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.