The morning of
This may sound absurd, but a chicken died in my arms the morning of this call.
Twelve inches of snow the day before. Zero degrees overnight. I walk out to the coop and one of our hens is down. Water bucket is solid ice with peck marks where she tried to break through. I bring her inside, hold her by the fire, feed her sugar water with a syringe. And she dies anyway.
Then I notice the mites crawling up my neck.
My son is squishing bugs off my collar while I’m trying not to infest the house. Two hours later, I’m on a Zoom talking about JSON automation with someone in Texas I’ve never met.
This is the version of “building in AI” and remote work that nobody posts about. The ability to seamlessly go from real life (rural Wisconsin, mites in your shirt) to a noon call with a woman figuring out how to bring wealth education to communities that have been systematically left out.
She raised her hand when nobody else did
I ran a LinkedIn contest a few weeks ago to give away a Free 30-day MindStudio L3 certification bootcamp. One woman who I’d never spoken with commented. And when I looked at what she was doing, the decision was easy: she was the only woman who raised her hand.
In the first few minutes of the call, she framed everything I’ve been observing in tech for years: she keeps walking into tech meetings and is the only person who looks like her. Sometimes the only woman. Often the only Black woman.
But look — she’s not complaining about it. She’s just stating the obvious. And the most important thing here is that she’s staying in the room.
What I didn’t expect
One of Kachi’s businesses, KIACE — Kachi Institute for Academic and Career Excellence — runs an accelerator for business owners. Before that, she managed components of federally funded initiatives north of a hundred million dollars. Serious rooms, serious stakes. AI is new territory for her. But the pattern recognition isn’t.
What struck me wasn’t her resume, it was genuine excitement about JSON — not the LinkedIn performance kind. The kind where you’re surprised at yourself. “I was shocked how excited I was about code.” Someone who gets fired up about a data format isn’t learning a tool. She’s understanding the architecture of what she can build.
Then the conversation turned. A colleague had invited her to an insurance conference in Dallas. She went as an AI consultant. Expected — her words — “middle-age soccer dads.”
She found a room full of Black professionals who’d built an organization that changed how their community thinks about life insurance and wealth building. Not as a grudge purchase. As a vehicle.
The CEO told her: don’t come in as a consultant. Join. Get trained. Get your license. See it from the inside first. Then figure out how technology fits.
So she did. Securities license on top of insurance licensing. Conference series starting in May. And AI infrastructure underneath all of it — education, onboarding, admin. Seamless.
The real bottleneck
The strategic work gets done. Proposals, plans, creative thinking — that’s where Kachi’s brain lives. The last mile — follow-ups, formatting, scheduling — eats time that should go toward the next thing. The work is strong. The system around it hasn’t caught up.
That question separates people who use AI as a novelty from people who use it as infrastructure.
I hit the same wall differently. Lost a developer because we hadn’t monetized yet. Before AI tools, that’s the end of the project. Now I pick up his codebase and work through it in natural language. Slower than a Python expert. But not dead in the water.
Kachi doesn’t want to hand someone a spec and say “build this.” She wants to understand the inner workings first. That instinct separates builders from buyers.
The filter
When everything is open-ended, it’s paralyzing. Every new tool, every new platform — you can spend all your time evaluating and none of it building.
The filter: what do you already have? Where’s your audience? Start there.
Kachi has grants expertise, an accelerator full of business owners, a new insurance track, and a community that needs systems. She doesn’t need the next consumer app. She needs infrastructure that makes her existing work compound.
Same realization I had when I stopped chasing and started building tools for the town I actually live in.
I gave away a certification to someone I’d never spoken to because she raised her hand when nobody else who looked like her did. Thirty days later, she’s planning a conference series, pursuing a securities license, and creating safe spaces for people who keep showing up to rooms that weren’t built for them.
I don’t know what the future holds for Kachi’s L3 Certification, let alone mine. But here’s what I’m genuinely excited about: checking back in with her in a year. When someone with her ambition and drive gets access to tools and a runway, you can be sure the result is going to be worth following up on.