

    $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 ThinkTank, the structured collaboration platform that Big Four firms used to run client workshops. When Accenture acquired ThinkTank's assets in 2021, Tim spent about four years operating at the partner level inside one of the biggest consulting machines on Earth. And what he saw was a workflow begging to be rebuilt: humans designing engagements, humans facilitating, humans synthesizing, and one poor analyst up until 2 AM cobbling together the PowerPoint. So he built Clyde, which launched April 7, 2026 at meetclyde.com. Clyde is what Tim calls AI-native collaboration: a workspace where you bring a real problem, collaborate with a library of AI advisors that act like human experts, pull in actual human stakeholders, and walk out with an aligned outcome and a usable deliverable. Not a wrapper. Not a chatbot bolted onto a legacy whiteboard. A guided system that extracts your true intent, because as Tim puts it, 99% of users don't know what they don't know about prompting. The results are early but loud: 1,300 users in the first month on a pure product-led growth motion, a fast-follow release shipping in June with adaptive workflows, and a customer base that already includes third grade teachers walking away with McKinsey-level curriculum plans. Everyone's getting a raise. Thanks, Clyde. Ryan and Tim also go deep on the founder condition in 2026: the guilt of stepping away from your desk, scheduling dedicated slots for original thought because AI can't invent new information, developers mourning the flow state as they become project managers of agent fleets, raising with extreme caution in a VC landscape where a Series A is the new pre-seed, and why Tim's kids get zero screen time while their dad builds frontier AI. Plus: heavy metal drumming, Suno experiments with his daughter Chloe, why Lovable's Anton Osika is the founder Tim admires most, and a charity using pediatricians as a distribution network. ⁠⁠https://meetclyde.com ⁠⁠https://linkedin.com/in/timlidman ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠ https://inboxalchemy.co/ https://ainativestudent.com/

    $250K and 3 Months to Build What Used to Cost $2 Million and 18 Months

  5. 6 Jul

    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 both of their companies from build mode into go mode. Jason drops the concept that should be tattooed on every founder's forearm in 2026: built is not built to scale. Anyone can vibe code something that "works" in a single session now. Jason points to reports of vibe coders getting sued after losing company data through open-ended permissions, and he watches CEOs get star-gazed by AI demos, fire people AI cannot actually replace, then quietly rehire them. Kindling's answer is a governance layer: a way to let a client's internal Lovable and Claude Code tinkerers keep building while Kindling governs the builds it does not even touch. Operators first, then engineers. Jason claims his team has exited three companies at nine and ten figure outcomes, and that operating scar tissue is the product. Ryan, meanwhile, is in full sales dog mode. He restructured his entire week (calls only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, deep work on Monday, Wednesday, Friday) and promptly signed two newsletter sponsorship deals in one week: Momentous, the NSF Certified supplement company behind the grass-fed whey and creatine he already takes daily, and Taelor, the AI-plus-human-stylist menswear rental subscription that is about to give him a dramatic before-and-after wardrobe glow-up, per his daughter's demands. And the whole thing wraps with the two of them planning a Denver panel with Gabe Anderson and ID345's Danny Newman that may or may not end in a staged WWE brawl. Leopard Speedo has been threatened. https://kindlingsolutions.comhttps://taelor.stylehttps://www.livemomentous.comhttps://aiforfounders.cohttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonkatz99/https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/

    What It Do: The 90% Rule - Why Finishing Is the Least Fun Part of Building Anything

  6. 6 Jul

    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 Holdings Corporation, publicly traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker AIAI since May 14, 2026. The model is deliciously simple to say and brutally hard to copy: buy real operating companies with real revenue and real EBITDA, retain the management teams, and deploy what Todd describes as Nobel-nominated Transformational AI to create new products, amplify earnings, and redefine what the business can become. No pilots. No rip and replace. No layoff bloodbath. Todd says nearly a billion dollars of EBITDA is sitting in the acquisition pipeline, and here's the kicker: AI Squared didn't cold-call a single one of those companies. They all came knocking.In this conversation, Todd pulls back the curtain on why he listed in Dallas instead of New York, why a direct public offering democratizes AI upside for retail investors, why the scariest businesses are the best businesses, and why 600 years of economic history says the AI jobs panic has it exactly backwards. He also explains how behavioral psychometrics turned a construction company's bid estimator into a weapon, and why he told his kids the liberal arts just became the most valuable degree on campus.https://aiaiholdings.comhttps://skullgames.orghttps://aiforfounders.cohttps://inboxalchemy.co

    He Buys Companies, Keeps Every Employee, Then Deploys Nobel-Nominated AI

  7. 25 Jun

    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 spent a career standing at the exact moment technology flips from impossible to inevitable. He was in the Apple atrium when Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone and watched the room's jaws hit the floor. He helped Reliance Jio connect 18,000 villages and vault India from 150th in the world for broadband penetration to first in a matter of months. Now he is pointing that same instinct at the most broken machine in America: healthcare. What makes this conversation land is that Gaurav refuses the easy framing. AI is not good or evil in healthcare, he argues. It is a mirror. Point it at margin and you get claim denials at machine speed. Point it at the member and you get a 24/7 companion that answers "why was my claim denied" in plain language, a copilot whispering the right answer into a service agent's ear so they can drop the robotic script and actually be human, and a roadmap that arrives in months instead of years. At Collective Health, the rule is blunt: every AI decision starts from "how does the customer benefit." If it also saves money, that is icing on the cake, never the recipe. The episode gets personal, and that is where it earns its rating. Gaurav's mother fell ill after moving to the US. The best healthcare system in the world, the one he trusted, failed her. He flew her back to India for care. She is no longer with us. That loss is the engine behind his work, and you can hear it. For founders, the practical payload is just as sharp: the benefits trap that springs the moment you hire your tenth person, the places AI absolutely should not go (claim rejections still pass through human eyes, every time), and how a lean team of around 210 engineers compresses an 18-to-24-month roadmap into six. https://collectivehealth.com https://aiforfounders.co https://inboxalchemy.co

  8. 25 Jun

    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 that takes a single spoken idea and turns it into finished video, social posts, and carousels, all before he sits down at a computer. The genius is not the automation. Plenty of people automate. The genius is that the output sounds exactly like Jason, because the system is engineered around authenticity instead of around shortcuts. Here is the part that should make every founder lean in. Jason does not let the AI write his ideas. He lets the AI interview him. He talks into his phone in the backyard with a coffee, an interviewer agent trained on the tactics of Joe Rogan, Oprah Winfrey, and Howard Stern pulls his real takes out of him across ten to twelve questions, and only then does the structuring begin. The words are his. The machine just gives them shape. As he puts it, the context truly does half the work, and that is the line nobody is saying out loud. Meanwhile Ryan turns the conversation into a masterclass on performance itself. After more than a thousand podcasts, he has reduced great content to a few unglamorous truths: sleep and caffeine are the real production stack, clarity beats cleverness, lead with a current event so your guest can find their feet, and tell yourself to speak ten percent slower so the ums take care of themselves. It is the kind of advice that sounds obvious until you realize almost nobody actually does it. Both threads land on the same destination. First-time founders obsess over product. Second-time founders obsess over distribution. Jason and Ryan are both, by their own admission, finally crossing that line, moving from "what is this business" to "let the world know what is up." The episode is the sound of two operators getting comfortable being the face of the thing they built. ⁠⁠https://kindlingsolutions.com ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co ⁠⁠https://linkedin.com/in/jasonkatz99/ ⁠⁠https://linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠

    What It Do: First-Time Founders Build Product. He Built a Distribution Robot.
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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.

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