AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

The theme of Q1 2026 is "I feel behind." Every founder, from the scrappy solo operator to the venture-backed exec, is feeling the same anxiety. Site traffic is dropping. AI chatbots are answering questions that used to send customers to your website. And the brands that wait to figure this out are not just losing clicks. They are losing the narrative.Justin Inman spent nearly a decade at Google selling enterprise ad tech to the world's largest marketers, companies like Coca-Cola, L'Oreal, and Unilever. He watched those companies resist the digital shift, then scramble to catch up. When he left Google and started watching his own AI usage explode, and then noticed his mom casually quoting ChatGPT, he knew something bigger was coming. He got demos of the biggest players in the AI visibility space. One demo was so underwhelming, so narrow in its thinking, that he started his own company the very next day. That company is Emberos, and it is building what Justin calls the operating system for AI brand visibility.The core insight Justin brings to this conversation is deceptively simple: your brand exists inside AI systems right now, and you have zero control over what those systems are saying about you. Every LLM, from ChatGPT to Gemini to Perplexity to Grok, has formed its own opinion about your pricing, your product, your genre, your identity. And those opinions are often wrong. Emberos measured 500 brands and found that 90% have factual errors across at least one major language model. One small studio picked up a festival film that every AI in the world had mislabeled as a violent thriller with a John Wick comp. Nobody dies in that movie. It took four weeks of strategic fix packs to correct the narrative.The Framework: Paid, Owned, and Earned Across the AI LayerJustin's central argument is that most players in the AI visibility space are thinking too small. Their answer to the problem is to publish more AI-generated content, flood syndicated publishers, and hope the LLMs pick it up. Justin calls this "push to publish," and he says it is not only ineffective, it is dangerous. LLMs will get smarter. The brands that played these hacks six months ago are already getting delisted.Emberos takes a fundamentally different approach, mapping AI visibility across the full digital footprint:Paid: Connected TV ads, programmatic spend, and paid placements all feed signals into AI systems. Emberos is running live studies with major streamers to measure the correlation between TV exposure and generative AI search behavior.Owned: Your website, FAQs, schema markup, and YouTube captions all contribute to how LLMs read and cite your brand. If your site is not structured for LLM readability, it is invisible to the systems now acting as the front door of the internet.Earned: Podcasts, PR placements, influencer content, and press all create citations inside AI systems. Remarkably, Emberos now recommends podcast appearances as a strategic fix pack for brand visibility, because podcast transcripts are among the cleanest, most credible training data available to LLMs.https://emberos.ai/https://www.linkedin.com/in/jinman11/⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠⁠

Ankit Dheendsa, CTO of Morphos.ai and creator of Green Vectors, a patent-pending vectorization tech. He describes KII, a chat-style RAG search for businesses. He explains massive vector compression and 4x faster queries. He discusses affordable enterprise RAG at $20/month, edge and sensor use cases, and applying the tech across vision, drones, and medical/offline inference.

Nick Lopez, co-founder and CEO of Prosal and former Lockheed Martin engineer, built a platform helping federal defense contractors find hidden opportunities. He discusses how to spot and qualify government procurements, synthesize RFI/RFP lifecycles, and use public signals and networks to turn obscure leads into high-value deals. The conversation covers pricing, product design, and how to sell before you build.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐There is a moment every founder hits. You have spun up agents, handed them access to your systems, pointed them at your data, and watched them go. It feels like progress. It feels like leverage. And then someone asks you a simple question: do you know what your agents are doing right now?The honest answer, for most teams, is no.Jasson Casey has spent years thinking about the gap between the speed at which companies adopt AI and the speed at which they reckon with what that adoption actually costs. He is the CEO of Beyond Identity, a company that has protected over 10 million identities, and his newest product, Ceros, was built for exactly this moment: the moment founders realize they have handed the keys to a car that can drive itself anywhere, including off a cliff.This conversation is a field guide for founders who are moving fast and want to stay alive.The AI Transformation SpectrumJasson opens with a framework that every founder needs to internalize before they ship another agent.Most companies think they are doing AI transformation. Most of them are not.AI Enabled: You turned on the AI features that already existed in your software stack. Superficial. Table stakes. Not a strategy.AI Native: You questioned every assumption about how your business is organized. You asked which processes exist only because a human had to do them. Then you rebuilt around the answer.The gap between those two positions is where most companies are quietly stuck. The board is asking for AI transformation. The team is checking boxes. And nobody is asking the harder question underneath it all: what had to be true about how we work for humans to do this, and does any of that still apply?https://beyondidentity.aihttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jassoncasey/https://x.com/jassoncasey⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠

There is a moment in every founder's journey where they realize the bottleneck in their pipeline is not their product, not their pricing, and not their pitch. It is time. Specifically, the time between when a prospect raises their hand and when someone, or something, responds.Will Del Principe discovered this the hard way. At 16, he was a solar sales rep dialing through a list of thousands of warm leads on an iPad, burning out after five or six calls, leaving a fortune in uncontacted interest sitting in a CRM. A decade later, he is the head of growth at Thoughtly, an AI voice agent platform that calls those same kinds of leads within 10 seconds of form submission, runs 13,000 calls a month for a single client, and once had to be reprogrammed after one of its agents agreed to go get coffee with a prospect.This episode is about what happens when you stop asking humans to do what machines can do endlessly, and start letting your best salesperson work around the clock without ever needing a break.https://www.thoughtly.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-del-principe-57b18b2a5/⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠

Guest: David Karandish, CEO and Co-Founder of Capacity.comIn December 2016, the top-selling product on Amazon was not a toy, a book, or a video game. It was Amazon's Alexa. For most people, that was a holiday novelty. For David Karandish, it was a starting gun.David had just finished one of the most successful runs in the history of vertical search. He built Announced Media, acquired answers.com, merged the two companies, scaled them into a powerhouse, and sold the whole thing for $900 million. He took five months off. He made his laundry list of what to do next, somewhere around 50 ideas. Forty were terrible. A handful were decent. One made him feel like he would regret skipping it for the rest of his life.That one became Capacity.He founded it in early 2017, before the world understood what AI was about to become. Blockchain was the darling. AR and VR were getting the hype cycles. AI was maybe fourth on the list of things people were excited about. David bet on fourth place, and he was right.But here is where the real story starts. Because building Capacity was not a straight line. In the early days, the product worked better for some customers than others, and the market was sending a confusing signal. Small companies had the problem but not the budget. Enterprise companies had the budget but needed security certifications, compliance frameworks, and infrastructure that a scrappy startup did not yet have. David built those things. SOC 2. HIPAA compliance. Role-based access controls. And while he was building the enterprise credibility, something else was happening: his customers kept asking for more.Not more features inside one product. More products that actually talked to each other.Over and over, David kept hearing the same thing. "We are so tired of duct-taping solutions together. We don't want five vendors. We want one platform that works." He heard it a dozen times before he finally went to his executive team and said, "I think I know what we need to build." They looked at him like he had three heads.He built it anyway.Today, Capacity serves 20,000 customers, including T-Mobile, Verizon, Nike, and American Express. Annual revenue has surged past $50 million. And the strategy behind all of it is something David calls the Compound Startup.https://capacity.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidkarandish/https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠

There is a moment in every founder's journey where they realize the map they were given was wrong. The old map said: have an idea, find a developer, wait months, launch, iterate. David Alonso, co-founder of Bloom and ETH Zurich robotics graduate turned mobile app revolutionary, is handing founders a new map. One where the distance between idea and working product is measured in minutes, not months.David didn't plan to build Bloom. He planned to build robots. But somewhere between reinforcement learning research and quadrupeds, he fell in love with the tight feedback loop of app development, met a world-class design engineer in his co-founder, and the two of them started following an obsession that eventually led them through Y Combinator, a $3.5 million raise closed before Demo Day, and a product that left investors texting their friends mid-demo saying it was the best tech demo they had ever seen.This episode is the story of what happens when you decide the bottleneck is not code. It is imagination.The Core Problem Bloom Is SolvingBuilding a mobile app used to take David and his co-founder four months from idea to having it on someone else's phone. Four months. And that was with two technical co-founders who knew exactly what they were doing. For a non-technical founder, the timeline was effectively infinite. Bloom collapses that timeline to minutes by combining three opinionated technology choices into a single agentic coding experience:Expo as the front-end framework, enabling one codebase to deploy to web, iOS, and Android simultaneouslyConvex as the backend, providing real-time sync between devices out of the box, full type safety, and a database that just works without configurationApp Clips as the distribution layer, an underutilized Apple feature that lets anyone open a fully native app from a single link without visiting the App Store, downloading TestFlight, or entering an invite codehttps://bloom.diy/https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-oort-alonso/⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠

Jesse Marble did not set out to build a typical VC firm. Growing up steeped in Colorado culture, watching people chase outdoor adventure, physical health, and something resembling a meaningful life, he kept noticing a gap. We have more technology in our pockets than it took to land Americans on the moon. And yet, by almost every subjective measure, people are not thriving more. They are thriving less.That tension became Wildwood Ventures, a Denver-based early-stage VC firm with a deceptively simple thesis: invest in human flourishing through technology. Not hiking apps. Not yoga trackers. The whole sprawling category of what it actually means to be healthy, connected, and alive in the modern world.What Jesse brought to this episode was not a polished fund deck or a rehearsed pitch. It was something rarer: a practitioner's honest account of what he sees every week sitting across from founders, scoring pitches in real time, and asking himself whether he would put his own money on the line.The answer, he admits, is increasingly complicated.https://wildwood.vc/https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessemarble/⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠⁠

Lucas Consoli, co-founder of EmpathEQ and creator of AI-powered empathy training for healthcare staff. He recounts a personal hospital moment that sparked the company. They build real-time simulations that train nurses in empathy, de-escalation, and communication. Lucas also covers technical architecture, funding, market validation, and why nurses are the priority for impact.

Francesco Hayes, co-founder and CTO of Luxxera, builds a vetted medical tourism marketplace and concierge service. He talks about the messy, fragmented market for cosmetic procedures and why Greece (and Turkey) are major destinations. He explains clinic vetting, starting with hair transplants, expanding to IVF, tech choices, growth via TikTok and livestreams, and hands‑on secret shopping to ensure quality.