AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

aiforfounders.co
  • 5.0 (49)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

AI for Founders is where 47,000+ founders learn to build and scale with AI. Hosted by Ryan Estes, a Denver investor, creator, and founder, the show breaks down real strategies from top operators and AI visionaries. AI-ready data, zero-dependency workflows, founder-led distribution, and the tools driving revenue for today’s fastest-growing companies. If you’re a technical or non-technical founder who wants to work smarter, scale faster, and stay competitive, this podcast is your weekly unfair advantage.

  1. 2d ago

    This Hologram Runs 60 Hotels (And Guests Prefer Her)

    It is midnight in a mountain town. You have been driving for nine hours, your kids are asleep in the back, and the hotel lobby is empty except for a bell on the counter and a sign that says "ring for service." Nobody comes. Now imagine instead a human-sized hologram greets you by name, checks you in, and books your fishing guide for the morning. That is not science fiction. That is already running in dozens of hotels across Europe. Ryan sits down with Filip Linek, founder of FLAE Robotics and creator of BE-A, the holographic AI receptionist built by a hotelier who could not hire humans fast enough. Filip's story is the founder arc in miniature: he built packaging distributor OSKAR PLAST from 1997, sold it to global giant Bunzl in 2014, tried retirement, lasted three months on the golf course, then bought two hotels in the Czech Republic and discovered the industry's dirty secret. Hospitality is drowning. Hoteliers tell him the same thing every month: we hire anyone who shows up to the interview, if they show up at all. So he built the receptionist he could not find. BE-A is not a chatbot bolted onto a website. She handles the full guest journey across email, WhatsApp, phone, and soon a human-sized holobox at the front desk, with a physical humanoid targeted for the end of 2027. She matches OTA prices within set limits, escalates to humans on demand, recognizes groups of guests and tracks each person, and gives hotels something they have never had: a full transcript of every guest conversation. Filip says the company is live in roughly 60 hotels, sitting at about $400K ARR, converting one in three demos, and preparing a Series A to enter the US market through, of all places, Denver. The deeper thread of this conversation is a contrarian bet: that guests will start to prefer AI as the first touch, because speed, accuracy, and availability beat a tired human at midnight. Filip is refreshingly honest about the limits too. He is a self-described skeptic on general-purpose humanoids, walking robots, and robot housekeepers. The front desk, he argues, is the one perfect use case: all communication, no locomotion. https://flaerobotics.ai https://be-a.ai https://www.linkedin.com/in/filip-linek-a70292318/ 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/

    This Hologram Runs 60 Hotels (And Guests Prefer Her)

  2. 2d ago

    The $50 Million Exit Trap Nobody Warns Founders About

    The happiest day of your founder life might be the emptiest. The wire hits, the champagne pops, and 90 days later the divorce papers get filed, the workouts stop, and you are staring at an earn-out agreement wondering why you hate the company that just bought yours. The official launch announcement:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rich--sassy-wealth-strategies-launches-qiretreat-a-china-expedition-for-leaders-and-changemakers-302817416.html The invitation page:https://richandsassy.com/china Cece Leung has watched it happen for more than 20 years. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she landed in Canada at 16 with one suitcase, taught piano and tutored math to get by, and clawed her way through the Big Four and Wall Street into a corner office, multiple CFO titles, and a string of IPOs. She spent nine months in dusty Chinese storage rooms hand-auditing paper contracts before AI could do it in seconds. She hit every number, then woke up rich and empty. So she burned the playbook. In January 2026 she launched Rich & Sassy Wealth Strategies, a New York advisory firm that pairs institutional-grade IPO and exit strategy with something almost no banker will touch: philosophical counseling. Alongside advisor Dr. David Kaye and her brother Kevin Leung, who leads the firm's invitation-only QiRetreat expeditions in Guangdong, China, Cece helps founders answer the question that no term sheet covers: who are you when the hustle finally stops? In this conversation, Ryan and Cece get into why deals take 18 to 36 brutal months and leave everyone too burned out to plan what comes next, why smart founders sign terrible earn-outs, why the shortest post-exit break Ryan has ever heard of was three days and the longest was nine months, and why Cece thinks movement, nature, and a Sunday morning coffee overlooking Manhattan beat any dashboard. https://richandsassy.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/cscfo/ ⁠⁠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 $50 Million Exit Trap Nobody Warns Founders About

  3. 4d ago

    He Predicted the Lithium Boom in 2016. Everyone Called Him Crazy.

    When China cut off rare earth exports, the American car industry came within two weeks of shutting down. Two weeks. That is not a hypothetical, that is the world we live in now, and Jeremy Wrathall saw it coming a decade ago. In 2016, Jeremy was a mining engineer and investment banker walking to work in London when a friend's comment about lithium in Cornish mine water sent him down a rabbit hole that would change his life. Everyone thought he was insane. Lithium? In Cornwall? The county famous for pasties and Poldark? But Jeremy knew two things most people didn't: the energy transition was going to need staggering amounts of critical minerals, and the West had voluntarily handed its supply chains to China because digging in the dirt wasn't glamorous enough for Wall Street. Ten years later, Cornish Lithium employs 100 people, has raised institutional capital from the National Wealth Fund, TechMet, and EMG, and holds the patents on one of the only lithium extraction technologies on Earth that China does not own and cannot switch off. The company is reviving a brownfield china clay pit at Trelavour, mining land that has been worked for 275 years, going deeper into rock nobody else bothered to look at. Cornwall itself has been mining for 4,000 years. The Bronze Age started there. Now the AI age might too. This conversation covers the two-week near-collapse of the US auto industry, why President Trump is invoking the Defense Production Act for minerals, how a $200 drone made the $2 million tank obsolete, why Jeremy handed the CEO seat to oil and gas veteran Jamie Airnes while keeping his hands on the wheel as Executive Chairman, and the outdoor clothing store failure that taught him to stick to his knitting. Plus: why he thinks Elon gets his billion robots, and why every single one of them needs what comes out of the ground in Cornwall. https://cornishlithium.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremy-wrathall-ba7891b/ ⁠⁠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 Predicted the Lithium Boom in 2016. Everyone Called Him Crazy.

  4. 4d ago

    Soccer League With ZERO Human Players

    Somewhere on a server right now, a striker who does not exist is deciding whether to cut left or right. Nobody scripted the choice. Not even the man who built him. That man is Tal Melenboim, a serial entrepreneur with more than twenty years of exits, patents, and AI ventures behind him, including Movota (sold to Bertelsmann AG), Score:Plug (acquired by Spil Games), VFR.ai, and Data+. His newest creation is Lega.bot, the first autonomous AI soccer universe: more than 20 teams, thousands of agents, each player with its own DNA, playing real 90-minute matches with outcomes nobody controls. Not a video game. Not fantasy soccer. Not generated highlight clips. A living league that runs 24/7, forever, launching right after the World Cup ends and the four-year soccer depression sets in. Tal walks Ryan through how he manages seven-plus simultaneous ventures without losing the plot, why he shares developers across projects and throws "founder dating" parties so his portfolio teaches itself, and why he bootstrapped the entire thing rather than pitch investors a dream they could not see yet. He also drops the line of the episode: every big unsolved challenge in your project is hidden value your competitors have not discovered. If you are suffering, you are early. https://lega.bot/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/tal-melenboim/ 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/

    Soccer League With ZERO Human Players

  5. 6d ago

    Stop Making AI Human: The Contrarian Take Every Founder Needs

    Your website is lying to you. Right now, while you read this, visitors are hitting a broken form, bailing on a checkout button they can barely see, and bouncing off a page designed for someone else entirely. Eric Schneider built a company to catch every single one of those moments, and he built it without a dollar of venture capital. Eric is the co-founder of Cora, a website optimization and monitoring platform that tracks every button, form field, and component on your site, learns how real humans (and bots) actually behave, then rewrites the experience to convert them. One early customer added $20K per week in revenue, a figure Eric shares on air. Cora's bigger bet, full adaptation, reshapes the entire visual site per visitor persona, and Eric says his statistical models point to a 24X lift on yearly revenue, converting 75 to 85% of visitors instead of the classic 3%. These are Cora's own numbers, and they are audacious on purpose. But the product is only half the episode. Eric is one of the most distinctive builders in the Denver AI scene, a fine arts grad turned interaction designer turned bootstrapped founder who writes his product requirements documents from his shower, phone in one hand, coffee somewhere nearby, kids ages two and four safely on the other side of the door. He ships edgy demos weekly, open sources his utilities, controls Claude with tonal frequencies for fun, and still insists the most important product skill in the AI era is saying no. The conversation runs from the early days of the AI Clubhouse meetup (ten people and warm PBR) to a group now drawing 100 to 150 attendees a week, from AI on college campuses to humanoid robots doing blue collar jobs within three years, per a founder friend of Eric's. And it lands on the take that gives this episode its spine: stop training AI to act human. Make AI more AI. Make robots more robot. https://getcora.io/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ecschneider/ ⁠⁠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/

    Stop Making AI Human: The Contrarian Take Every Founder Needs

  6. Jul 8

    $250K and 3 Months to Build What Used to Cost $2 Million and 18 Months

    A 6-person team just built in 3 months what took 18 months and $2 million the last time around. That's not a productivity story. That's a story about the ground shifting under an entire trillion-dollar industry. Tim Lidman knows consulting from the inside. He grew up in the collaboration industry: Webex before Cisco bought it, SuccessFactors before SAP bought it, then a decade helping run ThinkTank, the structured collaboration platform that Big Four firms used to run client workshops. When Accenture acquired ThinkTank's assets in 2021, Tim spent about four years operating at the partner level inside one of the biggest consulting machines on Earth. And what he saw was a workflow begging to be rebuilt: humans designing engagements, humans facilitating, humans synthesizing, and one poor analyst up until 2 AM cobbling together the PowerPoint. So he built Clyde, which launched April 7, 2026 at meetclyde.com. Clyde is what Tim calls AI-native collaboration: a workspace where you bring a real problem, collaborate with a library of AI advisors that act like human experts, pull in actual human stakeholders, and walk out with an aligned outcome and a usable deliverable. Not a wrapper. Not a chatbot bolted onto a legacy whiteboard. A guided system that extracts your true intent, because as Tim puts it, 99% of users don't know what they don't know about prompting. The results are early but loud: 1,300 users in the first month on a pure product-led growth motion, a fast-follow release shipping in June with adaptive workflows, and a customer base that already includes third grade teachers walking away with McKinsey-level curriculum plans. Everyone's getting a raise. Thanks, Clyde. Ryan and Tim also go deep on the founder condition in 2026: the guilt of stepping away from your desk, scheduling dedicated slots for original thought because AI can't invent new information, developers mourning the flow state as they become project managers of agent fleets, raising with extreme caution in a VC landscape where a Series A is the new pre-seed, and why Tim's kids get zero screen time while their dad builds frontier AI. Plus: heavy metal drumming, Suno experiments with his daughter Chloe, why Lovable's Anton Osika is the founder Tim admires most, and a charity using pediatricians as a distribution network. ⁠⁠https://meetclyde.com ⁠⁠https://linkedin.com/in/timlidman ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠ https://inboxalchemy.co/ https://ainativestudent.com/

    $250K and 3 Months to Build What Used to Cost $2 Million and 18 Months

  7. Jul 6

    What It Do: The 90% Rule - Why Finishing Is the Least Fun Part of Building Anything

    Jason Katz popped his LCL three weeks ago scrambling out of a leg entanglement, and honestly, that injury is the whole episode in miniature. You get excited, you move fast, you stand up into a hold you did not see, and something structural gives. In this What It Do check-in, Jason (co-founder of Kindling Solutions, back for another round) and Ryan trade war stories from the two weeks that turned both of their companies from build mode into go mode. Jason drops the concept that should be tattooed on every founder's forearm in 2026: built is not built to scale. Anyone can vibe code something that "works" in a single session now. Jason points to reports of vibe coders getting sued after losing company data through open-ended permissions, and he watches CEOs get star-gazed by AI demos, fire people AI cannot actually replace, then quietly rehire them. Kindling's answer is a governance layer: a way to let a client's internal Lovable and Claude Code tinkerers keep building while Kindling governs the builds it does not even touch. Operators first, then engineers. Jason claims his team has exited three companies at nine and ten figure outcomes, and that operating scar tissue is the product. Ryan, meanwhile, is in full sales dog mode. He restructured his entire week (calls only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, deep work on Monday, Wednesday, Friday) and promptly signed two newsletter sponsorship deals in one week: Momentous, the NSF Certified supplement company behind the grass-fed whey and creatine he already takes daily, and Taelor, the AI-plus-human-stylist menswear rental subscription that is about to give him a dramatic before-and-after wardrobe glow-up, per his daughter's demands. And the whole thing wraps with the two of them planning a Denver panel with Gabe Anderson and ID345's Danny Newman that may or may not end in a staged WWE brawl. Leopard Speedo has been threatened. https://kindlingsolutions.comhttps://taelor.stylehttps://www.livemomentous.comhttps://aiforfounders.cohttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonkatz99/https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/

    What It Do: The 90% Rule - Why Finishing Is the Least Fun Part of Building Anything

  8. Jul 6

    He Buys Companies, Keeps Every Employee, Then Deploys Nobel-Nominated AI

    Most founders think the endgame is IPO or bust. Todd Furniss built a company that offers a third door: sell to someone who keeps your entire team, hands leadership three to five year employment agreements, and then drops patented AI into your operations like a turbocharger into a truck that's been stuck in third gear for a decade.Todd is the CEO and co-founder of AI Squared, formally AIAI Holdings Corporation, publicly traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker AIAI since May 14, 2026. The model is deliciously simple to say and brutally hard to copy: buy real operating companies with real revenue and real EBITDA, retain the management teams, and deploy what Todd describes as Nobel-nominated Transformational AI to create new products, amplify earnings, and redefine what the business can become. No pilots. No rip and replace. No layoff bloodbath. Todd says nearly a billion dollars of EBITDA is sitting in the acquisition pipeline, and here's the kicker: AI Squared didn't cold-call a single one of those companies. They all came knocking.In this conversation, Todd pulls back the curtain on why he listed in Dallas instead of New York, why a direct public offering democratizes AI upside for retail investors, why the scariest businesses are the best businesses, and why 600 years of economic history says the AI jobs panic has it exactly backwards. He also explains how behavioral psychometrics turned a construction company's bid estimator into a weapon, and why he told his kids the liberal arts just became the most valuable degree on campus.https://aiaiholdings.comhttps://skullgames.orghttps://aiforfounders.cohttps://inboxalchemy.co

    He Buys Companies, Keeps Every Employee, Then Deploys Nobel-Nominated AI
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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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