n8n's founder puts the company's GitHub repo, nearly 200,000 stars, right next to the paid signup button, and he's genuinely fine if you never pay. In this episode of The Product Podcast, Carlos (CEO at Product School) sits down with Jan Oberhauser, CEO of n8n, the open-source automation platform that's crossed $100 million in ARR at a $5.2 billion valuation. Jan breaks down the "fair-code" license bet that let him give the product away and still build a business, how that free version became the on-ramp into enterprises like Meta, Nvidia, Dell, Accenture, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, and Mercedes, and why he believes the people with the problem should build the automation themselves, not a centralized team or an outside agency.

He also walks through a live build of a personal AI agent (email and calendar), shows how n8n falls back from Claude to GPT via OpenRouter when a model isn't available, and explains how enterprises get automations into production faster because each agent can only do exactly what it's been permitted to do.

What you'll learn:

• Why n8n rejected traditional open source for a "fair-code" license, and how it avoided the community backlash that burned other companies
• Why trust and consistency, not features, are the real center of a community
• How the free, self-hosted version drives bottom-up adoption inside major enterprises
• Why "sprinkling AI on top" kills products, and what to build instead
• How to chain agents so one agent's output becomes the next agent's input
• Why n8n is the "connective tissue" between models, tools, and business systems
• How guardrails (an agent can only do what it's explicitly allowed) speed up enterprise procurement and production
• Why the people with the problem should own the building, not a centralized AI team
• How 10,000+ community templates and 500+ integrations expand what non-technical builders can ship
• How one company routes 75% of support through an n8n agent, with customers happier than with humans

Connect with Guest (Jan Oberhauser):
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janoberhauser
X: https://x.com/JanOberhauser

Host: Carlos, CEO at Product School
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/villaumbrosia/

About Jan Oberholzer: Jan is the CEO of n8n, an open-source (fair-code) workflow automation and orchestration platform for building AI agents. He started the company over seven years ago, before LLMs went mainstream, and has grown it past $100M ARR at a $5.2B valuation.

About the Product Podcast: Product School's podcast brings you candid conversations with the founders and product leaders shaping tech.

Social Links:

• Find out more about Product School here
• Follow our Podcast on TikTok here
• Follow Product School on LinkedIn here

In this episode of The Product Podcast by Product School, Carlos González de Villaumbrosia sits down with Amit Zavery, President and Chief Product Officer at ServiceNow. The platform runs more than 75 billion workflows a year with around $15 billion in annual revenue growing over 20%. Its market cap is above $100 billion, yet the stock is down more than 30% this past year, while its AI business is on track for $1.5 billion, ahead of a $1 billion plan.

Amit previously ran product and platform at Oracle for over two decades and was a VP and General Manager at Google Cloud.

What you'll learn:

• Why the market can't yet tell AI winners from losers, and why companies that don't transform will get killed
• Why the idea of one company becoming the single end-to-end enterprise orchestrator is a fallacy
• The spare part approach that makes most enterprise AI projects fail, and what pacesetters do instead
• Why access is shifting from user interfaces to agents, and what taking action actually requires
• How to hold long-term conviction on platform bets while the market judges you on short-term sentiment

Key takeaways:

• Transform or die: the market will separate AI-native platforms from legacy vendors
• Interoperability beats domination in the agentic era
• Governance only wins when it accelerates innovation, not when it blocks it

Credits:
Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Amit Zavery

Social Links:

• Find out more about Product School here
• Follow our Podcast on TikTok here
• Follow Product School on LinkedIn here

In this episode of The Product Podcast by Product School, Carlos González de Villaumbrosia sits down with Saral Jain, SVP of Engineering at Snapchat, the last independent social platform operating at global scale, with 956 million monthly active users closing in on the one billion mark and a community that opens the app more than 30 times a day.

Saral joined Snap nine years ago, right around the IPO, after nearly a decade leading engineering teams at Amazon Web Services, and today leads all engineering for Snapchat, spanning product experiences, multi-cloud infrastructure, and the company's machine learning and generative AI platforms.

What you'll learn:

• How Snap lets designers and product managers ship production code, with an AI agent running the first review pass on 90% of code within 5 minutes
• What Casper is: the AI teammate any team at Snap can invoke from Slack or Jira to build a working prototype from a conversation
• How Snap turned company-wide AI adoption into business impact after early prototypes were being built and thrown away
• How lean startup squads mix engineers, designers, and data scientists to launch zero-to-one bets inside a mature platform

Key takeaways:

• Quality control does not have to slow down who gets to ship, it has to change what reviews the work first
• Widespread AI adoption is not the same as business impact, and the gap between the two is where most AI investment is being wasted right now
• Small, cross-functional teams with blurred roles can move faster than traditional org structures, even inside a billion-user company

Credits:
Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Saral Jain

Social Links:

• Find out more about Product School here
• Follow our Podcast on TikTok here
• Follow Product School on LinkedIn here