AREA 81 Meetup 003 Wrap Up
- Chris Herbert
- 18 hours ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 5 hours ago
Table of Contents (click on links below)
Introduction
It was a good night. Not perfect — but good in the ways that matter most.
We had a genuine mix of people in Loft 1020 at Powerlink. Most of them I didn’t know, which was exactly what we were aiming for. Four AREA 81 members were in attendance. The rest were all prospective members — curious, engaged, and asking good questions.
Not everyone in the room was an entrepreneur. Some weren’t planning to start a business. A few had a side hustle. But what they all had in common was a genuine curiosity about AI — what it means, what it can do, and whether it’s something they need to pay attention to. That told me something important.
The Room Told Me Something
The idea of being “stuck” as an entrepreneur is something we talk about a lot at AREA 81. Seventy-seven percent of the entrepreneurs we’ve interviewed describe feeling stuck or not moving forward. That’s our problem to solve. Funding is another … but I digress.
But standing in that room Thursday night, I realized the concept is bigger than entrepreneurship. Being overwhelmed by social media, by the pace of change, by the promises and threats and opportunities of AI — that’s a kind of stuck too. And a lot of people are feeling it right now.
So whether you’re a business owner or not, there was a shared thread in that room: “I want to understand this. I don’t want to be left behind.” That’s a good place to start a conversation.
The Question Everyone Was Most Interested In
The number one thing people wanted to know — the question that kept coming up in different forms throughout the evening:
“How do I design a business that can run itself?”
That’s not a small question. And it’s the right one. It’s also the question that AREA 81 exists to help answer. That question is what sparked the next thing I’m working on: a mock dinosaur startup. Watch my first episode here.
Watch It: The Encore
Couldn't attend this meetup? Or want to revisit what we covered? We’ve recorded both the full presentation and a live demo tied directly to the Dinosaur Startup series.
Video 1 | Show & Tell — The Business of AI (Encore Presentation)
This is the full encore of the March 26 presentation — for those who attended and want to revisit it, and for those who couldn’t make it. Here’s a summary of what we covered.
The Problem: Getting Stuck
The evening opened with the core problem we see in entrepreneurs — and honestly, in people generally. We get stuck. Too many things to do, too many resources, too many distractions. The result is inertia. And inertia is the enemy of progress.
The risk isn’t failure. Failure is a test. You fail, you learn, you move. The risk is getting stuck and staying stuck. That’s the AREA 81 mission in one sentence.
AI Is Already Here
AI is already changing how businesses run. Whether you’re using ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, NotebookLM — or nothing yet — the point of the evening was to help you figure out where to start.
“I want to understand this [AI]. I don’t want to be left behind.”
We talked through what AI is genuinely replacing right now: repetitive writing tasks, research and summarization, first drafts of anything, basic image and graphic creation. And what it’s amplifying: your judgment, your customer relationships, your speed to market, your ability to test ideas fast, your strategic thinking.
The bottom line: AI needs to free you up to do something more important that AI can’t do. Your human instincts. Your experience. Your critical thinking and decision-making. That’s irreplaceable.
Introducing Jarvis
Jarvis is an AI agent I built to accelerate the success of Mi6 and our clients — and to help AREA 81 members improve their chances of success. It’s not a chatbot. It’s a tool I use daily, built on the Mi6 Venture Operating System.
Think of a methodology like a recipe. If you want to bake a chocolate cake, you need specific ingredients and steps. You can’t wing it. The VOS is that recipe for building a venture — from idea through validation, growth, and potential exit. Jarvis has it baked in.
As a proof point: the entire content package for the March 26 event — the poster, the emails, the presentation you’re watching now — was built with Jarvis. That was the demo. Everything you received, everything you saw on the screen, was the output of an AI co-founder doing real work in real time.
AREA 81: The Network and the Work
AREA 81 is a Rural Entrepreneur Accelerator. It starts with the peer network — curated, entrepreneurs only, new and active and exited founders together. Then we get to work. We build ideas, build businesses, and work in peer groups using the Mi6 VOS.
The outcome: the business works for you. Not the other way around. Freedom is the most important thing entrepreneurs tell me they want. That’s what we’re building toward.
Video 2 | DEMO: Using AI to Design a Business That Runs Itself
The best question of the night came off an arrival card: “How do I design a business that runs itself?” That question became the premise for the Dinosaur Startup — a mock venture I’m building live, on camera, using Jarvis and the Mi6 VOS, to show exactly how venture design works in practice.
“How do I design a business that runs itself?”
The demo walks through four tools, all in the context of building this startup:
Claude / Jarvis — Starting the Venture
Jarvis is a configured project inside Claude — my AI co-founder, built specifically to walk through the Mi6 Venture Operating System. The starting prompt was simple: I want to start a business about dinosaurs. What should I do first?
What followed wasn’t a list of generic business tips. It was a structured dialogue. Jarvis asked questions. I answered. And through that conversation, a real direction started to emerge: a traveling dinosaur education and entertainment experience that operates without the founder — bringing wonder, learning, and fun to rural and regional Canada.
By the end of that session, Jarvis had produced a Big Idea Canvas — the first formal step in the VOS. Customer segments, problem and desire, revenue model, unfair advantage, key assumptions to test. All of it grounded in what I actually told it, not what it assumed.
You can do a version of this in ChatGPT or Gemini. Both will give you a starting point. Jarvis does it within a methodology designed specifically for venture design. That’s the difference.
NotebookLM — Making Sense of Long-Form Research
Every startup needs research. I found a YouTube video — an hour and twenty minutes on everything we got wrong about dinosaurs. 134,000 views. Lots of comments. Potentially useful for shaping the direction of the business.
I wasn’t going to watch an hour and twenty minutes. I dropped the URL into NotebookLM and within seconds had a high-level summary, a mind map organized by chapter, and the ability to ask specific questions about the content.
From there I generated an infographic. Evolution of the dinosaurs. Clean, visual, shareable.
A note on AI hallucination: always have a subject matter expert check the output before you publish it. In this case, reaching out to the video’s creators to verify the infographic is also a way to start building relationships with potential educators and collaborators for the business.
This use case applies to anything: 50-page reports, long podcasts, academic papers, competitor content. NotebookLM turns long-form material into something you can actually work with.
Gemini — Creating a Short Concept Video
While NotebookLM was building the infographic, I went into Gemini and asked it to generate a jingle for the Dinosaur Startup. Eight seconds. A short clip of a Triceratops narration set to music. Not quite ready for primetime — but it gets the ball rolling. You can iterate from there, or use it as a brief for a human creator.
The point isn’t that the first output is perfect. The point is that you have something to react to in minutes instead of weeks.
The Through-Line
Everything in this demo — the venture design session with Jarvis, the research in NotebookLM, the concept video in Gemini — is pointed at the same thing: building a business that runs itself. Not all at once. One tool, one output, one step at a time.
What’s Coming: The Dinosaur Startup
Out of that question came a working demonstration. I’m using a mock startup — a dinosaur business — as a live example of how I apply the Mi6 methodology to venture design. Not a hypothetical. A real process, documented in real time, using Jarvis as co-founder and AREA 81 as the network.
The dinosaur business is the vehicle. The Mi6 Venture Operating System — our proprietary VOS — is the framework. Jarvis is the co-founder. AREA 81 is the network. Every step of the venture design process — from problem discovery through demand validation and into value delivery — will be shown as it actually happens. No polish. No shortcuts.
That series will live here on the Mi6 site and connect directly to what we’re building at AREA 81. Here is episode one.
What’s Different Going Forward
Thursday night wasn’t as structured as I wanted. I found myself going back and forth, and the demo didn’t have the specificity it needed. That’s on me.
Going forward, every AREA 81 Business of .... Meetup will have a tighter structure, a pre-built demo sequence, and a clear through-line. The questions from the room are welcome — that’s the best part — but the foundation needs to be solid first. And, you kids in the back zip it while the presentation and demo is going on. Said with love.
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