Dannerys Peralta and the case for showing up

Clara Le Cleï thought Dannerys Peralta was French. She sent a LinkedIn message. Peralta wasn't French, but the mistake turned out to be an excellent introduction. Dinner followed, then bagels, then tacos. By their third meeting, the two had come up with The Bet., a community for people building businesses between New York and Europe. An international professional network had acquired a remarkably sensible founding ingredient: something to eat.

Peralta tells the story with a smile in the writing. She liked Le Cleï's willingness to contact strangers and learn from them. Le Cleï, meanwhile, had noticed Peralta's posts about working at Corma, a Paris startup. Before they knew each other, they had already seen something worth pursuing. The message gave that recognition a place to go. Neither needed an elaborate introduction from someone important.

By the first dinner in the community's series, there were 15 founders and operators around a table. The conversation kept going until the restaurant needed them to leave. Le Cleï recalled people continuing to talk outside. For an initiative devoted to bringing people together, being gently expelled from the venue is a rather useful kind of feedback. The evening had outlasted its booking.

Berlin was supposed to be a visit

The earlier turning point came in the winter of 2022. Peralta was a University of Chicago student on a career trek to Berlin when she met Deborah Choi, a Chicago alumna and co-founder of Founderland. The nonprofit supports women of color building businesses in Europe. Peralta later interned there, and the experience encouraged her to apply to business school in France.

She had chosen Chicago partly for its international opportunities. Going abroad was something she wanted to do as soon as she could. The Berlin encounter supplied a direction for that interest: entrepreneurship, a community of founders, and a reason to continue her education across the Atlantic. A trip arranged around possible careers became part of the career itself.

Read alongside her later projects, the episode offers a useful way to understand her route. An institution arranges a meeting; a student follows it into work; work prompts another move. Each step is concrete. Looking backward makes the sequence appear tidy. At the time, each invitation still had to be accepted, and each unfamiliar place still had to become somewhere she could work.

A passport with a purpose

Her international interests also had a public service dimension. The Obama Foundation selected Peralta for its 2022-2024 Voyager Scholarship cohort. Her scholar profile identifies the Bronx as her home and records an interest in immigration, particularly refugees and asylum seekers in France and Germany. Those countries were more than attractive destinations on a map. They were places where she wanted to understand people's circumstances.

The scholarship was created by Barack and Michelle Obama and Brian Chesky to support students pursuing public service. Its emphasis on travel and community makes a fitting backdrop to Peralta's interests. Her path crosses several kinds of organization: a university, a nonprofit, a venture firm, startups. The recurring activity is meeting people whose experience she wants to understand, then finding a way to participate.

In fall 2023, she was a CV Access Fellow at Commerce Ventures. She graduated from Chicago in 2024. She also took part in Model UN, including serving as an executive of the Nordic Council committee at MUNUC 34. Those are different settings for asking questions and working with other people. A debate committee and a venture fellowship have their own rules; both put a premium on paying attention.

The unglamorous education of a cold call

At Corma, Peralta worked close to the business. Chicago's international careers guide lists her as Right Hand to the CEO in Paris. Her own posts describe learning go-to-market work, making cold calls, and trying to put lessons into practice. The title sounds expansive. The daily education she chose to describe was much more specific: beginning a task, asking for help, deciding what deserves attention.

In September 2025, she announced an experiment in accountability. She intended to post three times a week about work, her thesis, and the parts of professional life she was learning to navigate. She had been overthinking starting and finishing things. Publishing the attempts would give her a reason to act before everything felt ready. Readers would encounter work in progress rather than a retrospective polished into inevitability.

“I'm going to fail more,” she wrote. The phrasing is playful, but the commitment is demanding. It means allowing an attempt to have a result before deciding what the result says about you. She pictured a chain from failure to feedback to knowledge. As a working proposition, that leaves room for adjustment. A cold call can be disappointing and still contain information for the next one.

Three months into Corma, she assembled 16 lessons. Some concerned generosity and gratitude; others concerned deadlines, honesty about limits, and writing things down. One was delightfully material: get a noise-cancelling headset. Another was to ask for help before the deadline. Advice becomes more believable when it includes an item someone might actually order and a conversation someone might otherwise postpone.

“Ask for help before the deadlines.”Dannerys Peralta, reflecting on Corma

Taking the other microphone

Paris also brought X-HEC Entrepreneurs and the HEC Startup Launchpad. During the program's 2025 London expedition, Peralta and Fynn Fröhlich moderated a conversation with venture investors Juliette Souliman of Portage Ventures and Jannat Rajan of Forestay. The discussion covered fundraising, market trends, and the venture landscape. This time she was helping guide the conversation from the stage.

That role asks something different from pitching a company. A moderator needs to make someone else's knowledge accessible to the room: invite an explanation, keep the exchange moving, give the audience a way into a complicated subject. In the event photograph, Peralta sits at the right of the panel, microphone in hand. The picture captures a practical part of learning entrepreneurship: listening while other people explain how they make decisions.

At Corma, she and Alessandro Mauro also met communication students from Lycée Sophie Germain through the Startups à l'École initiative. Students worked on a communication project for the company and asked about business constraints, AI, and budgets. It was another setting where startup work became something to discuss in ordinary, answerable questions. The company had needs; the students had a project to build around them.

New York, with Paris still in the conversation

Clay welcomed Peralta in its March 2026 group of new hires, naming her role as ClayDR. The New York company makes software for revenue teams to research accounts, bring together data, and build workflows. Her supplied professional title is Founding ClayDR. The word founding here belongs to the role; The Bet. is the venture she co-launched with Le Cleï.

The move put her inside a business built around helping other businesses find and engage customers. There is a useful continuity with the work she had been describing in Paris: choosing whom to approach, opening a conversation, and learning from what happens. Software can assist with research and coordination. Someone still has to decide why an exchange is worth beginning and what to do when a person responds.

Her approach has also included handwritten prospect letters and French chocolates, according to The Bet.'s introduction to her. The same introduction describes a one-minute video as part of how she landed her Clay job. She herself credits an event with helping her get the role. These are different pieces of the same arrival story, and both give the encounter a human scale. An application can be more memorable when it has a voice.

Returning to New York after a year and a half in Paris left her wanting to stay connected to Europe's startup world. She also wanted to keep using her French. The Bet. gave those intentions an appointment in the calendar. A desire to remain close to somewhere can become pleasantly practical: invite people who understand it, choose a date, and make it possible for them to meet.

The room becomes the project

The launch gathering drew more than 60 founders, investors, and operators, Le Cleï reported. A smaller dinner brought together revenue leaders, founders, go-to-market practitioners, and people working in strategic roles. Among them were Fred Viet of Aircall, Adam Cespedes-Zaman of Pigment, Anis Bennaceur of Attention, and Daniel Johnson of Clay. The guest list crossed company boundaries as well as national ones.

Peralta noticed how many people at the dinner were multicultural or spoke more than one language. The observation mattered to her because those experiences are part of her own daily life. Bringing people together around a shared context gives a conversation somewhere to start. It saves each person from having to explain the entire geography of their working life before asking the question they came with.

By September, The Bet. was announcing rooftop drinks on the Lower East Side and a partnership with Deel for the event. The community had moved beyond its first invitation. A recurring gathering requires a different kind of follow-through: people need a reason to come back, and the organizers need to keep making room for them. The early dinners had given Peralta and Le Cleï something tangible to build on.

The career story returns, finally, to a fairly modest action. Peralta went on a trip. She followed up on an encounter. She let people see what she was learning. Back home, she accepted a message from someone who had mistaken her nationality, and the two kept meeting. Dinner, bagels, tacos: an unusually appetizing sequence of next steps. Now other people get an invitation to take one of their own.