Tiny Brands Are Outranking Billion-Dollar Companies. Here Is the Hack.

The Physicist Building a Compiler for the Real World | Hugo Nordell, Encube

Some of the smartest engineers alive are designing the physical world with software older than their interns. Brake discs, axles, medical devices, aircraft, all built on tools that can take twenty minutes just to open a file, and a knowledge base that walked out the door when the industry shipped its expertise overseas. Hugo Nordell saw this up close. Trained as a theoretical physicist, seasoned in Silicon Valley's drone and autonomous driving years, then a digital transformation executive at Sandvik and Aker, he kept watching brilliant hardware teams fight their own tooling on a daily basis while production costs quietly ballooned. So he built the thing he wished he had. Encube is a browser based, collaborative design platform that sits between your CAD system and your release management, then layers AI on top of a foundation almost nobody else is building: a deterministic engine that actually understands manufacturability. Think of it as a FigJam board on steroids, where complex CAD models and heavy engineering drawings become first class citizens, loading in two to three seconds on a run of the mill laptop with no expensive graphics card required. People thought he was cheating. He was not. The deeper insight is the one founders in every category should tattoo somewhere visible. Generative AI is rewriting software engineering because software has forty years of validation infrastructure: compilers, linters, unit tests, CI/CD, stack traces that let an agent self correct. Hardware has none of that. There is no compiler for atoms. So Encube is building one, on the GPU, blazingly fast, deterministic where it must be, with large language models bolted on only at the edges where stochastic answers are safe. Get that order right, and you could reimagine hardware design the way Lovable, Bolt, and Claude Code reimagined software. Get it wrong, and you ship slop into the one place slop kills people. https://www.getencube.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/hugonordell/ ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠ https://trynina.co/

Why Posting on LinkedIn Is Dead (And What Top Founders Do Instead)

That is the dirty secret of LinkedIn for most founders. You scroll, you cringe at the textbook-perfect ChatGPT posts, you maybe drop a like, and you log off feeling exactly as broke as when you opened the app. Ali Hafizji, founder and CEO of Wednesday Solutions and the builder behind Chime at getchime.co, has been quietly running a different playbook. He went from under 5,000 LinkedIn followers to 12,000 without leaning on a content engine. The trick was not posting more. It was commenting smarter, on the right posts, in front of the right tribe, every single day. In this episode, Ali breaks down why the comment section is the most underutilized lever in B2B SaaS, why your ICP does not want to be educated by you, and how he built an AI agent that does the soul-crushing work of finding the right LinkedIn conversations so you can show up, drop one human comment, and close the laptop in ten minutes. He also walks through the design partner pricing, the rare anti-predatory SaaS model where the price goes down as the user base grows, and the curation logic behind Chime's 40,000-influencer database. If you have ever felt invisible on LinkedIn while watching your competitors print pipeline, this one is for you. The Interest Graph Engagement Loop * Engage on posts that match your expertise. * Show up in the feed of your ICP automatically, because LinkedIn is an interest graph, not a follower graph. * Get DMs and conversations started by people who already trust your thinking. * Skip the cold outreach phase entirely. The Comment Quality Bar * No teaching, no textbook tone, no "ChatGPT wrote this for me" energy. * Lead with contrarian views framed without picking a fight. * Add wordplay, wit, or one personal anecdote. * Keep it to two or three lines. * Always ask the author a question. The Post-Comment DM Loop * DM the author of the post you commented on. * DM other people who engaged in the comments. * No agenda, just "coffee chat" energy. * Invite them to your newsletter once trust is built. * Send referrals their way and watch the favor return. The Anti-Predatory SaaS Pricing Model * Lock in $39/month forever for the first 25 design partners. * Add new data sources (Reddit, X) without raising the base price. * Pass cost savings down to customers as the user base grows, not up. https://getchime.co [https://getchime.co] https://aiforfounders.co [https://aiforfounders.co] https://linkedin.com/in/alihafizji/ [https://linkedin.com/in/alihafizji/] https://linkedin.com/in/estesryan/ [https://linkedin.com/in/estesryan/]

AI Just Closed 40% of Your Tickets Without You

Your IT team is drowning. Every "how do I plug in this cable" Slack message you fire off is making it worse. And while everyone in 2026 is busy debating whether AI is coming for the C-suite, Tom Bachant has spent the last four years quietly automating the layer of work that actually keeps companies running. The help desk. The ticket queue. The Jira dashboard you've been ignoring for three weeks hoping it disappears. Tom is the co-founder and CEO of Unthread, an AI-powered helpdesk built natively into Slack and Microsoft Teams. He's also a two-time founder who sold his first company, Dashride, to Cruise in 2018, lived through the Cruise unraveling, then went back into the trenches with Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch. His new company has raised $3.5M, landed Intuit, Lemonade, and Automattic as customers, and finished as a TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 Startup Battlefield Top 20 finalist. In this episode, Tom walks Ryan through the inception of Unthread, the YC playbook that got him to his first 10 customers without spending a dollar on ads, and the philosophical bet that code is now free so distribution is the only moat left. He also explains, with a straight face, why he runs abolishcars.org as a side project despite his first company being a ridesharing platform. The conversation kicks off with cars (Tom hates them, Ryan rides fixed gear, they both agree on flipping people off responsibly), and ends with downhill mountain biking in Crested Butte. In between, you get one of the cleanest tactical breakdowns of agentic service management you'll hear all year. https://unthread.io [https://unthread.io] https://aiforfounders.co [https://aiforfounders.co] https://abolishcars.org [https://abolishcars.org] https://www.linkedin.com/in/tombachant/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/tombachant/] https://inboxalchemy.co [https://inboxalchemy.co] ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ https://trynina.co/

$1.6 Billion of Equity On-Chain. Here Is Why.

Picture St. Louis, 1849. Two men with a bottle of champagne and a brutal choice: go north for beaver pelts, or go south chasing gold in California. Joris Delanoue does not even blink. He picks the gold. Not for the metal. For the belief. That single line tells you everything about this conversation. Joris, co-founder and co-CEO of Fairmint, has spent the better part of two decades pushing into frontiers nobody else wanted to settle. He sold a cloud computing company, Nexteem, before most people trusted the cloud. Now he is doing the same thing to the one document that quietly governs every startup's destiny: the cap table. Here is the uncomfortable truth he lays out. Fifty years ago, Microsoft went public at an eight hundred million dollar valuation, and ordinary people built entire retirements on the climb that followed. Today, companies stay private until they are worth five hundred billion, and the upside goes to a happy few. The frontier did not close. It just moved behind a velvet rope. Joris wants to tear the rope down, and he thinks the tool to do it is equity that lives on a blockchain: programmable, transferable, and liquid enough that the engineer who bet fifteen years of her life on a startup can actually borrow against her shares to buy a house. This is a conversation about wealth, about who gets to build it, and about why the most defensible thing you own in the AI era is no longer your product. It is your distribution. Buckle up. Compliance by Automation (not Intermediation)Joris frames the entire Fairmint thesis as a shift away from people and toward code. * Old world: compliance happens through layers of intermediaries, lawyers, banks, and reconciliation. * New world: compliance lives inside a smart contract that mimics securities law and applies the rules automatically. * The promise: lower transfer costs, fewer trolls under the bridge, and a single source of truth for who owns what. The Shovel Seller's DilemmaThe gold rush metaphor that opens the episode is a strategy lesson in disguise. * The prospector grinds sixteen hours a day and often ends with broken backs and empty pans. * The shovel seller monetizes everyone else's dream regardless of who strikes gold. * Joris flips it: do not just sell shovels, own a piece of the mine through programmable equity. https://www.fairmint.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/delanoue/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠ https://trynina.co/ https://ainativestudent.com/

Tiny Brands Are Outranking Billion-Dollar Companies. Here Is the Hack.

Everything you know about getting found online is about to be obsolete. For two decades, founders chased one algorithm. Backlinks, page speed, keyword stuffing, the whole exhausting machine. Then a handful of chatbots quietly took the wheel, and now they decide which businesses get recommended and which ones get ghosted. SEO is bleeding out. Google traffic is leaking. And a huge slice of buyers now ask ChatGPT to pick their solution before a human ever enters the conversation. Here is the twist that should make every founder sit up straight: the playing field is wide open for the first time in twenty years. Tiny brands are outranking billion-dollar incumbents. Unknown podcasts are beating the giants. The new game is not about who has the biggest backlink pile. It is about who tells the clearest story. In this return visit, Jenna Hannon, co-founder and CMO of Hatter, runs a live tactical teardown using Ryan's own podcast page as the guinea pig. She walks through what AI search actually rewards, why a lead who found you through ChatGPT shows up on the call already sold, and the exact content structure that gets your brand cited instead of buried. She also drops the unglamorous truth about where AI pulls its recommendations from, and it is probably not where you think. This is your chance to control your narrative before the bots write it for you. The Three Names, One Thing PrincipleThe category has a branding problem. AEO, GEO, AI search. They sound different. They are not. * AEO stands for answer engine optimization. * GEO stands for generative engine optimization. * AI search is the plain-language version. * All three describe the same goal: showing up inside AI chatbots. Ignore the LinkedIn posts insisting they are separate disciplines. The Magical MomentThe new tell that AI search is working for you. * A lead arrives having done their research inside a chatbot, not a Google rabbit hole. * They already know they have a problem and that you are one of the few recommended solutions. * They land on the call warm, informed, and close to buying. * The chatbot's endorsement carries trust, because the user already treats the AI like a trusted advisor. https://gethatter.ai [https://gethatter.ai] https://aiforfounders.co [https://aiforfounders.co] https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennahannon [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennahannon] ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ https://trynina.co/