Get the Check welcomes Florian Juengermann, CTO and co-founder of Listen Labs, to talk about his journey from a small town in Germany to becoming an international mathlete and starting an AI company.

Maya and Priya ask about Florian's origin story from wanting to program his toys to winning IOI medals (the olympics for nerds). They also dig into his path to America: Harvard, Tesla's self-driving team, and the moment he realized he wanted to build after watching a company with no product raise $3M off a pitch deck when he'd actually built the product they pitched.

From there, Listen Labs is born, but v1 was a viral consumer AI image app with 20k users and a scary GPU bill charged directly to their personal credit cards. They still had a positive margin though!

The real insight came when they realize the hardest part of building products is understanding what users actually think, so they flip the model: instead of AI answering questions, they build AI that asks them. Listen Labs becomes the AI interviewer that can talk to thousands of customers at once and turn those conversations into real insights.

Maya and Priya deep dive into how the company found product-market fit, why marketing teams turned out to be the perfect first customers, and how Listen Labs went from scrappy demos to landing massive enterprise clients. Florian shares what it felt like to raise a Series A and then a Series B in rapid succession—and why it finally felt like the market caught up to what they'd believed all along.

The episode also delivers one of Listen Lab’s most memorable moments: the story of the infamous San Francisco billboard. Just a string of numbers. No logo. No explanation. Turns out it's an elaborate puzzle designed to nerd-snipe engineers and recruit talent in the most on-brand way possible.By the end, the conversation zooms out to what it really means to build in Silicon Valley, and Florian's philosophy around AI deepening human connection instead of replacing it.

00:00 Intro

00:18 Learning about programming in a small German town

01:46 Becoming an international mathlete

06:21 The dream of going to Harvard

07:33 Working at Tesla

10:19 Creating a viral app with co-founder Alfred Wahlforss

10:47 Founding Listen Labs

23:19 Finding product market fit

27:40 Fundraising and market validation

28:59 The power of customer insights

37:07 The SF billboard that went viral

44:01 AI and human connection

44:59 Why you should join Listen Labs