AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

Everything you know about getting found online is about to be obsolete. For two decades, founders chased one algorithm. Backlinks, page speed, keyword stuffing, the whole exhausting machine. Then a handful of chatbots quietly took the wheel, and now they decide which businesses get recommended and which ones get ghosted. SEO is bleeding out. Google traffic is leaking. And a huge slice of buyers no...

You are the smartest person in your company. That is exactly the problem. Every founder hits the same wall. The strategy lives in your head. The taste lives in your gut. The thousand tiny judgment calls that make your company yours live nowhere anyone else can reach them. So your team waits. They wait on your approval, your context, your answer to a question you have answered nine times already. A...

Everything you trust online is about to break, and André Ferraz built a company to catch the people breaking it. Picture a 12-year-old kid riding his bike through Brazil when a stranger points a gun at his face to steal it. That kid grew up with two computer scientist parents, an early love of code, and a peculiar fascination not with building systems but with breaking them. Three decades later, t...

Pradnesh Patil spent years as a product leader at Fortune 500 companies bringing in millions in revenue, and every single quarter the same thing kept happening. He would walk into leadership meetings, present data, get hit with the question "why is this number different from last week," and then watch the opportunity window close while his data team spent two months trying to figure it o...

When Punit Bhatia walks into a founder's office, the building is usually already on fire. Someone configured the CRM, blasted thousands of cold emails, scaled the AI agent stack overnight, and is now staring at a complaint, a regulator, or worse, a trending news story. The problem was never the AI. The problem was the speed without the guardrails. In this conversation, Punit walks Ryan through...

Will Ruben spent more than a decade at the companies that taught the internet what attention looks like. He led ranking and recommendations across Instagram during the era when Reels stopped being a feature and started being the entire product. He worked on Coinbase's Web3 Wallet. He scaled consumer products for billions of people. And then he walked away from all of it to solve something almo...

When Tim Freestone first logged into ChatGPT on November 23, 2022, he turned to his wife and said, "Okay, this is a thing." Two and a half years later, he's the Chief Strategy Officer at Kiteworks, a PE-backed unicorn protecting how data moves in and out of the world's most regulated companies. This episode is part jazz appreciation, part AI philosophy, and part hard-earned playb...

The Stealth Decade That Built a Category Most founders ship in six weeks and pivot in six months. Sameet Gupte and his four co-founders did the opposite. They put pen to paper in 2007, built in stealth from 2009 to 2019, and only then incorporated EvoluteIQ. No customers. No revenue. Just five operators with a thesis that everyone else in automation was solving fragments of the problem instead of...

In a market obsessed with AI multiples and overnight unicorn exits, Bryce Nagels is making a different bet. The CEO and co-founder of Planteva Farms is building what he calls a "halo company": high asset, low obsolescence. The kind of business that doesn't get wiped out when the next model drops, and actually gets stronger every time AI improves. Planteva specializes in propagation....

Jim Ferry has spent his career on the investor side of the table at Volition Capital, a Boston-based growth equity fund that writes Series A and B checks into capital-efficient companies between $1M and $10M in revenue. He's seen thousands of pitches, sat on dozens of boards, and watched the rules of building a defensible business get rewritten in real time over the last 24 months. The through...

In 2017, while most founders were still debating whether chatbots had a future, Punit Singh Soni was studying speech models with the patience of someone who'd already seen what came next. He wasn't a healthcare guy. He'd run games at Google, built mobile apps, sat in the social team. But he understood one thing the rest of the industry was about to learn the hard way: AI was about to b...

Most founders treat SEO like a slot machine. Pull the lever, publish a blog, pray to the algorithm gods. Kaelan Donadio, co-founder of Nina (trynina.co), walked into the studio and dismantled that fantasy in the first sixty seconds. Your blog posts aren't bad, he says. They're invisible. Google literally cannot find them, and no amount of ChatGPT-generated content is going to change that u...

Most founders are still asking how to use AI. Dave Sifry is asking something stranger: what if the org chart itself is the product? Nine companies in, Dave is running what he calls a Meta Factory, a system that spawns entire businesses with AI co-founders at the helm. Two of those companies are already live. One is cashflow positive. And the AI CEO, not Dave, is the one deciding to plow the money...

Most founders don't think about HR until HR thinks about them. And by then, it's a letter on the desk demanding $38,000 and a lien notice attached for good measure. This week on AI for Founders, John, the founder of CogNet HRO, walks through the quietly catastrophic world of multi-state payroll, the surprise tax bills no one warns you about, and why a guy who spent fifteen years running th...

Rebecca Liao spent her career advising the most powerful people in the world. Clinton's campaign. Biden's transition. The Pentagon's policy halls. And then one day she realized something brutal: she didn't want to give advice anymore. She wanted to build. Now she's running Saga AI Labs, a company quietly rewiring how brands acquire customers. Forget influencer budgets. Forget C...

Most founders are racing to build on top of the foundation models. Dan Pratl is doing something stranger and more interesting: he's betting against them. Or more precisely, he's betting against the assumption that the artifact, the output, the polished deliverable, is the thing that matters. Dan thinks expertise itself is the scarce resource of the AI era, and he's building Quadron to...

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Anti-AI Asset: How Nathan Jameson Builds Fortress Wealth in a Market Obsessed With Hype Nathan Jameson sits outside Philadelphia with a human skull (replica) on his desk and a fundamentally different worldview than the founders currently torching runway chasing the next model update. While Silicon Valley places hundred-x bets and watches whole categories get absorbed in a Tuesday re...

Bob Matteson grew up around a father who quietly carried a piece of history with him for decades. The dad attended Game 6 of the 1945 Cubs vs. Tigers World Series. Bob never knew. The story surfaced only after his father passed, dug up secondhand from his mother. That single missing thread, a baseball game his dad never spoke about, planted the question that would become a company: what happens to...

Stephen Rouse didn't set out to pick a fight with Google, OpenAI, Amazon, and Microsoft. He just noticed something broken. Every founder in his orbit was tracking their body through a circus of apps that refused to speak to each other. A Whoop on the wrist. A Garmin for skiing. MyFitnessPal for food. Epic MyChart for labs. Strava for runs. Six logins, zero clarity. Meanwhile, the 21st Century...

The Will You Don't Have Is Already Costing You Most people think estate planning is something you do when you're old, wealthy, or both. David Rosati spent 15 years as a corporate and M&A lawyer watching that assumption wreck families. The paperwork gets avoided. The conversations never happen. And then someone dies, and suddenly everything that should have been simple becomes a courtro...

Devansh walked into the legal tech market and saw a graveyard of point solutions. Word doc plugins. Document hosting tools. Niche contract reviewers. Each one promising to make attorneys more efficient, and each one adding another tab to an already fragmented workflow. That is the problem Irys was built to eliminate. Devansh, co-founder of Irys and creator of the AI Made Simple newsletter, reachin...

Most founders obsess over the wrong leverage point. Not the funnel. Not the product. Not the team. The voice in your head running all three. Dr. Dhruva Gulur grew up in Juneau, Alaska, the child of a schizophrenic mother, a father with full narcissistic personality disorder, and a brother struggling silently with addiction. He watched his family fracture in real time and absorbed it all without la...

Most founders aren't short on information. They're short on signal. Kevin, founder and CEO of Snipd, has been quietly solving the problem that every high-volume podcast listener knows intimately: you have hundreds of episodes queued up, a finite amount of attention, and no good way to extract the gold without siting through the banter. In this return visit, Kevin pulls back the curtain on...

Dr. Ian Ellis, Founder of voafit.com | Precision Dosing, Peptides, and the Future of Human Performance The story starts in an emergency room. Dr. Ian Ellis spent almost a decade watching the same patients cycle through with the same problems, receiving the same treatments, never actually getting better. Just bailing out the pool, he says. That disillusionment became the seed of something bigger. W...

★★★★★ You can automate your outreach. You can spin up agents overnight. But you cannot automate the moment someone walks into a room and feels seen. Virginia Frischkorn has produced several hundred million dollars worth of live events across 18 years. She is the founder of Partytrick, a platform she describes as having a professional event planner in your pocket. Her user is not the professional e...