How Gamification Can Skyrocket Your Business to $100 Million

Ash Lonare: You have seen AI chatbots and AI, uh, companions. But what if I tell you that now you can play games with AI like a friend? Join us as we explore this exciting frontier with Karisa Carbon, co founder of Astropops. Discover how AI is transforming the gaming experience and what it means for the future of play. Let's dive in. Hello, Carissa. How are you doing today?

Karisa Carbon: Hey, Ash. I'm doing well, how are you?

Ash Lonare: Good, thank you. Good, thank you, Karissa. Before we move forward, then, do you have a favorite quote? Something that motivates you, inspires you, you would like to share with our audience?

Karisa Carbon: Yeah. You know, I think one that really resonates with me is attributed to Henry Ford. Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.

Ash Lonare: Yeah. Because most of the time, if you think you can, you can. Right? And most of the.

Karisa Carbon: Exactly, Exactly. It's. It's so much perception. We tend to hold ourselves back, we tend to play small. And, you know, I think there's, um, a, ah, similar quote from Marianne Williamson where it's like, you know, we're not. It's not our incompetence that we're afraid of, it's truly our greatness that we're afraid of. Because what if we go after it and we achieve more than we ever thought was possible?

Ash Lonare: Indeed, indeed. Definitely. Great. Great food for thought. Thank you so much for that. So, Karisa, imagine you're in a room of. Full of founders, early, early stage builders. Right. They're eagerly waiting for you. Most of them actually don't even know you, and they are just expecting somebody who will come on the. And then share their life story. Right. Um, you walk in, you have the mic in your hand, the spotlight is on you. What would you share with them that after listening to it, they will stick with us for the rest of the hour?

Karisa Carbon: I think for me, what immediately comes up is this notion that everything is happening for us rather than to us. You know, I think that's been a really transformative lesson in my own journey is learning how to go through every single experience, no matter what it is, and see the beauty in it, whether it's painful, whether it's joyful, whatever it is. Um, seeing it as an opportunity, as an invitation to learn more about myself, to let go of those limiting beliefs or stories. Maybe it's a rep that I need to build the strength in order to prepare for what's to come. And so I think for me, it's really this idea of one looking in the mirror. Right. Looking at everything that happens around us as an invitation to go inward, to look at ourselves, to look at our stories, our, uh, conditioning, our beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. If we can see everything as a mirror and we can activate curiosity rather than judgment. I don't know about you, but I've spent so much of my life wishing something was different than the way that it was. And that resistance and that judgment took up a lot of energy that I could have been utilizing towards solving the problem or moving through it. And so for me, it's really. How do we suspend judgment and activate curiosity?

Ash Lonare: Indeed. Indeed. That's. That's a good one. I have always advocated for curiosity. Every time I have somebody coming on the pod, I make sure that I have an intro call before jumping on the recording. And what I've learned is every time I, I have these intro calls, the curiosity get a seeded inside me for, for that particular guest. And that drives me toward the episode and tells me, okay, what, what I'm going to learn from this individual. And same for my listeners. Right? So, yeah. So, Carissa, would you be able to talk more about what Astropuffs is? Who is your ideal customer Persona and why you actually came to, to this path?

Karisa Carbon: Well, I don't know how much time we have for that story, but it's a long one. It's a long and winding one, but absolutely happy to share a little bit about Astropuffs. I like to say that we are creating and building the first shared world for humans and AI to play together. And so what that means is, you know, a lot of the AI development and innovation that's happening today is focused more on efficiency optimization. Right. It's really task oriented and business focused. And what we recognize is that the power of play is truly transformational. It's something. There's actually another quote that I'll bring in, uh, from George Bernard Shaw that I really love. And it's, we don't stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing. And we know that play has so many opportunities to teach us to activate that curiosity we were just speaking of. And when we look at AI innovation, it's inevitable that we will soon be cohabitating and sharing our environment with embodied AI. Whether it's Musk's investment in robotics, whether it's these AI toys that are becoming really popular, we are going to be sharing our environment. And we know historically that there's a lot of fear, there's a lot of division that can happen. And oftentimes Even violence that might happen when that happens. However, through the lens of play, we're united towards a shared common goal. It doesn't matter what you look like, what your political beliefs are, we can come together in order to complete that goal, to complete that mission together. And so we really strongly believe that it's an opportunity for us to play with other players as well as AI to form these relationships that can really show us what's possible when we approach new relationships and new ways of being with that, uh, curiosity that we were speaking of.

Ash Lonare: Indeed, indeed. And this particular aspect of know Astroprof is playing with AI. So what I've learned is there's a lot of, there's a lot of sides of AI we utilize on a daily basis. Right. First of all, we kind of like my partner started noticing that I kind of spend quite a lot of time in front of tele. So for example, we, we are currently watching Bridgertons. Right? That's really nice. Good. Uh, YB British show on Netflix right now. While we watch it, it's more about love, affection and then all these kind of uh, scandals happening among the royalties. Right. I am not interested that much, but I'm interested in the story that drives me. So time to time I have my phone with me and instead of having a chat with my friends on LinkedIn or WhatsApp, uh, nowadays she spots me chatting with Claude on my phone, chatting with ChatGPT. So she started saying kind of you kind of chat with them like, like a person Nowadays, instead of chatting with your friends or you know, your acquaintance on the LinkedIn, the other side of AI I have witnessed is people have started developing these app, uh, where you can find partner, a girlfriend or a boyfriend from an AI perspective right there you can talk to them, you can have calls with them, you can share stories or your daily activities with them and they respond back with empathy and sympathy and sometimes being rude. Right. So having an AI companion in our life is kind of. We are seeing these small bits and pieces sprinkling around our life. Right. Playing with AI is something where what I have heard first time. And that's what intrigued the curiosity. What does it actually means? Is it something like if I'm playing a car race game instead of having a computer software with an algorithm racing against me with respect to time, it is an actual AI, uh, running against me and racing against me. So that means I could actually win, not necessarily just going fast, but with better strategies. What does it actually mean?

Karisa Carbon: Yeah, so for our game, I can absolutely see that being the case for, let's say a racing game. Our game is a uh, cozy open world multiplayer game. So in typical cozy games, think hello Kitty Island Adventure or Animal Crossing. It's more about co oping, right. If you're in a multiplayer environment, you know, you and I can join up in the game, we can go have adventures, we can go flying around together, we can solve puzzles. And now we actually have agentic NPCs or non player characters. So in a typical game, for anyone who's not familiar with the gaming world, an NPC tends to be pretty static, pretty superficial. There's kind of a decision tree, you know, if this, then that. But there's not a lot of replayability that comes from these scripted conversations. If you play the game two or three times, you start to see that repeated dialogue and it can get a little flat or boring. And so now with agentic AI, we can actually have a situation where quests unfold conversationally. Right. And it's because of the friendship that you're building with these NPCs that you are now going to learn about the world. You're going to be exposed to new quests not because there's a linear unfolding, but because you're investing the time, you're building trust with these AI companions. And they say, uh, you know what, Ash, you and I have spent enough time together. I'm kind of getting your vibe. I'm starting to trust you now. I'm going to share with you this new quest that can be unlocked so things can unfold conversationally. And when you're actually solving a puzzle, let's say you can go up to this NPC which is very novel, and you can say, hey, can you help me? Can you pull that green lever over there? Can you follow me over here? And so you can actually play the game with these NPCs that we've never been able to truly play with.

Ash Lonare: Very interesting. I don't know, do you, do you have an Xbox or.

Karisa Carbon: Um, so I'm more of a Nintendo girly, but Nintendo, yeah, yeah, there is

Ash Lonare: a game on Xbox. Something like better together or two together. I don't know if you have ever came across that game. It's like if you're playing it with your partner, you have to help each other out. If you don't, you can't actually cross the stage. That is the only game I have done bought like with paying my real money. After I got my the car racing beam, which is my favorite, right. And I started playing it with my partner. And it's kind of very cute and very strategic because now we do both have to think about what we are doing together, helping each other to, you know, cross the crop. When you say that you can actually ask AI to do something with you and then the AI is performing these tasks inside the game. Is it similar or am, um, I.

Karisa Carbon: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you've got it, you've got it Ash. It's exactly that. You know, there's this co oping and our game is multi dimensional. So these characters come from different dimensions, they have backstories, they have personalities. And you can come in and you can say, you know, maybe today I have more of an affinity for this character because I like their personality more. So I'm going to have them come on my adventure with me. Or perhaps you can ask them to, you know, you can come into our game and you can say, hey, what have you been up to? Because as a gentic AI, they're living in the game even when we're not there. So you can say, hey, what have you been up to? And they might say, I was over at the Firefly statue and you're like, oh, I've never seen that before. Can you take me there? And they will lead you to that part of the world so you can discover the world through that conversation. Much like uh, an actual friendship.

Ash Lonare: That's really cool. Many games actually claim immersion like, you know, what specifically make your AI driven NPC feel meaningfully different from traditional game characters. Would you be able to open to share that?

Karisa Carbon: Yeah, absolutely. I love that question. Thank you so much. You know, I think there's uh, there's a two part answer to that question. I think one is having a gentic AI, right? That is we believe going to be the future of gaming, really changing our experience of gaming as AI becomes more and more introduced, not just into the workflow of game development, but also into the game. You know, there are all kinds of unknown unknowns as we integrate AI into gaming environments. But what really sets us apart is we have that novelty because many games have not yet introduced AI NPCs. So we're at the forefront of this new technology in this particular application. But then also I would say that I've been on a journey and my co founder has also been on a journey of self awakening, of contemplative practice, of this inner work that I spoke to at the beginning of our session today. And so it's really about looking at how do we become more fully expressed human beings. And as we've been on this journey. Something I like to say is we can't encode what we don't embody. So if all we're doing is encoding AI because we're thinking about how do we make money, how do we optimize tasks, how do we keep this business focused, there's going to be a lot of richness we lose out on when it comes to the relationships we have with ourselves and with others. So as someone coming from a background in leadership development and relational dynamics, transformative experiences, we're really integrating a lot of that into how we're training and prompting our agentic AI so that it has more of that focus on relational depth, that emotional companionship that to your point earlier, we see this popping up in a lot of different ways. Whether it's the AI girlfriends. We've actually heard of people getting married to their AI bots uh, in different countries around the world. And so it's become a byproduct. But much of the AI that exists today has not been designed with responsible ethical and safe relationships in mind. And so that's really been more of our North Star is how do we do this in a way that feels authentic, it feels real and it's done with ethical and safeguards in uh, place.

Ash Lonare: That is impressive because I think one of the biggest challenge we have right now in our AI world is to have this explainability and the ethics governance gates in place because that's where things go out of our hand. Right. I don't know if you, if you have heard about this news around that there is a Palantire Palantire company which serves quite a lot of um, defense organizations in USA and instead of using OpenAI they switched to anthropic I think last six, seven months back. And one of the analysts, so they have human in the loop concept there. So one of the analysts who was responsible to figure out that where were the key locations for you know the, all the wars going on right now in Iran and U.S. right. Uh, where they can put predict like there could be something uh, meaningful for us to, to uh, to target upon. And uh, I think they had like 13 or 14 analysts who were doing that manually and after Claude came In they had two analysts who were doing the jobs for 14 people. And there are a lot of things which we can talk about but we are not here to talk about war right now. So I'll diverse myself from that conversation. But yeah, things are getting into deeper spaces in our life uh comes to AI. So we definitely need explainability and the ethics and the humans in the loop so well.

Karisa Carbon: And I love Ash. I just want to touch on that point really quickly. I think that speaks to exactly what we're building because of what you just said. Right. Claude can replace, you know, 13 different people on a team. There's a lot of fear. There's a lot of that division of what's going to happen to my job. And there's. Yeah, there's just a lot of conversations right now about AI replacing humans. And we are firmly. We take a stance that we want AI to amplify, to empower our humans. We are definitely not a studio that's looking to only have one or two developers, and the rest is AI. AI can accelerate. AI can be a catalyst. It can help us do things that we haven't done before. Or maybe we don't want to be doing the manual work, but it's really about amplifying human creativity and showcasing that a partnership between humans and AI is really the future that we're betting on.

Ash Lonare: Indeed. Indeed. Great stuff. So let's talk about numbers. I don't want you to disclose your secret revenue numbers or anything because I know you're in a stage where you might be able to go outside and raise fund and things like that. But talk to us more about the user base. How are you getting your, uh, you know, early stage adopters, who are your ideal customer Personas, uh, which communities you're more involved in, things like that, and how you're planning to do it in terms of the near future to acquire more customers?

Karisa Carbon: Yeah, it's a really good question. I would say it's been a very interesting journey so far because what we're building is very complex. So just to kind of create a little bit of context, we're building a mobile native game. So we're building for iOS, which constrains us from a technological standpoint. We have an AI companion layer, we have that RPG role playing game layer, and then we have a multiplayer layer on top of it. So there's a lot of complexity built into what we're doing. And so right now we haven't fully launched the game. We're in, uh, what we're calling a closed alpha. We're doing supervised play tests. So we're getting feedback from people to understand exactly what you're saying, the ideal customer Persona and how we can really start to target when we get those marketing dollars. Right. How do we really get this game in front of the people who are ready for it and who want it? So right now it's been a lot of kind of behind the scenes doing that work. We're not out in the public just yet so we can't speak to, you know, we're pre revenue, we can't speak to, oh, uh, this is how we're going about um, that go to market channel. But something that we're really finding is because our game has such a community focus, that's something that we're really focusing on when it comes to social media, you know, building our Instagram, our TikTok, our Discord communities. Because indie studios really have a hard time competing with, you know, the AAA studios, the big studios that have all the marketing dollars. But what' is that our game is really about community. So the people who are attracted to our game and want to play our game are also going to be the ones who want to tell their friends about it. We can have those network effects because it's a multiplayer game so we can invite people in. And what we're really banking on as well is as we develop relationships with these AI companions who are in the game, we believe just as the Internet created new opportunities, things we didn't foresee, we believe that we're going to start seeing these characters, whether they're AI companions in an app or in a game, following us across different platforms. They're going to be kind of these ever present friends in the digital world. And so if we've built a relationship with a companion in a particular game, now when it comes time to, you know, think about having a personal assistant, well, maybe I want someone that I already trust, that already holds my memories. We already have that shared context. Just as we would choose someone that we trust in real life to hire them to be an assistant or to work with us. So there's really that switching effect that uh, the switching costs that come into effect. Rather when we think about, let's say an email server, when we've been doing email and Gmail for many, many years, we don't want to switch, we don't want to have to move all of that data over. So we kind of have a multi layered play of how we're bringing people in, building that trust and that relationship. And something I would say that differentiates us is rather than focus solely on these dopamine addiction loops that many teams rely on because they're very profitable and they work very well. So kudos, you know, if for those who can crack the code. But something we're thinking about is how do we layer something like oxytocin on. We're partnering with a neuroscience lab to say, you know, how do we measure that neurological immersion that you spoke of and how do we actually make it more community focused and relationship oriented? By adding oxytocin in addition to dopamine. So rather than having a game that people want to play because they just need to level up, they just need to get that next dopamine hit, they come back because of the relationships, because of the community. And so that's really going to help us build that loyal audience. And of course, not to mention our IP is absolutely adorable. It melts everybody on contact. And so it's a lot of fun to come in and play the game, to see the features and to build those relationships.

Ash Lonare: Do you see this scaling more like a game, a platform or a social network?

Karisa Carbon: That's a really good question, Ash. I would say all of the above, honestly, because if you look at the trends, especially looking at Gen Z, Gen Alpha, they're hanging out in games as social platforms much more than traditional social media. So that's exactly where we're kind of skating to, is this understanding that games as a social platform are sort of the next wave outside of traditional social media. So I would say all of the above because then with the platform capability, we will be taking our agents that we've trained and they will become this kind of white label service that we can provide to other gaming studios or other industries in that more traditional B2B play. Because we now have these agents that can function in a crowd, which is very different than most of your typical AI companions that are interacting in a one to one interface. They will be trained in a crowd. And just like Google's DeepMind, we're training them in that game environment so they're going to be picking up and learning a lot faster. And we've actually just begun, I'm very excited. We've just begun training our own models. So that's very cool.

Ash Lonare: That is super cool. That is, that is super cool. And you touched a little bit more about creating the community. Like what are you doing in terms of generating content or are you on any social media platform? What are the strategies you're using? The reason I'm asking is most of our founders, they struggle to understand what kind of content or what kind of strategies they should use to attract the customers or the people who are already early adopters. Gaming is a big industry and it's, there are big players in gaming, right? And, and, and if a startup like yourself could go and grab attention from, from maybe hundreds and thousands of People, that strategy is worth listening to. So what, what kind of strategies you're using, and if it involves content generation, what kind of content you're creating.

Karisa Carbon: Yeah, love that. You know, I would say so. We're definitely still early days, so I'll say that we've grown our TikTok community to just over 10k. Our Instagram is close to 3k, so we're on the up and up of building our community. But it really comes down to right now, in this early stage, I would call it strategic experimentation. So it's. It's playing with different types of content, seeing what resonates, what gets the most engagement. And something that I really love that we've been doing is collaborating with micro influencers. So it's not just about us getting our word out there, but we really believe that a rising tide raises all boats. And so if we can partner with influencers, you know, they can borrow our audience, we can borrow their audience, and we can really start to build that community from the ground up. Because it's not just about, oh, uh, once we have a bunch of followers, then we'll start building community. It's really the community is the foundation. It's not just about getting eyeballs or attention. It's really about creating these messages that resonate right with where we are in today's society. Many of us are hearing messages day in and day out that things are getting worse. We should be afraid all of the time. We're constantly in this, like, chronic survival state. And so, so much of what we're building is really about safety and comfort and that play aspect. So it's, you know, how do we provide a space, a community where we can come together and take a breath? You know, we don't have to constantly be hustling and doing more and more. We can relax, we can enjoy, we can simply be. And so our content really reflects that ethos and we think about things like, for instance, reframing. Uh, that's a huge one coming from my 12 years of coaching experience. Reframing is such a powerful tool. So we share a content that's very similar. You know, someone comes in and says, oh, I spilled my ice cream, and they're really sad. And one of our characters picks it up and says, well, now it's a milkshake, right? So we can always reframe it. And it's all about our perception. So we're really focused on creating content that showcases the ethos of the brand

Ash Lonare: that we're building that is so powerful. I mean, I could not emphasize on this part of building a community and reframing and taking inputs from the community. And I would love to share an example with it. A, um, couple of months back we hired somewhere around 28 uh, micro influencers to advertise more about a SaaS product we were building. And one of the challenges we were facing with them is even though we were paying almost equally similar to all of them to generate the content, some people were delivering the content within a week, some people were delivering within a couple of days, and some people were delivering in two weeks or so. And the most of the conversations was going on is like they have a process in place. They first have the raw footage shot and then they have the B rolls in place and then they have the captions and then the background music and everything. So we started asking them to provide us the raw footage uh, in house. And then we had an intern who was doing all this editing and then this intern said that why don't we actually create some kind of API on our platform which does it for us. And we created a very simple endpoint where you upload your, your talking head video on your Google Drive, it picks it up from there and add captions on it. And that's the final result. Now what happened is we started sharing this API with our micro influencers. Let me quickly share my screen and I don't know if that makes any difference. Okay, so this is what we build on top of what we were talking with our micro influencers, right. And what we said, if you are building something, why don't you use our APIs, uh, with your automation tools? And then what we will do is we will just buy the raw footage from you. And they were like okay, but what is it? So we told them that you just utilize this um, captions API to put captions on it. And then we started sending them email. What other use case would you like to create with them? They said oh, it would be good to add an intro or outro. It would be good if we can concatenate multiple short clips. M it would be good if we could add a, uh, denoise it or add a background audio to it. And every single email we received back from these influencers, we created content and added YouTube videos on it. And now we have a full flesh of APIs to automate your video editing requirement.

Karisa Carbon: Amazing.

Ash Lonare: You would not believe we never created any content which we never received an email for. And we get 10 to 15 registration every single day. Mhm. Literally no SEO budget, spend, no advertisement Budget, spend, anything. And now our organization is already thinking we should actually focus on this tool because it has more eyeballs compared to our main source too. You know what I mean? Right? That is the power of community, right?

Karisa Carbon: Yes. Yeah, I love that example. I'm so glad you shared that story, Ash. It's really beautiful because it's really about relationships and value exchange. Right. So often in today's, especially Western culture, it's about extraction. Right. What can I get from you? It's about this transaction, but it's um, almost this paradox, right? When we let go of the transaction, when we let go of the focus on the output or what we're going to get out of it, and we focus on the relationship and the community. Look at that. What do you know? Letting go of the idea of getting eyeballs or making money or whatever it is actually gets you to that result. And so I think that's a really beautiful example of creating value for people and treating it as a win, win situation.

Ash Lonare: Indeed, indeed. So let's have a little bit more, uh, let's talk a little bit more around the founder's perspective then, um, before we move to our, ah, quick fire round. Most tech products, um, kind of like optimize for engagement and retention game is, seems to be optimized for calm. Does that conflict with traditional growth models, do you think?

Karisa Carbon: I love that you asked that question, Ash, because no, I don't think it, it conflicts. I think what we really take the stance on is it's an evolution, right? It's not adversarial, it's not this or that. It's really about recognizing all of the businesses, all of the games that have come before us, got us to this precise moment in time. They have helped us enable the awareness that we have, the knowledge, the opportunities that we have. And especially with, I'll call it the AI revolution, maybe a, uh, huge term to use. But we are at this huge inflection point in society where we can actually, we have the opportunity to say, okay, all the things that are good about what got us here, we can keep those and move forward with them. And we can evolve, we can adapt the things that don't serve us. And so we can let go of them or we can change them. And so when it comes to those traditional growth ideas and those metrics, it's how do we say yes? And it's not one or the other, so it's how do we look at, I mean there's already so much data out there that talks about, let's Say, treating employees well, right? Reduces turnover, reduces burnout out. It creates more efficiency and more output. And so there's still this traditional paradigm out there where many people think for some reason that you need to be ruthless to get ahead, that it's, you know, my way or the highway, or there's this mindset of scarcity, that there's not enough to go around. And so we are really building our business, not just the game, but our business on the foundation of abundance. There's enough to go around. There are the resources and there's the genius in all of the humans who want to be part of this project. It's not about our ego. It's not about me saying, oh, uh, this is what I did. It's really about saying, we are ready for this. Right? If you look at the state when we're constantly dysregulated, we're constantly in fight or flight, in survival mode. You know, I'm sure you know this, but, you know, from an evolutionary standpoint, our brains don't know how to differentiate between perceived threats and actual threats. So the stories we're telling ourselves in our mind about our boss, about the wars, about the AI infrastructure, whatever's happening, those stories feel real to our bodies. And what we know to be true is we cannot do our best work. We cannot transcend from a place of survival. So we actually must, it is imperative that we create spaces where we can feel calm, we can feel safe, because that's where the curiosity comes online, that's where innovation comes online, that's where relationships come online. And so we're actually at, uh, I believe this beautiful inflection point of saying, okay, we have a lot of great things that helped us get to the level of advancement that we are today. And we now have the opportunity to do things differently in order to really serve a future of human flourishing.

Ash Lonare: Indeed, indeed. And thanks for that. Because I was thinking while you were advising on that is how many games or software houses actually think it that way. Because even the appcom is focused on acquiring more customers than. I mean, they do quite a good job with brainwave music and things like that, but their primary goal is to acquire more customers, right? It's not just about. Just about providing the space. That's great. So thanks so much, Karisa, for that. Let's move into our quickfire round. I've got six quick, ah, fire question for you. If at any stage you think, you know, you don't want to answer one of them, just give me a skip and then we can Move on to the next one. Is that okay?

Karisa Carbon: Let's go. Yeah, let's go.

Ash Lonare: Okay, great. Number one, what are the top three strategies in 2026 to build a community specifically around caving space?

Karisa Carbon: Top three strategies, I would say number one is believing in yourself. You know, I think people really respond to energy. And so if I'm coming in with an energy of fear, of scarcity, of not believing in what I'm building, then people are going to pick up on that. So I think part of it is truly doing something that touches a purpose in your heart. So I think that's one. I think number two is highlighting exactly the story that you just shared. Ash. It's really about m providing value, uh, rather than thinking about what I can extract from someone, whether it's their attention, their money, their time, whatever it is, how do I give something rather than thinking about what I'm going to get? And then I would say the third is staying at the forefront of the technological innovation, the developments that are happening because there are new opportunities being created every day, and there are things that maybe a few years ago we never would have imagined were possible. So staying at that forefront, I think gives us a clue into, oh, this is a new thing that could be used to serve my community. So really showing up in service of that community.

Ash Lonare: And I think going forward, even the big brands are doing the same going forward. You have to have a community around your business because that's the way forward is specifically pointing out towards what AI is doing in terms of creating all these AI slop and everything. So the value you're gonna get going forward in the future is the community, the people who being in the same space and who care about the same cause. Right. So that's. That's really cool. What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Karisa Carbon: I would recommend the Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer. That book transformed my life about five years ago when I read it. And especially for founders out there, I think it could be a really beautiful example of what it means to accept what is happening and not resist to flow when things don't go our way. We have, you know, what we might call a failure or a misstep or something, just not meeting our expectations. And this book is all about how do we accept it and flow with it. Kind of back to that philosophy of things are happening for us, not to us. So that's a good one.

Ash Lonare: What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

Karisa Carbon: I would say it depends on your definition of success. So for Me coming from my definition of success, an attribute of a successful founder is inner peace. Being able to have that equanimity, having that peace, that flow, that knowing that we are a part of something bigger than us and being able to take that responsibility off of our shoulders, that we have to be the one to do all of the things, um, and instead recognize our part to play in the greater whole. So inner peace indeed.

Ash Lonare: Indeed. What's. What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Karisa Carbon: I m love voice notes for tracking things rather than manually. Whether it's with agents, sending voice notes to agents for things that need to get done or just my own audio journaling, you know, things to remember, to kind of clear out of my mind to create the space I need to focus. Being able to speak it out loud is a really beautiful tool for me.

Ash Lonare: Awesome. Great stuff. What's a new or a crazy business idea you would love to pursue if you had time?

Karisa Carbon: Let's see. A new or crazy business idea.

Ash Lonare: Hmm. Hm.

Karisa Carbon: I'll say this one, this one's a crazy idea because I don't immediately know how we'd make money from it. So maybe it's not really a great business. But uh, you know, something that brings us together to simply be to leave the phones at the door. The to do list, the accomplishments, the I feel like especially in the San Francisco Bay area, the first question we ask is what do you do? Oh yeah, what's your name? Tell me more about who you are. And I think there's a really beautiful energy behind it. Uh, you know, this desire to really be at that forefront of innovation. But I would love to create spaces where we simply just connect as human beings outside of any of the noise, outside of us.

Ash Lonare: Awesome. Awesome. What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Karisa Carbon: M I'm a pretty open book, so it's hard to say what most people don't know about me. I would say something that you don't know just by meeting me or looking at me is that a couple years ago my life sort of blew up. I went through a divorce, quit my job, sold my house, went on a 6m month sabbatical. And that was really what helped me create the space to step into life as a full time founder. It's something that I've been an aspiring entreprene entrepreneur, a wantrepreneur if you will, for the last 15 years. And while I was going through that really hard time a couple years ago, I didn't know what was going to happen. But because I have adopted this mindset of things happen for me, not to me. I trusted that something would be revealed, something better would come together. And now I have a beautiful partnership and I'm living that full time founder life that I always dreamed of.

Ash Lonare: Awesome. And you are one of the ideal person or founders who listen to our show should listen to this pod episode and get inspired by. Because there's a lot of people who think that if they have some kind of challenges or you know, setbacks in their life, you're done. But that's not the case. It's always about how you bring yourself back into the current. Right. That's how you go across the oceans and meet wonderful people, um, you know, and make your, make a, uh, life out of, out of your challenges. So that's the best part.

Karisa Carbon: This is a quote. It's not a famous quote from somebody else, but it's something that I've been sitting with really recently that I came up with. If freedom is the destination, uncertainty is the path.

Ash Lonare: Definitely. Oh, I love it more than the one you shared in the beginning. Great stuff. Cool. Carissa, thank you so much for joining me and sharing your story. Unpacking years of building this amazing game you guys are doing together with your founder. If people want to check out it or if people want to get on to like list where they can have the game when you guys launch it or whenever the new features are coming in or if people have some questions around it, what's the best way to do to contact you?

Karisa Carbon: Yeah, I would say for me, find me on LinkedIn these days. That's where I'm the most active. Carissa Carbon but would absolutely love for you to check out the game. Astropufs.com It's Astra, like the stars. Astropuffs.com and we are actively looking for people to beta test with us. So we'd love for you to go to our website, sign up for our wait list and we're going to be rolling out playtests pretty soon. So if you want to be part of not just seeing it early, but be part of that co creative process and really incorporating your feedback, we would love to hear your voice and have you get in the game with us so we can play well.

Ash Lonare: Carissa, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your inspiring journey. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on founders podcast.

Karisa Carbon: Thank you so much. Ash, it's been an honor and a pleasure. Really appreciate it.