AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

The average patient gets seen and disappears. No signal, no follow-up, no data trail. Just a receipt and a co-pay. Lauren Larson, CEO of Videra Health, knows exactly what lives in that gap, and he has spent six years building AI to close it. Lauren came up through HireVue, where video-based AI interviewed 100 million job candidates and surfaced the best ones through behavioral signal, not resume g...

Say Hello to Your AI Data Analyst: How Bruin Is Replacing Headcount, Not Just Dashboards There is a question Burak Karakan wants every founder to ask themselves right now: Do you know where your agents are? Burak is the co-founder of Bruin, an AI data analyst that connects directly to your data warehouse and answers any question in under 90 seconds, right inside Slack, Microsoft Teams, or a clean...

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 S...

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 t...

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 a...

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...

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 wr...

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 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 betwe...

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...

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...

There is a moment in every founder's journey where they realize the map they were given was wrong. The old map said: have an idea, find a developer, wait months, launch, iterate. David Alonso, co-founder of Bloom and ETH Zurich robotics graduate turned mobile app revolutionary, is handing founders a new map. One where the distance between idea and working product is measured in minutes, not mo...

Jesse Marble did not set out to build a typical VC firm. Growing up steeped in Colorado culture, watching people chase outdoor adventure, physical health, and something resembling a meaningful life, he kept noticing a gap. We have more technology in our pockets than it took to land Americans on the moon. And yet, by almost every subjective measure, people are not thriving more. They are thriving l...

There's a moment in every founder's journey where the market stops being theoretical and becomes deeply personal. For Lucas Consoli, co-founder of EmpathEQ, that moment happened in a hospital room, watching his mother in an induced coma for two weeks, his emotional state entirely at the mercy of whichever nurse happened to be on shift. Some had zero empathy. Some brought calm into chaos. T...

When the Market Is a WhatsApp Group, That's Your Opportunity Some of the best startup ideas don't come from pitch decks. They come from watching thousands of people make high-stakes decisions inside a Facebook group, realizing there is no trusted infrastructure, and deciding to build it yourself. That's exactly what Francesco Hayes did. As co-founder and CTO of Luxxera, he spotted one...

There is a certain kind of founder who, after building and exiting a company, does not slow down. They just get quieter about it. Colin McIntosh is that founder. He sold Sheets and Giggles, the irreverently named sustainable bedding brand he bootstrapped into a multi-million dollar e-commerce operation, and then he did what most founders say they will do and almost never do: he kept building, but...

There's a place in Denver, inside a buzzing AI builder clubhouse, where the future gets stress-tested out loud every Wednesday night. That's where this conversation happened, and it did not go the direction you'd expect. Carson Vest is an investment associate at Denver Ventures, a generalist fund covering pre-seed all the way to Series B. She sees everything. Hundreds of founders, hund...

Josh Gilmer on AI video journaling, founder self-awareness, searchable memory, and the future of personal growth Most founders say they want self-awareness. What they usually mean is they want a cleaner notes app. In this episode of AI for Founders , Ryan Estes sits down with Josh Gilmer , founder of Historic , to explore a wild and increasingly relevant idea: what if the most valuable founder dat...

This conversation starts with a blunt idea: most AI companies are moving fast enough to impress people, but not carefully enough to survive themselves. What looks like momentum from the outside can be chaos on the inside, and James Everingham makes the case that the next real layer of AI infrastructure will not be another flashy model. It will be the systems that govern, audit, orchestrate, and pr...

Ryan opens with a founder gut check. Scale sounds sexy, but control is the real addiction. Then Marcin walks in with a real world mirror, because warehouses do not care about your pitch deck, and robots do not care about your assumptions. Sevensense builds the “eyes and brains” for mobile robots, not the whole robot. The story starts in the ETH Zurich ecosystem where robotics talent is dense, labo...

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: social media isn’t preserving your memories. It’s strip-mining their meaning. We built trillion-dollar machines so strangers can watch us live… while the people who were actually there are already scrolling past it. Founders obsess over growth, distribution, scale. Reach. Impressions. Virality. But what if the most valuable product isn’t reach? It’s recall. You host...

Most founders are accidentally running a casino. Not a company. They’re bragging about ROAS, celebrating revenue spikes, and somehow… still bleeding cash. Because if you don’t know how much you should be spending, “ads” isn’t a strategy. It’s gambling with better graphics. Here’s the real conflict. AI is about to flood the world with “growth tools” that promise the moon, but they still can’t ask t...

If stillness is the source of your best decisions, why is your calendar built like it is trying to kill it? Be honest. When was the last time your biggest breakthrough happened in a meeting? Not a brainstorm. Not a sprint. Not a Slack war. I’m talking about the idea that actually changed your trajectory. The hire you finally understood. The product pivot that suddenly made sense. It probably happe...

What if the most valuable asset in your company isn’t your tech stack, your team, or even your brand What if it’s the quiet archive sitting on your laptop In this episode of AI for Founders, Ryan sits down with Dr. Jonathan Schaffer, a 40-year AI pioneer, professor, and now founder of a privacy-first AI platform called Kind. What unfolds is not just a product conversation. It is a philosophical re...

Your startup idea is probably garbage. Not because you are dumb. Because you are in love. And love makes you build… a product nobody wants. Here’s the controversial take: If you cannot survive 10 uncomfortable customer conversations, you do not deserve to write a single line of code. Because validation is not “vibes.” It is evidence. It is bruises. It is getting told “no” until your ego stops blee...

Most founders don’t have a software problem… they have a decision problem. We spend weeks “researching” tools, comparing top 10 lists, reading reviews written by people who’ve never run payroll, never closed a deal, never felt the pressure of making the wrong call. Meanwhile, your team is stuck. Momentum dies. And you call it due diligence. Here’s the tension: choosing a restaurant takes five minu...