Dennis May

This transcript was generated automatically (YouTube auto-captions) and then edited for readability: names and obvious mis-hearings corrected, filler words removed, speaker labels added where the speaker is clear. Passages that could not be understood are marked [unclear]; short omitted passages are marked [...]. Timestamps are approximate. The recording is the authoritative version.

Dennis May 00:00:00

If you are on a live deal, and you really want to win, time is of the essence, and then you just grind. Find something that you are truly passionate about.

Host 00:00:10

They are already spending more money on agents than on headcount, and that for every S&P company, this will be the case in the next 3 years.

Dennis May 00:00:18

I think a lot of people right now are switching to agentic content creation maybe a bit too quick. As a VC, you sometimes struggle with what is my actual

00:00:30

hard skill.

Host 00:00:30

So, you think that venture capitalists actually have fully unlocked the equation on how to price such rapid scaling companies, or is the industry still kind of challenged by fully accurately judging the terminal value of hyper-efficient AI application layer startups?

Konstantin Girst

Welcome back to a new episode of Campus To Capital. Today, Julius and I are joined by Dennis May, who's a former associate at Lakestar, and now recently became the chief of staff at Peec AI, which is a very, very fast-growing startup out of Germany right now, who's just recently expanded to the US. So, without further ado, let's get started, and welcome Dennis.

Dennis May 00:01:11

Hey, guys. Thank you so much for having me. Looking forward to today's conversation.

Julius Ambrosius 00:01:16

Yeah, thank you so much also from my side for taking the time off. I assume that they are quite busy times for you right now, but let's start into it. I mean, Konsti already mentioned it. You spent some time at Lakestar looking at companies from a more macro, multi-stage investment perspective. But now, you're the chief of staff at Peec AI, where the founders openly praise a founder mode, which means 80 to 100-hour work weeks, ruthless execution, and hyper-linear focus. So, what are the biggest and most interesting changes that you are experiencing from moving from the investor to the operator side, and what, yeah, in the end catalyzed your career move?

Dennis May 00:01:59

Yeah, let me try to unpack this because there are definitely so many changes involved. I think to start out with what you alluded to, the 996 trend and ruthless working hours and execution, I just think that the working style and the intensity differs a little between VC and like the operator side. In my perspective, on the VC front it was just more volatile, right? So, if you are on a live deal and you really want to win, time is of the essence and then you just grind and get the entire night and the weekend. So, that doesn't really matter, but especially in European VC every once in a while you just have a downtime and the Europeans, they do like their summer. So, yeah, in like second half of July and August typically from a fundraising perspective not that much is going on and if somebody is fundraising then all the investors are kind of fishy about it, like something has to be wrong. So I would just say it's more volatile and the intensity at a startup is just more constant. And maybe just to add on that, I think in particular in Europe and maybe even more so in the broader German ecosystem this whole 996 trend is so negatively connotated and all the tech bros are doing it and adapting to the SF lifestyle. I truly believe it depends on how you structure the entire organization and what kind of atmosphere you manage to create. And kudos to Marius, Daniel, and Tobi, the founders of Peec, because

00:03:29

I think they've assembled a great team first and foremost, but also kind of still a great atmosphere. So, it does not feel like this external pressure, like we have to be here every day. People just want to be here frankly, right? So, people get along interpersonally so well, all the incentives are aligned. There are different programs set in place that incentivize everybody even more. So, I think they just managed to nail it, that it is not negatively connotated. Everybody just wants to be here and on the weekends the office is full. Throughout the week the office tends to be full until fairly late. And they did it in the best ways.

Konstantin Girst 00:04:14

Cool. I mean, it's great to hear that there's such a great team spirit and energy going on. But we would love to hear about your role within that energy and that stewardship. So, maybe about the Chief of Staff role, I would guess that at a normal startup it's a lot about project management, internal alignment, also sparring with the CEO on ideas. But Peec AI is not a usual normal startup. Things are going extremely fast. You guys just went from zero to 10 million ARR in just 16 months. And now you're expanding with a physical office into New York. So, what does the Chief of Staff role look like under the hood at such great velocity?

Dennis May 00:04:49

Yeah. Maybe tying briefly into something that Julius mentioned regarding how my shift from the investor side to the operator side took place. And then I can allude to yeah, what the Chief of Staff role actually entails. So, I got to know Peec during my time when I was still at Lakestar and actually wanted to lead their seed round, which happened pretty much spot on a year ago, a bit over a year ago. Put down a term sheet, ultimately lost against 20VC, which was a bit of a pain in the butt. But luckily I got to meet the founding team throughout the process and managed to stay close ever since. So, back then it was just the three founders, one intern, and them just grinding 100-hour weeks. And then yeah, towards the end of last year I got to participate in their Series A and put together an SPV. So, I always managed to stay fairly close to them. And then end of last year it was obvious to me that at least my chapter within Lakestar is probably coming to an end. And naturally I also questioned whether the world of investing remains to be the main thing for me or whether there is kind of a natural transition back to the operator side. And beginning of the year or actually just a couple of months back, Marius knew that my head is somewhere else right now. And he approached me and was like, "How are the processes going? What does your next chapter

00:06:20

hold?" And could you imagine going back? And then he has been really transparent around kind of work intensity, expectation management, like what he is hiring for. And maybe now to the actual question from you Konstantin, like what does chief of staff at Peec entail? To be fair, I'm still figuring this one out myself because I think, mhm, the danger with this role is also that every company defines it differently. And it's not that any task is beneath me. And I also think this is kind of the wrong place for you then. But if it's just maybe a glorified EA role, I don't know if this would put my skill set to work best. And so we've at the beginning at least kind of agreed on two broader subsets. And one is on the fundraising side and prepping also for the Series B that inevitably at some point is going to come. And this is something where I feel fairly confident because I have seen it from the other side. And you kind of know already what are going to be the questions that all the investors are going to ask and what are the metrics that we need to improve? Where are we hitting it out of the park already? How can we build a narrative that works for the investors that we all want to attract? And most importantly also works for us, right? So it's not about artificially engineering a storyline so that the investors get excited, but it is about elaborating how we came to that conclusion. So

00:07:50

fundraising is kind of the first bucket and second bucket is now everything that touches upon US expansion, and this is loosely defined, right? So, we are in the process of hiring an incredible team there. The idea is to really ramp the US team until end of year, probably to 20-30 people. And this will be a catch-all, I think. So, what does it mean at Peec, at least when it comes to high velocity growth, chief of staff? Luckily Marius is 100% transparent with me and has kind of confidence and trust. So, from day one he involved me in every single thing that was going on in the organization, so meeting all the different team leads, being involved in every single discussion, even if it involves engineering, where I cannot really add that much value, but you get to understand the metabolism of the firm really quickly, and then it's about a constant reprioritization of, is the main task that you deemed relevant yesterday still the one that you're going to work on today? And I think maybe at the risk of shooting myself in the foot here, as a VC, you sometimes struggle with what is my actual hard skill, because you don't really know. But one thing that you do know is like juggling a lot of balls constantly and just reprioritizing without dropping any of them. So, this is

00:09:20

it. And for now it's going to be the two main buckets, but there will be so much more on a daily basis.

Host 00:09:26

Cool. I mean, we'll definitely keep our eyes and ears out for that Series B, which given your current rate of progression is going to be a great success, I'm sure. But going back to your initial touchpoint with Peec AI for the seed round which you lost to Harry and 20VC, shoutout by the way, we're huge fans. So your initial touchpoints, maybe when it became clear to you that you wanted to leave the investor side of things, what was the thing that made it evident that when you wanted to leave the investor side that you had to go to Peec AI? What made you say that this is not just an AI hype company, but something that's generation defining that you have to join?

Dennis May 00:10:04

I mean, to be fair, I'm going to be entirely honest. Like, when I met the team a year ago, it wasn't evident to me that I would eventually end up where I did end up now. It was more like, Marius, Daniel, Tobi were just amazing in their intensity, in their energy, and frankly the velocity with which they built this company, which is also why we got so excited in the first place. And then over the course of the last year, like just getting to know them better, I ended up in this space, okay? If I truly move from the investing side to the operator side, what are different companies that kind of spark passion in me? And just for me really personally, this always entails the people I get to work with. So, Peec in the back of my head was always top of mind because I de-risked to some extent the interpersonal connection with the founding team, which for me is just an amazing thing to have, and also a rare thing to find. Because you can get, or I personally can get excited about so many different companies and so many different technologies, but finding the people that you want to work with is, I think, the tougher part. And then over the course of the past couple of months when Marius and I started talking, it mostly was a gut feeling decision. Like, I had plenty of conversations that would have let me stay in the investing

00:11:34

realm. And whilst I am a rational person, I typically do these decisions by gut and the conversations I had with Marius and the entire team over the course of the process just made me incredibly excited and I always had the thought in the back of my head, is investing going to be it or shouldn't I be back on the operator side? Yeah, and I'm really happy with that decision and not questioning it at all.

Host 00:12:03

Yeah, we are certainly happy to hear that as well. Now, if we move to Peec and look at the product itself, I mean, we're watching traditional Google search engine optimization structurally decay as there are a lot of LLMs that take over user intent. So, for brands like Attio or ElevenLabs who use Peec, what does a winning generative engine optimization strategy actually look like today? And how does it work under the hood because this is also sort of a personal matter to us or to me because we have our own website, of course, as well. [...] Now they aren't anymore, but so I really would like to know how this works under the hood.

Dennis May 00:13:01

To be fair, I won't comment too much on the world of SEO which inevitably is still the foundation of what we do. And like today we're not tracking the specific individual keywords anymore, it's more about the prompts. But I'm frankly not an expert and like right now I'm still trying to get up to speed with the entire SEO rabbit hole because this is kind of the next evolution built on top of this. And whilst a lot of our competitors pretty openly focus on the call to action piece, so not just the analytics part, but also like identifying where you have gaps and then really recommend AI generated content and workflow automations, this is something at least for now where we are a bit hesitant. Like we do give a lot of actions and show you kind of the gaps when it comes to how do your competitors rank, but we don't want to touch upon the AI generated content, because as of now it's at least clear that it does not rank so well when you compare it to human generated content. And we also think you can do a lot of damage if you let agents run loose and create the content that you supposedly need. So coming back to the core and to the question, like everything comes down to the right set of prompts and defining this. And a lot of our customers

00:14:31

do have a good understanding of what are the prompts that they want to track for, but also a lot of customers, they do need some educational help from our side. So we have built like a prompt creation and then also like on top state of the art prompt tracking tool. And our analytics I think show you the most granular insight across the different LLMs that you want to track that there currently is, and there are a lot of competitors still out there and I think from outside, even for me it felt like the visibility side of things is kind of a commodity already, right? Like so many of the different dashboards look the same, but then if you actually look under, what prompts are being tracked in what frequency and what is the actual methodology. So, a lot of them, for example, just work with API calls and we do not do this. We want to be as close to the actual human behavior as possible. So, we actually scrape the UI of the different LLMs that you would receive as an output and based on this we build our rankings and give you insights. The only tool or the only LLM as of now that does not allow this, and this is the case for all of our competitors as well, is Claude. So, when it comes to Claude, it's also more expensive, frankly. You can only track it through

00:16:01

the APIs, but this is just kind of the industry standard that everybody has to deal with as of now. And yeah, I think I went a bit beyond the initial question that you had, but hopefully this covers some of the picture.

Host 00:16:16

It definitely did. So, but then if you look at your product, I mean, I could believe that there are certainly some customers that have a lot of demands because there are so many AI companies that try to ship new features every day. So, how do you make sure that your product keeps staying razor sharp and you don't drift into a sort of all-in-one AI writing tool just to serve the customers?

Dennis May 00:16:45

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's a great question and like a constant question that we are thinking about internally. I think for a while, like I mean, Impetus [unclear] is only 16 months old, but especially throughout 2025, the positioning of Peec has more been in the mid-market segment, right? So, like thinking about marketing agencies that can also act as a great distribution channel, but then more of the SMEs, SMBs, and kind of the long tail of self-serve customers. Whilst the other competitors were more going towards enterprise and "we do want to have big ACVs", and we have always pushed back on this idea because if you look at how SEO evolved over the past couple of years and even decades by now, it was truly about winning the mid-market and if you look at all the competitors out there, a lot of them frankly by now are just gone or are kind of irrelevant and within this mid-market segment Peec is dominating and not just in Europe. Like a good chunk of our revenue is already generated in the US and beyond Europe and the US in general. So I think our positioning when it comes to the market segment is something where we differ and where we still believe that this is where a dominant player will be built.

Host 00:18:08

Cool. So but speaking about the dominance of Peec, I mean your founder Marius, he noticed that there were roughly 15 Y Combinator backed startups that were trying to build the exact same AI search tracking engine and yet none of them were able to even come close to the velocity and speed of scaling like you guys are. So from an operational standpoint, you said that there's a good position for you to be in, but what did you guys do differently than all the other players in the space that allowed you, being a small team from Berlin initially, to completely outpace competitors from the Valley?

Dennis May 00:18:46

Honestly, sheer horsepower. This was also again something that got me really excited when I met the team three, four months into their building journey and it was the three founders and an intern. Like the entire team just grinded immensely seven days a week. They had sales calls from 8:00 a.m. in the morning to like 12:00 a.m. in the morning again, so like just covering Israel for example on the Sunday because they were open and all the inbound demand that was generated there, they just took care of this on the Sunday. And really like even the intern who then switched to becoming a full-time sales member, to an AE, like just grinded inbound calls on a daily basis and Marius, Daniel and Tobi just feel like they have an infinite battery pack, right? So they were aware that this land grab moment is happening and there was only one competitor from the US that had started out a couple of months earlier and ever since it was okay, like we need to close this gap again and even like the product at the time was complex, yes, but not rocket science. By now like we have built so much more on top of this. So they truly had to just outpace and outwork everyone and they did an amazing job up until now and they're still doing so and the entire team is

00:20:16

behind it.

Host 00:20:17

That's six six [unclear] strategy. It's cool. Yeah, I agree. Maybe one question you probably hear a lot and it might also suck a bit to answer this, but there is a running cynical narrative in tech that the AI application layer is very thin and that a lot of companies are very vulnerable to being wiped out by the momentum of OpenAI or Claude releasing a feature. I mean I read a recent interview by Lovable's head of growth that they're like seriously worried about being obsolete because of Claude just deploying another feature. So having deep dived into Peec's architecture and customer stickiness, why is that thesis wrong for you and what constitutes a true defensible moat for an AI first B2B SaaS startup today?

Dennis May 00:21:11

Yeah. I think maybe the last part first, just a comment on a true defensible moat. Like answering this question is becoming trickier and trickier and when I was still on the investing side this was something that was also frightening at some point. We were like okay, I struggle to detect an area where there is still significant defensibility and where you can build significant outcomes in a short period of time. But maybe more specifically towards Peec, I think about it in two axes essentially. Like one is, when you compare the SEO world to the GEO world or AI world, however you want to call it, I think inherently there's one difference and this is like Google is the de facto monopoly when it comes to online, or when it came to online search and hence traditional SEO, and now we just have a plethora of different LLMs and none of these LLMs also truly have stickiness. Like on the B2C side, yes, like ChatGPT powers the majority of the B2C realm, but in B2B the second new benchmarks come out all the different businesses just shift immediately. All the different engineers just want to work with the best tools out there. So I do think that you just see there will be several dominant players globally, so them internalizing AI visibility

00:22:41

only gets you so far because you typically want to know it across different tools. This is one, and then the second one, even if this were to happen, if you think about just the business model of a Google and by now arguably also the business model more and more often of OpenAI when it comes to placing ads and making money through ads. They don't really care so much about the organic search part, right? So, they do want to sell money through ads. They don't necessarily want to give you the best insight into how you can generate more organic search to your platform because this kind of cannibalizes their advertised placements. And I think this combination plus the velocity with which Peec is evolving and the fact that up until now we have grown 100% through inbound, like we haven't even properly started with the outbound motion, which just goes to show how much demand there is, gives me great confidence that we are on a good track.

Host 00:23:46

I mean, if I was a VC, I would have been sold by now.

00:23:51

Yes. But as you already mentioned, you guys are about to plant the flag in New York with your new office. And I mean, from your vantage point, I don't know if you can determine that by now already, but how do US enterprise buyers differ from European ones when it comes to adopting entirely new AI budget categories? Are they buying raw FOMO or are their procurement teams demanding tight ROI metrics on search analytics?

Dennis May 00:24:21

To be fair, I don't feel confident enough yet to say this from a Peec perspective, but more like from the perspective what I have seen over the past couple of years with some of the portfolio companies I got to work with. Whether I like it or not, technology adoption in the US just tends to happen a little faster when compared to Europe. And this is almost true for every different stage of the company. So, enterprises that typically take forever, even in this area, they tend to be faster and tend to be more open to tech adoption. Same goes for SMBs and in Peec's case also for marketing agencies. So, I think this is just something that we have to tackle and we have to be present and as I said a big chunk, without us being present and with an inbound and a self-serve motion, is being generated in the US. And we want to dominate this geo both from a customer perspective but also from building a significant company, right? Like also the public markets in Europe are unfortunately not necessarily there where we would all like to see them. So, if you have the ambition levels that we clearly do, there's just no way around the US in our opinion. And lastly, why

00:25:51

New York and not SF? You didn't pose the question directly but A, from a time zone perspective, it's just much easier to steer a team across 6 hours of difference. But B, when it comes to thinking about the world of marketing and kind of the media houses, they're all based in New York and these are a lot of the clients that we already have and want to go after. And a lot of the brand clients that we also have are there and the rest is easy for us to reach without being in SF.

Host 00:26:25

Because you talked about the public markets in Europe, for our listeners who haven't done so already, we actually recently just spoke with the CEO of Scalable Capital about how to unlock more retail investor growth within Europe. But actually, I want to get back into your experience in venture capital because you just touched upon it as well. Because I mean at Lakestar, you valued companies looking at long-term structural defensibility, what we talked about earlier, and massive addressable markets. And now in the 2026 landscape I think we've seen a big shift that we have already seen over the last couple of years, with a small B2B startup hitting massive ARR numbers in one and a half years with a team that you just mentioned started off with three founders and an intern, whereas maybe a couple years ago it required hundreds of employees and multiple years of grinding in order to get to very significant numbers. So within this very fast-paced environment also for investors, do you think that venture capitalists actually have fully unlocked the equation on how to price such rapid scaling companies or is the industry still kind of challenged by fully accurately judging the terminal value of hyper-efficient AI application layer startups?

Dennis May 00:27:42

This is a really good question and I can obviously give you just a really subjective answer. I'm not a big fan of constantly bashing Europe because I do think we have everything it takes to just build great companies in the first place and this by now is also, or like we're getting better on the capital front as well, right? Like if you were to compare the amounts that are being deployed in VC in the US, it still dwarfs Europe by a magnitude. But even in Europe by now we have more and more seed rounds for example of several hundred millions and valuing companies from the inception at several billion dollars and I do think that this is just a necessity, right? And now the question is like how much value will actually be created, how many companies can survive and is this a bubble and yada yada yada and I think as history typically has shown, new technological waves tend to lead to bubbles and a lot of value will be destructed, but there will be so many winners as well, right? And in my opinion at least the job of a venture capital investor, like in the description or if you think about the German description as well, it's kind of risk allocator, right? So, you need to, like risk capital allocator. And if you're not willing to make a mental shift and go away from the typical

00:29:13

growth investing of looking into the financial model and having your top quartile benchmarks in mind when it comes to the SaaS metrics that you want to check and you confidently want to underwrite a 5x and then you look into the public market comps and can this company in 5 years grow to this EBITDA margin and this is then my multiple on it. If we do not move away from this, I think we would be in a pickle, but the US might be slightly ahead, but more and more of the European VCs have started to catch up and I think we're on a good track.

Konstantin Girst 00:29:46

Certainly. And I mean honestly on the European thing, I could not agree more. [...] So, I mean there's great momentum there and despite the capital discrepancy compared to the US, I think we're certainly on the right track.

Dennis May 00:30:10

Oh, sure.

Host 00:30:11

Yeah. But now being an investor turned operator, is there maybe any advice that you used to give to startups when you were in the Lakestar investor seat and now being on the startup side again that you realize that that's maybe something that's completely useless or impractical?

Dennis May 00:30:30

I just like the first thing that pops to mind is on the hiring front. I think from an investor perspective, if you are not in the trenches and you are not actually conducting the interviews and vetting the candidates and like even finding them in the first place, so creating top of funnel, you underestimate how tough it is to a, find the right people and then b, get them into the company at the right moment in time, because if you think about Peec and if you also speak to Marius, I think for him this was the biggest learning. At the beginning you have to start hiring way ahead of the needs and for so many of the talent that we also want to get, they're still in contracts, they have three months notice periods yada yada yada and like we tripled the team since the beginning of this year. And in some of the sub teams we are exactly where we are right now and in some of the others we might have started a tiny bit too late and a few positions where you're like how is this so tough to find the right person? You would be amazed and I think this is something that I was not that aware of from the investor side unless you actually experience it.

Host 00:31:52

I think this is super interesting because I listened to the most recent 20VC episodes with the Corgi and Macorra [unclear] founder and he said that they are already spending more money on agents than on headcount and that for every S&P company this will be the case in the next three years. So this was actually a question I was about to ask, like how much do you allocate to AI agents and maybe connected to that, I don't know if you want to give it away, but how does your personal tech stack look like because I have played around with mine in the last couple of days and downloaded the famous YC CEO get [unclear] for the personal OS. So could you maybe tell us how that looks like for Peec, but also on a personal level?

Dennis May 00:32:41

Yeah. I mean, on Peec, I can definitely say we had to tighten our budgets when it comes to token spend, and this was not just from engineering, but across the org. Like I'm also really revealing, but don't really care. I'm 31, and I belong to the older people within the organization. And everybody inherently is just AI native. So, this is part of everybody's working environment. Personally, and this is also great, because Peec just provides the infrastructure. Like I over the past couple of months have just played around a ton with Claude first and foremost. I tested OpenClaw in the past, and then eventually moved to Claude Code, and having this connected to the entirety of the organization, so every single product and tool that we're using is connected, just allows you to build so many great agents and efficiency gains. Every once in a while, I think it's also easy to get lost, and you really have to ask yourself, am I becoming more efficient right now, or am I just building something because it's fun to build? But yeah, in summary, I think we managed to grow so quickly and so efficiently because we do leverage these tools natively, but we also had

00:34:11

to constrain it because the usage just got out of hand eventually, and now it's also about being smart with it.

Host 00:34:19

Makes a lot of sense. I personally can't wait to have my first subscription on any company's bill, and not play around with my personal account.

00:34:29

[...] So, it's definitely going to be a shift then as well.

Dennis May 00:34:43

Yeah.

00:34:44

For sure. And it's also just for me, I think a good reality check joining here. Yes, having arguably more working experience than a lot of my colleagues, all younger colleagues, but just observing and witnessing them, how they interact, and my thought is like, I better step up my game. I think this is a good environment to be in.

Host 00:35:08

I'm sure you're doing great, Dennis.

Dennis May 00:35:10

Let's see.

00:35:11

[laughter]

Host 00:35:12

I mean well we're already talking about people and culture at Peec AI. I mean you had a very nice-looking team offsite in Malaga right when you started and your executive team openly states that great things happen when smart people build in person with high intensity. So, for our listeners that might also want to join a company similar to Peec or Peec, what does someone need to bring to fit in with the Peec AI environment?

Dennis May 00:35:40

Yeah. Great question and I think it's fairly simple in my head. Like first and foremost, you need to have grit and be ambitious. So, if you truly are passionate about a specific area that potentially adds value to the company and you can bring this across, like this is already half of the rent, as we would say in Germany, but this is what it's mostly about. And then secondly, this is something that you cannot really fake, but that is really important, is just the interpersonal connection, right? And this goes both ways. Like do we think that we are the right working environment for you? And also do you think that you click with us, right? And this is a two-way street. I think these two things are the most important and we're trying to be really transparent when it comes to expectation management. Like the amount of hours that we work, without glorifying working a lot. I'm not saying that this is for everyone by all means, but we're being open with it and this can potentially take a toll on your private life, frankly, right? Like also your hobbies, your relationship, family time, whatever. Like there's always some flexibility to it. But if this is not for you, this is totally fine. But we like to have everybody, like everyone who is kind,

00:37:10

everybody who is ambitious and just passionate about a specific area of their life or like their work life. This is everything we look for and lastly, this is also just, I think, just a reminder for myself. As a VC investor, you look for proxies and kind of shortcuts when you evaluate founders and potential founders and look through their CVs, and there are early signs of showing a lot of grit when it comes to becoming a national champion in sports or in chess or then through high school grades and university grades and attending specific universities, that I think after a while you almost get fatigued or blind to talent that is a bit more extraordinary and did not follow these really great but fairly straightforward paths and this is something that the Peec team and we are now I think nailing, being open to all different kinds and all different colors of great people.

Host 00:38:13

Love the take. I mean, our most recent newsletter article was actually about this topic. That I mean, it was about that VCs look at founders who only attended some math olympiads or something like that and they have such a narrow scope that they leave out such a large talent pool. So, I think this is super relevant.

Dennis May 00:38:33

Exactly.

Host 00:38:34

Certainly it's a great pep talk, but I think you forgot to mention that being a professional League of Legends player also is a, well, being extraordinary grit and commitment.

Dennis May 00:38:45

For sure. For sure. And if Marius finds time, I think he's close to spending too much time on that again. So, he tries to limit himself.

Host 00:38:59

If Peec AI now with the New York expansion hits all the milestones and targets that you guys have surely set for yourself on your road map, maybe in a year from now, what would success for you look like personally, having now made the step to become the chief of staff of this company?

Dennis May 00:39:18

I mean the first one and also obvious one, because I'm going to be involved in that and it's part of my former DNA as well, it's just definitely raising a really solid Series B, like knocking it out of the park with finding the right partner for us and this does not necessarily mean a specific brand only. It also means finding the right individual who gets to join Peec's board frankly. So, this is the first milestone that I definitely need to hit. And secondly, it will be a stretch to build truly one team across two different locations and frankly also across two different cultures. And coming up with frameworks and also programs to have regular exchanges between the different offices and whilst growing on that scale from an FTE perspective still feeling as one team and everybody stays that motivated and everybody running into the same direction, it's harder to quantify than the first goal, but it's equally important to me and definitely something that I consider my second most important milestone.

Host 00:40:36

Sounds like two very great tasks to be working on and I'm sure that your contact book from your previous job might be of help there as well potentially.

Dennis May 00:40:47

It's not bad. That's for sure.

Host 00:40:51

So maybe slowly wrapping up the very interesting conversation today. This is probably, yeah, this is a question where you kind of have to sell the product a little bit. When you think about one thing that most founders or specifically marketers should understand about how people will discover products in the future, what would it be?

Dennis May 00:41:18

One specific thing. Mhm. I think it's important to understand for everyone, essentially everyone searching online, and this frankly by now is the majority of the global population: generative engine optimization doesn't necessarily cannibalize search engines, right? Like so the search behavior is changing, but it's not like we are only using LLMs to search right now. The majority of people use it in parallel. And I think understanding this from a brand perspective, so how do I reach my customers? What are the different channels and also how do I have to step up my SEO game to remain relevant, is key. Understanding this, that this also expands the search market. It's not "the cake remains the same size and you are just eating into it". It expands the entirety. And then secondly, what I said fairly at the beginning, I think a lot of people right now are switching to agentic content creation maybe a bit too quick before understanding that this can also have a negative impact on your brand perception and also how visible you are. So truly nailing the analytics side and then also understanding the gaps and what you can

00:42:48

do, but doing this semi-automated, I think gets you much further in the foreseeable future.

Host 00:42:56

Nice. Great. And as a final wrap-up, I mean, it's safe to say that there's currently an unprecedented interest from young people to move into entrepreneurship and into becoming a founder. So as a last piece of advice before you wrap up this conversation, for those who are courageous enough to move past the idea stage and actually try to realize what they're thinking about and what they're dreaming of, but then are stagnating or lacking growth, what do you have to say to those people? What should they think about to keep themselves going?

Dennis May 00:43:31

I mean, honestly, exactly this. I just hope that they find the strength to just keep on doing what they're doing because it's amazing. In my head or like also the way I am wired, find something that you are truly passionate about, right? And don't necessarily try to find a nail that might be worth hitting because in my opinion, this only gets you so far. The chances that you will fail in the beginning and maybe even mid to long term are fairly high. So if you do not love what you're doing, you will just end up feeling miserable. And I also think you can become good at something if you just put your head into it, but you will excel and outperform all other people if you are the one person that just wants to solve a specific problem inherently, right? Because you are passionate about it. So, I think this is the first recommendation that I have, and the second recommendation is tough to do, but find the right people to work on this problem with because they will become kind of your new family, and I've also kind of made the experience myself in the past that you believe that this is the ideal person to build something with, and then in the end it turns out that your perception of a specific situation, they are just different, and you are not compatible. So,

00:45:02

spend some time on truly figuring out who are the people that you want to spend this chapter of your life with, and they're going to become the people who you're going to see the most. And I think with this combination, so having passion and finding people that you want to do this with on a daily basis, in my opinion, are the key ingredients to eventually build something truly unique and really successful.

Konstantin Girst 00:45:26

Awesome. Well, on that note, thank you, Dennis, but also actually, because you said so, thank you, Julius, for being the person who's doing this podcast with me and who's going for all the sparring sessions and all the recordings and all the planning and all the failed planning as well because yeah, I'm really enjoying doing this with you.

Host 00:45:44

That's exactly what it's about. Thank you so much.

Dennis May 00:45:47

Thank you, guys. Thanks for having me.

Host 00:45:49

Thanks. And guys, also, don't forget to tune in for our next episode where we'll be speaking to founding and general partner Christian Meermann from Cherry, and then afterwards, we'll probably go on a short summer break, but then afterwards, we will be back again with even more exciting guests. So, thank you so much for tuning in.