The Dinosaur Startup: The Challenge
- Chris Herbert
- Mar 28
- 5 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
Most businesses run their owners. Watch this one get designed from day one to run itself
About This Series
The Dinosaur Startup is the story of an entrepreneur and an AI co-founder building a business together — live, on screen, one episode at a time.
The entrepreneur is Chris Herbert. The AI co-founder is Jarvis. The business is a travelling dinosaur education and entertainment experience. Chris knows nothing about dinosaurs. That’s deliberate. The point isn’t the dinosaurs. The point is what happens when a structured methodology meets an unlikely idea — and two co-founders have to figure it out together.
Every episode is a real working session. You see the questions, the decisions, the outputs, and the dead ends as they happen. Nothing is scripted. Nothing is cleaned up after the fact. When Chris doesn’t know the answer, Jarvis pushes until they find it. When the idea has holes, Jarvis names them.
That’s what a co-founder does.
The challenge that started this series came from an audience at a live event: design a business that runs itself. Chris took the challenge seriously. This is what that looks like in practice.
If you are building a business, thinking about building one, or curious about what it actually looks like to work with AI as a strategic partner — follow along. Every episode moves the venture one step forward. Every episode shows you exactly how it’s done.
Timeline
0:03 | Chris introduces the AREA 81 meetup and the live AI demo that started it all |
1:26 | The challenge card question: “If AI could do one thing for you tonight, what would it be?” |
1:33 | The winning card revealed: “Design a business that runs itself” |
2:39 | The concept introduced: a dinosaur startup — built from passion, not expertise |
3:10 | Meet Jarvis, the AI co-founder powering the session |
4:29 | First live session with Jarvis begins on screen |
6:48 | Picking a direction: travelling entertainment, events and experiences |
7:05 | Jarvis confirms the starting point: Business Model Design — exactly the right place to start |
11:23 | Chris names the lifestyle constraint: the business must run itself, including quarterly 3-month breaks |
13:03 | Jarvis identifies the core design challenge: travelling experiential businesses are operator-dependent by default — the self-running structure has to be built in from day one, not bolted on later |
14:05 | The revenue question surfaces: the first major unknown |
14:24 | What Chris and Jarvis know so far — and what they don’t |
15:37 | Where they’re headed next — opt in to follow Episode 2 |
Key Outputs — The Five Open Unknowns
The real output of Episode 1 isn’t a completed document — it’s a set of named unknowns. Before any real work can begin, Chris and Jarvis have to get honest about what they don’t know. These are the five questions the venture needs to answer — in order of importance.
1. Who is the paying customer? This is the foundational unknown. Everything else — the solution, the pricing, the revenue model — depends on who is writing the cheque. Is it parents buying tickets? Schools booking experiences? Festival and event organisers? Corporate teams? Until this is answered, everything else is guesswork. Episode 3 tackles it directly.
2. What problem or desire are we solving? Businesses succeed because they solve something real, not because they exist. Is the customer looking for education? Entertainment? A memorable experience for their children? A curriculum add-on? The answer needs to come from real customers — not from assumptions made at a desk.
3. What does the solution actually look like? A travelling dinosaur experience could be many things: a roaming show, an immersive event, a school program, a festival activation. It needs to be specific enough to deliver and defensible enough to own.
4. How does the business make money? Ticket sales, event hire, school bookings, licensing — each revenue model creates a different business with different economics. The lifestyle constraint adds a filter: some models require someone to be present at every event. Those don’t work here. This gets stress tested in Episode 4.
5. What makes it defensible? Why can’t someone set up a competing dinosaur experience next month and take the market? What makes this one worth choosing? The answer to this question is what separates a business from an activity.
Key Outcomes — What Episode 1 Moves Forward
The venture has a direction: travelling dinosaur education and entertainment experiences
The lifestyle constraint is named and on the table as a design requirement, not an afterthought
The core design challenge is identified: operator-dependent businesses have to be built differently from day one
The five open unknowns are surfaced — the work of Phase 1 is now clearly defined
Chris and Jarvis are ready to build the Big Idea Canvas in Episode 2
Supporting Output — What or Who is Jarvis?
Jarvis is Chris’s AI co-founder. Every session you see on screen is the two of them working together to build the venture — asking hard questions, making decisions, producing outputs, and moving the business forward.
Jarvis isn’t a chatbot. It doesn’t just answer questions. It challenges assumptions, identifies risks, pushes back when the logic doesn’t hold, and keeps Chris honest when the thinking gets comfortable. That’s what a co-founder does.
Jarvis runs on Claude, built by Anthropic — and is configured to apply the Venture Operating System (VOS), Mi6’s proprietary framework for building ventures that work. Every question Jarvis asks and every document it produces is grounded in the VOS.
The VOS moves every venture through four phases:
Phase 1 — Business Model Design: Get the idea clearly articulated and stress tested before spending anything.
Phase 2 — Demand Validation: Find out if real customers have the problem and will pay for a solution.
Phase 3 — Value Delivery: Build, launch, and retain customers.
Phase 4 — Rocketship Growth: Scale what works.
The VOS is built on Running Lean and the Continuous Innovation Framework — with L3 practitioner certification and a direct relationship with the methodology’s creators — and extends further with additional Mi6 proprietary frameworks developed through years of venture work. That combination is what gives the VOS its rigour.
In Episode 1, the Dinosaur Startup enters Phase 1 of the VOS. The idea exists. Nothing else does yet. Chris and Jarvis are starting from zero — which is exactly where every business starts.
Next Episode — Episode 2: The Canvas
At the end of Episode 1, Chris and Jarvis know what they don’t know. The five unknowns are on the table. The lifestyle constraint is locked in as a design requirement. The direction is set.
Episode 2 is where the real work begins.
Chris and Jarvis sit down to build the Big Idea Canvas — a structured way to deconstruct any business idea into its essential components. What the business is. Who it’s for. What problem it solves. How it makes money. What makes it defensible.
The canvas won’t be complete by the end of Episode 2. That’s the point. The gaps are the story — and the most important gap of all is the question that shapes everything else: who is the paying customer?
That question doesn’t get answered in Episode 2. It gets sharp enough to make Episode 3 feel necessary.
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