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. Delightful Procurement: The CFO That Never Sleeps - Alex Yakubovich from Levelpath

    22H AGO

    Delightful Procurement: The CFO That Never Sleeps - Alex Yakubovich from Levelpath

    Procurement Is Not Boring. It's Just Broken. There is a word that kills deals before they start. A word that makes investors yawn, makes journalists skip the story, and makes founders steer away from the category entirely. That word is procurement. Alex Yakubovich has spent his entire career proving that instinct wrong. As co-founder and CEO of Levelpath, and previously co-founder and CEO of Scout RFP (acquired by Workday for $540 million in 2019), Alex has made procurement his life's work. Not because it is glamorous. Because it is genuinely broken. And because broken things, when fixed well, are worth a fortune. This episode covers what it actually means to build an AI native company from the inside out, why delightful procurement is a real mission and not a marketing tagline, and what founders building in any category can learn from a man who took the most overlooked function in business and turned it into a $100M+ venture-backed platform. The Anchor Framework: What Doesn't Change Alex opened by addressing the thing that keeps most founders anxious right now: the pace of change. His answer was not to slow down or resist it. It was to find the anchors that hold steady underneath all the noise. At Levelpath, those anchors are their four values: Obsess over the customer (the north star above all others)A players only (owners, not passengers)Elevate our employees (growth that sometimes comes with pain, and is always worth it)Earn the trust of others (not just "have integrity," but actively earn it, every single day)The insight here is structural. When everything else is accelerating, values are not motivational posters. They are operating instructions. They tell every person in the company what to optimize for when no one is watching. The Experiment Framework: Run More, Not Fewer Counterintuitively, Alex argued that the right response to AI-driven chaos is not more focus. It is more experimentation. The cost of experiments has collapsed. What used to take two weeks of spreadsheet warfare now takes seconds. That changes the calculus entirely. But the filter for which experiments to keep? That never changes. His rule: name the customer this experiment will serve better. If you cannot answer that question with a specific person in mind, kill it. If you can answer it clearly, run it. The Delight Framework: Predictable, Not Surprising Alex built his case for "delightful procurement" not on feature lists or dashboards, but on a feeling. The highest compliment Levelpath receives from customers is: "This is the product I would have built if I were a product person." That is not a UX win. That is empathy at scale. His practical examples of delight in enterprise software: Label your icons. Or remove them entirely. Cognitive load kills trust.Pre-configure the AI assistant to deliver an insight the moment someone lands on a page, before they ask. (A negotiation strategy based on your company's playbook, generated automatically when you open a contract, is a delight.)The Pavlovian ping. DocuSign's signature sound. Quicken's completion tone. Small audible moments that signal: you did something right.The through line is predictability. Delight is not surprise for its own sake. It is when the product does exactly what you needed before you knew to ask for it. https://www.levelpath.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-yakubovich/ ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠⁠

    59 min
  2. Your API Keys Are Killing Your Productivity: Mitchell Jones of Lava.so

    1D AGO

    Your API Keys Are Killing Your Productivity: Mitchell Jones of Lava.so

    Mitchell Jones did not set out to build a payments company. He set out to solve a problem he could not stop running into: brilliant people paralyzed by plumbing. The API keys, the secret credentials, the subscription walls, the context switches. Every one of those friction points is a tax on thinking, and Mitchell decided the tax was too high. Lava is his answer. At its core, it is an AI gateway that sits between end users and the services they need, handling authentication, payment, and routing so the human never has to. Install the Lava MCP, load your wallet, and your Claude Code or Codex instance can immediately reach financial data, LLM models, go-to-market enrichment tools, blockchain queries, and dozens of other paid APIs without a single secret key or signup flow. The Two-Sided Marketplace Framework Lava operates on a marketplace model with two distinct customer types, each with a distinct problem Lava solves: End users: founders, operators, and builders who want to access paid services without managing credentials or subscriptions. Lava handles the plumbing and acts as their universal AI service wallet.Merchants and service providers: companies sitting on valuable APIs and data who have no native way to meter, monetize, or convert the agent traffic already hitting their endpoints. Lava becomes their monetization layer, tracking usage, enforcing paywalls, and remitting payments, without requiring any new infrastructure.The Manager-of-Instances Framework Mitchell introduced a framework that reframes the exhaustion founders feel after long AI work sessions. The shift from individual contributor to manager is not metaphorical. When you run multiple Claude Code instances simultaneously, you are no longer doing the work. You are directing it, context switching constantly, evaluating outputs, making judgment calls. The mental load is managerial, and it compounds quickly. Recognizing that shift is the first step toward managing your energy alongside your instances. The Systems Over Goals Framework Mitchell's team at Lava does not set goals for how they adopt new AI tools. They set systems. Teammates experiment freely, share their wins and learnings weekly, and those learnings get baked into default files, memory blocks, and shared context that the entire org benefits from automatically. The system compounds. The goal-setting would not. Founder AI Experiment Using Cursor or Claude Code with the Lava MCP installed, build a one-prompt podcast production workflow. Start by listing every tool in your current production stack that has an API. Then prompt Claude to check which of those tools are already accessible through the Lava gateway. For any that are available, write a single system prompt that takes a recording timestamp as input and chains all the downstream production tasks: transcription, show notes generation, title creation, and asset formatting. Time how long the workflow runs versus your current manual process. This gives you a real cost-per-episode number and a live demonstration of the "one-shot your whole tech stack" concept Mitchell describes. https://www.lava.so/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitchell-jones-333559a2/ ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠⁠

    52 min
  3. The New SEO Is Happening Without You

    2D AGO

    The New SEO Is Happening Without You

    The theme of Q1 2026 is "I feel behind." Every founder, from the scrappy solo operator to the venture-backed exec, is feeling the same anxiety. Site traffic is dropping. AI chatbots are answering questions that used to send customers to your website. And the brands that wait to figure this out are not just losing clicks. They are losing the narrative. Justin Inman spent nearly a decade at Google selling enterprise ad tech to the world's largest marketers, companies like Coca-Cola, L'Oreal, and Unilever. He watched those companies resist the digital shift, then scramble to catch up. When he left Google and started watching his own AI usage explode, and then noticed his mom casually quoting ChatGPT, he knew something bigger was coming. He got demos of the biggest players in the AI visibility space. One demo was so underwhelming, so narrow in its thinking, that he started his own company the very next day. That company is Emberos, and it is building what Justin calls the operating system for AI brand visibility. The core insight Justin brings to this conversation is deceptively simple: your brand exists inside AI systems right now, and you have zero control over what those systems are saying about you. Every LLM, from ChatGPT to Gemini to Perplexity to Grok, has formed its own opinion about your pricing, your product, your genre, your identity. And those opinions are often wrong. Emberos measured 500 brands and found that 90% have factual errors across at least one major language model. One small studio picked up a festival film that every AI in the world had mislabeled as a violent thriller with a John Wick comp. Nobody dies in that movie. It took four weeks of strategic fix packs to correct the narrative. The Framework: Paid, Owned, and Earned Across the AI Layer Justin's central argument is that most players in the AI visibility space are thinking too small. Their answer to the problem is to publish more AI-generated content, flood syndicated publishers, and hope the LLMs pick it up. Justin calls this "push to publish," and he says it is not only ineffective, it is dangerous. LLMs will get smarter. The brands that played these hacks six months ago are already getting delisted. Emberos takes a fundamentally different approach, mapping AI visibility across the full digital footprint: Paid: Connected TV ads, programmatic spend, and paid placements all feed signals into AI systems. Emberos is running live studies with major streamers to measure the correlation between TV exposure and generative AI search behavior.Owned: Your website, FAQs, schema markup, and YouTube captions all contribute to how LLMs read and cite your brand. If your site is not structured for LLM readability, it is invisible to the systems now acting as the front door of the internet.Earned: Podcasts, PR placements, influencer content, and press all create citations inside AI systems. Remarkably, Emberos now recommends podcast appearances as a strategic fix pack for brand visibility, because podcast transcripts are among the cleanest, most credible training data available to LLMs.https://emberos.ai/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jinman11/ ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠⁠

    58 min
  4. Enterprise AI for $20 a Month

    3D AGO

    Enterprise AI for $20 a Month

    The dream of AI that actually knows your business has been haunted by two enemies since day one: hallucinations and speed. Everyone building on top of large language models has accepted these as the cost of doing business. Ankit Dheendsa, CTO of Morphos.ai, decided not to. Ankit came on to build something that most of the industry had already written off as impossible: a vectorization engine that doesn't just compress data, it fundamentally rethinks how a vector is constructed. The result is Green Vectors, Morphos's patent-pending core technology that reduces vector database size by up to 99.5%, speeds up queries by 4x, and pushes search accuracy to the 99th percentile. That's not an incremental gain. That's a category redefinition. What makes this sticky for founders is the affordability story. Enterprise RAG used to cost $50,000 and up, delivered mediocre accuracy, and still left your team second-guessing every output. Morphos.ai now delivers that same infrastructure layer for $20 a month, the same price as ChatGPT Pro, with dramatically better performance across the board. https://www.morphos.ai https://www.linkedin.com/in/ankit-dheendsa/ ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠⁠

    1h 2m
  5. The B2G Playbook Nobody Talks About (And It's Printing Money)

    5D AGO

    The B2G Playbook Nobody Talks About (And It's Printing Money)

    Most founders spend their careers chasing customers who are already convinced. Nick Lopez spent his learning to find customers who don't even know they need you yet, in a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars that most of the startup world has never touched. Nick is the co-founder and CEO of Prosal, a capture intelligence platform built for federal defense contractors. But before you write that off as too niche or too complicated, stick with the story, because the principles buried inside this conversation are universal. Nick started at Lockheed Martin as an engineer out of Georgia Tech, working on programs he still can't fully talk about. What he could see, though, was a massive structural gap. The people building the technology and the people selling it were operating in completely separate worlds. Business development teams with decades of domain knowledge were spending their most valuable hours doing slow, manual research instead of talking to the customers who could change their entire trajectory. That insight became the seed of Prosal. But the path there wasn't straight. https://prosal.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/thenicklopez/ ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠ ⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠ ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠

    54 min
  6. Do you know where your AI agents are?

    6D AGO

    Do you know where your AI agents are?

    ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ There is a moment every founder hits. You have spun up agents, handed them access to your systems, pointed them at your data, and watched them go. It feels like progress. It feels like leverage. And then someone asks you a simple question: do you know what your agents are doing right now? The honest answer, for most teams, is no. Jasson Casey has spent years thinking about the gap between the speed at which companies adopt AI and the speed at which they reckon with what that adoption actually costs. He is the CEO of Beyond Identity, a company that has protected over 10 million identities, and his newest product, Ceros, was built for exactly this moment: the moment founders realize they have handed the keys to a car that can drive itself anywhere, including off a cliff. This conversation is a field guide for founders who are moving fast and want to stay alive. The AI Transformation Spectrum Jasson opens with a framework that every founder needs to internalize before they ship another agent. Most companies think they are doing AI transformation. Most of them are not. AI Enabled: You turned on the AI features that already existed in your software stack. Superficial. Table stakes. Not a strategy.AI Native: You questioned every assumption about how your business is organized. You asked which processes exist only because a human had to do them. Then you rebuilt around the answer.The gap between those two positions is where most companies are quietly stuck. The board is asking for AI transformation. The team is checking boxes. And nobody is asking the harder question underneath it all: what had to be true about how we work for humans to do this, and does any of that still apply? https://beyondidentity.ai https://www.linkedin.com/in/jassoncasey/ https://x.com/jassoncasey ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠ ⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠ ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠

    49 min
  7. AI booked 650 meetings, and almost got a date

    MAR 25

    AI booked 650 meetings, and almost got a date

    There is a moment in every founder's journey where they realize the bottleneck in their pipeline is not their product, not their pricing, and not their pitch. It is time. Specifically, the time between when a prospect raises their hand and when someone, or something, responds. Will Del Principe discovered this the hard way. At 16, he was a solar sales rep dialing through a list of thousands of warm leads on an iPad, burning out after five or six calls, leaving a fortune in uncontacted interest sitting in a CRM. A decade later, he is the head of growth at Thoughtly, an AI voice agent platform that calls those same kinds of leads within 10 seconds of form submission, runs 13,000 calls a month for a single client, and once had to be reprogrammed after one of its agents agreed to go get coffee with a prospect. This episode is about what happens when you stop asking humans to do what machines can do endlessly, and start letting your best salesperson work around the clock without ever needing a break. https://www.thoughtly.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-del-principe-57b18b2a5/ ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠ ⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠ ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠

    56 min
  8. Built a $50M+ AI Support Empire by Owning the Edges

    MAR 25

    Built a $50M+ AI Support Empire by Owning the Edges

    Guest: David Karandish, CEO and Co-Founder of Capacity.com In December 2016, the top-selling product on Amazon was not a toy, a book, or a video game. It was Amazon's Alexa. For most people, that was a holiday novelty. For David Karandish, it was a starting gun. David had just finished one of the most successful runs in the history of vertical search. He built Announced Media, acquired answers.com, merged the two companies, scaled them into a powerhouse, and sold the whole thing for $900 million. He took five months off. He made his laundry list of what to do next, somewhere around 50 ideas. Forty were terrible. A handful were decent. One made him feel like he would regret skipping it for the rest of his life. That one became Capacity. He founded it in early 2017, before the world understood what AI was about to become. Blockchain was the darling. AR and VR were getting the hype cycles. AI was maybe fourth on the list of things people were excited about. David bet on fourth place, and he was right. But here is where the real story starts. Because building Capacity was not a straight line. In the early days, the product worked better for some customers than others, and the market was sending a confusing signal. Small companies had the problem but not the budget. Enterprise companies had the budget but needed security certifications, compliance frameworks, and infrastructure that a scrappy startup did not yet have. David built those things. SOC 2. HIPAA compliance. Role-based access controls. And while he was building the enterprise credibility, something else was happening: his customers kept asking for more. Not more features inside one product. More products that actually talked to each other. Over and over, David kept hearing the same thing. "We are so tired of duct-taping solutions together. We don't want five vendors. We want one platform that works." He heard it a dozen times before he finally went to his executive team and said, "I think I know what we need to build." They looked at him like he had three heads. He built it anyway. Today, Capacity serves 20,000 customers, including T-Mobile, Verizon, Nike, and American Express. Annual revenue has surged past $50 million. And the strategy behind all of it is something David calls the Compound Startup. https://capacity.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidkarandish/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠ ⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠ ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠

    1 hr
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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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