A Ribeye at Timberjacks: Justin Sonnenreich Meets Dennis Yu

By Leo Pohlmann · 10 July 2026

Some introductions happen over a handshake in a hotel lobby. This one happened over a ribeye — served in cast-iron pans at a place called Timberjacks, an American steakhouse dropped into Germany. Two Americans, meeting for the first time on the wrong continent, with me and a table full of steak and Kölsch between them.

Two Americans in Germany

Timberjacks is exactly what it sounds like: beef, beer, and a bit of rock ’n’ roll, built to look like an American blockhouse. Ribeye, tomahawk, burgers — the kind of food that makes two guys from the States feel at home a few thousand miles from it. Dennis Yu flew in from Las Vegas; Justin Sonnenreich is out of Washington, DC. Put them at the same table and the conversation basically starts itself.

Who is Justin Sonnenreich

Justin is a serial builder. He started Boosted Notify, a consulting business that helped people get their hands on rare sneakers, and sold it in 2019. Then he co-founded Mission: Mentor, an edtech nonprofit whose free virtual college counselor helped more than ten thousand students find scholarships — acquired in 2022. Two exits before most people finish deciding what they want to do. Today he runs Markit Advertising, a marketing and PR agency that gets brands and founders the attention they’ve earned.

Why this table mattered

So you had two people who live in the same world — reputation, attention, building things that outlast the launch — sitting across from each other for the first time. Dennis has spent years turning personal brands into engines that Google and buyers actually see. Justin has spent his building and selling companies around online attention. The overlap is obvious, and watching the first version of that conversation happen over steak was the whole point of being there.

The website

My part in it is smaller and concrete: I built Justin’s personal-brand site, justinsonnenreich.com. Same idea as this one — a real home on the internet, built and published with AI, that puts a founder’s story where the right people (and the right machines) can find it. Introductions like this are exactly what those sites are for.

Two Americans, one ribeye, one very German beer. Not a bad way to start a relationship.

A Week in Germany with Dennis Yu

By Leo Pohlmann · 9 July 2026

Dennis Yu flew from Las Vegas to Germany this week for one main reason: to work with me in person. When your calendar entry literally reads “Fly to see Leo,” you take the week seriously.

Here’s what it actually looked like.

Mornings start at the bakery

If you’ve never started a German workday at a proper Bäckerei, you’re missing out. Fresh Brötchen still warm from the oven, real coffee, and a table to spread out on. Some of the best conversations we had all week happened over breakfast before we’d opened a single laptop — what to build next, what’s working, what I should be paying attention to as I get started.

Long working sessions

The core of the week was sitting side by side and actually doing the work — cutting video, shaping content, and learning the systems Dennis and the Local Service Spotlight team run. There’s a difference between watching someone work over Zoom and sitting next to them while they do it. Small things — how he decides what’s worth publishing, how fast he moves from idea to shipped — are hard to pick up any other way.

Meeting people

Between the working sessions, we got out. The one I’ll remember most was meeting Jan Koch at Motorworld in Cologne — a WordPress veteran now building AI agents inside German companies, and a longtime friend of Dennis’s. Meals together, a lot of walking, and the kind of unhurried conversation that only happens in person.

What I’m learning

A few things are sinking in this week:

• The craft. Turning raw footage into a story people actually watch is a skill, and it rewards reps.
• Personal brand is real work, not luck. The people I’m around didn’t get found by accident — they built it deliberately, one published piece at a time.
• The standard. Ship the finished thing, not a plan to build it. That one’s going to stick.

This site is my own small start on that. Thanks to Dennis for the week — and for showing up in person to make it count.

Meeting Jan Koch at Motorworld in Cologne

By Leo Pohlmann · 9 July 2026

This week, Dennis Yu flew in from Las Vegas to spend time with me here in Germany — and one of the highlights was sitting down with Jan Koch at Motorworld in Cologne.

If you’ve spent any time in the WordPress world, Jan needs little introduction. He built WP Mastery, ran the WP Agency Summit that pulled agency owners together from all over the world, and has been teaching people how to actually run a business around WordPress for over a decade. These days he’s the founder of KoBra Dataworks, putting supervised AI agents to work inside real German small and mid-sized businesses — not slideware, but agents that do the boring work that actually needs doing.

He and Dennis go back years. Jan was one of the early voices who vouched for Dennis’s Dollar-a-Day approach back when most people still thought you needed a huge budget to matter online.

Why Motorworld

Motorworld Köln is an old airport hangar turned car-culture cathedral — classic cars, coffee, and a lot of glass and steel. It’s a fitting backdrop for the kind of conversation we had: less about tools, more about where AI is genuinely useful versus where it’s just noise.

What stuck with me was how similar Jan and Dennis sound when they talk about this. Both keep coming back to the same idea: an agent is only worth anything if it ships real work. Not a demo. Not a plan. The finished thing. Jan is proving that inside German companies; Dennis is proving it across a fleet of personal-brand sites (this one included — it was built and published by a Claude agent).

What I took away

I’m at the very start of this. Sitting between two people who’ve been building for years, my job was mostly to listen — and to film. The lesson I’m walking away with is simple: the people who last aren’t the loudest about AI, they’re the ones quietly turning it into work that would have taken a team.

Thanks to Jan for the time, and to Dennis for making the introduction. More from the trip in my week in Germany with Dennis.