Welcome to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes.
If you’re building something in AI and you haven’t checked the patent landscape, there’s a non-zero chance someone you’ve never met already owns the rights to your “million dollar” idea.
And one day, right when you hit real traction, they show up with a lawsuit instead of a term sheet.
On today’s episode of AI for Founders, I’m talking with Ophir Kra-Oz, co-founder of SenseIP, an AI-powered patent and IP platform that turns the slow, expensive, attorney-only patent process into a fast, founder-friendly validation step you can run on day zero.
We get into how patents actually work in an AI world that moves faster than the legal system, when you should protect your IP, why provisionals are criminally underused, how AI agents can make your ideas better and more defensible, and how to avoid having your startup killed by a piece of paper you ignored.
If you’re a founder, operator, product leader, or engineer with too many ideas and not enough time, this conversation will plug a huge hole in your validation stack and might save you years of pain later.
https://senseip.ai
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ophirk1
https://aiforfounders.co/
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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 tension: real friends have boundaries and bias, therapists have calendars and copays, and apps are drowned in notifications. Commitify bets the future is UI-less voice with long-term memory that feels like a friend and works like a coach.
In this episode, you’ll learn why they chose phone calls over screens, how they design agent personas that motivate without being cringey, what “memory” should and shouldn’t remember, the wild origin story (a 100-hour hackathon sprint), pricing by calls per week, and how they’re hunting for a true ICP before scaling. This one’s for founders, builders, and product people who want big retention with small surfaces—and anyone exploring AI that actually changes behavior, not just creates content. Let’s get into it.
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehdi-greefhorst
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 powerhouses that helped startups scale before “offshoring” became a buzzword. His company has supported 1,500 employees, partnered with 90+ global startups, and sits at the center of a massive shift in how founders build teams in the age of AI.
In this conversation, you’re going to learn how founders should think about global talent, why Filipinos consistently outperform expectations, what roles are perfect to offshore, and what roles you should never outsource. You’ll also learn how AI, culture, and human psychology collide when you build teams across continents.
If you’re a founder, operator, or anyone building with AI who wants to scale with precision—not chaos—this one is for you.
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Please check out our friends at:
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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 legacy and unstructured data get transformed into trustworthy, AI-ready fuel in hours instead of years. We dig into onboarding that’s almost “just upload it,” pricing that shares in customer savings, and a playbook for selling urgency to cautious C-suites. This one is for founders, CTOs, and operators who want their AI to stop hallucinating and start shipping outcomes. If you want practical steps, case-study thinking, and a few killer metaphors you can repeat to your board, you’re in the right place.
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https://datarockit.com
https://facinghistory.org
Please check out our friends at:
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https://codestory.co/
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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 building the rope line up that mountain.
Mehul Shah, former AWS engineer behind OpenSearch and Glue, now leads Aryn.ai — a company on a mission to help enterprises turn the 90 percent of their data they can’t analyze into an engine of intelligence.
If you’re a founder, data leader, or investor wondering where the real AI gold rush begins — not in flashy demos, but in the hard, unseen work of structuring the world’s chaos — this episode is for you.
You’ll learn why most enterprise AI deployments fail, what “human-in-the-loop” really means, and how the next wave of productivity won’t come from chatbots — but from invisible AI that simply makes work work.
So grab your coffee, open your mind, and get ready to rethink what data really is.
Here we go.
https://www.aryn.ai
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehulashah
https://x.com/mehulashah
https://www.shfb.org
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Please check out our friends at:
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https://codestory.co
https://warmstart.ai
https://kitcaster.com/application
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, that is Kadence with a K, the workplace operations platform behind hundreds of companies, Fortune 50s, ten thousand teams, and tens of millions of dollars raised after a brutal pivot from dead in the water hardware to must-have SaaS.
In this conversation, you will learn how to turn empty and expensive offices into a real advantage, how to design a hybrid cadence that actually improves mentorship and family life, why sales and engineering need to share the same oxygen sometimes, and what founder-led marketing does for enterprise deals.
If you are a founder, operator, head of workplace, real estate leader, or just a sales dog wondering where your team should actually sit, this episode is for you.
Alright, let us get into it with Dan from Kadence.
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https://kadence.co/
https://x.com/danbladen
https://stopthetraffik.org/
https://ambient.us - Your AI Chief of Staff that preps you for every meeting, keeps your team accountable & aligned, and helps you stay on top of key initiatives.
https://codestory.co/?utm_source=newsletterorpodcast&utm_medium=emailorepisode&utm_id=aiforfounders - A podcast featuring founders, tech leaders, CTO's, CEO's, and software architects, reflecting on their human story in creating world changing, disruptive digital products.
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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 think you finally know which LLM to trust, Gemini 3 launches and resets the entire scoreboard.
Today’s guest has lived inside that chaos — and built a business on top of the turbulence.
I’m talking to Brennan Pothetes, the CEO of Infinity Constellation, the world’s first AI holding company that’s already deployed 10+ companies, raised $17 million, and pushed multiple ventures past $1M ARR in their first year — often with teams of fewer than five people.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Why the tech moat is collapsing — and what replaces it
The new math of “good headcount” vs “bad headcount”
How to sell outcomes instead of tools
Why founder-led distribution is more powerful than ever
And what a true AI-first services business actually looks like in the wild
This conversation is for founders building right now — especially if you’re wondering how to keep your edge while AI moves faster than your ability to form an opinion about it.
Let’s get into it.
Please check out our friends at:
https://www.infinityconstellation.com
https://www.notanotherpodcast.co/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brennanpothetes
https://ambient.us
https://codestory.co
https://warmstart.ai
https://kitcaster.com/application
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 your AI agents their own cryptographic identity. If you are building AI products, securing a growing team, or just tired of MFA fatigue, this conversation shows you how to protect your business while still shipping fast.
You will hear how Beyond Identity uses passkeys, cryptographic keys, and device posture to create unphishable authentication, and how a hospitality operator with non-technical frontline workers is actually deploying it in the real world. The episode also explores agentic AI, why detection-only tools are a losing arms race, and why data provenance, not just content detection, will define the next decade of cybersecurity.
What you will learn
How AI-enabled adversaries mimic victims through cloned voices, synthetic identities, and deepfake.s
Why detecting fake content is an arms race and why provenance and authorization matter more
How device-bound, hardware-backed identity works in practice, using examples like Apple Pay
How passkeys and local hardware enclaves eliminate credential movement, the root of most breaches
How to give AI agents their own identity, permissions and audit trail so you can prove who was acting
How a hotel group uses passkeys to protect line-level staff and reduce MFA friction across brands
Why founders should demand modern identity support (SSO, passkeys) from every new vendor they adopt
Around 80 percent of security incidents involve stolen or misused credentials, not exotic zero days
Credentials that never move and never live in general memory cannot be phished, replayed or leaked in logs
AI does not always create new vulnerabilities; it massively scales the impact of the ones you already have
Treat AI agents like short-lived employees, give them identity, scope, permissions, and an auditable trail
Identity is becoming the real perimeter, and data provenance will be critical as sensors and implants get closer to the body
For many organizations, the biggest security win is replacing passwords and fragile MFA flows with hardware-backed passkeys
Resources mentioned
Episode Sponsors
More from AI for Founders
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 specifically for private company shareholders. They break down the mathbehind diversification, the risks of concentrated startup equity, and why a tax-efficient liquidity strategyis becoming essential for founders and employees in the modern venture ecosystem.
This conversation is for founders, executives, and early employees at venture-backed companies who want toturn pre IPO shares into long-term wealth without waiting a decade or handing half to taxes.
Key Takeaways
Resources and Links
Episode Sponsors
ambient.us – Your AI Chief of Staff that preps you for every meeting, keeps your team accountable and aligned, and helps you stay on top of key initiatives.
Code Story – A podcast featuring founders, tech leaders, CTOs, CEOs and software architects, reflecting on their human story in creating world changing, disruptive digital products.
warmstart.ai – Build lasting business relationships and stay connected with your network, effortlessly.
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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 one for this, just natural conversation and sub 500 millisecond response times.
Christian shares how his team went from an idea in early 2024 to a funded, fast growing restaurant AI platform with around 1,000 paying locations, all while relying heavily on inbound demand, SEO, and customer referrals.
This episode is for founders building AI products, B2B SaaS teams selling into SMB and mid-market, and anyone interested in restaurant technology, phone automation, and high-intent GTM strategies.
https://ambient.us: Your AI Chief of Staff that preps you for every meeting, keeps your team accountable and aligned, and helps you stay on top of key initiatives.
https://codestory.co/?utm_source=newsletterorpodcast&utm_medium=emailorepisode&utm_id=aiforfounders: A podcast featuring founders, tech leaders, CTOs, CEOs, and software architects, reflecting on their human story in creating world changing, disruptive digital products.
https://warmstart.ai: Build lasting business relationships and stay connected with your network, effortlessly.
https://kitcaster.com/application: Let us schedule your podcast interviews on the world’s top podcasts.
More from AI for Founders: https://aiforfounders.co
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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 clinical validation, cultural and regulatory friction, value-based care incentives, and what an AI-assisted “team of experts” model means for the future of pregnancy care.
Who This Is For
Key Takeaways
Frameworks
Adoption Waves
Care Delivery Loop
Engagement Design
Incentive Alignment
Future Model
Resources
Episode
More from us: aiforfounders.co | ryanestes.info
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, how he achieves character consistency at scale, and the unit economics behind paid acquisition and repeat purchase behavior.
Time-Saving Highlights
Key Takeaways (Founder-Focused)
Ricardo’s Playbooks and Frameworks
1) Agentic Content Studio Framework
2) Intimacy-at-Scale Loop
3) Retention Through Episodes
4) Paid Media Unit Economics
5) Brand-Safe Personalization Guardrails
Resources and Links
Episode Sponsors
More from the Host
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 recommendations.
Founders, CMOs, growth leaders, e-commerce operators, and SEO pros who want practical playbooks for AI search, Reddit marketing, and LLM-driven discovery.
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 experiments, A/B tests, and personalization in live apps.
What you will learn
Key takeaways
Frameworks and operating models
MyOp Architecture
Separation of Responsibilities
Experiment-to-Production Pipeline
Adoption Playbook
Pricing and Metrics
Fast stats
Resources mentioned
Episode Sponsors
More from AI for Founders: https://aiforfounders.co
About Ryan: https://ryanestes.info
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, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, and more without interrupting the doctor–patient relationship. We cover continuous monitoring, aggression detection for nurse safety, patents and IP strategy, data security, deployment across devices, and how ambient AI moves healthcare beyond chat.
Key Takeaways
Who This Episode Is For
Frameworks Discussed
Ambient AI Pipeline
Clinical Decision Support Loop
Longitudinal Delta Method
Compare patient voice features across time to quantify change and trend risk.
Safety and Operations Layer
Aggression detection with green yellow red indicators to reduce nurse assaults and burnout.
Compliance and Trust Stack
Hospital-level security posture, ISO certifications, integration with existing transcription and EHR workflows.
IP and Defensibility
Patents for voice biomarker detection, ambient AI methods, longitudinal comparison, and LLM fusion.
Notable Numbers
Resources
Episode Sponsors
More from Ryan
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 community building beats early monetization, and how contemporary artists can thrive without chasing algorithms.
What You Will Learn
Key Takeaways
Frameworks Discussed
1) Discover → Learn → Engage → Support
2) Human First → Algorithm Next
3) Community Before Monetization
4) Taste Mapping Signals
Who This Episode Is For
Founders building consumer AI or marketplaces, product leaders designing recommendation engines, community builders, and creators exploring ethical and effective ways to scale human taste with technology.
Resources and Links
Episode Sponsors
Also visit: aiforfounders.co and ryanestes.info
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 brands, the frameworks behind consistent visibility, and how AI is transforming content creation at speed and scale.
If you’re a founder or marketer looking to grow your brand, streamline your content pipeline, and actually generate leads from what you post — this episode is your roadmap.
Frequency x Quality x Distribution = Reach
Create → Publish → Engage → Measure → Refine → Repeat weekly.
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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-loop workflow, and why smart Q&A in comments now powers answer-engine optimization for LLMs. If you run paid social, manage community at scale, or need brand-safe engagement across languages, this playbook shows how to capture viral moments instead of missing them.
Key Takeaways
Frameworks Mentioned
Who This Episode Is For
Founders, CMOs, growth and community leads, performance marketers, and creators who need scalable, brand-safe engagement, especially teams running paid social or managing global communities.
Resources & Links
Sponsors
ambient.us - Your AI Chief of Staff that preps you for every meeting, keeps your team accountable & aligned, and helps you stay on top of key initiatives.
codestory.co - A podcast featuring founders, tech leaders, CTO's, CEO's, and software architects, reflecting on their human story in creating world changing, disruptive digital products.
warmstart.ai - Build lasting business relationships and stay connected with your network, effortlessly.
kitcaster.com/application - Let us schedule your podcast interviews on the world’s top podcasts.
Links: aiforfounders.co | ryanestes.info
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 products faster than ever before using tools like Lovable, Magic Patterns, and Strella.
This conversation explores the evolution of vibe coding, agentic coding, and generative UI, and how these innovations are collapsing the gap between an idea and a finished, functional app. Whether you’re a product designer, founder, or creative experimenting with AI, this episode reveals how to go from zero to prototype in days—and how the rise of AI-driven interfaces could completely reshape the SaaS industry.
The sponsors of this episode are the most beautiful people on planet earth. See for yourself:
Visit aiforfounders.co for new episodes, tools, and insights.
Connect with Ryan at ryanestes.info
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 tracking on make-or-break initiatives. We cover the CoS vs EA vs AI division of labor, why “push not pull” is the future UX, and how calendar-anchored intelligence powers fundraising and execution.
Key Takeaways
Frameworks
1) Office of the CEO OS (CoS–EA–AI)
2) Ambient’s Three-Workflow Stack
3) Push UX Principle
4) Decision Quality Ladder
5) Pricing Mindset for AI Ops
Resources & Links
Connect
Sponsors
The sponsors of this episode are the most beautiful people on planet earth. See for yourself: