AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

aiforfounders.co
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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. 17h ago

    Why your AI-designed brand is invisible, and the 3-step fix

    Everyone got the same tools. Almost nobody got taste. Jacqueline Schmidt grew up two subway stops from tigers. The Bronx Zoo was her backyard. Her favorite exhibit was the sloth, which she went back to visit twenty-five years later and found out had died. She spent summers collecting salamanders in the woods and carrying them home in her Smurf boots, fifty at a time, to the ongoing horror of her grandparents. She drew animals constantly. Then she sold the drawings. Then the drawings became a company. Today she is CEO of Radiance, an AI-powered design agency backed through Infinity Constellation's $24M Series A, running a proprietary Creative OS called The Source®, with clients including Coca-Cola, MoMA, CBS, NBC, Guess, Crate & Barrel, Barnes & Noble, Anthropologie, West Elm, and Siggi's. The through-line from salamanders to Series A is the thing this episode is actually about: what survives when the tools stop being the advantage. Because right now, they have stopped. Jack's Instagram feed is wall-to-wall ads promising a design agency can go from $10K a month to $100K a month by plugging in one AI tool. Then she takes real meetings and gets handed real decks. Same fonts. Same colors. Same soulless template with a different logo on top. "The originality is kind of lost," she says. The tools got more powerful and taste got more rare, so everyone is swinging the same hammer and almost nobody is building anything memorable. She has a name for what happens next. Digital Darwinism. It is the title of the TEDx talk she gives at TEDxSouthlake on November 8, 2026, and the argument is blunt. In a landscape where every founder has the same generative tools, the selection pressure is no longer access. It is memorability. Who evolves. Who is sticky. Who is left. She frames it as a question you should be able to answer in one word: Warby Parker does not need its logo for you to remember that blue. Do you have a color, a feeling, a fingerprint that survives without your name attached? Which is not an argument against AI. Jack is more bullish than most people making that argument. She rebranded her entire company in a single weekend because she could not stop working. She calls the tools a playground and says she cannot put them down. What she wants back is the distinction between the work that deserves a human and the work that does not. "Was I put on this planet to left-align data?" The business she has built is the answer to that question, and it is stranger than a normal agency. Radiance is an agency plus an intelligence layer. Where most shops pull freelancers in as needed and let the institutional knowledge leave with whoever quits, Radiance is building the memory layer underneath. Her framing of the problem is the sharpest thing in the episode: your logo came from one vendor, your marketing strategy from another, and then Bob decides he wants to become a surfer and walks out with all the mind share. Who was collating, organizing, and storing the brand? Nobody. That gap is the product. Radiance: https://www.withradiance.com/The Source®: https://www.withradiance.com/the-source LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacqueline-schmidt-92a3734b/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.co Build your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/ Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1 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/

    Why your AI-designed brand is invisible, and the 3-step fix

  2. 1d ago

    The 10-minute morning routine that replaced an entire project management stack

    Five days. Twelve-hour build sessions. One founder describing himself as delirious. Jason Katz opens this one by announcing he has AI psychosis, and he is only half joking. Five straight days inside Claude Code, shipping, prototyping, handing off to his dev team, and coming back for more. It is the kind of week that either produces a business or produces a burnout, and the whole episode is really about the difference between those two outcomes. Ryan is in the same trench from the opposite direction. He shipped Howdi to 36 people after roughly six months of building, and the thing that got him unstuck was not a new tool. It was a hypnotherapist. One session, mostly just saying the problem out loud to another human, and the week broke open. What makes this one useful is the gap between those stories and the systems underneath them. Jason walks through why a vibe-coded prototype and a production-ready system are separated by a canyon most founders never see coming. He lays out how Kindling decides what to build and what to walk away from. Then he opens up Chief of Staff, an app he has in testing with executives, and describes something genuinely strange: you start with a blank slate, talk to it every morning for ten minutes, and 30 to 45 days later you have a complete operations plan you never sat down to write. The back half turns into a conversation about avoidance. Not the failure kind. The ordinary kind, where you know exactly what the most important task is and you find four other things to do first. Jason's take is that AI killed one of the biggest reasons for it, because the scope of an unfamiliar project is no longer unknowable. You brain-dump the whole mess by voice and get a map back in minutes. Then Ryan drops the first item from a list of twelve things he believes supercharge execution, and it is not a tool, an app, or a supplement. It is: build a family. Become a person a partner can thrive with. Learn to relish domestic life as an engine for getting things done. Jason, who says he avoided that exact thing for most of his life, backs it hard. Two operators, mid-build, saying the quiet stuff out loud. This is what it do. https://kindlingsolutions.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonkatz99/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai! ⁠https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1 #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 10-minute morning routine that replaced an entire project management stack

  3. 1d ago

    8.3 billion faces, zero infrastructure: the AI likeness market nobody is serving

    Sixty percent of the faces training AI were never asked Katrien Grobler woke up on the 29th of December and saw a word written above her bed. Not metaphorically. She describes seeing the name in her mind's eye, getting up, and telling her team they were pivoting that day. The word was Twinnin. She had spent the previous year running AI KAT, making AI-generated video ads for clients like Capital.com and Reckitt's Dettol brand. On one project she needed a trader character. Rather than generate a synthetic face, she pulled photos of an investor she knew, ran them through Nano Banana, and built the character. The client's first reaction was the whole business model in one sentence: is this a real person? It was. He hadn't been asked. She called him afterward, apologised, and made him sign a licence. That awkward phone call is now a company. Her argument runs on arithmetic she calls the math of human likeness. There are 8.3 billion people on the planet. Frontier labs have already consumed images of humans at a scale in the tens of billions apiece, and by 2030 she projects the training requirement climbing into the trillions. Models cannot reuse the same face indefinitely. They need novelty, and novelty means new humans. Meanwhile the legal ground is moving under everyone: the EU AI Act's obligations landed, Denmark is rewriting its copyright law to treat likeness as property, and the NO FAKES Act cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously in June 2026. Demand is accelerating. Supply is becoming illegal. There is no clearing house in between. That gap is the company. Twinnin verifies a human with government ID and a liveness check, lets them set granular terms for how their face can be used, hashes the consent record so it is auditable, and routes payment when a brand or lab licenses it. Seventy-five percent goes to the human, always, agent or no agent. Then there is the half of the market that wants nothing to do with any of it. When Deadline clipped her panel and posted it, the comments were not friendly. One person told her she looked like an Incredibles villain, which she thought was fantastic. Most of the rest were worse. She did not dismiss them. She built for them. The Defend product exists because she concluded that people who want to opt out have nowhere to formally do so, and that a documented, timestamped "no" is the only evidence that holds up when a deepfake surfaces. The other half of this episode is about how she operates. She has been to a contrast therapy club in Canary Wharf more than three hundred times since April 2025. Sauna, then a three minute plunge at one degree, then sauna again, sometimes three cycles before a call. She does not describe it as recovery. She describes it as a forced thinking environment. You cannot leave, you cannot distract yourself, so the problem you brought in gets solved. Most of her best product decisions happened underwater at one degree. Twinnin: https://www.twinnin.ai Katrien Grobler on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katriengrobler Ryan Estes on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.co Build your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/ Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai! https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1 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/

    8.3 billion faces, zero infrastructure: the AI likeness market nobody is serving

  4. 6d ago

    Insure Your AI Agent. This PhD Built the Policy

    Insurance for AI agents: what happens when the machine screws up In January 2026, something happened that almost nobody in tech noticed and everybody in tech should have. The biggest names in commercial insurance walked into statehouses across America and asked permission to stop covering artificial intelligence. Berkshire Hathaway. Chubb. Travelers. AIG and WR Berkley followed. Regulators approved more than 80% of the requests. Florida, Connecticut, and Maryland moved fastest. Three ISO endorsements went live on January 1st, and the silent AI coverage era ended without a single press release. Meanwhile, you spun up four more agents this quarter. Dr. Charles Higgins saw the gap coming before the paperwork landed. He and Dr. Sophia Kalanovska met inside the UKRI Safe and Trusted AI programme, both doing PhDs in AI at King's College London. Halfway through, they built Tromero, a GPU aggregation platform that turned crypto mining rigs into cheap machine learning compute. BlueYard Capital led a £1.5 million seed in 2023. They sold the platform to a cloud infrastructure company and went back to consulting. And then the same conversation kept happening. Every enterprise they talked to was moving from chatbots to agents. Agents that book things. Agents that route trucks. Agents that pay invoices. And every single conversation collapsed into the same word: risk. Not "will it work." Not "what does it cost." Risk. Higgins describes projects dying over a 0.001% chance of catastrophe, because a rounding error on a probability is still a career-ending headline for whoever signed off. They were doing risk assessment for free. Then they realized they were describing a product that already exists everywhere else in the economy. Somebody hands you a piece of paper. If it goes wrong, they pay. That product is insurance. Neither of them knew anything about insurance. A data scientist and a software engineer walking into one of the most closed, credential-obsessed industries on earth. They gave themselves six months to figure out who was writing AI cover and why. The answer: nobody, because there was no data. Insurance runs on history. Actuaries price the future by counting the past. There is no past here. The failure modes for agentic AI are, in Higgins's framing, close to inconceivable right up until the moment they happen. So Redberry Labs built an underwriting engine that uses AI itself as the simulation layer, running an agent against thousands of scenarios to estimate how likely it is to fail and how expensive that failure gets. He argues this style of underwriting was impossible before large models were flexible enough to play out the scenarios. Redberry is now a managing general agent. They write the policy, assess the risk, find the client, and sell it. They just do it on a reinsurer's checkbook. The part of the conversation founders need to sit with is the murky middle. Pure AI failure is easy: the agent did it, the policy pays. Pure human failure is easy: your general liability handles it. But your inbox agent drafts an email that's 90% right, you change three words, you hit send, and it triggers a lawsuit. Who caused that? Your D&O? Your tech E&O? Your cyber? Higgins spends most of his time in that gap, and he's honest that there is no clean answer yet. Redberry Labs: https://www.redberrylabs.com Charles Higgins on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-higgins-70a996170/ Ryan Estes on LinkedIn: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/

    Insure Your AI Agent. This PhD Built the Policy

  5. Aug 31

    Chronic Insomnia. Almost None Get Treated. Colin Lawlor On The Sleep Data Gap

    Everything you believe about hustle culture is quietly destroying your brain Colin Lawlor called in from Berlin at nine at night, three days after leaving San Diego, wearing the accumulated fatigue of a Heathrow layover. He runs a sleep company. He was tired. He knew exactly why, down to the hormone. That is the whole thesis of this episode. Sleep is not a soft topic. It is a measurement problem, a data problem, and now a business model, and Colin has spent a decade turning it into all three. Sleep.ai started life in 2016 as SleepScore Labs, spun out of ResMed with backing from Dr. Mehmet Oz and Pegasus Capital. It rebranded in 2025. Along the way it collected something close to a billion hours of real-world sleep data, ran more than 250 intervention studies, and became the first sleep technology in the world to be reimbursed by health insurers. The founder relevance arrives fast. Colin describes landing at Heathrow exhausted and craving sugar and fat, then explains that this was not weakness. The hormones that govern appetite are produced during deep sleep. Short the sleep, short the hormones, and your body starts negotiating with you at the vending machine. Every founder who has ever eaten a gas station dinner at 11pm after a bad night has felt this mechanism without naming it. Then he goes after the thing every one of your listeners is wearing. Put four wearables on one wrist and you will get four different answers about the same night. Sleep.ai's answer is to normalize all of them against polysomnography, the hospital sleep lab standard where a technician scores every thirty seconds of your night. That is expensive, slow, and almost nobody else has funded it at scale, which is precisely why it became a moat. The line that will stick with you is the one about action. There is a decade of aggregated wearable data on this planet and the population is not sleeping better. Data without intervention is a graph you feel bad about. Sleep.ai sells the intervention layer to companies that already own the customer relationship, priced per monthly active user, integrated in about a day. Colin also drops something most founders never see coming. Germany passed a prevention law requiring insurers to reimburse proven prevention tools, and Sleep.ai walked through that door first with Dein Schlaf. Regulation as a distribution channel. Not a phrase you hear at demo day. There is a harder passage in here too, about his mother's cancer treatment and the stress he was carrying in the wrong direction. And a lovely detour where Ryan brings up Turiya, the fourth state of consciousness in Vedic philosophy, and Colin, running a company built entirely on quantifying sleep stages, says he has no problem believing the brain is doing something in all of them that we have not measured yet. Every founder in your audience is making a trade they have not priced. This episode prices it. Sleep.ai: https://www.sleep.ai Sleeping Children Around the World: https://www.scaw.org https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinjlawlor/ Ryan's links: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/

    Chronic Insomnia. Almost None Get Treated. Colin Lawlor On The Sleep Data Gap

  6. Aug 26

    The consent economy

    Every time you unlock your phone, somebody makes money. It just isn't you. Forty to sixty hours a week. That is what the average person spends on a smartphone, which works out to somewhere between a third and half of your waking life. Big tech built trillion dollar fortunes on that time. You signed up for exactly none of it. Dan Novaes wants to change the math. He is the co-founder and CEO of Mode.Inc, the company behind Mode Mobile, the EarnPhone, and EarnOS. He has raised over $110 million, all of it from retail investors, not a single traditional venture round in the mix. He has 65,000 shareholders who own a piece of the thing they use. He built a physical smartphone, got it into Walmart and Best Buy, then looked at the P&L and walked away from hardware entirely. He now buys "dead" consumer apps that nobody else wants and turns them into first-party data assets for AI labs. Oh, and he lost 35 pounds and ran a marathon while doing it. The best ideas, he says, come in the float tank. This conversation moves fast. Ryan and Dan get into the Anthropic settlement, the Cloudflare crawler wall going up September 15, why hedge funds are buying your Amazon receipts, why the 55-plus demographic funded a company built for budget-conscious app users, and why a QR code reader was one of the smartest acquisitions Dan ever made. Mode.Inc: https://mode.incYoungstown Community Food Center: https://www.ycfoodcenter.orgDan Novaes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielnovaes/ Ryan Estes on LinkedIn: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 consent economy

  7. Aug 24

    From Apple to Animals: The Pivot That Built a 6 Continent AI Company in 30 Months

    Everybody says the problem with veterinary medicine is burnout. Yannick Bloem thinks the problem is paperwork. A veterinarian finishes a full day of consults. The animals have been seen. The owners have gone home. And then the second shift starts: SOAP notes, discharge summaries, referral letters, records that have to exist by law whether or not anyone has the energy left to write them. Two hours, most nights. That is the part of the job nobody signed up for, and it is the part that quietly pushes people out of a profession they love. Yannick Bloem spent five years as a senior software engineer at Apple building productivity software for hundreds of millions of people. Before that he built a consumer startup in Switzerland that reached over 100,000 users. When GPT landed in late 2022 and he was living in San Francisco watching doors open in real time, the obvious move for a person with that resume was to chase the frontier. He did the opposite. He called a friend from Toronto whose mother is a veterinarian, and they went hunting in the least fashionable corner of healthcare they could find. That friend is Mike Parent, now CoVet's COO. Mike had grown up filling out paperwork alongside his mom during school holidays and had already built a company in the space. When Yannick brought him a list of AI ideas seeded by his sister's stories from human hospitals, Mike pointed at vet med and said it was the better industry to build for. They got a rough, ugly, half working product into the hands of about 20 beta vets through Mike's network. The vets loved it anyway. That gap between how bad the product was and how excited the users were is the entire founding signal. Two and a half years later CoVet is used daily across North America, Europe, and Australia, in 20 languages, by groups including Mars Veterinary Health, IVC Evidensia, CVS Group, VetPartners, Petfolk, and Small Door Veterinary. The company grew user volume 550% in 2025 alone. It employs over 30 DVMs and RVTs in house, and Yannick says the team is approaching 130 people. It has raised remarkably little to get there. The episode goes deep on three things founders keep getting wrong. First, that the newest frontier model is automatically the right model. Yannick's medical team evaluates models constantly and routes tasks based on speed, cost, and quality, and the newest release frequently loses. Second, that regulatory burden is a tax. CoVet built to human healthcare standards in an industry where HIPAA does not strictly apply, and that decision became the reason enterprise groups across Europe and Australasia could say yes. Third, that you need a mega round. CoVet grew on customer cash flow, took angel money from veterinarians who had sold clinics, and raised later from a position where nobody was desperate. There is also a section on the domain, which Yannick correctly describes as drip. And a section on why horses need so much more paperwork than cats. CoVet: ⁠https://co.vet⁠Not One More Vet: ⁠https://nomv.org⁠Yannick Bloem on LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/yannick-bloem/⁠CoVet for students: ⁠https://co.vet/students⁠ __ Ryan Estes on LinkedIn:⁠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/⁠

    From Apple to Animals: The Pivot That Built a 6 Continent AI Company in 30 Months

  8. Aug 19

    Psychedelics Might Be The Most Important Founder Technology Of This Decade

    Niko Skievaski has been raising venture money since 2013. He co-founded Redox, the healthcare interoperability company that became one of the largest data networks in American health tech, and he watched AI arrive and compress the parts of the job that used to force him to slow down. Research, analysis, first drafts, scaffolding. All of it collapsed toward zero. What he found on the other side of that compression was not free time. It was concentration. "It doesn't actually reduce the psychological load of being a founder. It actually concentrates it." When you can go from unknowns to three viable options in an afternoon, the entire weight of the job lands on the one thing that did not get faster: your judgment. Your ability to know which bias you brought into the room. Your ability to find signal in noise you generated yourself. Those are not technical skills. AI cannot build them for you. Niko's answer, and now his company, is Althea, a public benefit corporation building the infrastructure layer for legal, supervised psychedelic therapy in Colorado and Oregon. It started as compliance software for licensed facilitators. It has become a marketplace where a person can find a screened, licensed, reviewed psilocybin experience the way you would book anything else you actually intend to show up for. Althea is formed in partnership with the University of Colorado School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry, and in January 2026 it acquired Tricycle Day, the psychedelic education newsletter founded by Henry Winslow, now Althea's President. The origin is not a market thesis. Niko sat with his father a month before he died, with psilocybin, and watched a man who had spent his life arguing about his own addictions stop arguing. "He chose to move into death courageously, in a way that aligned with who he was." They spent the last days on a beach with beers and Pink Floyd. Niko left Redox in 2022 and went looking for how to point a fifteen-year healthcare technology career at that. This conversation is not a sales pitch for mushrooms. It is a working founder describing, in specifics, what happens to a person whose identity was built on cognitive output when the cognitive output gets commoditized. It includes the parts that do not fit on a thumbnail: the hero's dose four days before recording that he described as a really challenging experience, the pacing in a hallway, the exhaustion, the gratitude on the other side. It includes who should not do this and why. And it includes a genuinely useful working practice that has nothing to do with psychedelics at all, which is what to do with the ninety seconds while your agent finishes running. Two-thirds of the people going through Althea's system are not there for mental health. They are there to get unstuck. If you have ever felt like productivity quietly became your entire personality, that number will land. Althea: https://withalthea.comBrowse legal experiences: https://be.withalthea.com/experiencesThe Forward Fund: https://withalthea.com/forward-fund/Tricycle Day newsletter: https://www.tricycleday.com/Niko on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/skievaski/ Ryan Estes on LinkedIn: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/

    Psychedelics Might Be The Most Important Founder Technology Of This Decade
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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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