AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

How many tabs are in the one spreadsheet that secretly runs your company? Seventy-two? Rickard Hansson is betting that spreadsheet is about to become an app, without you writing a single prompt. Rickard is a Malmö-based serial entrepreneur on his sixth company in more than 20 years of building, including a decade in Los Angeles. His newest company, Gainable, sits in the gap between low-code platfo...

A CGI artist once looked at Pablo Starr’s screenplay and told him he’d need someone like Steven Spielberg to greenlight it. Every minute of his evolved creatures, parrots grown into terror birds and bats that hunt by echolocation, would cost thousands of dollars. The script was 10 Million AD, and Pablo had been writing it since the 1990s. Six years later, he made it himself. Pablo is the founder o...

Your grandfather has told the same three stories at every holiday dinner for twenty years. Nobody has ever asked him the follow-up question. Rafi Moshe built an AI that does. Rafi is the founder and CEO of StoriedLife, a Toronto company behind Eva, an AI biographer. Eva interviews your parents and grandparents in their own language, turns those conversations into warmly written stories, and prints...

Forty-seven seconds. That’s how far ahead Gelu Sulugiuc’s machines finished when IBM dropped disappointing numbers: a clean headline with revenue against the FactSet estimate, published before a legacy terminal had typed a word. In trading, forty-seven seconds is the difference between catching a move and paying for someone else’s. Gelu knows both sides of that race. He started as a financial jour...

What if the most valuable thing your highly paid experts do has nothing to do with their computers? That question kept Joe Esteves up at night. As CEO of Maine Pointe, the supply chain and operations consulting firm ranked #1 by Consulting.us, he kept walking into project rooms full of consultants clicking away at screens while clients waited outside. So he asked his team to do the math on how muc...

Lior Illouz once walked fifteen meters, turned around, and walked fifteen meters back. He did it for four hours a day, four days straight, without speaking to anyone. Somewhere around the hundredth turn, a memory from second grade surfaced that he didn’t know he still had. That was Thailand, right after seven years at Meta across Singapore, London and Tel Aviv. The paycheck was gone and so was the...

Jason Katz can make a 12-minute YouTube video, from research to final cut, in under an hour of his own time. The secret isn't the software he built. It's that a machine interviews him first. This What It Do opens with cereal, takes a detour through the Bible, and lands on the most practical tour of an AI content engine we've ever done. Ryan kicks things off with a new installment of hi...

What if the business you're saving for retirement could go live before your coffee gets cold? In this episode of AI for Founders, Ryan Estes skips the interview and does something riskier: he builds a real business, live, in one hour, with every stumble left in. The rules were strict. It had to run from home with one person. It needed no degree, no certification and no pile of cash. And it had...

Eric Marton spent 25 years learning exactly how broken American healthcare is, from the inside, at the top. Health system executive. Private equity. Partner at two venture funds. The kind of career that ends in board seats and boat drinks. Then he took a portfolio company up to NVIDIA headquarters in Santa Clara to look at molecule design, sat in a room full of tenured scientists from Stanford and...

Kostas Koukoravas came out of lockdown about ten kilos heavier, having taken up baking like half the planet. So he did what a former Microsoft product manager does. He started logging his food. MyFitnessPal first, which meant weighing everything and then typing it in, which meant quitting. Then the AI photo apps arrived and made logging fast, which was great until he found the research: photo esti...

Did you know that winning a lawsuit can be a worse bet than a Vegas table? Morgan "Mo" Duffy Tregenza thinks so, and she has the courtroom miles to back it up. Mo grew up in Telluride, Colorado, the daughter of a zoologist, back when mining and ranching families still shaped the town. She's an attorney by training. Her grandfather spent 30 years as a judge, then became a mediator in...

Congress wants a roll call of your AI agents. Could you produce one by Friday? In early September, Reps. Josh Gottheimer and Mike Lawler introduced the Stop Rogue AI Act. The bill would have NIST write standards for tracking and logging AI agents, including a live, machine-readable inventory of every agent on a network. Meanwhile, carriers like Berkshire Hathaway, Chubb, Travelers and AIG have bee...

Ryan Estes has a confession. He is terrible at hiring. Not incompetent. Worse. He is charmed . Put him in a room with a candidate and forty-five minutes later he is quietly in love with a person's mind, their weird hobbies, the way they think about problems that have nothing to do with the job. Then a colleague walks in and says the thing nobody wants to hear: they were not qualified. So Ryan...

Thirteen days from now, the FDA convenes a panel that has never convened before. On September 23, 2026, the Molecular and Clinical Genetics Panel sits down to vote on Grail's Galleri test, the first multi-cancer early detection test ever to reach an FDA advisory committee. Every founder building in early detection is watching. Shlomi Madar is watching too. He just is not building the same thin...

Nobody warns you that traction is the lonely part. Broke and scared has company. Everybody has been broke and scared. What nobody prepares you for is the 11 PM decision, three years in, revenue real, team growing, and not a single person left who understands the shape of the problem. Your friends stopped relating around round two. Your family cannot parse the question. Your team needs you to alrea...

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 g...

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...

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 Capita...

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 approve...

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,...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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 De...