AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

Epizody

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  Psychedelics Might Be The Most Important Founder Technology Of This Decade 19.08.2026 1h

  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 that compression was not free time. It was concentration. "It doesn't actually reduce the psychological load of being a founder. It actually concentrates it." When you can go from unknowns to three viable options in an afternoon, the entire weight of the job lands on the one thing that did not get faster: your judgment. Your ability to know which bias you brought into the room. Your ability to find signal in noise you generated yourself.Those are not technical skills. AI cannot build them for you.Niko's answer, and now his company, is Althea, a public benefit corporation building the infrastructure layer for legal, supervised psychedelic therapy in Colorado and Oregon. It started as compliance software for licensed facilitators. It has become a marketplace where a person can find a screened, licensed, reviewed psilocybin experience the way you would book anything else you actually intend to show up for. Althea is formed in partnership with the University of Colorado School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry, and in January 2026 it acquired Tricycle Day, the psychedelic education newsletter founded by Henry Winslow, now Althea's President.The origin is not a market thesis. Niko sat with his father a month before he died, with psilocybin, and watched a man who had spent his life arguing about his own addictions stop arguing. "He chose to move into death courageously, in a way that aligned with who he was." They spent the last days on a beach with beers and Pink Floyd. Niko left Redox in 2022 and went looking for how to point a fifteen-year healthcare technology career at that.This conversation is not a sales pitch for mushrooms. It is a working founder describing, in specifics, what happens to a person whose identity was built on cognitive output when the cognitive output gets commoditized. It includes the parts that do not fit on a thumbnail: the hero's dose four days before recording that he described as a really challenging experience, the pacing in a hallway, the exhaustion, the gratitude on the other side. It includes who should not do this and why. And it includes a genuinely useful working practice that has nothing to do with psychedelics at all, which is what to do with the ninety seconds while your agent finishes running.Two-thirds of the people going through Althea's system are not there for mental health. They are there to get unstuck. If you have ever felt like productivity quietly became your entire personality, that number will land.Althea: https://withalthea.comBrowse legal experiences: https://be.withalthea.com/experiencesThe Forward Fund: https://withalthea.com/forward-fund/Tricycle Day newsletter: https://www.tricycleday.com/Niko on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/skievaski/Ryan Estes on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/
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  Two Purple Belts on Scaling Startups With AI, Stoicism, and Cold Plunges 17.08.2026 26min

  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, if you hold the vision long enough and cultivate the right things, the seeds start to grow like vines, they connect, and suddenly you are not running six disparate projects anymore. You are running one organism. Jason calls the moment it clicks a symphony, and he is not being modest about it.This one is different from a standard What It Do. Ryan and Jason both showed up on the same wave: two purple belts in their forties, both coming off a break, both watching years of quiet groundwork finally pay out at the same time. Ryan floats renaming the show "Stoic Jiu-Jitsu Guys in Their 40s Celebrating Their Wins," and honestly, that is the episode.The tension underneath the celebration is the good part. Jason spends the first half telling younger founders not to try to prove themselves, and then spends the second half admitting that his entire career was built on doing exactly that. He raised his hand for roles he had no business taking. He put himself in pressure cookers where the only exit was to shine. It worked, he is batting 1000 on do or die, and he has been in what he calls PhD education mode for fifteen straight years. He also says plainly that there is a healthier way to do it, and he did not take it.What emerges instead is a calibration: not zero pressure, not crushing pressure, but permanent low-grade discomfort. Always carry something a little heavy. Live in the gray. That is the version he would sell to a 25-year-old.Then there is the relationship math. Jason is currently in conversations about strategic partnerships that trace directly back to people he met a decade ago. Not networking. Not a CRM sequence. Just being a decent, disciplined, curious person for ten years and then picking up the phone. Ryan brings in a gem from Jeremy Wrathall, founder of Cornish Lithium: be interested, and be interesting. Interested carries the relationship. Interesting earns you the right to be interesting to somebody else. Grinding alone does neither.The travel stretch in the middle earns its keep. Ryan went to the Yucatán, climbed Ek Balam, swam cenotes, and came back with a founder observation dressed up as an anthropology lesson: the ancient Maya city has a temple, a state building, side houses, and a ball court. Drive fifteen minutes to the modern village and you find a chapel, a state building, side houses, and a soccer court. Twelve hundred years later, humans are still laying out the same city. Jason counters with a cave dive story that is either a spiritual experience or an OSHA violation depending on your risk tolerance.Ryan closes with a launch. Howdi went live this week at gethowdi.com, built on the back of Wildcast, his host-read advertising platform. The pitch: an autonomous AI sponsorship agent named Casey Taylor that sources real partnership opportunities for independent creators, starting with podcasters. Alpha is open.--kindlingsolutions.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonkatz99/https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/
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  The $9 Billion Warning Every Founder Scaling Past $1M Needs To Hear 16.08.2026 1h 1min

  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 Debra.The conversation starts where every founder conversation is starting in 2026: Elon Musk told The Economist in July that money won't matter by 2036. Ryan asks Brett to place himself on the doom to utopia scale. Brett does not hedge. He puts himself at ninety five percent confident that humanity reaches what he calls the Age of Abundance for All, and then spends the next hour explaining why that confidence is the opposite of complacency.The risk, in his framing, is not the Terminator. It is the amygdala. Homo sapiens spent 99.9% of our time on this planet without electricity, and the scarcity software is still running. The laziest way to make money, Brett argues, is to hijack human biology: the mind, the body, the wallet. Social algorithms tuned for fear. Media tuned for dystopia. Profit routed over people. He is blunt about the fact that he has been a beneficiary of the system he is critiquing, which is exactly what gives the critique teeth.Then it gets personal. Ryan brings the Bodhisattva vow. Brett brings Bhutan, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Stoicism, and argues they all sink into the same root: the kingdom is found within. He talks about the Lamborghini on his childhood wall, the Lamborghini he eventually owned for ten years, and the exact amount of lasting happiness it produced. Zero. Not any of it.What did work, according to Brett: being on a mission that is genuinely yours, breaking out of the comparison machine, and doing the internal work to identify the programs running in your head before they run your company.The practical spine of the episode is a set of tools. Reading Doty. Building a plank from two minutes to twenty four minutes over seven years, one increment at a time, because patience is a trainable muscle and almost no American trains it. Buddying up with someone who will ask you what you're reading and how you're actually doing. Meditation as a 300 baud modem to the divine, psychedelics as broadband, and integration as the part that actually matters. And AI as the greatest tool ever built for the eternally curious, if you point it at the right questions.Ryan brings his own anger, his own grappling, his own dinner table in Denver with a daughter home from college and a son back from football practice, and names it: this is heaven. That is the whole thesis in one sentence.If you are scaling past a million and quietly wondering whether the finish line moves every time you get close, this one is for you.Books referenced: Love Conquers Fear by Brett Alexander Hurt, Into the Magic Shop and Mind Magic by James Doty, Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright, The Gospel According to Jesus by Stephen Mitchell, Tao Te Ching, Bhagavad Gita, How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan.Brett's book : https://www.loveconquersfear.orgBrett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bretthurt/--https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/
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  From $80M To $1B: The Scaling Lesson That Now Applies To Every AI Workflow 16.08.2026 56min

  Your best people just got twice as fast. Congratulations. You have a problem.Ross Barnes has seen this movie from the projection booth. Twenty-five years in tech and advertising, ending as Global CTO of a WPP agency he helped scale from 15 people to more than 1,500 and from $80M to over $1B in revenue. Toyota. Lexus. EA Sports. British Airways. He sat on a global board and drove agile transformation across every function of a company growing faster than its own org chart could redraw itself.Then he left to build Galahad, and the tagline he chose tells you exactly what he learned on the way out: build the machine, protect the human.Here is the trap he watches companies walk into. A gaming client's engineering team was flying. Claude Enterprise across the org, shipping 10X features every week, genuinely at the frontier. And every one of those features needed legal sign-off, because gaming is a regulated business. Legal was not using AI. So the engineering team was not shipping faster. It was building a snowball and rolling it downhill into a team that had no way to catch it.That is the insight Ross has built a consultancy around. AI adoption is not man versus machine. It is your fastest team versus your slowest team. And if you only fund the fast ones, you have not created leverage. You have relocated your bottleneck to someone who never asked for it.His answer is almost aggressively unfashionable: raise the floor, not the roof. Get everyone to a baseline of capability before you go build a superhuman pocket of one department. The org that wins is not the one with the best AI users. It is the one with the fewest people who cannot keep up.Which is why his enablement sessions do not touch a tool for the first two sessions. In any leadership cohort, someone has been living in Claude for two years and someone has never opened it, and you cannot predict which is which from a job title. So you level set. Then, and only then, you ask the question almost nobody asks first: what do you actually want this to accomplish? Handing a team a seat and saying "crack on" does not produce adoption. It produces a room full of people quietly wondering whether they are training their own replacement.The conversation gets genuinely contentious in one place, and it is the best part of the episode. Ryan builds agents with personalities, accents, backstories, the full treatment, partly because a charming agent converts better. Ross builds agents with tone too, but draws a hard line at personification, and his reason is not squeamishness. It is accountability. The moment an agent feels human, you start grading it like a colleague, extending it the benefit of the doubt you would extend a person, and quietly outsourcing your own judgment to something that has none. It is a machine. Treat the inputs and outputs exactly like that. You are accountable for what you ask it and you are accountable for checking what comes back.Ryan pushes on the word "coercive." Ross pushes back, and the exchange surfaces the real question underneath consumer AI: where is the line between charming and manipulative, and who is responsible for drawing it? Ross's position is that the guardrails are the job. No overclaim. No false validation. Build them in before the agent meets a customer, not after.Galahad Group: https://galahadgroup.co.ukRoss Barnes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rossbarnesImNotOK: https://www.imnotok.ukHost and Showhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter! -https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life! -https://inboxalchemy.co/If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job! -https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous! -https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent! - https://gethowdi.com/
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  He Sells Oxygen Systems Nationwide: The Zero-Funding Hardware Playbook 15.08.2026 1h

  Necessity Built the Company. Gratitude Kept It Alive.Brad Pitzele was collecting diagnoses faster than he could treat them.Autoimmune arthritis first. Then melanoma, caused by the very drugs prescribed to manage the arthritis. Then late-stage Lyme disease on top of both. He was in his late thirties and, in his words, he felt ninety-five years old. He could barely walk. Everything hurt. And every door in traditional medicine led to a version of the same trade: take the drug that might kill you, or live in the pain.So he went looking for a third road. He tried roughly two hundred things. None of them moved the needle.Then a doctor threw a Hail Mary and told him to look at oxygen. Hyperbaric was going to run $50,000 to $75,000, plus ninety minutes in a tube, seven days a week, for eight weeks. This was before remote work was normal. He could not afford the money or the hours. The alternative, exercise with oxygen therapy, was sold by a handful of companies at prices he described as high enough that he walked away from that too.Here is the moment the company was born, and it is not the moment you expect. Brad asked himself a single reframing question: "Well, if it didn't cost that much, would you do it?" Fifteen minutes a day he could do. So the recovering engineer, mechanical engineering degree, fifteen years in retail and e-commerce, went and built the thing himself. Sourcing parts at a volume of one is its own nightmare, and he did it anyway.A year later he was better. His doctor noticed, and asked if Brad would build systems for his patients. Brad said no. He was still recovering and did not want to set himself back. Six to nine months after that, he said yes, and One Thousand Roads was born.The name is the whole thesis. Everyone has their own road to walk back to health, and Brad refused to be the guy screaming that his was the only one. The other half of the name is a target: help one thousand people get out of the lonely, scary place he had been in.What follows in this episode is a founder story that is unusually clean of the normal startup noise. No round. No investors. No creditors breathing down his neck. He self-financed in increments so small they are almost funny. Ten masks. Sell the ten. Buy fifteen. Sell the fifteen. Buy twenty. He took nothing out of the business for four to five years. eBay first as a test, because standing up full e-commerce infrastructure before you have proof is how founders die. Then his own site once eBay's cut got annoying. Then SEO. Then paid ads. Then podcasts, YouTube, and a social presence his team had to drag him into.And the physiology underneath the product is genuinely the most interesting science on this show in a while. Your cells make energy two ways. With oxygen, they run the good engine. Without it, they fall back to a generator that produces a fraction of the output. Brad says your ability to use oxygen drops roughly 1% a year after age twenty-five, which means by fifty you have quietly lost about a quarter of your energy-making capacity. That shows up as brain fog, slower healing, more inflammation, and less life.One Thousand Roads: https://www.onethousandroads.comOne Thousand Roads on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@OneThousandRoadsHQBrad Pitzele on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradpitzele/The Dr Kumar Discovery, hosted by Dr. Ravi Kumar: https://drkumardiscovery.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/
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  Your Doctor Gets 18 Minutes. Netflix Gets 1,095 Hours. This CEO Is Fixing The Gap 12.08.2026 52min

  The Other 8,760 HoursYou see the person responsible for your health for somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes, once or twice a year. Netflix gets three hours a day. One of those two relationships has enough data to know you. It is not the one keeping you alive.That asymmetry is the entire business case for Lirio, and Marten den Haring has been building against it since 2019.He is not a healthcare lifer. He is an economist by training, MSc and PhD, who spent 25 years shipping AI products for financial services, law enforcement, and national security. Oracle. OpenText. Chief Product Officer at Digital Reasoning in Nashville. Then SVP Platform at Element AI in Montreal, the lab co-founded by Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio. Six months into Canada, Nashville called him home, and Lirio was hiring.He joined as Chief Product Officer in May 2019 to turn a Series A business plan into an actual product. The MVP went live around January 15, 2020.Do that math. Six to eight weeks in the wild, and then the world closed.Lirio's product exists to drive people toward care. Care was shut. Then care reopened on 50 different state timetables into backlogs and staffing shortages, and nobody wanted more patient volume. Marten took the CEO chair in May 2021, in the middle of it. He describes 2021 through 2023 as a stretch where the team was openly asking whether product market fit simply was not there.What flipped it was not healthcare. It was everything else. Consumers spent three years learning that they could get anything from their couch, and then brought that expectation to their care. Suddenly a company built to communicate digitally, personally, at scale, was standing in exactly the right place.Today Lirio delivers more than 400 million nudges a year and reports outcomes that are hard to argue with: nudges 4x more effective than standard health messaging, a 60% reactivation rate on patients lost for three or more years, 50% HbA1c improvement in under six months, and $4.4 million in direct margin added through targeted interventions.The word "nudge" is doing a lot of work there, and Marten is careful about it. It has been called precision shoving. It has been called nagging. Ryan suggests it sounds like his wife on his fourth glass of wine. Marten's answer is the best line in the episode: if you want an automated version of your spouse, Lirio cannot help you.What Lirio actually does is treat every variable of a message as a decision. Not the content alone. The channel, the hour, the frequency, the framing, and whether the right recipient is even the patient at all. Sometimes the highest leverage nudge goes to the daughter who manages her father's medications.Liriohttps://lirio.com/Marten den Haring's team page at Liriohttps://lirio.com/our-team/marten-den-haring/Ryan Estes on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/
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  Vibe Coding Your MVP Is a Time Bomb: AI Workflows for Founders Who Want to Ship Twice 11.08.2026 41min

  The Smartest Model on the Planet Will Still Build You a House With No FoundationMike Vitez has been shipping software since before the word "agentic" meant anything. Ten years leading projects. A computer science background. Fifty plus products across three continents, by his studio's count. And a few months ago, he did something most experienced technical leaders refuse to do.He went back to the drawing board. Literally the planning table. He picked the architect's pencil back up."I haven't been coding for a while," he says on this episode. "Like, I wasn't the one who was writing the code, but my people. I needed a mindset change as well and go back to the real architecture part stuff. Not just reviewing it, but planning it."That decision, made in a moment of frustration with routines that had gone stale, is the hinge this entire conversation swings on. Because Mike is now a member of the Claude Partner Network, running an in-house runtime environment where AI agents handle testing, development tasks, and product planning. He has automated quality control on every single commit. He has run forty-plus agents in parallel to build a product landscape in days instead of months. He is, by any reasonable measure, all the way in.And his central warning is this: AI can save you the cost of a low-level code developer. It cannot save you the cost of an architect."You can build a house without a foundation," Mike says, "but it won't be solid."That is not a caution against speed. Mike is aggressively pro-speed. His whole thesis is that MVPs are now trivially fast and you should rush to market, get users, and iterate. The caution is against speed without structure, which is a different animal entirely. It does not prevent collapse. It schedules it.Ryan pushes on the obvious founder question: if you use Claude and I use Claude, what exactly am I paying you for? Mike's answer is one of the cleanest articulations of the AI-era consulting value proposition we have had on the show. Go to Claude and say "build me something," and it will build you something. It might even work. But can you find the bugs? Can you make it scalable? Can you still add the fourteenth feature without the whole thing coming apart in your hands? "Most of the people cannot," he says, "because if you don't plan it out right, that's where the real engineering knowledge comes into the picture."Saturnia Design: https://www.saturniadesign.com/Mike Vitez on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikevitez/https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/
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  The $0 Fix That Makes Claude 10x Smarter For Your Business 10.08.2026 59min

  Rob Collie spent 30 years inside the machine, and AI still scared himHe was there in 1996, a fresh Vanderbilt grad walking into Microsoft. He led the business intelligence work inside Excel. He was a founding engineer on what became Power BI. He wrote three books about it and, by his own account, sold more than 92,000 copies. If anybody had a right to shrug at the next wave, it was Rob Collie.Then ChatGPT landed, and the guy whose entire career was telling computers what to do realized he ran the exact kind of company AI eats first. A data and BI consultancy. Code, scripts, formulas. Easy mode for a language model.By late 2024 he calls it dread. Not curiosity. Dread. And here is the part that makes this episode worth your commute: he did not fight the fear, he followed it. What he found on the other side was almost insultingly simple. AI success is not an AI problem. It is a data problem and a traditional software problem. The thing you already know how to do.That discovery became Fair Game, his fourth book, out now, and it is aimed squarely at the person who is not getting briefed. Because that is the real divide Rob names on this episode. If you run a Fortune 500, the hyperscalers are in your office with slide decks because they want to keep you. Everyone from mid-market down is left to guess while the labs sprint past them, too busy racing each other to slow down and teach anybody anything.Meanwhile the internet offers you two flavors of fear. The hype side needs you scared so you buy the course. The doom side needs you scared so you click the next video. Rob's read is blunt: both are engagement strategies, and neither one is running a business.What he offers instead is a diagnosis. When you sit down with vanilla Claude or vanilla ChatGPT and try to do real, repeated business work, you hit a wall, and you blame yourself. You should not. That model knows a staggering amount about the Roman Empire and nothing about your company. It is a PhD in everything and a brand new hire at your business. So you spend an hour explaining your world to it, get 80% of the way there, grind on the last 20%, and then the chat ends and all that context evaporates. Rob has a name for the feeling. Bot sitting.The fix is not a better prompt. It is grounding. Rob's own hello-world moment was connecting Claude Desktop through MCP to a Notion knowledge base holding nothing more exotic than his company's brand guidelines. Suddenly the model was not just more accurate. It felt more confident, more willing to take a creative swing. Same model. Different context. He describes it like the LLM got smarter, and functionally, it did.Ryan pushes on the entry point, and Rob's recommendation for anyone still on the sidelines is refreshingly unglamorous: open Claude Cowork, make a folder, and start letting a project accumulate its own memory. Motivation, history, guidelines, goals, all injected on hello. No engineering degree required.https://fairgamebook.ai/https://p3adaptive.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/robcollie/https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/
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  Tokenomics Will Wreck Your Margins: The AI Model Routing Workflow That Cuts Spend 50% 27.07.2026 1h 3min

  Tarun Raisoni built a data center company to roughly $400 million in trailing sales without taking a dollar of outside capital, sold it to a Fortune 500 for $217 million, then walked away from the boat and the fishing rod to start over. His answer for why is four words long: "exits are just a number."What he started instead is Gruve, and what he came on the show to argue is the most uncomfortable idea in enterprise AI right now.Here it is. In the cloud era, your data went somewhere else and stayed exactly what it was. A provider could store it, back it up, and hand it back to you unchanged, because storage does not understand. The AI era broke that. When you push high quality proprietary data into a frontier model, the data can be parameterized, and the intelligence inside it can escape. Tarun's question is not who owns the file. It is who owns the understanding.He calls it the intelligence boundary, and nobody has drawn it yet.Ryan pushed on the obvious nightmare version. You install Claude Code across your team, they ship ten times faster, you feed your financials and your roadmap into it, and then Anthropic launches Claude for Teachers into the exact market you were building for. Tarun did not flinch. He reached for Amazon Basics instead, which is the cleanest available precedent: watch what sells on your platform, build your own version, undercut the seller. Except now the platform is not a marketplace. It is the thing your team talks to all day.His prescription is not "go local and hide." It is a hybrid routing model, and he is blunt that where you draw the lines depends entirely on your business. Some workloads belong in a frontier model because the data gravity and the IP density are low. Some workloads you fine-tune inside your own ecosystem on a large open source model. And some workloads you do not let a frontier model see, not the data, not the metadata, not even the shape of the algorithm.Then the economics arrive, and this is where founders should sit up. Tarun's word is tokenomics, and his point is that the bill you are staring at right now is not a real bill. It is a heavily investor-subsidized bill. What you paid for ChatGPT or Claude two years ago versus one year ago versus today reflects a subsidy that is being slowly withdrawn. Ryan told the story of a founder friend who worked himself into a hospital bed in January because he was convinced the tools were about to be yanked. Tarun's answer was calmer and more useful: stop worrying about the rug pull and start measuring whether the spend is actually producing measurable productivity. Software engineering is measurable. Most other things in your company are not yet.The go-to-market story is genuinely unusual. Enterprises are notoriously brutal to sell into, so Gruve bought its way to a standing start, acquiring NetServ, Lumos Cloud, and SecurView to import talent, partnerships, and customers in one motion. Cisco is both a channel partner and an investor. Reception from the inherited accounts, in his telling, was not resistance but relief, because those customers were being offered outcomes instead of headcount and hours.Gruve: https://gruve.aiTarun's Forbes Technology Council article, "The Next Enterprise Won't Just Use AI, It Will Own Its Intelligence": https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2026/07/15/the-next-enterprise-wont-just-use-ai-it-will-own-its-intelligence/Iron Lady Foundation: https://ironladyfoundation.orgTarun on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raisoni/https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/
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  Tokens Go to Zero, Energy Goes to Zero: What Do You Build When Intelligence Is Free? 25.07.2026 36min

  Every animal on earth runs on four drives. Humans have a fifth. The question is whether AI feeds it or buries it under a pile of chat windows.That is the cold open Ryan Estes is bringing to a Denver AI panel next Wednesday, and it is why this week's What It Do with Jason Katz, co-founder of Kindling Solutions, is bigger than a build in public check in.Ryan walks through his whole panel hosting playbook live, and the metaphor is a DJ booth. Five panelists are five tracks. You mix them, you watch the room. You know when to loop somebody's best point and when to bring the fader down on a rambler. Jason's contribution: a bullhorn. One short honk to underline a great answer, three seconds to shut somebody up.Then Jason pushes back on the hook itself, the most useful sixty seconds in the episode. "Divine" is ambiguous, he says, and worse, it is divisive. Rewrite it as "does AI make us more or less human" and everyone in that room can answer it. Ryan takes the note on the spot.The heart of the episode is Jason's field report from two CEO meetings in one week, both at different places on the AI maturity curve. One has visionary leadership, sharp balance sheet instincts, and almost nothing underneath it operationally. The systems audit came back empty. The other has already built impressive end to end AI systems and has the opposite problem: a pile of tools with no shared brain, and a CEO asking how to fuse them into one operating system.Jason's read is that everyone lands in the same place. Every company will run on a custom operating system with AI inside it, and the spread between companies right now is the widest it will ever be. That spread is the entire market.Then Ryan drops the question he asks every guest: what AI automation would you be lost without? The answer is almost always the morning brief, the thing that reads your Slack, calls, calendar, and inbox and hands you five lines with your coffee. Jason's caveat matters. The brief is a beautiful entry point and also the ceiling for any company that has not fixed its operational leadership first. Without executive buy in, you are delivering a nicer looking version of the same chaos.From there: model routing, tokenomics, compliance, and the quiet fear that frontier labs will eat the tools built on top of them. Ryan uses Claude for Teachers as the case study. Jason's answer is not to defend the model layer. It is to own the layer nobody can copy. Code is democratized. Anyone can build a thing. The value is understanding the engine: workflows, business logic, and how they connect to strategy. That understanding is the moat.The best structural insight of the episode: an IT department is three buckets. Services, meaning hardware, permissions, users, servers. Data, meaning governance, security, and a model anyone can query. And applications, meaning custom software. In 2021, bucket three meant six months from "we need a thing" to a signed proposal, and up to five hundred thousand dollars for an iPhone app. That timeline collapsed to nearly zero. The reason IT owned it did not. As Jason puts it, three years ago your guy running Claude Code would never have been near building your company's software. He is building it now. Governance did not stop mattering because the build got fast.Kindling Solutions - https://kindlingsolutions.comJason Katz on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonkatz99/https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter! -https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life! -https://inboxalchemy.co/If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job! -https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous! -https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent! - https://gethowdi.com/
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  $7,500 AI Team Replacing an Entire Growth Department 24.07.2026 55min

  Your Website Is About to Become a Line ItemMatt Hassett spent seven years making byloftie.com beautiful.Now he is fairly sure that beauty is depreciating.Not because the design is bad. Because the customer is changing shape. Shopify says AI-driven traffic to its stores grew roughly 8x year over year in Q1 2026, with orders from AI search up nearly 13x. Loftie's post-purchase survey went from 1.5 percent AI attribution to 3 percent in six months. That is still small. That is also what small looks like right before it isn't.Here is the part that should scare every DTC founder. Ask an AI for a sleep product and you never land on a homepage. You get a list. Six items. Your brand is one word next to a category tag. Every hour of art direction and every bit of story that justified your premium folds into a row in a table.The row is the problem. Matt puts a number on it: Amazon costs Loftie roughly fifteen points of contribution margin versus direct. If agentic commerce quietly rebuilds Amazon inside every chatbot, that is not a distribution change. That is a repricing of your entire business.So he did something more interesting than panic. He pointed the same technology at his own books.Loftie had a rule buried in its email platform, written years ago by someone being responsible about GDPR, blocking welcome emails to the EU and UK. Sensible then. Loftie did not sell there. Then tariffs reshaped the business and international became roughly half of sales. Nobody updated the rule. Half of new customers were signing up for a welcome sequence they would never receive. No dashboard flagged it. It just sat there costing money until someone thought to look.Another brand poured spend into one narrow audience while Meta now rewards broad targeting. Another ran two creative families where one beat the other 2x, and funded the loser for months. Matt's advice was blunt: stop making those ads, you are losing money.None of it is clever. That is the point. These are not insights, they are inventory. Money already in the building that nobody had time to walk down and find.Which is how Deliberate got built backwards. Matt was not trying to start a software company. He was trying to keep five people employed through a tariff year without hiring a sixth he could not confidently pay. So he handed the rote work to agents, gave each one a name, a lane, and a personality, and let them argue. Zelda runs paid media. Maggie runs finance and pushes back when Zelda wants to spend. Louisa listens to customers. Seven more cover ops, Amazon, wholesale, people, and the site. Ten in all, $7,500 a month.The naming is not only a gimmick. Agent teams behave like human ones: they get better when perspectives differ. One optimist, one pessimist, one who always asks about the money. Make them identical and you have built an expensive echo.Underneath it is the thesis Ryan keeps circling: your taste is not data. You will build the beautiful ad and it will die, and a stick figure with a red X will convert like a slot machine. The businesses winning are not the ones with the best instincts. They are the ones willing to be corrected in public, by a machine, weekly.Both things. At the same time. That tension is the episode.https://byloftie.com/https://deliberatestudio.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-hassett/https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/
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  Your AI Agents Are Burning You Out: The Sustainable AI Workflows Founders Actually Need 22.07.2026 1h

  Fourteen terminal instances. Fifty-two tabs across three browsers. Six customers, a dozen half-finished workflows, and a Friday morning where your brain simply refuses to boot. That's not leverage. That's a slow-motion crash dressed up as productivity.This week, Ryan sits down with Ilan Man, founder and CEO of Paradox Machines, an AI-enabled data services company helping mid-market and private equity-backed businesses finally get real value from their data without the enterprise price tag. Ilan spent nearly 20 years in data before founding anything: statistician, actuary, data scientist back when it was "the sexiest job in America," data engineer, data leader, and consultant at an exited firm. Four months ago he put on the founder hat for the first time, backed by Infinity Constellation, the AI-native holding company founded by CEO Brennan Pothetes and Chairman Francis Pedraza that just raised a $24M Series A.And here's the paradox his company is named for: AI and data are everywhere and nowhere at once. Every conference, every feed, every board meeting is drowning in AI talk. Meanwhile, actual executives will tell you they don't trust their own reports, their pilots died on the vine, and they're on their third AI strategy deck. Ilan built Paradox Machines to close that gap for the companies that can't afford a Palantir, a Snowflake stack, and a full data team, especially portfolio companies that need to be exit-ready in three to five years.But the deeper conversation is about the thing nobody puts in their LinkedIn victory lap: sustainability. Ilan is running a small senior team, reportedly serving half a dozen customers just months in, and he's blunt about the cost. Always-on agent swarms are mostly a novelty. Velocity without a moving product roadmap is theater. And your customers, without exception, want you, not your bot. Zero percent of them have ever asked for the agent to run the meeting.Ryan opens up about his own fix: killing calls on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, stacking deep work, and trading short-term speed for the ability to close the laptop at 6 PM with enough energy left to cook dinner and put on a record. Ilan counters with quarterly self-audits, treating your own workflow like a system you run analytics on.If you're excited about AI but exhausted by the hustle culture version of it, this episode is your permission slip to build something durable instead.https://www.paradoxmachines.comIlan Man on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilanmanhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/
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  AI Agents Just Unlocked $7 Trillion in Invoices Nobody Could Finance 20.07.2026 56min

  Trust is the most expensive thing in business, and nobody bills you for it until it is gone. Four nine-figure receivables frauds hit the industry in a single year, and every one of them traces back to the same quiet failure: a lender who built a relationship, got comfortable, and stopped checking. Anthony Eden watched that pattern from inside one of the world's most secretive private equity shops, and he decided the fix was not more clerks making phone calls. It was agents making thousands of them.Anthony is the founder of Iridium (iridiumcredit.com), a company that automates the entire lifecycle of invoice finance for lenders: verification, fraud detection, collections, and cash reconciliation. In most of the world, borrowing against invoices is the default way businesses get short-term cash. In Latin America and parts of Europe it runs around 15% of GDP by Anthony's telling, with Belgium as high as 22%. In the US it is roughly 2%, because without government e-invoicing registries, verifying that an invoice is real means emails, phone calls, and logging into accounts payable portals by hand, at a cost Anthony puts at about $22 per invoice. Iridium replaces that grind with email agents, voice agents, and browser agents, so lenders can profitably finance invoices they used to turn away, and the 58% of SMBs who Anthony says get denied the credit they seek finally get a shot.The origin story is just as good as the product. Anthony started as an intern at Cerberus Capital Management, came back to build credit underwriting automation alongside PhD scientists who wrote his college textbooks, watched it print millions for European banks, and realized someone was going to compress financial services into a hyper-efficient market. He decided that someone would be him. He joined an accelerator a month late, teamed up with co-founder Preesha Gehlot, an ex-Bloomberg and Microsoft machine learning engineer who published two AI papers before graduating from Imperial College London, and closed their first customer in a two-week sales cycle. Today the four-person, fully Claude Code pilled team is packing for New York with a contracted book of revenue and a pipeline Anthony describes as massive.What does Iridium do? Iridium (iridiumcredit.com) automates invoice verification, fraud detection, collections, and cash reconciliation for invoice finance lenders using email, voice, and browser AI agents.How does invoice factoring make money? A lender advances roughly 80 to 95% of an invoice, collects the full amount when it is paid, returns the remainder minus a 1 to 3% fee, which annualizes to a 10 to 15% APR product per Anthony Eden.Why is invoice finance small in the US? The US lacks government e-invoicing registries, so verifying invoices is manual and costs lenders about $22 per invoice, per Anthony Eden, pricing out small invoices entirely.How do AI agents detect invoice fraud? Document forensics, IP and location checks on emails, domain checks, portal verification via browser agents, and network-level detection of double-pledged invoices.Who founded Iridium? Anthony Eden and Preesha Gehlot, both Imperial College London alumni, after Anthony built credit underwriting automation inside private equity.https://www.iridiumcredit.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-eden/https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/
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  How This AI Hospitality Agent Is Transforming Guest Communication Across 60 Hotels 17.07.2026 53min

  It is midnight in a mountain town. You have been driving for nine hours, your kids are asleep in the back, and the hotel lobby is empty except for a bell on the counter and a sign that says "ring for service." Nobody comes. Now imagine instead a human-sized hologram greets you by name, checks you in, and books your fishing guide for the morning. That is not science fiction. That is already running in dozens of hotels across Europe.Ryan sits down with Filip Linek, founder of FLAE Robotics and creator of BE-A, the holographic AI receptionist built by a hotelier who could not hire humans fast enough. Filip's story is the founder arc in miniature: he built packaging distributor OSKAR PLAST from 1997, sold it to global giant Bunzl in 2014, tried retirement, lasted three months on the golf course, then bought two hotels in the Czech Republic and discovered the industry's dirty secret. Hospitality is drowning. Hoteliers tell him the same thing every month: we hire anyone who shows up to the interview, if they show up at all.So he built the receptionist he could not find. BE-A is not a chatbot bolted onto a website. She handles the full guest journey across email, WhatsApp, phone, and soon a human-sized holobox at the front desk, with a physical humanoid targeted for the end of 2027. She matches OTA prices within set limits, escalates to humans on demand, recognizes groups of guests and tracks each person, and gives hotels something they have never had: a full transcript of every guest conversation. Filip says the company is live in roughly 60 hotels, sitting at about $400K ARR, converting one in three demos, and preparing a Series A to enter the US market through, of all places, Denver.The deeper thread of this conversation is a contrarian bet: that guests will start to prefer AI as the first touch, because speed, accuracy, and availability beat a tired human at midnight. Filip is refreshingly honest about the limits too. He is a self-described skeptic on general-purpose humanoids, walking robots, and robot housekeepers. The front desk, he argues, is the one perfect use case: all communication, no locomotion.https://flaerobotics.aihttps://be-a.aihttps://www.linkedin.com/in/filip-linek-a70292318/https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠_#1 AI Founder Newsletter! - ⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠Build your audience for life! - https://inboxalchemy.co/ If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job! -https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous! - https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd⁠Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist! https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent! - https://gethowdi.com/
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  The $50 Million Exit Trap Nobody Warns Founders About 17.07.2026 56min

  The happiest day of your founder life might be the emptiest. The wire hits, the champagne pops, and 90 days later the divorce papers get filed, the workouts stop, and you are staring at an earn-out agreement wondering why you hate the company that just bought yours.The official launch announcement:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rich--sassy-wealth-strategies-launches-qiretreat-a-china-expedition-for-leaders-and-changemakers-302817416.htmlThe invitation page:https://richandsassy.com/chinaCece Leung has watched it happen for more than 20 years. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she landed in Canada at 16 with one suitcase, taught piano and tutored math to get by, and clawed her way through the Big Four and Wall Street into a corner office, multiple CFO titles, and a string of IPOs. She spent nine months in dusty Chinese storage rooms hand-auditing paper contracts before AI could do it in seconds. She hit every number, then woke up rich and empty.So she burned the playbook. In January 2026 she launched Rich & Sassy Wealth Strategies, a New York advisory firm that pairs institutional-grade IPO and exit strategy with something almost no banker will touch: philosophical counseling. Alongside advisor Dr. David Kaye and her brother Kevin Leung, who leads the firm's invitation-only QiRetreat expeditions in Guangdong, China, Cece helps founders answer the question that no term sheet covers: who are you when the hustle finally stops?In this conversation, Ryan and Cece get into why deals take 18 to 36 brutal months and leave everyone too burned out to plan what comes next, why smart founders sign terrible earn-outs, why the shortest post-exit break Ryan has ever heard of was three days and the longest was nine months, and why Cece thinks movement, nature, and a Sunday morning coffee overlooking Manhattan beat any dashboard.https://richandsassy.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/cscfo/⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠_#1 AI Founder Newsletter! - ⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠Build your audience for life! - https://inboxalchemy.co/ If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job! -https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous! - https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd⁠Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist! https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent! - https://gethowdi.com/
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  He Predicted the Lithium Boom in 2016. Everyone Called Him Crazy. 15.07.2026 45min

  When China cut off rare earth exports, the American car industry came within two weeks of shutting down. Two weeks.That is not a hypothetical, that is the world we live in now, and Jeremy Wrathall saw it coming a decade ago.In 2016, Jeremy was a mining engineer and investment banker walking to work in London when a friend's comment about lithium in Cornish mine water sent him down a rabbit hole that would change his life. Everyone thought he was insane. Lithium? In Cornwall? The county famous for pasties and Poldark? But Jeremy knew two things most people didn't: the energy transition was going to need staggering amounts of critical minerals, and the West had voluntarily handed its supply chains to China because digging in the dirt wasn't glamorous enough for Wall Street.Ten years later, Cornish Lithium employs 100 people, has raised institutional capital from the National Wealth Fund, TechMet, and EMG, and holds the patents on one of the only lithium extraction technologies on Earth that China does not own and cannot switch off. The company is reviving a brownfield china clay pit at Trelavour, mining land that has been worked for 275 years, going deeper into rock nobody else bothered to look at. Cornwall itself has been mining for 4,000 years. The Bronze Age started there. Now the AI age might too.This conversation covers the two-week near-collapse of the US auto industry, why President Trump is invoking the Defense Production Act for minerals, how a $200 drone made the $2 million tank obsolete, why Jeremy handed the CEO seat to oil and gas veteran Jamie Airnes while keeping his hands on the wheel as Executive Chairman, and the outdoor clothing store failure that taught him to stick to his knitting. Plus: why he thinks Elon gets his billion robots, and why every single one of them needs what comes out of the ground in Cornwall.https://cornishlithium.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremy-wrathall-ba7891b/⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠_#1 AI Founder Newsletter! - ⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠Build your audience for life! - https://inboxalchemy.co/ If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job! -https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous! - https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd⁠Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist! https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent! - https://gethowdi.com/
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  Soccer League With ZERO Human Players 15.07.2026 1h 6min

  Somewhere on a server right now, a striker who does not exist is deciding whether to cut left or right. Nobody scripted the choice. Not even the man who built him.That man is Tal Melenboim, a serial entrepreneur with more than twenty years of exits, patents, and AI ventures behind him, including Movota (sold to Bertelsmann AG), Score:Plug (acquired by Spil Games), VFR.ai, and Data+. His newest creation is Lega.bot, the first autonomous AI soccer universe: more than 20 teams, thousands of agents, each player with its own DNA, playing real 90-minute matches with outcomes nobody controls. Not a video game. Not fantasy soccer. Not generated highlight clips. A living league that runs 24/7, forever, launching right after the World Cup ends and the four-year soccer depression sets in.Tal walks Ryan through how he manages seven-plus simultaneous ventures without losing the plot, why he shares developers across projects and throws "founder dating" parties so his portfolio teaches itself, and why he bootstrapped the entire thing rather than pitch investors a dream they could not see yet. He also drops the line of the episode: every big unsolved challenge in your project is hidden value your competitors have not discovered. If you are suffering, you are early.https://lega.bot/https://www.linkedin.com/in/tal-melenboim/https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠_#1 AI Founder Newsletter! - ⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠Build your audience for life! - https://inboxalchemy.co/ If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job! -https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous! - https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDd⁠Use code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist! https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent! - https://gethowdi.com/
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  Stop Making AI Human: The Contrarian Take Every Founder Needs 13.07.2026 59min

  Your website is lying to you. Right now, while you read this, visitors are hitting a broken form, bailing on a checkout button they can barely see, and bouncing off a page designed for someone else entirely. Eric Schneider built a company to catch every single one of those moments, and he built it without a dollar of venture capital.Eric is the co-founder of Cora, a website optimization and monitoring platform that tracks every button, form field, and component on your site, learns how real humans (and bots) actually behave, then rewrites the experience to convert them. One early customer added $20K per week in revenue, a figure Eric shares on air. Cora's bigger bet, full adaptation, reshapes the entire visual site per visitor persona, and Eric says his statistical models point to a 24X lift on yearly revenue, converting 75 to 85% of visitors instead of the classic 3%. These are Cora's own numbers, and they are audacious on purpose.But the product is only half the episode. Eric is one of the most distinctive builders in the Denver AI scene, a fine arts grad turned interaction designer turned bootstrapped founder who writes his product requirements documents from his shower, phone in one hand, coffee somewhere nearby, kids ages two and four safely on the other side of the door. He ships edgy demos weekly, open sources his utilities, controls Claude with tonal frequencies for fun, and still insists the most important product skill in the AI era is saying no.The conversation runs from the early days of the AI Clubhouse meetup (ten people and warm PBR) to a group now drawing 100 to 150 attendees a week, from AI on college campuses to humanoid robots doing blue collar jobs within three years, per a founder friend of Eric's. And it lands on the take that gives this episode its spine: stop training AI to act human. Make AI more AI. Make robots more robot.https://getcora.io/https://www.linkedin.com/in/ecschneider/⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠_#1 AI Founder Newsletter! -> ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠Build your audience for life! -> https://inboxalchemy.co/ If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job! -> https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous! -> https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist! -> https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent! -> https://gethowdi.com/
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  $250K and 3 Months to Build What Used to Cost $2 Million and 18 Months 08.07.2026 1h

  A 6-person team just built in 3 months what took 18 months and $2 million the last time around. That's not a productivity story. That's a story about the ground shifting under an entire trillion-dollar industry.Tim Lidman knows consulting from the inside. He grew up in the collaboration industry: Webex before Cisco bought it, SuccessFactors before SAP bought it, then a decade helping run ThinkTank, the structured collaboration platform that Big Four firms used to run client workshops. When Accenture acquired ThinkTank's assets in 2021, Tim spent about four years operating at the partner level inside one of the biggest consulting machines on Earth. And what he saw was a workflow begging to be rebuilt: humans designing engagements, humans facilitating, humans synthesizing, and one poor analyst up until 2 AM cobbling together the PowerPoint.So he built Clyde, which launched April 7, 2026 at meetclyde.com. Clyde is what Tim calls AI-native collaboration: a workspace where you bring a real problem, collaborate with a library of AI advisors that act like human experts, pull in actual human stakeholders, and walk out with an aligned outcome and a usable deliverable. Not a wrapper. Not a chatbot bolted onto a legacy whiteboard. A guided system that extracts your true intent, because as Tim puts it, 99% of users don't know what they don't know about prompting.The results are early but loud: 1,300 users in the first month on a pure product-led growth motion, a fast-follow release shipping in June with adaptive workflows, and a customer base that already includes third grade teachers walking away with McKinsey-level curriculum plans. Everyone's getting a raise. Thanks, Clyde.Ryan and Tim also go deep on the founder condition in 2026: the guilt of stepping away from your desk, scheduling dedicated slots for original thought because AI can't invent new information, developers mourning the flow state as they become project managers of agent fleets, raising with extreme caution in a VC landscape where a Series A is the new pre-seed, and why Tim's kids get zero screen time while their dad builds frontier AI. Plus: heavy metal drumming, Suno experiments with his daughter Chloe, why Lovable's Anton Osika is the founder Tim admires most, and a charity using pediatricians as a distribution network.⁠⁠https://meetclyde.com ⁠⁠https://linkedin.com/in/timlidman ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠https://inboxalchemy.co/ https://ainativestudent.com/
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  What It Do: The 90% Rule - Why Finishing Is the Least Fun Part of Building Anything 06.07.2026 33min

  Jason Katz popped his LCL three weeks ago scrambling out of a leg entanglement, and honestly, that injury is the whole episode in miniature. You get excited, you move fast, you stand up into a hold you did not see, and something structural gives. In this What It Do check-in, Jason (co-founder of Kindling Solutions, back for another round) and Ryan trade war stories from the two weeks that turned both of their companies from build mode into go mode.Jason drops the concept that should be tattooed on every founder's forearm in 2026: built is not built to scale. Anyone can vibe code something that "works" in a single session now. Jason points to reports of vibe coders getting sued after losing company data through open-ended permissions, and he watches CEOs get star-gazed by AI demos, fire people AI cannot actually replace, then quietly rehire them. Kindling's answer is a governance layer: a way to let a client's internal Lovable and Claude Code tinkerers keep building while Kindling governs the builds it does not even touch. Operators first, then engineers. Jason claims his team has exited three companies at nine and ten figure outcomes, and that operating scar tissue is the product.Ryan, meanwhile, is in full sales dog mode. He restructured his entire week (calls only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, deep work on Monday, Wednesday, Friday) and promptly signed two newsletter sponsorship deals in one week: Momentous, the NSF Certified supplement company behind the grass-fed whey and creatine he already takes daily, and Taelor, the AI-plus-human-stylist menswear rental subscription that is about to give him a dramatic before-and-after wardrobe glow-up, per his daughter's demands.And the whole thing wraps with the two of them planning a Denver panel with Gabe Anderson and ID345's Danny Newman that may or may not end in a staged WWE brawl. Leopard Speedo has been threatened.https://kindlingsolutions.comhttps://taelor.stylehttps://www.livemomentous.comhttps://aiforfounders.cohttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonkatz99/https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/