AI for Founders with Ryan Estes · 2026-08-10 · 59 min
Rob Collie spent 30 years inside the machine, and AI still scared him He was there in 1996, a fresh Vanderbilt grad walking into Microsoft. He led the business intelligence work inside Excel. He was a founding engineer on what became Power BI. He wrote three books about it and, by his own account, sold more than 92,000 copies. If anybody had a right to shrug at the next wave, it was Rob Collie. Then ChatGPT landed, and the guy whose entire career was telling computers what to do realized he ran the exact kind of company AI eats first. A data and BI consultancy. Code, scripts, formulas. Easy mode for a language model. By late 2024 he calls it dread. Not curiosity. Dread. And here is the part that makes this episode worth your commute: he did not fight the fear, he followed it. What he found on the other side was almost insultingly simple. AI success is not an AI problem. It is a data problem and a traditional software problem. The thing you already know how to do. That discovery became Fair Game , his fourth book, out now, and it is aimed squarely at the person who is not getting briefed. Because that is the real divide Rob names on this episode.
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