Carissa Karban: Lean Into the Swerve – Veering, Letting Go
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Carissa Karban is less interested in having the right plan than staying awake enough to know when the plan is no longer right. After careers in engineering and leadership consulting, she took a long-awaited sabbatical to build the business she had been envisioning for five years. Instead, she hibernated that dream to co-found Astrapuffs, an AI-native entertainment studio building companions that learn, remember, and evolve with us. Her work sits at the intersection of play, human development, and AI, grounded in the belief that as technology evolves, our task is to remember what makes us human and lean further into it.
Carissa Karban Vroom Vroom Veer Stories
Summary
This week on Vroom Vroom Veer, I sit down with Carissa Karban, co-founder of Astrapuffs. Her path runs from materials engineering and a decade at Cisco to a divorce, a six-month sabbatical, a hard stretch of burnout and depression, and now a game full of AI companions. We cover a lot of ground, from the “villain masquerading as the hero” voices in our heads to why cold plunges (and long flights) are mostly about the story we tell ourselves.
What we talk about
Astrapuffs: a game where the NPCs actually remember you
- Carissa and her co-founder are building companions that co-op with you on adventures. These are agentic NPCs powered by language models, so quests unfold conversationally and the characters remember you from one play session to the next.
- No gunplay. Instead you get bubble wands, “bubblers,” and sonar pickaxes that break ice with sound. It’s a creative take on solving problems without defaulting to violence.
- You can try it now. There’s a live alpha demo on TestFlight, and the team runs weekly “play parties” where fun comes first and bugs and ideas surface naturally.
- A fun tangent on Gabe Newell, Valve, and Half-Life, and why finding the sweet spot between “too easy” and “too frustrating” is the whole game.
Growing up, control, and the checklist life
- Carissa grew up with a single parent and moved around a lot. She decided early that if she were in control, things would be better.
- She followed the standard checklist (degree, marriage, career, white picket fence) and realized she was ticking every box without being happy.
- The big lesson: you can control yourself, and very little else. It’s your relationship to what’s happening that shapes your experience, not the circumstances.
Engineer to leadership nerd
- Bachelor’s and master’s in materials engineering, then a decade at Cisco as a network engineer. She went through the Cisco certification track and later trained and mentored new hires, including veterans.
- Her curiosity pulled her toward leadership and systems thinking, and she earned a second master’s in leadership and organizational development.
- Why she left: she needs her work to carry meaning, and the culture had drifted toward checking boxes and hitting targets.
- Her take on the era of the generalist, and why an engineering mindset still serves her today.
The veers
- Veer #1 wasn’t her choice: an amicable divorce.
- Her response was to quit her job, sell the house, and take a six-month sabbatical. She climbed Kilimanjaro, went on safari, earned a yoga teacher certification in Guatemala, drove a camper van around New Zealand, and took in Australia and Hawaii.
- The black ice metaphor: when you start to skid, your instinct is to brace, but the thing that actually helps is to lean into the swerve.
- The closet lesson: you can’t call in new things until you make space for them.
Burnout, depression, and finding the way back
- Carissa describes burnout as overwhelm plus powerlessness. Her to-do list grew faster than she could check things off, and she felt she couldn’t say no.
- Dropping a few balls and watching the world keep spinning (a little bruising to the ego, but freeing).
- A candid conversation about depression and the belief that she had to earn her place by making a big impact.
- What helped her turn the corner: gratitude for her old limiting beliefs, which she calls a jacket that used to fit and is now too small, and a decision to stop living small.
Fear, power, and the story machine
- Fear as a clue and the “next step on the path to freedom.” Carissa’s cold plunge story: 15 minutes of dread, a 2-minute plunge, and the realization that the anticipation was far worse than the water.
- Pema Chödrön’s How We Live Is How We Die and the idea that most fears are stand-ins for the fear of death.
- Jeff’s long-haul-flight “tantrum in my head” and how a podcast helped him realize he didn’t have to whine.
The villain masquerading as the hero
- Carissa’s practice for the inner voices (think Internal Family Systems) that claim to protect us but keep us stuck, like the voice of overwhelm, or the people-pleaser who fears abandonment and ends up abandoning you.
- Her tool: when a voice insists on something, try doing the opposite. Listen, thank it, tell it you love it, and move on.
- Jeff’s bonus lesson: use the tub you already have. Imperfect action beats waiting for the perfect setup.
Takeaways
- Lean into the swerve instead of bracing against it.
- Control the controllables, and let go of the rest.
- Make space before you expect something new to arrive.
- The anticipation is usually worse than the thing itself.
- Your relationship to what happens matters more than what happens.
- Some action beats no action.
Quotable moment
“I’m a professional lemonade maker.” — Carissa