Office Hours incubator. What do you think? We're not only a nonprofit, can we help our members sign up profitable enterprises or spin up profitable enterprises?
ASKED BY · Paul Valhous · AUSTIN, TEXAS · 12 OCT 2026 · ▶ 00:31:35
Expressed concern about starting businesses in an AI-dominated landscape, suggesting instead an AI-based film production company that uses real actors and editors but automates other roles, as a potential business model.
Noted that After Hours already functions as an incubator, mentioning prior successful projects like remote Zoom weddings, Zoom ISO development, and various media experiments that evolved from Office Hours collaboration.
Shared his experience building OlliTerm, a terminal app in a weekend using Claude, highlighting how AI enables rapid prototyping but makes monetization difficult since others can recreate the product in similar timeframes.
Emphasized learning from experienced community members and participating in Discord and After Hours sessions as the best way to find business opportunities and absorb knowledge that leads to competitive advantage.
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31:14truck. But having it directly built in, and it was a feature that I know I pushed for a long time ago and it's super awesome to see it coming to fruition. person. Very cool. All right, let's jump to the next question. All righty then. Next question comes in from down in Austin, Texas. Paul Valhous says, office hours incubator. What do you think?
31:39We're not only a nonprofit, we can help our members sign up profitable enterprises or spin up profitable enterprises. Yeah. Courtney, what do you have to say on this one? You know, the way things are moving with AI, I'd be very nervous about trying to spin up a new company or a profitable enterprise these days because sooner or later, somebody is going to come along and vibe code your business out from under you.
32:07Yeah, what's your moat, right? Yeah. Even Adobe. Paul keeps talking about, you know, the film business coming to Austin there, you know, and setting up, building brand new studios there. And they're getting ready to go, you know, become the production capital of Southwest. And every day I see all these film festivals with AI encoded films and the look of them is quite amazing.
32:34The acting is yet to be final, you know, gotten fine tuned yet. but if you use real actors doing the voices, you can get some pretty realistic and amazing looking sci-fi films that you can turn out. How about a incubator that starts up a film production, a virtual film? I mean, an AI based film production company that hires real actors, real editors to do the editing and, you know,
33:00to do the color correction, sound mixing, post-production, sound mixing, But everybody else's job is going to be handled by AI other than the writer, the main voice actors, and the editor, and the post-production sound supervisor. So maybe something like that might be possible. Let's go over to Jeffrey Powers. So, yeah, we do have an incubator, and it's called After Hours. And we've had a lot of things come through after hours.
33:37So I'm a little confused because, you know, I remember, I can't remember his name, but the first one I remember was the wedding. It is during COVID, of course. This was the production to do weddings over Zoom. And, of course, that worked for a little while. But then, of course, things got to real life. And then that kind of fell through. through, we had the remotes, which made songs through, of
34:01course, through office hours. And, and so we had a few, we have a few songs out there from that. And you know, even the whole zoom ISO was going through was kind of being built or or tested through office hours. I remember that times where I had zoom ISO open, I was doing this fun thing where I had a TV behind me and you bring in four people and then it would always just start to
34:28shift around so person in top left-hand corner would all of a sudden move to the top right-hand corner everybody would shift so we yeah we've had some pretty successful and you know just testing type things this is it's already an incubator it's just for video and audio not for AI programming and maybe there is some ai programming in there too but uh it's it's nice that i can go to after hours and just
34:54say hey i'm trying something i need some uh talking or some heads so i can do my put together and see if it works and i've got a whole bunch of people that are willing to come in and do that so i think we've already got that nice and oliver yeah so i'm i'm with uh i'm with uh courtney here I think software companies is not what you want to incubate right now.
35:28So I built this tool that I wanted to use because I needed to use it. And it's like, I can give a short demo if you want me to. to... So it's called OlliTerm and it's basically a terminal program and the terminal program that's out there is like, you know, I didn't find anything that could keep a list of the hosts I wanted to access. And let me see if I have something here that I don't. And
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