Episode 48 - Growing a webby nominated AI company, Self-Love as a Black woman | Casey Ariel Thobias

Casey Ariel explains her journey in building a Webby nominated AI company. She goes into detail about the roadblocks and the crafty solutions she had to come up with to build blazegroup.io. She also goes into detail about starting an AI Tech company and the difficulties she faced while trying to get funding for a saturated market as a Black woman entrepreneur.

The second half of the podcast, Kristian and Casey go into detail about how self-care and self-gentleness helped them start their companies and scale it without burning out and underperforming. The core message is clear: Prioritize your self-care while on your journey and you’re always a “How else?” question away from changing everything for the better.

Quote from interviewee for callout box: “You just need to find the one thing to solve, put a time and date on it and stop giving away your time and effort for free.”

 Biggest Takeaways You Don’t Want to Miss:

• Prioritizing self-care will not only ensure that you’re performing at your best but also will ensure that those around you get the best you. Which means you’re growing as a team towards your vision.
• Break your problems into projects. Casey highlights, her vision was so big that it was paralysing to her people. So, breaking big problems into chunks of tasks to solve as a project is key.

Check Out These Highlights: 

• Casey explains how she started a webby nominated AI company from scratch as a Black woman in a competitive market (2:46) 
• Kristian explains her techniques to meditate even when she has struggled in her past with not being able to silence her thoughts (22:36)
• Casey and Kristian explain on how self-care has helped them as entrepreneurs (28:17)

Quotes:

• “When plants do die in the wintertime, they are going to die every single time. They will eventually come back. I remind myself to move as nature does, because I am made up of the same things.”
• “During your cycle, your body needs you to stop and relax. Are you fighting against that? Are you allowing it to happen? I want to be more intentional about stopping and relaxing and being okay with that without feeling guilty about it.”
• “If we say that we came to entrepreneurship for freedom we got to start naming what freedom looks like. What is freedom to you? Is it the ability to take more naps? Is it the ability to plant gardens? Be less reliant on industrial agriculture? What is freedom to you? We got to start naming it so that we settle into it.”