AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

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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.

  1. Will VC destroy your startup?

    1 DAY AGO

    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, hundreds of pitches, hundreds of ideas competing for the same finite pool of attention and capital. And yet the most radical thing she said had nothing to do with a hot deal. It was this: you might not need us. That single idea runs like a thread through this entire conversation, pulling at the assumptions most founders carry into every investor meeting without even realizing it. The Frameworks You Need to Steal The Founder DNA Thesis: Why the person always comes before the product Denver Ventures bets on founders first, especially at pre-seed and seedPrior company experience, big tech background, or deep channel relationships signal real distribution potentialIf you can't sell the vision to an investor in a casual conversation, how will you sell it to a team, a customer, or a market?The Distribution Co-Founder Gap: The missing piece on most cap tables Most founders plan to hire for distribution after raising, but bringing that person in as a co-founder from day one dramatically increases investabilityThe strongest founding teams Carson sees came up together, school friends, former colleagues, people who already trust each other under pressureDistribution is not a marketing problem. It is a survival problem.The Moat Has Moved: Why code is no longer defensible An MVP that cost $320,000 and 18 months in 2022 now costs $20 and a weekIf your only edge is the technology, someone with a Claude account can clone you by FridayThe new moats: proprietary data, founder network, channel relationships, and obsessive domain expertiseThe VC Gut Check: The question every founder should answer honestly Carson asks founders point blank: why do you actually want VC money?Many founders admit they just assumed it was the next stepBootstrapping to $500k or even $1M ARR may give you more leverage, more equity, and more freedom than a seed round ever couldThe Retention Signal VCs Actually Watch High AI margins look great on paper, but paradoxically can signal low usageInvestors want to see high inference costs because that means users are actually on your platformRetention is the metric that separates a product people want from a product people try once and forgetThe Agentic Shift: Where the smart money is moving post-ChatGPT The infrastructure layer, models, GPUs, wrappers, is maturingThe next wave is workflow automation and vertical AI that disappears into the backgroundThe winner is not the best chatbot. It is the tool that makes the task vanish entirely. https://denverventures.co/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/carson-janae-vest/ ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠ ⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠ ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠

    1 hr
  2. Searchable personal memory, now

    1 DAY AGO

    Searchable personal memory, now

    Josh Gilmer on AI video journaling, founder self-awareness, searchable memory, and the future of personal growth Most 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 not in your CRM, your calendar, or your analytics dashboard, but in the raw, unfiltered way you talk when nobody is grading the performance? Josh argues that handwritten journaling and polished note-taking often miss the point. By the time a thought hits the page, it has already been edited, softened, and made presentable. Historic takes the opposite path. It uses video journaling plus AI to capture tone, posture, energy, hesitation, and emotional context, then turns that into searchable, structured memory. The conversation starts with founder productivity and quickly opens into something bigger: burnout detection, AI coaching, parenting, second brains, the future of memory, and whether technology will help humans reconnect or just become even more insulated. This one is for founders building hard, thinking fast, and wondering whether the biggest blind spot in the company might be the person running it. What you’ll learn Why written journaling often captures polished thoughts instead of real thoughts How video journaling can reveal emotional and cognitive patterns text misses Why searchable personal memory may become a founder advantage How AI could eventually detect burnout, mood shifts, and recurring decision patterns Why productivity might shift from doing more to remembering better How Historic is being built and positioned for founder adoption Why Josh believes AI should strengthen human relationships, not replace them https://historic.app/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuagilmer/ ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠ ⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠ ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠

    47 min
  3. Speed is killing AI startups

    6 DAYS AGO

    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 preserve what those models and agents actually do. From there, the story widens. James pulls from years inside Meta, where he worked on developer infrastructure and saw firsthand what happens when agentic systems start touching real enterprise environments. The lesson was not that agents are weak. It was that they are powerful enough to require governance, access controls, traceability, and compliance like any serious employee or internal system. The conversation then moves into a bigger historical frame. Browsers, spreadsheets, infrastructure shifts, platform wars, and the collapse in the cost of intelligence all become part of the lens. James argues that we are not just watching better tools arrive. We are watching corporate infrastructure reorganize around agents, much like the internet reorganized business around the browser. The winners may not be the companies with the loudest demos, but the ones that can make their systems stable, reusable, secure, and multiplayer. It also gets personal. James talks about building again after a successful career, the difference between burnout and lack of inspiration, why network matters more than people admit, and why founders should not start companies just to start companies. They should wait for the idea they cannot ignore. https://guild.ai https://www.linkedin.com/in/jevering/ ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠ ⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠ ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠

    55 min
  4. The uncanny valley is real

    5 MAR

    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 is expensive, and the only way to win is to build high-value systems that actually work outside the lab. Marcin explains how early industrial robots were basically obedient roombas with a job title, rigid paths, brittle behavior, and zero ability to handle a changing environment. Then the thesis lands. Vision-based navigation uses natural features, so you do not need QR codes on the floor, magnetic tape, or a warehouse redesigned around your machine. Instead, you give a robot something closer to human perception, cameras, inertial sensing, wheel and leg signals, and enough compute to reason about space. The result is not just navigation. It is adaptability. The conversation expands into the social layer. Robots need to communicate intent so humans trust them. Lights, sounds, turn signals, speed indicators. And robots need to understand humans as humans, not as just another obstacle. Predict motion. Yield. Negotiate the sidewalk dance. The future of robotics is not only engineering. It is manners. Marcin’s founder journey is a deep tech reality check. Early money gets wasted on cool R&D nobody needs. The breakthrough comes from a gritty commercial project, autonomous cleaning machines that forced them to ship systems that worked for non-roboticists, with real customers and real consequences. That pain becomes the advantage. Robustness becomes the moat. https://sevensense.ai https://www.dymczyk.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/dymczyk/ ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠ ⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠ ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠

    54 min
  5. Social media is killing your memories

    2 MAR

    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 retreat for your top 50 customers. Magic happens. Voice notes at midnight. Inside jokes. Breakthrough conversations.Two weeks later? Buried in camera rolls. Lost in Slack threads. Emotion turned into data exhaust. What if there was a product that automatically stitched those fragments into a shared living story?Not for the algorithm. For the tribe. Because here’s the conflict: attention is rented. Memory is owned. In a world optimized for attention… are you building something that deepens connection — or just consumes it? That’s the deep question. Welcome to AI for Founders, I’m Ryan Estes. And today you’ll learn how Oleg is rethinking memory itself — building technology that turns scattered moments into structured meaning. This is for founders who care about product psychology, community retention, and designing experiences people actually remember. If you’re building in AI, you need signal, not noise.Go to aiforfounders.co.That’s aiforfounders.co — where ambitious builders sharpen their edge. If this episode sparked something, leave a review like you’re time-stamping a moment that mattered. And if you’re a founder with a story worth remembering, go to Kitcaster.com. Kitcaster is the premier podcast booking agency for high-growth companies. They don’t just book interviews. They position you as the authority in your space and turn conversations into customers. Kitcaster.com. Be heard. https://www.linkedin.com/in/oleggolynker/ https://www.trueli.me/ https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Unicorn-Founder-Obsession-Chasing/ ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠ ⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠ ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠

    44 min
  6. Congrats on the revenue. Sorry about your money.

    28 FEB

    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 right questions.AI can do the math.It just can’t build the equation. So here’s the deep question.If your business is growing, but you can’t explain why you’re not making money, are you building a company… or a very expensive coping mechanism? Welcome to AI for Founders, I’m Ryan Estes.This is for founders building with AI, especially if you sell real products, run paid media, or you’re staring at a P&L like it’s written in ancient Sumerian.You’re going to learn how to stop guessing, set a profit foundation first, and then scale like you actually mean it. And now, meet Adam.He took an e-comm brand from zero to $60 million in sales, then built Pentane, software that basically “encapsulates his brain” and tells operators what to do to get profitable.Even wilder, he plugged in an agent so you can literally ask, “How do I hit 5% net profit this month?” and get a direct answer in seconds. Founders, if you want your business to run like a system, not a mood, go subscribe to the newsletter at aiforfounders.co.If your calendar is chaos, your margins are chaos, your brain deserves better, aiforfounders.co.Join 27,000 founders who want signal, not noise, aiforfounders.co. Quick favor, leave a review of the podcast like you’re rating a parachute after you actually jumped. And a word from Kitcaster.com, if you’re a founder who should be on podcasts but you keep “meaning to,” Kitcaster books you on shows your customers already trust.They handle the outreach, the follow-up, the scheduling, and the chaos.You just show up and sound like the person who built the thing. __ https://www.linkedin.com/in/adammcallinan/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ https://pentane.com https://aiforfounders.co https://bigskybravery.org ⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠ ⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

    1h 3m
  7. She exited in 18 months, then walked away to find stillness

    27 FEB

    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 in the car.On a walk.On a random Thursday when you ditched work and went snowboarding. And yet your calendar looks like a competitive sport. Back-to-backs. Fifteen minute blocks. “Quick sync.” “Fast follow.” “Rapid alignment.” Alignment with what? Exhaustion? Here’s the uncomfortable truth.Most founders are not blocked by strategy. They’re blocked by noise. And now we’re adding AI to the noise. Welcome to AI for Founders, I’m Ryan Estes.Today you’re going to learn how a builder thinks after an exit, why exploration is not procrastination, and what “AI-native” actually means if you’re serious about product, health, and human behavior. This is for founders who want leverage without turning their life into tab toggling. My guest is Alyssa Eidam from Inkfish Studio. She built AI agents in healthcare, specifically to support clinicians and solve staffing bottlenecks, then exited after about a year and a half and did the thing most founders refuse to do. She stopped. Traveled solo. Got present. Let her attention tell her what to build next. And the big takeaway for your company is this.Do not use AI because it is powerful. Use it because it is intentional. If the system is broken, AI does not fix it, it makes it break faster. Also, “AI-native” is not a chatbot. Chat interfaces should die.AI-native is picking the exact moments in the workflow where prediction, pattern matching, and reasoning actually change what is possible. Surfacing what matters before the user even knows to ask. Founder use case.Instead of building another chat box, build a product that watches the process, detects the bottleneck, predicts the next step, and removes the need for five apps and thirty tabs. Less typing, more outcomes. Go subscribe to the newsletter at aiforfounders.co.It’s for founders building in the mess, not founders collecting prompts like trading cards.If you want ideas that ship and frameworks that punch back, you’ll like it. Leave a review of the podcast by writing one sentence that would make your smartest friend immediately hit play. https://www.inkfish.studio/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/eidamam/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ https://aiforfounders.co/ ⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠ ⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

    1h 2m
  8. AI is quietly stealing your life’s work

    24 FEB

    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 brand What if it’s the quiet archive sitting on your laptop In 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 reckoning with who AI is supposed to serve. From competitive chess in the 1970s to launching a company in 2026, Dr. Schaffer shares how decades of teaching, research, and observing AI hype cycles led him to one conviction The moat is not the model The moat is your data https://synsira.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ https://aiforfounders.co/ ⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠ ⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

    50 min
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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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