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

"Intensity Is a Bulldozer" The Leadership Trait Everyone Praises and Nobody Survives

The wall you built to protect yourself is the same wall your team can't get past. Most founder advice is about adding. Add a growth loop. Add a framework. Add another seven habits. Tyler Dickerhoof showed up to AI for Founders to argue the opposite. The thing standing between you and the company you want is usually something you are spending enormous energy to keep hidden. Tyler is the founder of the Impact Driven Leader community, host of The Tyler Dickerhoof Show, a Cornell graduate, and the author of a new book called The Things We Hide. He has generated more than $700 million in business sales across a career that started, of all places, as a nutritionist for dairy cows in Ohio. He is not a guru who floated in from a TED stage. He is a farm kid who got told farm kids were not smart, spent decades proving his worth through intelligence and intensity, and watched that same intensity push away the people he cared about most. The conversation opens with a story he did not tell anyone for years. At 14, in a farming accident, Tyler drove over his three year old brother, who died. Sitting on the hood of a sheriff's car being questioned, a teenage Tyler hardened into a posture that would quietly run his leadership for the next 25 years. Get in line or get out. It took a normal employee dispute at a gym he owned, almost three decades later, to snap him back to that moment and realize, "Oh. That's how I deal with things." From there the episode becomes a working manual for founders on how fears and insecurities leak into leadership, tone, relationships, and revenue, and what to do about it. Tyler and Ryan trade their own defense mechanisms, intensity and anger and humor, and land on a hard truth every operator needs. The scariest part about leading with intensity is not that it fails. It is that it works, in the short term, which is exactly why founders double down on it until the carnage piles up. https://www.tylerdickerhoof.com/book ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠/ https://inboxalchemy.co/ https://trynina.co/

What It Do: 6 Parameters That Separate Cinematic AI From Total Slop

Everyone thinks the magic is in the prompt. It is not. The magic is in everything you build around the prompt. That is the thread running through this build in public session, where the conversation goes deep on what it actually takes to make AI video that looks like a real person, sounds like a real person, and does not collapse into that plastic, uncanny mush we have all learned to scroll past. The answer is not a better sentence typed into a box. It is a system. A founder who spent nine months in trial and error walks through the exact chain of models, references, and approvals that turns a single orange hoodie character into a living, transforming short film. Along the way you get the unglamorous truths nobody puts in a launch video: the order you stitch voice and visuals in matters, your characters have to be locked before they are useful, and the cheapest thing in the entire pipeline is the thing that holds it all together. There is also a quieter story underneath the tooling. It is about why a founder builds anything as a system in the first place, the pull between shipping at scale and being present in your own life, and the strange new normal where your face and your voice can be reproduced from a phone full of selfies. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonkatz99/ ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠ https://inboxalchemy.co/ https://trynina.co/

Ship A Full App In 5 Minutes, Not 5 Weekends

Every founder has a graveyard. Half-finished apps, abandoned prototypes, that "killer tool" you vibe-coded over a weekend and never touched again. Mariam Hakobyan, Co-Founder and CEO of Softr, thinks she knows exactly why those projects keep dying, and it is not your discipline. It is the chains. AI handed everyone a hammer and called them a carpenter, but it never removed the hard part. It just moved the complexity onto you: the authentication, the permissions, the security, the thousand boring edge cases that make a toy into a tool people can actually log into. Mariam is an engineer turned entrepreneur who led product and engineering teams of forty-plus people before walking away from a six-figure job to build something of her own. She and her husband Artur Mkrtchyan started Softr in 2019 with one stubborn belief: 80% of every business app is the same repetitive plumbing, and nobody should have to rebuild it from scratch ever again. They call it Lego for software. Connect your data, snap the blocks together, and a non-technical operator ships a full, secure, working app in about five minutes. The numbers tell a quiet, brutal story. A $2.2M seed they did not even plan to raise. A $13.5M Series A from FirstMark. Then a hard stop on fundraising, because the thing was already profitable. Today Softr runs eight-figure revenue with a lean team of fifty across fifteen countries, no traditional sales team, and growth that came almost entirely from a Product Hunt launch and word of mouth. Oh, and investors told a husband-and-wife founding team it would never work. Mariam's reply: they had a decade of conflict-resolution experience before they ever incorporated. This episode is for the founder who keeps starting and never shipping, the operator drowning in spreadsheets, and anyone trying to figure out when to reach for Claude Code and when to put the terminal down. https://www.softr.io/pricing https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariamhakobyan/ ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠ https://trynina.co/

"We Don't Use AI" Will Be the Flex of 2026

Two fifteen-year-old rock climbing buddies from Long Island made a pact in a surf lineup: build one-of-a-kind experiences for causes they cared about. That idea died. So did the loyalty app before it, and the apparel company after it. What survived was the thing nobody planned, an agency born from following opportunity instead of forcing a vision. Justin Abrams and Mike Rispoli have been failing forward together for twenty years, and Cause of a Kind is the compounding result. The deal that let them quit their jobs was the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, their first real foray into medical software and the moment Justin took out a half million dollar SBA loan and burned the boats. Today they build and modernize software for small and mid-sized businesses on a flat monthly model, no offshore handoffs, no surprise invoices. This conversation is a gut check for every founder currently drowning in shiny object syndrome. Mike has the scars of the Web3 era and sees the exact same pattern repeating with AI: companies slapping an "AI native" label on a context call to ChatGPT, then wondering why three competitors clone them in a month. His thesis is sharp and survivable. The magic is not AI. The magic is AI plus workflow plus deep domain knowledge, the combination that cannot be knocked off because you had to be the person on the inside to build it. Then there is the distribution story, which is the part founders will rewatch. Cause of a Kind went from roughly 7,000 to 160,000 plus YouTube subscribers in five months by doing one unglamorous thing relentlessly: they ship every single day. No filter, no precious production cycle, just two fast-talking Long Islanders who treat their business as a media house and treat publishing as the cheapest sales conversation on earth. https://www.causeofakind.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/cuzzinjustin/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-rispoli-cto/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWAstEyCK6YsKVTTRsQr37w ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠ https://trynina.co/

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/