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. 6d ago

    Two Purple Belts on Scaling Startups With AI, Stoicism, and Cold Plunges

    In the beginning, the seeds are everywhere and nothing is talking to each other. That is the exact feeling Jason Katz describes at the top of this What It Do check-in, and if you have ever built anything from zero, your stomach just dropped a little. You are running six initiatives. None of them touch. You are shifting attention left and right and none of it compounds. It is disorienting. And then, if you hold the vision long enough and cultivate the right things, the seeds start to grow like vines, they connect, and suddenly you are not running six disparate projects anymore. You are running one organism. Jason calls the moment it clicks a symphony, and he is not being modest about it. This one is different from a standard What It Do. Ryan and Jason both showed up on the same wave: two purple belts in their forties, both coming off a break, both watching years of quiet groundwork finally pay out at the same time. Ryan floats renaming the show "Stoic Jiu-Jitsu Guys in Their 40s Celebrating Their Wins," and honestly, that is the episode. The tension underneath the celebration is the good part. Jason spends the first half telling younger founders not to try to prove themselves, and then spends the second half admitting that his entire career was built on doing exactly that. He raised his hand for roles he had no business taking. He put himself in pressure cookers where the only exit was to shine. It worked, he is batting 1000 on do or die, and he has been in what he calls PhD education mode for fifteen straight years. He also says plainly that there is a healthier way to do it, and he did not take it. What emerges instead is a calibration: not zero pressure, not crushing pressure, but permanent low-grade discomfort. Always carry something a little heavy. Live in the gray. That is the version he would sell to a 25-year-old. Then there is the relationship math. Jason is currently in conversations about strategic partnerships that trace directly back to people he met a decade ago. Not networking. Not a CRM sequence. Just being a decent, disciplined, curious person for ten years and then picking up the phone. Ryan brings in a gem from Jeremy Wrathall, founder of Cornish Lithium: be interested, and be interesting. Interested carries the relationship. Interesting earns you the right to be interesting to somebody else. Grinding alone does neither. The travel stretch in the middle earns its keep. Ryan went to the Yucatán, climbed Ek Balam, swam cenotes, and came back with a founder observation dressed up as an anthropology lesson: the ancient Maya city has a temple, a state building, side houses, and a ball court. Drive fifteen minutes to the modern village and you find a chapel, a state building, side houses, and a soccer court. Twelve hundred years later, humans are still laying out the same city. Jason counters with a cave dive story that is either a spiritual experience or an OSHA violation depending on your risk tolerance. Ryan closes with a launch. Howdi went live this week at gethowdi.com, built on the back of Wildcast, his host-read advertising platform. The pitch: an autonomous AI sponsorship agent named Casey Taylor that sources real partnership opportunities for independent creators, starting with podcasters. Alpha is open. -- kindlingsolutions.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonkatz99/ 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/

    Two Purple Belts on Scaling Startups With AI, Stoicism, and Cold Plunges

  2. Aug 16

    The $9 Billion Warning Every Founder Scaling Past $1M Needs To Hear

    Brett Hurt has sold companies to IBM, taken one public on NASDAQ, and watched ServiceNow absorb his last one. He is telling you, on the record, that none of it made him happy. That is not a humble brag. It is a warning shot, and it lands differently coming from a man who has spent forty seven years writing code, six times as a founder, and who now backs more than 150 startups alongside his wife Debra. The conversation starts where every founder conversation is starting in 2026: Elon Musk told The Economist in July that money won't matter by 2036. Ryan asks Brett to place himself on the doom to utopia scale. Brett does not hedge. He puts himself at ninety five percent confident that humanity reaches what he calls the Age of Abundance for All, and then spends the next hour explaining why that confidence is the opposite of complacency. The risk, in his framing, is not the Terminator. It is the amygdala. Homo sapiens spent 99.9% of our time on this planet without electricity, and the scarcity software is still running. The laziest way to make money, Brett argues, is to hijack human biology: the mind, the body, the wallet. Social algorithms tuned for fear. Media tuned for dystopia. Profit routed over people. He is blunt about the fact that he has been a beneficiary of the system he is critiquing, which is exactly what gives the critique teeth. Then it gets personal. Ryan brings the Bodhisattva vow. Brett brings Bhutan, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Stoicism, and argues they all sink into the same root: the kingdom is found within. He talks about the Lamborghini on his childhood wall, the Lamborghini he eventually owned for ten years, and the exact amount of lasting happiness it produced. Zero. Not any of it. What did work, according to Brett: being on a mission that is genuinely yours, breaking out of the comparison machine, and doing the internal work to identify the programs running in your head before they run your company. The practical spine of the episode is a set of tools. Reading Doty. Building a plank from two minutes to twenty four minutes over seven years, one increment at a time, because patience is a trainable muscle and almost no American trains it. Buddying up with someone who will ask you what you're reading and how you're actually doing. Meditation as a 300 baud modem to the divine, psychedelics as broadband, and integration as the part that actually matters. And AI as the greatest tool ever built for the eternally curious, if you point it at the right questions. Ryan brings his own anger, his own grappling, his own dinner table in Denver with a daughter home from college and a son back from football practice, and names it: this is heaven. That is the whole thesis in one sentence. If you are scaling past a million and quietly wondering whether the finish line moves every time you get close, this one is for you. Books referenced: Love Conquers Fear by Brett Alexander Hurt, Into the Magic Shop and Mind Magic by James Doty, Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright, The Gospel According to Jesus by Stephen Mitchell, Tao Te Ching, Bhagavad Gita, How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. Brett's book : https://www.loveconquersfear.orgBrett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bretthurt/ -- 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/

    The $9 Billion Warning Every Founder Scaling Past $1M Needs To Hear

  3. Aug 16

    From $80M To $1B: The Scaling Lesson That Now Applies To Every AI Workflow

    Your best people just got twice as fast. Congratulations. You have a problem. Ross Barnes has seen this movie from the projection booth. Twenty-five years in tech and advertising, ending as Global CTO of a WPP agency he helped scale from 15 people to more than 1,500 and from $80M to over $1B in revenue. Toyota. Lexus. EA Sports. British Airways. He sat on a global board and drove agile transformation across every function of a company growing faster than its own org chart could redraw itself. Then he left to build Galahad, and the tagline he chose tells you exactly what he learned on the way out: build the machine, protect the human. Here is the trap he watches companies walk into. A gaming client's engineering team was flying. Claude Enterprise across the org, shipping 10X features every week, genuinely at the frontier. And every one of those features needed legal sign-off, because gaming is a regulated business. Legal was not using AI. So the engineering team was not shipping faster. It was building a snowball and rolling it downhill into a team that had no way to catch it. That is the insight Ross has built a consultancy around. AI adoption is not man versus machine. It is your fastest team versus your slowest team. And if you only fund the fast ones, you have not created leverage. You have relocated your bottleneck to someone who never asked for it. His answer is almost aggressively unfashionable: raise the floor, not the roof. Get everyone to a baseline of capability before you go build a superhuman pocket of one department. The org that wins is not the one with the best AI users. It is the one with the fewest people who cannot keep up. Which is why his enablement sessions do not touch a tool for the first two sessions. In any leadership cohort, someone has been living in Claude for two years and someone has never opened it, and you cannot predict which is which from a job title. So you level set. Then, and only then, you ask the question almost nobody asks first: what do you actually want this to accomplish? Handing a team a seat and saying "crack on" does not produce adoption. It produces a room full of people quietly wondering whether they are training their own replacement. The conversation gets genuinely contentious in one place, and it is the best part of the episode. Ryan builds agents with personalities, accents, backstories, the full treatment, partly because a charming agent converts better. Ross builds agents with tone too, but draws a hard line at personification, and his reason is not squeamishness. It is accountability. The moment an agent feels human, you start grading it like a colleague, extending it the benefit of the doubt you would extend a person, and quietly outsourcing your own judgment to something that has none. It is a machine. Treat the inputs and outputs exactly like that. You are accountable for what you ask it and you are accountable for checking what comes back. Ryan pushes on the word "coercive." Ross pushes back, and the exchange surfaces the real question underneath consumer AI: where is the line between charming and manipulative, and who is responsible for drawing it? Ross's position is that the guardrails are the job. No overclaim. No false validation. Build them in before the agent meets a customer, not after. Galahad Group: https://galahadgroup.co.ukRoss Barnes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rossbarnesImNotOK: https://www.imnotok.uk Host and Showhttps://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/

    From $80M To $1B: The Scaling Lesson That Now Applies To Every AI Workflow

  4. Aug 15

    He Sells Oxygen Systems Nationwide: The Zero-Funding Hardware Playbook

    Necessity Built the Company. Gratitude Kept It Alive. Brad Pitzele was collecting diagnoses faster than he could treat them. Autoimmune arthritis first. Then melanoma, caused by the very drugs prescribed to manage the arthritis. Then late-stage Lyme disease on top of both. He was in his late thirties and, in his words, he felt ninety-five years old. He could barely walk. Everything hurt. And every door in traditional medicine led to a version of the same trade: take the drug that might kill you, or live in the pain. So he went looking for a third road. He tried roughly two hundred things. None of them moved the needle. Then a doctor threw a Hail Mary and told him to look at oxygen. Hyperbaric was going to run $50,000 to $75,000, plus ninety minutes in a tube, seven days a week, for eight weeks. This was before remote work was normal. He could not afford the money or the hours. The alternative, exercise with oxygen therapy, was sold by a handful of companies at prices he described as high enough that he walked away from that too. Here is the moment the company was born, and it is not the moment you expect. Brad asked himself a single reframing question: "Well, if it didn't cost that much, would you do it?" Fifteen minutes a day he could do. So the recovering engineer, mechanical engineering degree, fifteen years in retail and e-commerce, went and built the thing himself. Sourcing parts at a volume of one is its own nightmare, and he did it anyway. A year later he was better. His doctor noticed, and asked if Brad would build systems for his patients. Brad said no. He was still recovering and did not want to set himself back. Six to nine months after that, he said yes, and One Thousand Roads was born. The name is the whole thesis. Everyone has their own road to walk back to health, and Brad refused to be the guy screaming that his was the only one. The other half of the name is a target: help one thousand people get out of the lonely, scary place he had been in. What follows in this episode is a founder story that is unusually clean of the normal startup noise. No round. No investors. No creditors breathing down his neck. He self-financed in increments so small they are almost funny. Ten masks. Sell the ten. Buy fifteen. Sell the fifteen. Buy twenty. He took nothing out of the business for four to five years. eBay first as a test, because standing up full e-commerce infrastructure before you have proof is how founders die. Then his own site once eBay's cut got annoying. Then SEO. Then paid ads. Then podcasts, YouTube, and a social presence his team had to drag him into. And the physiology underneath the product is genuinely the most interesting science on this show in a while. Your cells make energy two ways. With oxygen, they run the good engine. Without it, they fall back to a generator that produces a fraction of the output. Brad says your ability to use oxygen drops roughly 1% a year after age twenty-five, which means by fifty you have quietly lost about a quarter of your energy-making capacity. That shows up as brain fog, slower healing, more inflammation, and less life. One Thousand Roads: https://www.onethousandroads.com One Thousand Roads on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@OneThousandRoadsHQ Brad Pitzele on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradpitzele/ The Dr Kumar Discovery, hosted by Dr. Ravi Kumar: https://drkumardiscovery.com/ 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 Sells Oxygen Systems Nationwide: The Zero-Funding Hardware Playbook

  5. Aug 12

    Your Doctor Gets 18 Minutes. Netflix Gets 1,095 Hours. This CEO Is Fixing The Gap

    The Other 8,760 Hours You see the person responsible for your health for somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes, once or twice a year. Netflix gets three hours a day. One of those two relationships has enough data to know you. It is not the one keeping you alive. That asymmetry is the entire business case for Lirio, and Marten den Haring has been building against it since 2019. He is not a healthcare lifer. He is an economist by training, MSc and PhD, who spent 25 years shipping AI products for financial services, law enforcement, and national security. Oracle. OpenText. Chief Product Officer at Digital Reasoning in Nashville. Then SVP Platform at Element AI in Montreal, the lab co-founded by Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio. Six months into Canada, Nashville called him home, and Lirio was hiring. He joined as Chief Product Officer in May 2019 to turn a Series A business plan into an actual product. The MVP went live around January 15, 2020. Do that math. Six to eight weeks in the wild, and then the world closed. Lirio's product exists to drive people toward care. Care was shut. Then care reopened on 50 different state timetables into backlogs and staffing shortages, and nobody wanted more patient volume. Marten took the CEO chair in May 2021, in the middle of it. He describes 2021 through 2023 as a stretch where the team was openly asking whether product market fit simply was not there. What flipped it was not healthcare. It was everything else. Consumers spent three years learning that they could get anything from their couch, and then brought that expectation to their care. Suddenly a company built to communicate digitally, personally, at scale, was standing in exactly the right place. Today Lirio delivers more than 400 million nudges a year and reports outcomes that are hard to argue with: nudges 4x more effective than standard health messaging, a 60% reactivation rate on patients lost for three or more years, 50% HbA1c improvement in under six months, and $4.4 million in direct margin added through targeted interventions. The word "nudge" is doing a lot of work there, and Marten is careful about it. It has been called precision shoving. It has been called nagging. Ryan suggests it sounds like his wife on his fourth glass of wine. Marten's answer is the best line in the episode: if you want an automated version of your spouse, Lirio cannot help you. What Lirio actually does is treat every variable of a message as a decision. Not the content alone. The channel, the hour, the frequency, the framing, and whether the right recipient is even the patient at all. Sometimes the highest leverage nudge goes to the daughter who manages her father's medications. Liriohttps://lirio.com/ Marten den Haring's team page at Liriohttps://lirio.com/our-team/marten-den-haring/ Ryan Estes on LinkedInhttps://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/

    Your Doctor Gets 18 Minutes. Netflix Gets 1,095 Hours. This CEO Is Fixing The Gap

  6. Aug 11

    Vibe Coding Your MVP Is a Time Bomb: AI Workflows for Founders Who Want to Ship Twice

    The Smartest Model on the Planet Will Still Build You a House With No Foundation Mike Vitez has been shipping software since before the word "agentic" meant anything. Ten years leading projects. A computer science background. Fifty plus products across three continents, by his studio's count. And a few months ago, he did something most experienced technical leaders refuse to do. He went back to the drawing board. Literally the planning table. He picked the architect's pencil back up. "I haven't been coding for a while," he says on this episode. "Like, I wasn't the one who was writing the code, but my people. I needed a mindset change as well and go back to the real architecture part stuff. Not just reviewing it, but planning it." That decision, made in a moment of frustration with routines that had gone stale, is the hinge this entire conversation swings on. Because Mike is now a member of the Claude Partner Network, running an in-house runtime environment where AI agents handle testing, development tasks, and product planning. He has automated quality control on every single commit. He has run forty-plus agents in parallel to build a product landscape in days instead of months. He is, by any reasonable measure, all the way in. And his central warning is this: AI can save you the cost of a low-level code developer. It cannot save you the cost of an architect. "You can build a house without a foundation," Mike says, "but it won't be solid." That is not a caution against speed. Mike is aggressively pro-speed. His whole thesis is that MVPs are now trivially fast and you should rush to market, get users, and iterate. The caution is against speed without structure, which is a different animal entirely. It does not prevent collapse. It schedules it. Ryan pushes on the obvious founder question: if you use Claude and I use Claude, what exactly am I paying you for? Mike's answer is one of the cleanest articulations of the AI-era consulting value proposition we have had on the show. Go to Claude and say "build me something," and it will build you something. It might even work. But can you find the bugs? Can you make it scalable? Can you still add the fourteenth feature without the whole thing coming apart in your hands? "Most of the people cannot," he says, "because if you don't plan it out right, that's where the real engineering knowledge comes into the picture." Saturnia Design: https://www.saturniadesign.com/Mike Vitez on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikevitez/ 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/

    Vibe Coding Your MVP Is a Time Bomb: AI Workflows for Founders Who Want to Ship Twice

  7. Aug 10

    The $0 Fix That Makes Claude 10x Smarter For Your Business

    Rob Collie spent 30 years inside the machine, and AI still scared him He was there in 1996, a fresh Vanderbilt grad walking into Microsoft. He led the business intelligence work inside Excel. He was a founding engineer on what became Power BI. He wrote three books about it and, by his own account, sold more than 92,000 copies. If anybody had a right to shrug at the next wave, it was Rob Collie. Then ChatGPT landed, and the guy whose entire career was telling computers what to do realized he ran the exact kind of company AI eats first. A data and BI consultancy. Code, scripts, formulas. Easy mode for a language model. By late 2024 he calls it dread. Not curiosity. Dread. And here is the part that makes this episode worth your commute: he did not fight the fear, he followed it. What he found on the other side was almost insultingly simple. AI success is not an AI problem. It is a data problem and a traditional software problem. The thing you already know how to do. That discovery became Fair Game, his fourth book, out now, and it is aimed squarely at the person who is not getting briefed. Because that is the real divide Rob names on this episode. If you run a Fortune 500, the hyperscalers are in your office with slide decks because they want to keep you. Everyone from mid-market down is left to guess while the labs sprint past them, too busy racing each other to slow down and teach anybody anything. Meanwhile the internet offers you two flavors of fear. The hype side needs you scared so you buy the course. The doom side needs you scared so you click the next video. Rob's read is blunt: both are engagement strategies, and neither one is running a business. What he offers instead is a diagnosis. When you sit down with vanilla Claude or vanilla ChatGPT and try to do real, repeated business work, you hit a wall, and you blame yourself. You should not. That model knows a staggering amount about the Roman Empire and nothing about your company. It is a PhD in everything and a brand new hire at your business. So you spend an hour explaining your world to it, get 80% of the way there, grind on the last 20%, and then the chat ends and all that context evaporates. Rob has a name for the feeling. Bot sitting. The fix is not a better prompt. It is grounding. Rob's own hello-world moment was connecting Claude Desktop through MCP to a Notion knowledge base holding nothing more exotic than his company's brand guidelines. Suddenly the model was not just more accurate. It felt more confident, more willing to take a creative swing. Same model. Different context. He describes it like the LLM got smarter, and functionally, it did. Ryan pushes on the entry point, and Rob's recommendation for anyone still on the sidelines is refreshingly unglamorous: open Claude Cowork, make a folder, and start letting a project accumulate its own memory. Motivation, history, guidelines, goals, all injected on hello. No engineering degree required. https://fairgamebook.ai/ https://p3adaptive.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/robcollie/ 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/

    The $0 Fix That Makes Claude 10x Smarter For Your Business

  8. Jul 27

    Tokenomics Will Wreck Your Margins: The AI Model Routing Workflow That Cuts Spend 50%

    Tarun Raisoni built a data center company to roughly $400 million in trailing sales without taking a dollar of outside capital, sold it to a Fortune 500 for $217 million, then walked away from the boat and the fishing rod to start over. His answer for why is four words long: "exits are just a number." What he started instead is Gruve, and what he came on the show to argue is the most uncomfortable idea in enterprise AI right now. Here it is. In the cloud era, your data went somewhere else and stayed exactly what it was. A provider could store it, back it up, and hand it back to you unchanged, because storage does not understand. The AI era broke that. When you push high quality proprietary data into a frontier model, the data can be parameterized, and the intelligence inside it can escape. Tarun's question is not who owns the file. It is who owns the understanding. He calls it the intelligence boundary, and nobody has drawn it yet. Ryan pushed on the obvious nightmare version. You install Claude Code across your team, they ship ten times faster, you feed your financials and your roadmap into it, and then Anthropic launches Claude for Teachers into the exact market you were building for. Tarun did not flinch. He reached for Amazon Basics instead, which is the cleanest available precedent: watch what sells on your platform, build your own version, undercut the seller. Except now the platform is not a marketplace. It is the thing your team talks to all day. His prescription is not "go local and hide." It is a hybrid routing model, and he is blunt that where you draw the lines depends entirely on your business. Some workloads belong in a frontier model because the data gravity and the IP density are low. Some workloads you fine-tune inside your own ecosystem on a large open source model. And some workloads you do not let a frontier model see, not the data, not the metadata, not even the shape of the algorithm. Then the economics arrive, and this is where founders should sit up. Tarun's word is tokenomics, and his point is that the bill you are staring at right now is not a real bill. It is a heavily investor-subsidized bill. What you paid for ChatGPT or Claude two years ago versus one year ago versus today reflects a subsidy that is being slowly withdrawn. Ryan told the story of a founder friend who worked himself into a hospital bed in January because he was convinced the tools were about to be yanked. Tarun's answer was calmer and more useful: stop worrying about the rug pull and start measuring whether the spend is actually producing measurable productivity. Software engineering is measurable. Most other things in your company are not yet. The go-to-market story is genuinely unusual. Enterprises are notoriously brutal to sell into, so Gruve bought its way to a standing start, acquiring NetServ, Lumos Cloud, and SecurView to import talent, partnerships, and customers in one motion. Cisco is both a channel partner and an investor. Reception from the inherited accounts, in his telling, was not resistance but relief, because those customers were being offered outcomes instead of headcount and hours. Gruve: https://gruve.ai Tarun's Forbes Technology Council article, "The Next Enterprise Won't Just Use AI, It Will Own Its Intelligence": https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2026/07/15/the-next-enterprise-wont-just-use-ai-it-will-own-its-intelligence/ Iron Lady Foundation: https://ironladyfoundation.org Tarun on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raisoni/ 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/

    Tokenomics Will Wreck Your Margins: The AI Model Routing Workflow That Cuts Spend 50%
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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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