Profile: Oskar Bruening
Meet Oskar Bruening. Co-Founder and CTO at Peek.
Name: Oskar Bruening
Job: Co-Founder and CTO at Peek
City: Cleveland (via San Francisco)
Hometown: Germany
Q: What do you do at Peek?
Experiences are the reason we travel and what we look forward to on the weekend. We want to connect to other people, learn something new, and create lasting memories.
Peek makes experiences easily bookable online by empowering thousands of businesses, from campgrounds and kayak rentals to bus tours and cooking classes, through technology and offering an online marketplace to consumers. The company has the support of investors like Eric Schmidt, Jack Dorsey, Pete Flint, Paul English, and Cathay Innovation and has over 110 employees worldwide.
Q: What’s a problem that you are working to solve?
As a consumer, booking new experiences can be strange and daunting, waiting for calls or emails to be returned, unsure of making deposits over the phone, not feeling certain an activity will actually happen. Experience providers, on the other hand, have been slow to adopt technology; they grapple with change management fears, asking questions like, “what if reception drops while I rent out jetskis on the beach?”
By working closely with tour operators over the last eight years, Peek has built an industry-leading B2B technology platform that allows experience providers to seamlessly transition to a digital workflow.
This move to online has never been more important than during the pandemic. Operators have had to reduce their staff and now need technology to tightly manage their business within regulations. Our team had to react quickly to support clients during this time. Peek now optimizes equipment use while keeping groups distanced and automatically allocates time for cleaning. Customers can sign liability waivers ahead of time and pay contactless onsite. With the rise of virtual classrooms, we help manage and organize Zoom meetings. Automated emails make it easy to notify customers of recent protocol changes for their activity.
Our goal is to help consumers find and easily book new, exciting activities and to empower operators to run and grow their businesses, and to focus on what they love doing: put a smile on every customer’s face when they go on that zipline or fly that parasail.
Q: What’s a lesson you’ve learned that has helped shaped your work?
Over-invest in first line managers. They are often new to the role and can be the weakest link. Give them regular training, a safe forum to ask questions and share ideas, and access to executives. A strong, empathetic, accountable management culture will carry the company, especially when the leadership is not in the room.
Q: What’s a trend in technology or innovation that you believe doesn’t get enough attention?
The sophistication of engineering tools has exploded over the last 15 years. The number of engineers needed to build a product has shrunk. What, a decade ago, took a team of 50 can now be done with a team of ten. How it is done is no longer the challenge. Whatever one sets their mind to, can be accomplished easily.
This change from “how to build” to “what to build” is now putting tremendous pressure on those in charge of product direction, the Product Managers. Too often expensive resources are wasted by weak product leadership. A good PM needs to be organized and creative, a clear communicator, a humble, non-authoritative leader with customer empathy, and have good judgment based on limited data. How do you measure and train for that? You can go to college to become an engineer, but not a PM. As the industry adapts, I expect a lot more emphasis on growing the next generation of product leaders. A small team with the right product leadership can have a massive impact.
Q: What’s one moonshot idea that could help make Ohio a world leader in technology and innovation?
To attract tech talent, Ohio needs to expand awareness and create more name recognition of the word, “Ohio” itself.
When New York started to emerge as a tech hub, many startups there proudly advertised “Build with ️ in NY” on their homepage. Ohio could do a similar campaign. Remote work will be the default for many engineering organizations going forward. People will, and already are, leaving the expensive cities looking for a better quality of life, at lower cost, with high speed internet. Ohio has it all! Advertise this competitive differentiator with an engaging slogan, displayed with pride by local companies and at tech conferences. It could raise a lot of awareness without a lot of effort.
Another opportunity is to enable local tech communities to spread the word. For example, Peek uses Elixir, a relatively new, high performance server technology. Cleveland has an active Elixir community, but that is not well known. An easy way to change that is to encourage hosting Elixir engineering conferences. Make it easy for these communities to apply for small grants or maybe a part-time admin who helps organize the event.
Q: What’s a recent book, podcast or news story that you found interesting?
I recently read “Ninety Percent of Everything” by Rose George about the shipping industry. It was fascinating to learn about this part of the supply chain and made me ponder how technology can provide more insight for the consumer into products they chose to purchase.
Q: What's your favorite place in Ohio?
Lake Erie, hands down. I love Ohio’s beauty, the Metroparks, the museums. I grew up at Lake Constance in Germany, the largest lake in Central Europe, and it pales when compared to Lake Erie which is 50 times larger. My mind still struggles to comprehend its vastness. Kayaking and sailing Lake Erie is my happy place.
Q: What makes Ohio special to you?
The people. There is a combination of down-to-earth friendliness, strong work ethic, and humility here that deeply resonates with my own upbringing and values. It’s a place where everyone takes pride in getting things done without the need to brag about it afterwards.
Connect with Oskar on LinkedIn.