The Product Podcast

Most apps optimize for time on screen. Hinge optimizes for you leaving. In this episode of The Product Podcast, Carlos (CEO at Product School) sits down with Ben Celebicic, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Hinge, the dating app "designed to be deleted," to unpack how you build a product whose North Star is great dates, not engagement, and still chase a billion dollars in revenue.

Ben has been at Hinge for 11 years, since the 2015 relaunch, and recently became one of a growing number of leaders to hold both the product and technology mandate in a single CPTO role. He and Carlos get into the healthy tension between the CPO instinct (ship fast, innovate) and the CTO instinct (protect quality and infrastructure), and how he now runs that debate inside one person and across a team of nearly 300. He lays out Hinge's monetization philosophy in two principles: build the free experience so everyone can succeed, and only charge for things you can't give away free without breaking the ecosystem (which is why fewer than 15% of users pay). He explains how a dedicated culture and consumer insights team studies real daters to find core needs, how generative AI now enables per-user profile coaching that was impossible before, why trust and safety makes up roughly a third of the entire Hinge organization, and where he draws the line on AI-assisted engineering today. He closes on Hinge's mission to reach $1 billion in revenue in 2027.

What you'll learn:
- Why "designed to be deleted" is a real product principle, and how an anti-engagement North Star works
- How to run the CPO-vs-CTO tension, even when both roles live in one person
- Hinge's two-principle monetization model, and why fewer than 15% of users pay by design
- Why you should only charge for things that would break the ecosystem if they were free
- How a culture and consumer insights team turns real dater problems into features
- How generative AI enables personalized profile coaching that wasn't possible before
- Why trust and safety is about a third of the whole org, and how AI powers it
- Where an engineering-background leader draws the line on AI-built product today
- The mission to hit $1B in revenue in 2027, and the "obsess over user needs" formula behind it

Connect with Ben Celebicic: CPTO, Hinge
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lrb-podcasts/about/

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

About Hinge: Hinge is the dating app "designed to be deleted," built to help people get off the app and out on great dates. Founded by Justin McLeod and relaunched in 2015, Hinge is part of Match Group's portfolio of dating and social discovery apps.

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

One month before Bolt exploded, Eric Simons was preparing to wind the company down. In this episode of The Product Podcast, Carlos (CEO at Product School) sits down with Eric Simons, CEO of Bolt, to tell the story behind one of the fastest revenue ramps software has ever seen, and what he learned building toward it for seven years first.

Eric is a high-school dropout who approaches life from first principles and treats endurance sports as training for the pain of building a company. He and Carlos trace the near-death moment (a board meeting set to start spinning the company down was one month away), the bet on WebContainers (an operating system Eric's team wrote to run in WebAssembly inside the browser, so you can build real full-stack apps from a browser tab, the way Figma brought design to the web), and the ramp that followed: zero to about $5M ARR in the first 30 days, then to roughly $20M ARR within two months, a curve that normally takes companies years. He explains why StackBlitz is now going deep on professional builders (PMs, designers, engineers), how Bolt is solving the hard part of turning AI-generated prototypes into production code your engineering team will actually sign off on, and why he frames the market like the ChatGPT-vs-Anthropic split: pick a specific ICP and workflow instead of spraying money at everything. He closes on the open-weights bet (StackBlitz was the earliest backer of Vite), aggressive usage-based pricing, and why cheaper open models are closing the last bit of distance to the labs.

What you'll learn:
- The near-death story: one month from shutting down, then a record revenue ramp
- Why the WebContainer bet (a real OS running in the browser) took seven years and made Bolt possible
- What a 0-to-$20M-ARR-in-two-months curve actually looks like, and why it's so rare
- Why StackBlitz is focusing on professional product builders, not just cute prototypes
- How to turn an AI prototype into production code your engineering team signs off on
- The "ChatGPT vs. Anthropic" framing: why going deep on one ICP beats spraying money everywhere
- Why first-principles thinking and endurance sport shape how Eric builds
- The open-weights bet, aggressive usage-based pricing, and open models catching up to the labs

Connect with Eric Simons, CEO, Bolt
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-simons-a464a664/

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

About Bolt / StackBlitz: StackBlitz is the company behind Bolt (bolt.new), an AI-powered web development platform that lets anyone build real full-stack applications from a browser tab, powered by its in-browser WebContainer operating system. StackBlitz was also the earliest backer of the open-source Vite project.

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

What do you do after you've founded a company, sold it to Databricks, and could coast? Amandeep Khurana went back to being hands-on. In this episode of The Product Podcast, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia (CEO at Product School) talks with Amandeep Khurana, now on Anthropic's go-to-market team, about a career built on deliberately choosing the harder path.

Amandeep traces the whole arc: training as an engineer, moving to the Valley to go customer-facing at Cloudera, catching the company-building bug "by osmosis," and founding Okera in 2016, which eventually exited to Databricks. He talks about what he learned in the ups and downs of running a startup, why he later joined AWS as a founding PM (on Kiro) to run four zero-to-one initiatives instead of taking a comfortable management track, and how he thinks about the two fundamental jobs in any company: building a product and selling a product. He and Carlos dig into the tension between being a hands-on builder and being a manager, how to decide which domains are worth jumping into when you know nothing, and why he joined Anthropic to work on bringing AI safely to enterprises. It's a candid conversation about career design, first-principles decision-making, and staying close to the work.

What you'll learn:
- Why Amandeep repeatedly chooses the "harder path," and how first-principles thinking drives his career decisions
- What founding and exiting Okera (to Databricks) actually taught him about company building
- Why he went back to hands-on building instead of a pure management track
- How to think about the two core jobs in any company: building the product and selling it
- How to decide whether to jump into a domain you know nothing about
- What running four zero-to-one initiatives inside a big company teaches you
- Why he moved into GTM and enterprise AI adoption at Anthropic
- How to stay hands-on as your career pulls you toward management

Connect with Amandeep Khurana:
Anthropic (GTM / Enterprise); previously co-founder and CEO of Okera, founding PM for Kiro at AWS
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amansk/

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

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

Visual collaboration is missing from the AI era. That's the provocation Elaina O'Mahoney, Chief Product Officer at Mural, brings to this episode of The Product Podcast with Carlos (CEO at Product School). We spend all day alone in our tools, typing or talking to an LLM, and when it's time to collaborate we drop words into a doc instead of thinking together visually. Elaina makes the case that AI has quietly turned work into "solo-player mode," and that the teams who win next will be the ones who rebuild shared context and multiplayer collaboration on top of it.

Elaina and Carlos get into why ideas are now cheap (you can go from a thought to a working prototype in hours) and why that makes shared context, not idea generation, the real bottleneck. She argues that everyone is a designer at heart, that product leaders should replace the five-page strategy doc with a fast prototype that conveys the North Star, and that "shipping" can mean a workflow or an agent, not just a production release. They also dig into the crowded "where work happens" landscape (Slack, Teams, Jira, Linear, Notion) and the blank-canvas gap around how and why decisions actually get made, how to create safe spaces for people to try AI and fail inside large enterprises, and the pricing tension between legacy seat-based SaaS and AI-native usage models.

What you'll learn:
- Why Elaina says visual collaboration is "absent" in the AI era, and why that matters
- The "solo-player mode" problem: how AI made work lonely, and what multiplayer should look like
- Why ideas are now cheap, and how that shifts the bottleneck to shared context and faster decisions
- Why the real blank space isn't planning or chat, but how and why decisions get made
- The case that everyone is a designer, and how visual thinking speeds up decisions
- How a CPO ships to demo a direction (a prototype instead of a strategy doc)
- What's still scarce in an AI world: data science, taste, and synthesizing analytics
- How to create safe, low-risk spaces for teams to try AI and fail inside big enterprises
- Why smaller "champion" teams beat top-down rollouts, and how internal builders spread practices
- The pricing dilemma: seat-based SaaS vs. AI-native usage models

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:59 Intro: Elaina O'Mahoney, CPO at Mural
01:31 Mural's origin as a collaboration canvas
03:01 Multiplayer vs. AI's solo-player mode
04:23 Ideas are cheap now: idea to prototype in hours
05:44 The competitive landscape and convergence
08:31 The blank space nobody owns: how decisions get made
09:22 Lowering the bar so everyone can design
11:33 Everybody should be shipping now
12:25 Shipping to demo, not to production
14:04 Creating safe spaces to try AI in the enterprise
17:10 Forward-deployed engineers
19:14 Building a community around Mural
22:11 The pricing dilemma: SaaS vs. AI-native usage
24:07 Measuring real AI impact
26:19 How Elaina structures her team
28:20 The innovator's dilemma
30:03 From annual QBRs to monthly loops
31:05 Ten years of Mural, and a World Cup sign-off

Connect with the Guest:
Elaina O'Mahoney, Chief Product Officer, Mural
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eomahoney/

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

About Mural: Mural is a visual collaboration platform built for teams to brainstorm, converge, and make decisions together on a shared canvas. Originally created by co-founders in Argentina, it scaled rapidly during the shift to remote work.

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

Two years ago, Square tore up its general-manager model and rebuilt the entire company around functional excellence. In this episode of The Product Podcast, Carlos (CEO at Product School) sits down with Willem Avé, Global Head of Product at Square (part of Block), to unpack why they made that bet, what it costs, and how AI is now reshaping the org itself.

Willem started at Block as a CTO whose company was acquired, grew up through engineering, and has seen every era of the company from the little white card reader to today's multiple product ecosystems. He explains why orgs should be built around customer outcomes (and how quality degrades the further you drift from that principle), why hardware demands a different kind of craft than software, and how Jack Dorsey's thinking pushed them toward the idea of running Block like a "mini AGI company," where AI encodes institutional knowledge instead of red tape and process. Then he opens up a live demo of "manager bot," an agent that lets a small-business owner delegate real tasks (like an inventory workflow for a bakery) without worrying about memory, connectors, or prompts. He closes with a genuine hot take on TAM and what AI agents mean for the size of the market Square can serve.

What you'll learn:
- Why Square replaced general managers with a fully functionalized org, and what "functional excellence" buys you
- How to organize teams around customer outcomes, and why quality drops the further you drift
- Why hardware craft (approachable, reliable, "it just works") differs from software craft
- What it means to run a company like a "mini AGI," and how AI can encode knowledge instead of process
- Why the era of the simple question-answer chatbot is ending, and what replaces it
- A live look at "manager bot": delegating real business tasks to an agent
- Why small-business owners want outcomes, not memory, connectors, or prompt-craft
- Willem's hot take on TAM, and how agents expand who Square can serve
- Why economic empowerment and democratizing advanced technology is the throughline

Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
01:32 Inside Square and Block: how the teams are designed
03:34 The four orgs: audiences, platform, growth, money
04:46 Marrying hardware and software in one function
05:56 Finding leaders who understand both worlds
07:25 The DRI model and killing the silent veto
09:16 Can everyone report to one person?
11:12 Why flat orgs still need great managers
12:41 Building for people who are not on X every day
14:41 The loneliness of running a business
17:24 Demo: Manager Bot doing real work
20:19 Why AI should not create more work for sellers
22:13 Hot take: TAM is almost infinite
24:22 Killing the fragmented point solution stack
26:06 WhatsApp, Instagram, and the comms problem
27:54 Buzz and what nobody has solved yet
28:34 Closing

Connect with Willem Avé:
Global Head of Product, Square (Block)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/willem-ave/

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

About Square: Square, part of Block, builds payments hardware and software plus a broader ecosystem of tools that help sellers and small businesses run and grow. Block also includes Cash App and other brands.

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