AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

AI music companies are treating creativity like disposable garbage, and they’re about to hit a wall so hard it sparks the next artistic renaissance. Hot take: Generative AI didn’t democratize music, it cheapened it. Because when anything can make a trillion songs a second, the algorithm stops rewarding artists and starts rewarding… sludge. Here’s the tension. The stats say AI music is everywhere....

"Stop hiring AI passengers, they're dead weight. If your team says 'this is what AI thinks,' fire them. Here's why..."Two billion people use AI every day, but they won't pay a dime for it. That means enterprise has to foot the entire bill, and right now, they're hemorrhaging cash on $30/month seats that nobody's actually using. The brutal truth? CEOs spend a y...

The best AI companies won't use LLMs. Here's why most founders are building the wrong thing... Everyone's chasing ChatGPT wrappers while the real money is buried inside boring businesses making $100M a year. Cabinet factories. Paint mixers. Ball-bearing manufacturers. They're sitting on decades of proprietary data, proprietary SOPs, chemical formulas, machine configurations, and no...

Hot take: AI isn’t killing creativity, it’s exposing how emotionally lazy founders have become. Because most people use AI to move faster, not to feel deeper. AI can either make you more human… or quietly turn you into a productivity zombie who panics when the tools shut off. Then I met Ziah Orion from Deep Gem Interactive . And instead of talking dashboards and prompts, we went somewhere unexpect...

College didn’t get expensive. It got unnecessary for anyone who wants to make real money in the next 10 years. Because the future isn’t “learn more.” It’s learn fast, get licensed, get paid. America has about 700,000 registered apprentices. That’s roughly 0.4% of the workforce. Basically… nobody. Meanwhile we’ve got over a million electrician jobs open, licensed workers retiring, and data centers...

Business owners, I already know you hate taxes. Not the “ugh, paperwork” kind of hate. I mean the kind of hate where you’d rather get dental work at a gas station than explain your P&L. And here’s the part that should scare you a little: taxes aren’t just expensive. They’re sneaky. Most founders don’t overpay on purpose. They overpay because they’re too busy. And even worse, half of you are si...

Hot take: Healthcare doesn’t have a diagnosis problem. It has a time problem. And that time problem is quietly ruining lives. Most patients get 13 minutes with a doctor. That’s barely enough time to describe symptoms, let alone find the real cause. So you get pills, not answers. Not because doctors don’t care, but because the system doesn’t allow them to. Haresh Patel learned this the hard way. He...

You know that moment when your “vibe coded MVP” finally gets users… and then it starts breaking in ways you can’t even explain? That’s where Mike Vitez shows up. Mike’s a computer scientist who was doing machine learning and building his own big data and clustering algorithms before AI was cool. Then he launched a software company straight out of school, watched the industry evolve from “just ship...

You ever watch a “non-tech” industry get quietly eaten alive by a kid with a phone and zero patience? Kai Stone went from post-college degenerate mode to building Stone Systems. A $297/month “copy-paste” software stack that helps contractors run their whole business from their PHONE. Because most contractors aren’t at a laptop. Some don’t even own one. Here’s the tension: marketing agencies lose e...

You raised a seed round. You sold the dream to investors. You sold the dream to your team. And now comes the part nobody budgets for… the dream might be wrong. Ali from Wednesday has seen this movie a thousand times. Founders obsess over signups, views, downloads… and then wonder why revenue is allergic to them. His move is brutal and simple: Sprint Zero. Audit the “pirate metrics” that actually m...

Most startups don’t break because they lack talent. They break because the product quietly splits into parallel universes. One team ships a feature. Another ships the same feature… differently. Both are “right.” Everyone’s moving fast. No one’s moving together. Chris Strahl saw this up close and decided chaos was not a growth strategy. Before co-founding Knapsack , he watched high-performing teams...

What if the biggest AI risk in your company isn’t hallucinations… it’s that you’re quietly turning your team into button clickers. Because right now, everyone’s “doing AI,” but most companies are just buying the same tools as their competitors and calling it strategy. Geoff Gibbins from Human Machines is obsessed with the real advantage. Not better prompts. Better collaboration between humans and...

It’s late December energy. The year’s basically over. The cookies are gone, the group chats are quiet, and this is the one moment where you’re allowed to stop shipping long enough to look back. Because 2025 was insane for AI. Every week felt like a new launch, a new model, a new panic, a new promise that this one would change everything. Faster code. Cheaper labor. Smarter agents. Louder fear. And...

If you have an app idea and it is still living in Notes, you are not “early.” You are stuck. Because the new founder trap is not lack of code. It is fake momentum. Vibe coding gets you a pretty prototype fast, then the last 30% hits like a brick wall. Architecture, requirements, integrations, security, the stuff that makes you want to delete the repo and move to a cabin. Ehsan Mirdamadi built Coda...

Welcome to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes. Founders, you’re not stuck because your idea is bad. You’re stuck because your AI won’t do the last 10%… and you’re about to rage quit in slow motion. You know the moment. You’ve prompted it 47 different ways. Perplexity, ChatGPT, YouTube tutorials. Your energy leaves your body. The project dies right there on your laptop like a Victorian child. Dann...

Welcome to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes. Every founder I know is sprinting to keep up with AI. New tools. New models. New expectations. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: AI is making technical skill cheaper by the day — and exposing something most leaders never developed. Their human edge. Today’s guest, Uma , spent 20 years inside Microsoft , climbed the ladder, played the game, and then...

Welcome to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes. Every non-technical founder hits the same wall. You’ve got the idea. You’ve got the market. You’ve even got early traction. But then comes the question that kills momentum: “Who’s going to build this?” Technical cofounder? Impossible to find. Dev agency? Expensive and slow. No-code tools? Great… until you need something real. Today’s guests are here...

What happens when you build an AI that can spot disease years before symptoms, cut diabetes related complications by 20 percent, and slash healthcare costs, and the market still shrugs. That is the problem my guest today ran straight into. On this episode of AI for Founders, I am talking with Mariano García Valiño, four-time healthcare entrepreneur and CEO of Axenya. Axenya is an AI-powered operat...

Welcome to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes. Today’s episode starts with a simple question: What happens when the world’s smartest podcast app is built in a country obsessed with precision, craftsmanship, and self-responsibility… and then shipped to founders who desperately need to learn faster? Because here’s the tension: podcasts have become the biggest knowledge library on Earth , yet most p...

Today’s episode starts with a simple but brutal truth: Vibe coding breaks the moment your idea gets bigger than “make the button blue.” Every founder knows this moment — when you’ve stretched Lovable, Cursor, or Claude Code as far as your vibes can take you… and suddenly the whole thing collapses under unclear prompts, messy code, and your total inability to explain what you want in the first plac...

Today’s episode starts with a problem almost every founder fears… What happens when the system you're trying to disrupt is so big, so regulated, and so politically volatile … that one election can flip your entire business model overnight? That’s the world my guest lives in — and somehow thrives in. I’m talking to Eugene Sayan , founder and CEO of Softheon , a 25-year-old startup that processe...

Welcome to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes. Today’s episode starts with a problem every founder knows too well: You finally get a user into your product… and then watch them get completely lost. They bounce. They churn. Or they email support with the dreaded: “Hey uh… how do I actually use this?” That onboarding black hole costs SaaS companies billions — and Alex and Andy from Quarterzip.ai sa...

Welcome to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes. Most of us were never really taught how money works —we were taught how to earn it, maybe how to spend it, but never how to build it. Now imagine the largest wealth transfer in human history—somewhere between $60 trillion and $90 trillion —is happening right now… and most of the inheritors don’t know what a limited partnership is. That’s the problem...

Welcome to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes. Today’s episode starts with a problem every founder secretly wrestles with: the future is moving faster than your product roadmap . Models change monthly, competitors ship weekly, and half the AI space seems to be guessing their strategy on the fly. But what if prediction wasn’t a parlor trick… but a real capability? And what if the companies who mas...

Welcome to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes. If you’re building something in AI and you haven’t checked the patent landscape, there’s a non-zero chance someone you’ve never met already owns the rights to your “million dollar” idea. And one day, right when you hit real traction, they show up with a lawsuit instead of a term sheet. On today’s episode of AI for Founders, I’m talking with Ophir Kra...