AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

AI for Founders is where 47,000+ founders learn to build and scale with AI. Hosted by Ryan Estes, a Denver investor, creator, and founder, the show breaks down real strategies from top operators and AI visionaries. AI-ready data, zero-dependency workflows, founder-led distribution, and the tools driving revenue for today’s fastest-growing companies. If you’re a technical or non-technical founder who wants to work smarter, scale faster, and stay competitive, this podcast is your weekly unfair advantage.

AI for Founders with Ryan Estes is a business podcast hosted by aiforfounders.co, with 219 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

aiforfounders.co hosts AI for Founders with Ryan Estes, a business show with 219 episodes published.

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  AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

  Psychedelics Might Be The Most Important Founder Technology Of This Decade

  Aug 18, 20261h 1m

  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.com Browse legal experiences: https://be.withalthea.com/experiences The 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.co Build 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/8RDrnXDd Use 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 for Founders with Ryan Estes

  Two Purple Belts on Scaling Startups With AI, Stoicism, and Cold Plunges

  Aug 17, 202626 min

  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.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonkatz99/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter! https://aiforfounders.co Build 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/8RDrnXDd Use 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 for Founders with Ryan Estes

  The $9 Billion Warning Every Founder Scaling Past $1M Needs To Hear

  Aug 16, 20261h 1m

  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.org Brett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bretthurt/ -- https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter! https://aiforfounders.co Build 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/8RDrnXDd Use 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 for Founders with Ryan Estes

  From $80M To $1B: The Scaling Lesson That Now Applies To Every AI Workflow

  Aug 15, 202656 min

  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.uk Ross Barnes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rossbarnes ImNotOK: https://www.imnotok.uk Host and Show https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ #1 AI Founder Newsletter! - https://aiforfounders.co Build 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/8RDrnXDd Use 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 for Founders with Ryan Estes

  He Sells Oxygen Systems Nationwide: The Zero-Funding Hardware Playbook

  Aug 14, 20261 hour

  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.com One Thousand Roads on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@OneThousandRoadsHQ Brad 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.co Build 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/8RDrnXDd Use 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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