AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

Welcome back to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes. What happens when your most reliable teammate isn’t an app… it’s a voice that calls you at exactly the right moment? Today we’re meeting the founders of Commitify, an AI accountability coach with personalities—Life Coach, Zen Master, Slay Bestie, Hype Beast, Drill Sergeant, and CEO—that literally ring your phone to snap you back into flow. The t...

Welcome back to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes. Today’s episode starts with a tension every founder feels but rarely admits: What do you do when the talent you need doesn’t exist in your own backyard - but exists in abundance halfway across the world? My guest, Nico Bivero , has spent 22 years in Asia and 15 years in the Philippines building Penbrothers—one of the original offshore-team power...

Welcome back to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes. AI is sprinting, but most enterprises are stuck doing the splits — one foot on a mainframe, one foot in the cloud — and the plumbing in between is Victorian. Today, we fix that. My guest is David Carmell, founder of DATAROCKiT, and his claim is simple and spicy. Data is just data until it’s clean enough for AI. In this episode, you’ll learn how...

Welcome back to AI for Founders, I am Ryan Estes There’s a mountain every company is quietly climbing — not of code or customers, but of unstructured data . Billions of pages. Decades of contracts, PDFs, and reports trapped in digital silos no human has time to read. It’s where trillions of dollars in untapped insight are hiding — and where most AI systems still fail. Today, we meet the man buildi...

Welcome to AI for Founders I am Ryan Estes. You are probably feeling the whiplash right now. Your office lease was signed in 2018 for 10 years, your team is half remote, your desks cost $15–40k a year, and your people are either lonely at home or resentful about being dragged back to the office. Today I am talking with someone who went through the fire on this. Dan Bladen is the founder of Kadence...

There’s a problem simmering under the surface of the AI boom that nobody wants to say out loud: The tech is evolving faster than founders can keep up — and the tools we rely on keep regressing back to kindergarten. One month Perplexity is brilliant, the next it’s recommending Arby's. One day GPT is your super-genius co-pilot, the next you’re bottle-feeding it simple math. And just when you thi...

In this episode of AI for Founders, Ryan Estes sits down with Jasson Casey, CEO of Beyond Identity, and Josh from Brand Hospitality Group to unpack what happens when AI can convincingly impersonate humans and your passwords are the weakest link in the system. They break down how device-bound, hardware-backed identity can stop AI-enabled adversaries, eliminate most password-based attacks, and give...

Greg Brogger of Collective Liquidity Guest: Greg Brogger, Founder and CEO of Collective Liquidity Show: AI for Founders with Ryan Estes Episode Overview What do you do when most of your net worth is tied up in one late-stage startup that might never exit? In this episode, Ryan talks with serial fintech founder Greg Brogger about how Collective Liquidity isbuilding an exchange fund designed specifi...

Friday night in a busy restaurant, the phones never stop ringing and up to 40 percent of calls never get answered. Loman AI turns that chaos into captured revenue. In this episode, Christian Wiens breaks down how Loman AI built a fully conversational voice AI agent that answers every call, takes orders, handles reservations, and plugs directly into restaurant POS systems. No phone trees, no press...

Guest: Anish Sebastian, CEO & Co-Founder, Babyscripts Host: Ryan Estes Episode Summary Maternal mortality is rising in the U.S. while access to care lags. Anish Sebastian explains how Babyscripts uses AI, remote patient monitoring, and data-driven care plans to connect OB providers with patients between visits, cut unnecessary appointments, and surface high-risk events earlier. We dig into cli...

Guest: Ricardo Vice Santos, CEO and co-founder of DreamStories.ai Topic: Agentic content studio, personalized children’s books, character-consistent AI imagery, subscriber-style publishing economics Episode Overview How DreamStories.ai turns kids into the hero of their own beautifully illustrated adventure. Ricardo explains the “agentic content studio” model, why he started with physical books, ho...

AI for Founders — Danny Kirk (ReddiReach) Show Notes Episode summary Reddit has become a prime source for AI training data and AI search results. Founder Danny Kirk explains how ReddiReach helps 7–10 figure brands win inside AI search by using Reddit the right way. We break down why comments beat posts, how AI search is changing SEO, and what brands should do now to capture demand from LLM recomme...

Guest: Keren Fanan, Co-Founder & CEO, MyOp.dev Topic: Plugging AI-generated UI into production without breaking your core app Episode overview AI can now generate front ends and UX logic in minutes, but most teams still cannot ship that code safely. Keren explains how MyOp’s pluggable layer lets non-developers ship UI in isolation while engineering protects the core, enabling faster experiment...

Henry O’Connell, CEO of Canary Speech — Voice Biomarkers, and Real-Time Clinical Support Summary Canary Speech turns everyday conversation into clinical-grade insight. Henry O’Connell explains how ambient listening analyzes 2,590 vocal biomarkers every 10 milliseconds to produce about 16 million data points per minute. The system returns real-time scores for anxiety, depression, cognitive health,...

AI for Founders Guest: Devika Sarin, Founder of Soal ( thisissoal.com ) Topic: AI-powered art discovery, taste mapping, and community-driven curation for Millennials and Gen Z Episode Overview Soal is building a daily ritual for art discovery that blends human curation with behavioral science and AI. Devika shares how the app helps users learn to see, name, and evolve their taste, why early commun...

AI for Founders with Dave Polykoff, Founder of Zenpost Episode Summary In this episode of AI for Founders , Ryan Estes sits down with Dave Polykoff, the founder of Zenpost — a content engine helping founders, consultants, and service providers turn one video shoot into a month of high-converting content. Dave breaks down how he built Zenpost into a systemized growth machine that scales personal br...

AI for Founders — Show Notes Guest: Hank Leber, cofounder of Stanify.ai Topic: Turning the comment section into conversions with multilingual, human-in-the-loop AI Episode Summary Hank Leber breaks down how Stanify.ai automates brand-safe engagement in social comment sections and DMs at scale. We cover auto-moderation that preserves healthy debate, multilingual on-brand replies, a human-in-the-loo...

AI for Founders – Guest: Drew Falkman Summary In this episode of AI for Founders , Ryan Estes talks with Drew Falkman , a veteran product strategist and AI coach who’s been building digital products for more than two decades. Drew has worked with major brands like HP, Adobe, AARP, and American Airlines , and today he’s leading the charge in AI product acceleration —helping founders build and test...

Show Notes: Lawrence Coburn, CEO & Co-founder of Ambient Serial founder Lawrence Coburn (DoubleDutch, Twine) returns with Ambient, an AI Chief of Staff that helps founders and CEOs reclaim time and upgrade decision quality. After interviewing 400 Chiefs of Staff, Ambient focuses on three high-leverage workflows: daily prep dossiers, secure leadership meeting notes, and red/yellow/green trackin...

Guest: Dr. Brigham Hyde , Co-Founder & CEO of Atropos Health Episode Summary: In this episode, Ryan Estes interviews Dr. Brigham Hyde to explore how Atropos Health is closing medicine’s “evidence gap” — the staggering reality that only 14% of clinical decisions are based on high-quality evidence. With products like ChatRWD® and GENEVA OS™ , Atropos uses generative AI to transform real-world data i...

How Isaac Kassab Scaled Pearl Talent to $10M in ARR Guest: Isaac Kassab (Pearl Talent) Host: Ryan Estes, AI for Founders Overview In this episode of AI for Founders , Ryan Estes sits down with Isaac Kassab, cofounder of Pearl Talent. Isaac shares how he bootstrapped the business to $1M ARR in 7 months and scaled it to $10M by year three. You’ll hear actionable insights about using conversational a...

Building Pinery with Heberti Almeida Summary From a stormy Brazilian farm to the Mac App Store. Former Square engineer Heberti Almeida spent seven years turning a side project into Pinery , a focused Markdown writing and self-publishing app for Mac. We cover privacy-first on-device AI, clean ePub and PDF export, subscription pricing that sustains indie software, and how tractor time can sharpen pr...

AI for Founders with Eunice, Co-founder and CTO of Kawara.ai Topic: Turning creator content into newsletter-driven sales Summary Eunice explains how content-led growth is reshaping sales for creators and lean startups. Kawara.ai helps solopreneurs turn YouTube and other consumed or created content into weekly newsletter drafts that convert. We cover why newsletters outperform social for sales, how...

AI for Founders — Owen from Meld on Somatic Leadership, Founder Resilience, and Community Guest: Owen Marcus, co-founder of Meld (Men’s Emotional Leadership Development) Topic: Building embodied leadership for founders through somatics, nervous system training, and high-trust men’s groups. Why listen: A field guide for high performers who’ve maxed out intellect and want scalable tools to reduce st...

Royan Nidea on Scaling to $100K Months with Setters Philippines In this episode of AI for Founders , Ryan Estes sits down with Royan Nidea , founder of Setters Philippines , a consulting and lead generation firm that has scaled to millions in revenue by helping coaches, consultants, and B2B founders consistently land qualified calls and build thought leadership. Royan shares how he generated $16 m...