Will VC destroy your startup?

AI for Founders with Ryan Estes · Mar 12, 2026 · 59m · transcript

There's a place in Denver, inside a buzzing AI builder clubhouse, where the future gets stress-tested out loud every Wednesday night. That's where this conversation happened, and it did not go the direction you'd expect.

Carson Vest is an investment associate at Denver Ventures, a generalist fund covering pre-seed all the way to Series B. She sees everything. Hundreds of founders, hundreds of pitches, hundreds of ideas competing for the same finite pool of attention and capital. And yet the most radical thing she said had nothing to do with a hot deal. It was this: you might not need us.

That…