Welcome to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes.

Every founder I know is sprinting to keep up with AI.

New tools. New models. New expectations.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:
AI is making technical skill cheaper by the day — and exposing something most leaders never developed.

Their human edge.

Today’s guest, Uma, spent 20 years inside Microsoft, climbed the ladder, played the game, and then hit a breaking point that forced a hard question:
If everyone has access to the same technology, what actually makes a leader indispensable?

In this conversation, we unpack how influence, visibility, communication, and emotional intelligence are becoming the real leverage points in an AI-driven world.

You’ll learn:

• Why AI is amplifying weak leadership instead of fixing it

• The “human advantage” that separates replaceable operators from irreplaceable leaders

• How founders can stay relevant, trusted, and influential as automation accelerates

This episode is for founders, operators, and execs who don’t just want to survive the AI wave — but lead it.

Let’s get into it.

https://thelimitlessleaders.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/uma-subramanian-limitless/

__

https://aiforfounders.co/

https://ambient.us⁠

⁠https://codestory.co

⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠

⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠

⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

Welcome to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes.

Every non-technical founder hits the same wall.

You’ve got the idea. You’ve got the market. You’ve even got early traction.

But then comes the question that kills momentum:
“Who’s going to build this?”

Technical cofounder? Impossible to find.
Dev agency? Expensive and slow.
No-code tools? Great… until you need something real.

Today’s guests are here to blow that bottleneck up.

Ben and Brad are the co-founders of Woz, an AI platform designed to act like your technical cofounder — turning raw ideas into production-ready, scalable software, not demos, not toys.

They met as roommates at MIT, raised $6 million, and are building what could become the operating system for non-technical founders who want to ship real products fast.

In this episode, we break down:

• What AI can actually replace in software development

• Where humans still matter more than ever

• And how founders without engineering backgrounds can finally compete at scale

If you’re a founder, operator, or investor wondering what building software looks like in the AI era — this one’s for you.

https://withwoz.com

https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Mpk-woz-your-ai-technical-cofounder

https://www.cervinventures.com/news/building-the-next-generation-of-software-why-we-invested-in-woz

__

https://aiforfounders.co/

https://ambient.us⁠

⁠https://codestory.co

⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠

⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠

⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

What happens when you build an AI that can spot disease years before symptoms, cut diabetes related complications by 20 percent, and slash healthcare costs, and the market still shrugs. That is the problem my guest today ran straight into.

On this episode of AI for Founders, I am talking with Mariano García Valiño, four-time healthcare entrepreneur and CEO of Axenya. Axenya is an AI-powered operating system for corporate health that monitors over one hundred thousand people, runs around ninety-five million clinical inferences a month, and can intelligently route people to care across more than forty conditions, all while pushing costs from two and a half times inflation down toward inflation.

If you are a founder building in AI, health tech, or any regulated, incentive-broken industry, this episode is for you. You are going to learn how Mariano redesigned his entire business model so someone actually had a financial reason to pay for prevention, how he thinks about AI as a copilot for doctors instead of a replacement, and how he keeps his sanity and creativity through writing, photography, sports, and reading while running his fourth company.

If you want conversations like this distilled into founder ready experiments every week, head to aiforfounders.co and subscribe to the newsletter.

https://axenya.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mgarciavalino/

__

https://aiforfounders.co/

https://ambient.us⁠

⁠https://codestory.co

⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠

⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠

⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

Welcome to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes.

Today’s episode starts with a simple question:
What happens when the world’s smartest podcast app is built in a country obsessed with precision, craftsmanship, and self-responsibility… and then shipped to founders who desperately need to learn faster?

Because here’s the tension: podcasts have become the biggest knowledge library on Earth, yet most people forget everything they hear.
Our guest today — Kevin Smith, founder of Snipd — decided that was unacceptable. So he built the world’s greatest AI-powered podcast app, from Zurich, one of the top AI hubs on the planet, surrounded by Google, Apple, Meta, OpenAI, and ETH talent.

In this conversation, Kevin breaks down:

• Why Zurich gives founders an unfair talent advantage

• Why 74 percent of podcast listeners use podcasts to learn

• How to build an AI-native product — not an AI add-on

• And the future of audio: chat with episodes, discoverability, and AI-driven learning loops

If you're a founder who listens to learn, builds with AI, or wants to extract every hidden insight from every episode you hear, this episode is absolutely for you.

https://x.com/KevinBenSmith

https://www.snipd.com/

https://x.com/snipd_app

__

https://aiforfounders.co/

https://ambient.us⁠

⁠https://codestory.co

⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠

⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠

⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

Today’s episode starts with a simple but brutal truth:
Vibe coding breaks the moment your idea gets bigger than “make the button blue.”

Every founder knows this moment — when you’ve stretched Lovable, Cursor, or Claude Code as far as your vibes can take you… and suddenly the whole thing collapses under unclear prompts, messy code, and your total inability to explain what you want in the first place.

Well, today’s guest built the fix.

I’m talking with Tyler Wells, co-founder of BrainGrid.ai, the platform powering over 2,000 AI builders and 10,000+ shipped features by turning messy human ideas into precise, AI-ready specs, tasks, and prompts.
If you’ve ever wondered how non-technical founders are suddenly shipping multi-tenant SaaS apps, or how senior engineers are spinning up six agents at once without imploding a repo, this is your episode.

We get into:

• how BrainGrid builds the missing planning layer of AI development

• why your prompts suck and how to fix them

• how founders with zero engineering background are shipping real products

• and the future of “anyone with an idea can actually build it” software

This episode is for vibe coders, indie hackers, AI-native SaaS founders, and anyone who has ever thought:
“Wait… can I seriously build this myself?”

Spoiler: yes. And Tyler shows you how.

https://www.braingrid.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerswells/

https://x.com/tylerwells

__

https://aiforfounders.co/

https://ambient.us⁠

⁠https://codestory.co

⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠

⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠

⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

Today’s episode starts with a problem almost every founder fears…

What happens when the system you're trying to disrupt is so big, so regulated, and so politically volatile… that one election can flip your entire business model overnight?

That’s the world my guest lives in — and somehow thrives in.

I’m talking to Eugene Sayan, founder and CEO of Softheon, a 25-year-old startup that processes $20 billion in premiums, powers 30 million enrollments, and delivers affordable healthcare access to 10 million Americans — all while building his own AI infrastructure using agentic systems with zero hallucination tolerance.

If you’re a founder, operator, or AI-obsessed builder who wants to understand how to scale inside complexity, leverage AI responsibly, and build a company that can survive political headwinds, economic shocks, and massive technical stakes — this conversation is for you.

You're going to learn:
• How Softheon uses agentic AI + human-in-the-loop workflows to reach 99.99999% accuracy.
• Why designing for a problem 10 years in the future is their secret weapon.
• How Eugene bootstrapped a healthcare giant by thinking like an outsider — and an immigrant with something to prove.

This episode is high-energy, full of insight, and packed with big numbers. Let’s dive in.

https://softheon.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/eugenesayan/

__

https://aiforfounders.co/

https://ambient.us⁠

⁠https://codestory.co

⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠

⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠

⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

Welcome to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes.

Today’s episode starts with a problem every founder knows too well:
You finally get a user into your product… and then watch them get completely lost.
They bounce. They churn. Or they email support with the dreaded:
“Hey uh… how do I actually use this?”

That onboarding black hole costs SaaS companies billions — and Alex and Andy from Quarterzip.ai say it’s time to kill “activation debt” forever.

These two founders sold their last AI company, immediately spun into their next one, and created an entirely new onboarding modality: a real-time AI voice agent that sees your screen, talks to you, guides your steps, and can literally move your cursor for you.
They’ve onboarded users across entire product ecosystems without a single line of engineering integration — and booked 250 demos in 48 hours at launch.

Today we dig into:

• The origin story behind Quarterzip

• Why onboarding is the hidden growth lever no one talks about

• How AI design is shifting from textboxes to vision-driven, voice-guided workflows

• Remote co-founding across SF and Australia

• And what comes after the chatbot era

If you’re a founder building AI, building with AI, or scaling a product with too many features and too few hands — this episode is for you.

https://quarterzip.ai

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-valente-829989100/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewpankevicius/

__

https://aiforfounders.co/

https://ambient.us⁠

⁠https://codestory.co

⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠

⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠

⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

Welcome to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes.

Most of us were never really taught how money works—we were taught how to earn it, maybe how to spend it, but never how to build it. Now imagine the largest wealth transfer in human history—somewhere between $60 trillion and $90 trillion—is happening right now… and most of the inheritors don’t know what a limited partnership is. That’s the problem my guest today, CJ Follini, is trying to solve.

CJ is the founder of NOYACK, a “learn-plan-invest” ecosystem using AI agents to teach financial literacy and democratize access to alternative assets like real estate, fine art, and venture capital. He’s managed billions for ultra-wealthy families, built an AI called NOYACK.ai to help the next generation DIY their wealth, and—get this—his family once held a $50 million fine-art portfolio before Masterworks existed.

In this episode, you’ll learn how CJ turned his father’s medical crisis into a 35-year wealth-management career, why he believes the future belongs to financial generalists, and how AI agents will completely disrupt wealth management. If you’re a founder, investor, or just someone who wants to finally feel confident about your money, this one’s for you.

Three reasons to sign up for the AI for Founders newsletter at aiforfounders.co:

1. You’ll get the smartest AI startup insights you can actually use.

2. You’ll never miss the playbooks my guests only share off-air.

3. You’ll look dangerously well-informed at your next investor meeting.

If you enjoy this episode, leave a review—tell us what your AI agent would say about it.

https://wearenoyack.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cjfollini/

__

https://ambient.us⁠

⁠https://codestory.co

⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠

⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠

⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

Welcome to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes.

Today’s episode starts with a problem every founder secretly wrestles with: the future is moving faster than your product roadmap. Models change monthly, competitors ship weekly, and half the AI space seems to be guessing their strategy on the fly. But what if prediction wasn’t a parlor trick… but a real capability? And what if the companies who master it don’t just survive the AI boom — they run the table?

That’s exactly where we’re going today with Ben Turtel, founder of Lightning Rod AI, a company beating frontier models at forecasting the real world — using messy data, no humans in the loop, and a training method inspired by how humans actually learn.

If you’re a founder, CEO, builder, or operator trying to understand:

• Where the puck is going in AI

• How to build a defendable product when software is collapsing to zero

• What predictive AI means for your roadmap, your team, and the way you make decisions

…this conversation is built for you.
By the end of this episode, you’ll see the future of AI through a totally new lens — and you may walk away with the most important strategic insight for the next five years.

https://aiforfounders.co/

https://lightningrod.ai
https://maps.org
https://www.thefire.org
https://twitter.com/BTurtel

__

https://ambient.us⁠

⁠https://codestory.co

⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠

⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠

⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

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/

__

See our friends:

https://ambient.us⁠

⁠https://codestory.co

⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠

⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠

⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠