AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

aiforfounders.co
  • 5.0 (48)
  • 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. AI Heart Doctor (And 150 Fortune 500s Are Buying)

    9h ago

    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 outcomes lag. Amir from Hello Heart spends his days inside that gap. Hello Heart is a preventive heart health platform built around a connected blood pressure monitor, a smart pill box, and a mobile app, and it is trusted by more than 150 Fortune 500 and government employers. The newest piece is Nia, which the company launched in October 2025 as the world's first AI heart health assistant. This episode is the rare founder conversation that hands you the blueprint instead of the brochure. If you are building vertical AI, health tech, or any agent where a wrong answer carries real consequences, this is the one to study. The throughline is trust. Amir keeps returning to a simple idea: humans were never meant to be the data layer. The job of AI here is not to replace the doctor. It is to absorb the 90% of a visit that is administrative friction so the 2% that is actually human, the fear, the reassurance, the "how does this fit your life," can finally breathe. He calls it the shift from reactive to preventive, and he is blunt that the only way to earn it is to build guardrails most teams skip. https://www.helloheart.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/amir-dolev-b5618421/ https://www.helloheart.com/press/hello-heart-launches-the-worlds-first-ai-heart-health-assistant-nia https://ainativestudent.com ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠ https://inboxalchemy.co/

    55 min
  2. The Self-Driving Car Of Men's Fashion

    3d ago

    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 he is Head of AI at Taelor, the AI-powered menswear rental subscription founded by Anya Cheng and Phoebe Tan. The premise is simple and a little radical: most men do not have the time, the skills, or the desire to shop, yet they still want the outcome of looking sharp. So Taelor sends you a box, you wear it, you keep what hits, you mail back the rest, and no one ever folds laundry or guesses at the mall again. Underneath the box is the hard part. Zoher calls it the matching problem. Picture Ryan, 30,000 pieces of inventory, and the question "which six go in the box." Basic rules thin the herd, no wrong sizes, no shirts you would hate. After that, you need to capture something almost nobody can write down: why a person on the street simply looks put together. Ask a great stylist to explain the rule and they cannot, the same way a driver cannot list every reason they tap the brake. Taelor's job is to bottle that instinct and run it at scale, with human stylists in the loop and the machine learning from every piece of feedback. The twist that should make founders sit up is the second business hiding inside the first. Every rental generates a signal about what real men actually like on real bodies in real contexts. Brands today buy on gut, betting that yellow is big this year. Taelor is building the feedback layer that turns a B2C rental into a B2B data product for the brands themselves, with sustainability as the upside, since roughly 30% of clothing reportedly reaches the landfill never having been worn. This one is for the founder who spent on the camera and the mic and still shows up in a college shirt. Your product may be great. In the first ten seconds, you are the product. https://taelor.style/ https://taelor.style/pages/membership https://www.linkedin.com/in/zzkaru/ ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠ https://inboxalchemy.co/ https://ainativestudent.com/

    44 min
  3. 40,000 Models, One API Key, And A $25M Bet On Open Source

    5d ago

    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 across a seed and a Series A led by AMD Ventures and Airbus Ventures, and a platform that holds tens of thousands of open models online at once through a single API key. The throughline is freedom. Eugene's grandmother speaks seven languages and none of them are English or Chinese, which is roughly half the planet that the closed, English-and-Chinese-first future would leave behind. Open source, he argues, is not just free as in money. It is free as in freedom: when the model runs on your terms, nobody can ever take it away from you. He walks through why the database wars of the past, Oracle and Microsoft and IBM, then MySQL and Postgres, are replaying in AI at ten times the speed, why "lazy" models are really just a mirror of us, and why the labs chasing superintelligence may be solving the wrong problem while businesses quietly beg for one thing: reliability. ⁠⁠https://www.featherless.ai⁠⁠https://www.x.com/picocreator (Eugene on X)⁠⁠https://www.techtalkcto.substack.com (his Substack, Tech Talk CTO)⁠⁠https://www.wiki.rwkv.com (RWKV, Linux Foundation) ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠ https://inboxalchemy.co/ https://ainativestudent.com/

    1h 2m
  4. He Analyzed Millions of Calls. The Move That Closed Deals Was a Laugh.

    6d ago

    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, pointed a team of machine learning engineers at the data, and found something nobody scripted for. The single strongest predictor of a signed lease was not the special, not the square footage, not a scarcity tactic. It was whether the leasing agent laughed on the phone. The second strongest was whether they asked a genuinely curious question. So Grotto AI did the counterintuitive thing. While most of the industry raced to replace humans with voice agents, Grotto built a tool to make humans better at the one thing only humans can do: build rapport. A leasing agent gets a push notification fifteen minutes before a tour telling them the prospect has a dog named Fido, loves natural light, and drives a Subaru. They record the tour on a small clip-on mic, get instant feedback on what they crushed and what they missed, and Grotto drafts the personalized follow-up, catches the special they forgot to mention, and quietly does the CRM grunt work. Nick calls it targeted advertising for the real world. Ryan called it a second brain for the field. Both are right. This episode is the clearest case study going for vertical AI: pick one painful, measurable leak, capture data nobody else has, and sell revenue instead of cost cuts. https://grotto.ai https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-deveau-a6241379/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ https://aiforfounders.co https://inboxalchemy.co https://robinhood.org

    54 min
  5. AI Law Firm: The Logan Brown Playbook

    6d ago

    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 into the Douglas County District Attorney's office in Lawrence, Kansas at twelve years old and asked for a job. A secretary named Dolores made her a personal intern, and Logan spent her summers filing, dusting, and sitting in on hearings she had no business sitting in on. Vanderbilt valedictorian. Harvard Law. A machine-washable pantsuit company called Spencer Jane that she still runs out of her parents' basement. Two and a half years at Cooley billing $900 an hour to the founders she could not stop admiring. And then, when she watched ChatGPT and Claude crack open legal work, she did the unthinkable: she left to build the thing that competes with the very rates she used to charge. Soxton is an AI-powered outside general counsel for early-stage companies. You make a request on the site in plain English, AI takes the first pass, a startup lawyer with real experience reviews every single output, and you get your document back in 24 hours for $100. Form a Delaware C Corp for free through a banking partner. Get your influencer or advisor agreement papered for a hundred bucks. Run a priced round for $10,000 instead of the $50,000 to $100,000 Big Law charges. Logan is blunt about who she is fighting: her competition is not Cooley, it is Claude and ChatGPT, and her edge is the human in the loop plus the market data from thousands of deals that tells you when a provision is one you should never sign. This one is for the founder who keeps saying "I'll deal with legal later." Later just got a lot cheaper. https://www.soxton.ai/ https://x.com/loganbrown799 https://www.linkedin.com/in/logan-brown-03765552 ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠ https://inboxalchemy.co/ https://ainativestudent.com/

    56 min
  6. America Spends $5 Trillion On Health. This Is Where It Leaks.

    Jun 13

    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. Patients lose their patience before they ever lose their health, and the industry has spent years selling a false binary: hire more humans who burn out, or unleash bots that collapse the moment a call actually matters. Frederik Mueller, Timm Schneider, and their team built Third Way Health on a different premise. Pair AI agents with embedded human operators, let the machines crush the repetitive volume, and free real people for the conversations that need a heartbeat. The company started before ChatGPT made AI a dinner-table word, which is why the name carries a double meaning: there was always a third way between low-tech service vendors and high-friction software, and there is now a third way between full automation and full staffing. Jamie Reddick, COO of Graybill Medical Group, lived the payoff. Over a two-year partnership, North San Diego County's largest independent multi-specialty group cut front-office costs by roughly $3 million, about 50%, while making patients feel less like a ticket number and more like a person. This episode is a clinic on building in a broken market without pretending the brokenness will disappear if you throw enough technology at it. https://thirdway.health https://www.linkedin.com/in/frederik-mueller-53198a17/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/timm-schneider-463a2683/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-reddick-586691249/ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/healthcare-ops-wave/id1774334723 https://aiforfounders.co https://inboxalchemy.co https://ainativestudent.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/

    57 min
  7. "We're AI-First!" No You're Not. Here's the Test.

    Jun 12

    "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 IBM and MetaLab (where his teams built products for Uber and Amazon and helped design Slack), Justin realized the hardest part of every technology project is never the technology. It's the humans. Every business challenge is a human challenge wearing a software costume. Switchboard works with mid-market companies, the $50 million to $500 million crowd, the businesses old enough to have 40 years of legacy process and young enough to actually change. These companies think they're AI-enabled because they bought everyone a Claude license. Meanwhile, month-end close runs through one person's spreadsheet that nobody else can read, and if that person quits, the business forgets how it works. Justin's fix is unglamorous and devastatingly effective: map the real workflow, not the org-chart version. Find where humans are doing machine work. Inject AI at the steps where it actually moves the needle. Keep humans in the loop everywhere else. The result isn't layoffs, it's smart people finally doing smart work. In Justin's experience, less than 5% of leadership conversations are about cutting headcount. The conversation is always about the endless pile of work standing between the company and its goals. Along the way, Ryan and Justin cover the AI washing epidemic (blaming layoffs on AI to cover up old hiring mistakes), why frontier lab doom marketing blew up in everyone's faces, the death of "bring your whole self to work," quiet quitting as cowardice, Garth Brooks selling his catalog for a rumored $2 billion, ravens that speak English, and the most surreal government website in existence. https://withswitchboard.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/wattjustin/https://aiforfounders.cohttps://inboxalchemy.cohttps://spcai.orghttps://www.war.gov/ufo (referenced as war.gov/ufo)https://suno.com (Suno, the AI music generator discussed)

    56 min
  8. Agent Memory Is the Next Great Moat

    Jun 12

    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, and its founder is Elon Salfati. Yes, Elon. No, not that one. This Elon is a former Israeli intelligence engineer, ex R&D Director at web security firm Reblaze, co-founder of RELE.AI, founder of intelligent testing startup Metiss, and now a PhD researcher in AI security. He has spent his career deleting more code than he writes, and now he is deleting org charts. The episode opens with a ripped-from-the-headlines jump off: Microsoft's Build 2026 announcement of Autopilots, always-on agents with their own identity that act on your behalf. Ryan asks the uncomfortable question: if 10,000 enterprises flip on the same agents, does diversity of thought dissolve into a hive mind? Elon's answer reframes the whole AI transformation conversation. Most companies are stuck sprinkling AI to please the board or deploying point solutions on annoying spreadsheets. The real unlock is flipping the entire model from "a human with an army of agents" to "an army of agents with a human." From there the conversation gets practical, then philosophical, then back again. Elon walks through a real client engagement: a service marketplace with a 51-step quote-to-cash process bleeding retention, and how color coding every step revealed exactly where humans add value and where they were just hands on keyboard. Then Ryan, a lifelong meditator and self-described student of human consciousness, pulls Elon into the deep end: what does it mean that Salfati Group calls its agents sentient? Elon's answer centers on memory, causality, and temporal understanding, and why he believes agent memory is the next great moat. Plants, cats, the Library of Alexandria, and Mr. Bridgewater the Denver farrier all make appearances. It is that kind of episode. salfati.groupaiforfounders.coinboxalchemy.coElon Salfati on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/elonsalfatiRyan Estes on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/estesryan

    47 min
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5
out of 5
48 Ratings

About

AI for Founders is where 47,000+ founders learn to build and scale with AI. Hosted by Ryan Estes, a Denver investor, creator, and founder, the show breaks down real strategies from top operators and AI visionaries. AI-ready data, zero-dependency workflows, founder-led distribution, and the tools 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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