Most people think of drones as toys. Alden Jones thinks of them as infrastructure. In this episode of The Product Podcast, Carlos (CEO at Product School) visits Skydio's California office to sit down with Alden Jones, VP of Product at Skydio, the autonomous drone company building "flying robots" for public safety, defense, and infrastructure inspection. With a history degree and a military background (he was a truck-driving officer running supply convoys in Iraq) rather than an engineering one, Alden explains how a vertically integrated company of nearly 1,000 people builds everything in house, from chip-level design to hardware, embedded software, and cloud, and why autonomy, not just flight, is the real product.

He breaks down Skydio's "Drone as First Responder" (DFR) program, where a drone often reaches the scene before human officers, and the outcomes dashboard cities use to track response times. He compares the economics against police helicopters (roughly $3,000 an hour to operate and $10-25M to buy), walks through the defense and tactical ISR use cases shaped by the war in Ukraine, and explains how thousands of cheaper camera drones could democratize air support while saving lives. He covers physical security (where 90-95% of alarms turn out to be false), the work of earning FAA trust to unlock groundbreaking waivers, and why Skydio's $3.5B, five-year investment in US and allied supply chains is funded by revenue instead of debt. He also opens up the product org itself: roughly 20 product managers across the entire stack, "strike teams" that work like forward-deployed engineers, and a customer-first culture where PMs are expected to go watch the robot fly in the real world.

What you'll learn:

• Why Skydio calls its products "flying robots," and the "toys to tools to infrastructure" thesis
• What full vertical integration looks like: chip-down design to cloud, all in house
• How "Drone as First Responder" changes 911 response, tracked in a live outcomes dashboard
• The real economics of drones vs. police helicopters
• How the war in Ukraine reshaped Skydio's thinking on tactical ISR and democratizing air support
• Why 90-95% of physical security alarms are false, and how autonomous drones clear them at near-zero marginal cost
• How Skydio earns FAA trust to fly beyond visual line of sight and win first-mover waivers
• Why a $3.5B, five-year US manufacturing commitment is funded by revenue, not debt
• How one pilot flying multiple drones becomes possible only through real autonomy
• How Skydio runs product with ~20 PMs, "strike teams," and a customer-first org design
• Why shipping hardware plus software (the Tesla comparison) shapes a roughly two-year program cycle

Connect with Alden Jones, VP of Product, Skydio:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aldenljones/

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

About Skydio: Skydio is a US-based manufacturer of autonomous drones ("flying robots") for public safety, defense, security, and infrastructure inspection. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in California, the company is vertically integrated across hardware, autonomy software, and cloud.

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

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