Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
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Jeff: [00:00:00] Alright. Right, Carlos, man, it's great to have you on. It's funny, I think we've met four or five years ago at this point pre covid out at, product Con in San Francisco. It's the first time I got to meet you, but I think this is gonna be the longest we've gotten to talk straight, so I'm really excited to have you on.

Thank you for joining

Carlos: Love being here. And also, yeah, weird to be just one on one with you when we run into each other, there's always like, 2000 people around that. So it's hard to have a more than a two minute conversation.

Jeff: I'm actually a little thrown talking to you without 1000 people around us, but I'll just pretend I guess cool. We always like to kick this thing off with a little bit of warm up. And I'll be honest, I'm interested to see your take on a few of these things because You are the kind of first non, practitioner, a product person we've had on, so I think you're gonna have cool insights in a couple of these things, but first off product is one of those things that I think as much as tech can defy what people understand and if you're not living it, it's a little inside baseball at times, [00:01:00] but product especially, I feel like is kind of amorphous and.

What one person's job can be really different from someone else with the same job title. How would you explain product management to a non tech person, 

Carlos: Well, I thought you were going to take this question in a different direction because when I hear the word in law and the thing with marriage and I'm married with two kids is that you do not get to choose your in laws, right? They come in a packet, but when you are hiding PMs. They do not come in a package with engineers.

You really get to pick your team. But from your perspective, my kids are seven and five and they ask me, what do you do? And it's funny because they think that , my work is just showing in front of a screen and then doing this with my hands as if I'm a hamster. That's all they know about my work.

But the way I try to explain it is. What's your favorite app? And they would say things like, Oh, I like Disney or Netflix or this video game. I say, okay, I teach people to create. 

Jeff: Nice. Yeah. That's it's the kids when I should use that actually, cause that's a good example. Like my kids, I [00:02:00] think their knowledge of marketing is pretty much comes from the show boss baby. So that's what they think I do. And then to further that point, I feel like there's always.

People have strong opinions in product. There's always, something going on about how to the best way to do something. What is a controversial opinion you hold or what do you think is. Being done wrong in product right now that, should be done differently.

. I've been around product space for 10 years. We turned 10 as a company.

Jeff: Oh, congrats. That's awesome.

Carlos: Thank you. So we're not a garage idea anymore. When we started literally, like people had no idea what product management was. Companies weren't hiding PMs. There was so much confusion.

So I think the biggest challenge there was to show what PMs do why they should have a PM in their company in the first place. Now we've evolved a lot as an industry. We even see chief product officers, including the fortune 100. So there's much more adoption for the function. But I think the next level for this function to stay relevant and [00:03:00] continue thriving is to actually show revenue value.

It is not enough to build products that customers love. Now we are, we have to do that. That's stable stakes. And we also have to contribute to revenue growth. It's about optimizing for company and shareholders, not just for users.

Jeff: That's fair. Do you think that's where kind of the move to product led growth and some of that stuff leans in from is it's much easier to justify the value when you are growing a product that kind of drives its own growth at some level or is the sales mechanism sometimes. 

Carlos: We've seen trends come and go all the time, right? Like PIG is important, in my opinion, PIG is just a new way of defining something that already existed. But at the end of the day, as I speaking as a CEO, when I'm making hiding decisions or investment decisions. I want to see what's the ROI.

And that doesn't mean that the ROI has to be tomorrow, but there has to be a correlation to that ROI. Even if we are building on products that are internal or [00:04:00] are not directly closing deals. I think that's just a healthy practice in general. And I live in San Francisco and I always felt like an outlier by saying those things, because sometimes I felt judged, by like building a business that is profitable.

And now that being profitable seems to be, The right thing, more people be are on this camp, but the reality is that there are more profitable business out there than unprofitable businesses. And I think having some common sense in the tech world is a good thing.

Jeff: I mean, It is funny that profits cool again, which is wild to me. That was ever not cool. But but it is interesting to see the kind of, the posts are, people can't just fundraise with, very little dilution. You have to think about every dollar and the focus there has a lot more focused on.

How is this going to drive? Growth. If we do this effort, how is it gonna turn into, growth for the company? And like you said, it doesn't have to be direct, but it has to exist and you have to have the path. Going backwards a little bit though, you just mentioned this is 10 years of product school, right?

You started in 2014. It's been a long road for you guys, but I guess let's go back to the [00:05:00] beginning. Like you're, in 20 12, 20 13, you were an engineer to start, right? You were coding. 

Carlos: And I hated it.

Jeff: Yeah,

Carlos: That's why I became a PM I always say that I started product school as a solution to my own problem. I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. This is my third company. And I've always been in the education field because I have a love hate relationship with education. In this particular case, when I went to, when I started computer science, I think that was, it was just by elimination, my, my dad is a doctor, my mom is a lawyer.

I hated all of that. So I was this in with numbers and I like video games. So I made a, wrong decision to go into engineering because I was so naive. I had no idea what that was all about, but I didn't give up. So I think I, at least I learned to work hard. And as soon as I was able to choose my next move, I decided to start learning more about what to do with technology and how to build a business or how to actually connect it to market.

And that's what Brought me to Silicon Valley. I'm originally from Spain. So I came to Silicon Valley for business school. And I also soon [00:06:00] realized, Oh my God, this is not teaching me anything about business, really. It's more about, high level discussions on MNA and read a book and tell me what you think.

And look, I also met amazing people and I had great experiences in life, but the content wasn't what I was looking for. So I always found myself in between engineering. And business. And luckily I realized there was a thing called product that is right in between those two worlds.

And I created the school that I wish I had.

Jeff: that's the heart of entrepreneurship, right? Is you find a problem that you have solve it and, obviously in there is somewhere understand if it's a problem for other people, it's just you, but it's a great Silicon Valley story is go solve the problem you have.

It's looking at that though, right? Like you're 2014 is not too far removed. That's before. Product was cool, right? That's back when I think the most pop culture understanding of what product was Tom from the movie office space. And, he's in with the Bobs, the consultants and explaining what he does and he's meant to look foolish and it's, the whole thing is he's yelling and angry and, I have [00:07:00] people skills.

And he clearly doesn't just, the joke was, there's nothing he does. You started a company to teach people to do that. And obviously, now we know the purpose of the role and that has changed so much. It's now very cool to be in product and it's super functional and drives a ton of value for companies with that at heart, right? Let's abstract back one level from that joke and, you run a school that teaches that. What do you do? What is your day to day like as Carlos, the CEO of product school look like? What are you doing? Are you just sitting here on podcasts with people like me all day?

Or I assume there's a lot more to it knowing the role. A CEO.

Carlos: Actually, I wish I had more time to actually hang out with you, and be on podcasts, but this is just I don't know, 5 percent

Jeff: Yeah. I was joking.

Carlos: Yeah, but maybe one day. So the role has evolved, right? I treat the company as a product. I treat my. My, my job description as a product.

When I was in that zero to one phase, I bootstrapped the business for the first seven years, by the way. So I did it all myself. I was a instructor for the first two [00:08:00] years. I was doing sales, customer support, marketing, you name it. reinvesting every single penny into the company. At some point was we started grow the business.

My, the first thing I dedicated was the instruction part, even though I loved it with a passion. I also realized that I wasn't the best in the world at it. I, the more time for me, the best instructors are practitioners. So the more time you spend in academia, the more rusty you get. So it was very important for me to bring the absolute best in the world as instructors.

And these are world class product leaders at Google. Google, Netflix, Airbnb, and other top companies in Silicon Valley. I was still obsessed with quality. So I would sit down as a student, to audit that everything was going well, and that I would still know everybody by their name and try to help them in between sessions.

But that was the first level, I think, where I started feeling more comfortable with delegating some of our aspects of the product. Next level for us was to start hiding. Other people who are not just instructors who and because I mentioned that I'm from Spain, I've always been very comfortable working [00:09:00] overseas with people from all over the world.

So we started working remotely before it was cool. And there are some benefits and trade offs to that, but as soon as it started, hiding some people in Europe, some people in Latin America, I was always very conscious of, first of all, do we really need to hire? And if so, do we really need to hire that person in San Francisco and pay top dollar?

And maybe sometimes the answer is yes. But most, most often than not, it was no. And that was part of the DNA of the company as we scale.

Jeff: That makes sense. Yeah, that's the same problem that software companies have or everyone. At some level you are probably like, I know you are not a proper software company, but like you said, you thought about it as a product and treat it, and I think that shows the results and, the success you guys have had over 10 years.

looking at that and to kind of Talk about the education and staying on the education theme. One thing that amazes me here is we talk to dozens and dozens of product leaders doing this show and the background that people come from is so immensely varied.

One thing is in common is no one went to [00:10:00] school for product cause you really can't. Even today, there's only a handful of programs probably across the country. That offer that which, opens up a great opportunity for great programs like product school to fill that. But why do you think it is that, you can go to some of the top name brand universities for engineering, you can go for marketing, you can go for finance and accounting, you can go for, all of, you can go for HR, I think even.

But product is still one where, most of the training is going to happen. Either a, you're going to come from some other function into it, or B you're going to do something like product school to really uplevel your skills.

Carlos: Yeah. And you're right. We are the first movers in this space, like 10 years ago, this wasn't obvious. And I think that's part of the. Ten year overnight success, if you will, right? We were able to go for something that the data wasn't that clear about, and we got relatively lucky. We were still working, but had I chosen a different category that was maybe more obvious, I don't know if I would be having this conversation with you.

I think what was cool 10 years ago in [00:11:00] the alternative education space was coding. There were a bunch of coding bootcamps that were teaching people how to become software engineers without a CS degree. And they were able to prove that model because they were taking anyone from any type of background and then teach them within two to four months specific coding language and then help them get a job.

But nobody had tried that for non coding skills. And I happen to have experience in an engineering school where I was the outlier. They didn't want to code. So I knew there was a small percentage of people, even in technical schools that wanted to do something different with their technical schools.

I. Got similar sense in business school. Most of my classmates wanted to work in consulting, investment banking, private equity. And there were a few, and I was optimizing for those few. And that was a big bet on me. \ I'm not going for a massive market yet. As some VCs would say, I'm going for Something very specific, so specific.

I know that the people by their name, and I'm hoping that this [00:12:00] will grow, but you know what, my hope wasn't to become a unicorn for the sake of it. My hope was to create a good product that my users will enjoy and help with their careers and that I would also be able to pay my bills and that was my.

Definition of happiness at that point, obviously things turned out in a, in an incredible way that I couldn't even predict for the better. But I think starting and looking for those smaller wins and taking it one day at a time can make a big difference.

Jeff: right. You have focused, you've driven in and you saw that kind of need but I guess to double down the question, do you think there's a reason that, the bigger universities haven't actually entered or is it just a skill set that.

Is particular or that you need real world practitioners more that does it not lend itself to academia? Maybe

Carlos: So it's to me is the classic adoption curve. Like they say, the S shape adoption curve, like with this type of roles, 10 years ago, they weren't really that popular. So maybe it didn't make sense for [00:13:00] universities that are more the late players in the space. To pay attention at as the function evolved.

And now we are seeing that even in the fortune 100, over 50 percent of those companies already have a chief product officer, by the way, most of those companies are not just in high tech talking about oil and gas, consumer packaged goods, healthcare, financial services, or when non tech companies outside Silicon Valley.

Start investing so hard in tech, especially in product. Now of course, universities and other startups are paying more attention and realizing that we have a supply problem. There is more demand in the market than supply. So now it's a different situation in the market. There are more companies out there, more startups, there's more universities, so they.

the next move or what we've been trying to do is to maintain our leadership position in a much bigger market. And the way we do it is by staying true to those initial principles, which is hyper focus on one thing and go as deep as possible, instead of trying to diversify and now suddenly start covering so many other [00:14:00] types of skills.

Jeff: no, I think that it's clearly a plan that has worked out well for y'all. It's still you know, 10 years in I think the biggest product community on the planet. Is that accurate or it's

Carlos: Yeah, we are now over 2 million members and Jeff, I remember when , we met many years ago, even your product, right? Maybe it wasn't fully optimized for PMs and there will be other personas. And I've seen how a lot of SAS companies also, as they grow, they've been now paying more attention or in some cases, even focusing their product around the product function.

So that's also helped the ecosystem a lot. Like when you and I go to these meetings. Product conferences or other events and see thousands of people who speak our same language. That is so inspiring for the next generation.

Jeff: Yeah, I mean it is if you look at the set of tools available to product people. I started out in the engineering space, right? I wasn't an engineer, 20 years ago when I started my career, I was marketing and working at tool companies that, sold very technical, application performance management and, load testing and [00:15:00] stuff like that.

And the thought at that time was engineering was where the money was. Like you sold to engineers because across an org, they were the ones who gave budget for what they needed. And over my, six years at log rocket, it's been amazing to see this kind of the ascendance of product to where, if you told me in 2010, let's say that if there was a, set of tools that was being evaluated by a company and product, one, one thing and marketing, one, one thing and engineering, one, one thing.

I would have told you engineering was going to win that fight almost every single time. And that was true up until I'd say like the late teens or 2020, when all of a sudden that started to invert and you started to see that, this kind of growth of product and they became the center of, this ecosystem that kind of brought forth these great digital experiences.

And, I was lucky enough with log rocket to be there to help them, provide a product that helps them do that. But the essence of product into the real kind of decision makers and drivers [00:16:00] of what the tooling that they need has been really intense to see. And, I think that does right now you start to see it's cool to be in product and people come out of college and want to go into product.

And it's it reminds me of, 15, 20 years, 15 years ago, when everyone wanted to go into engineering. I do want to get into one thing there is there has been, I feel like a slight hiccup on this, or I'm curious to see what you guys are seeing over at product school where leading up and through even a lot of 2022, it seemed like if you did a product bootcamp, you'd exit and you would get a job and you were set and companies were just ramping up their product teams you started to see like very large, very high functioning product teams.

And then, late 22 happened and when profit got cool again suddenly everyone started to take a really hard look across a lot of functions. And I feel like product has been hit pretty hard on here. Like I still, through this show, I talked to product leaders a lot.

And I've seen, I feel like more and more people, job changing or looking for jobs is taking longer. What do you think happened in this correction here? Like, this just a correction because people over rotated into it [00:17:00] and we're finding balance? Or is there something bigger than that?

Do you think?

Carlos: Yeah. So as I look at this with the 10 year perspective, we've made tremendous progress, right? We went from being literally absolutely relevant to now being in charge of some of the most strategic decisions, as you were mentioning, like our product wholesale budget, which is huge. Product called shots.

There's a CPO. It's not just a pm under a CTO, just writing spreadsheets. So all of that is incredible and that has happened only during the last 10 years. So I'm very bullish in the role of product for the next 10 and beyond. I think, I hope you and I are going to have this conversation 10 years from now and say, oh my God, remember when we were just saying that 50% of 4,100 have a CPO as if that was a big thing and now everybody has it.

Jeff: In 10 years from now, we'll do it sitting on a beach.

Carlos: Yes, and we'll be the grandpas, of product. But of course, and of course, right now, if you look at the micro level, there is definitely a correction in the market that has also affected the product team, and I believe that [00:18:00] we'll come out of that stronger because that is forcing now product to be more accountable for revenue, to add business value in addition to user value, to also force PMs to really become irreplaceable.

It's not just, Oh, I'm going to get a job because I took a course. No. And you also need to really add value from the get go. Otherwise, it's just going to be harder. There's more competition, less spots open. So I believe that, yes, it's sad that right now, like a lot of people are being affected. And I do not want to diminish that pain for many.

But I think long term, staying focused on one thing, And I, based on my experience over the last 10 years, I think that this is going to be extremely profitable and powerful for people who come out on top.

Jeff: Yeah. What we, you and I are old enough to remember , the crash of the late nineties and, the two thousands and Oh, wait, when everything fell apart in the financial markets. And I feel like every time that happens, it's tough. And it's a hard time, but what consistently comes out of it is [00:19:00] companies and leaders that are tested through that and have lived through that.

And, in the end it ends up being probably good. Good in the big picture. It's tough if you're on the bad side of it, but it ends up being a positive thing for , the ecosystem as a whole where startups were way stronger coming out of the tech downturn in the nineties, because you had to, you understood the fundamentals you had to focus on to actually build a real sound, long term company And it does seem like there's a good chance that's what's happening here, right?

It's like people over rotated in and now we're correcting. And like you said, they're finding the value and proving out and making sure that it connects to not like just straight revenue, but how does it connect to company growth and creating a more sustainable long term company? So I do think that's a good thing.

It's a tough little slog to get through, but it'll come out more positive. To think about kind of tooling and changes that, might help there. You just, so we were just in New York. You put on ProductCon New York a couple of weeks ago, months ago at this point. And AI has obviously [00:20:00] just bombarded every industry from every direction.

And everything now has an AI functionality and AI feature, go on and so on and so forth. But you, I think you did a good job of, at that show, actually you presented on AI in product and what's going on and what's really, driving forward the function here. And you presented a whole bunch of solutions up in front of the whole crowd.

What's your view on where this is going to go a little bit? Like where is AI going to find value for product? , what's maybe smoke and mirrors right now versus really valuable and I guess, what did you hear at that show, especially, I'm sure people came up and talked to you after that.

Carlos: Oh yeah. I'm obsessed with this topic. I'm a tech optimist, right? So every time there is a new trend or opportunity, I jump in quickly. Just to learn, literally where the student had to be like, okay, I'm not pretending to now be a thought leader on this space. I just want to learn and separate like what's really smoking mirrors versus reality and , we've seen with blockchain, we've seen with VR and that's of this time, maybe the time wasn't right, or maybe the technology wasn't right, [00:21:00] whatever that might be.

But I think that just. learning, there's no downside in just considering that option. So now with AI, it seems like there are lags here, that this is not going to die. If anything this keeps going. However, there's also a lot of bluff. So my obsession with AI in particular applied to product is to highlight the lags.

The real value, the specific use cases that PMs can leverage right away to become irreplaceable to be on the winning side, as well as other use cases they can integrate into their own products to truly add value to their users. So my talk there was all about that. In fact, I remember I gave you guys a shout out because I was showing specific use cases.

Yours was around session replay, right? On, on how you could. You now can group a ton of those session replays and automatically to highlight those insights for so a PM doesn't need to watch tons of videos. They can automatically know what's happening and then still decide what to do about it. That's real.

That is not smoking mirrors, right? So there are the [00:22:00] same way I use that example. There are many others. And that's what I'm expecting PMs to grab onto.

Jeff: What are some of the other cool use cases you've seen? You're like, what are the real benefits, right? Cause obviously that's one is session replay. The problem has always been it's data rich. Like you've just so much stuff there, but it's not super structured.

It's not . Easy to access. And really the kind of discovery use case to find stuff was, you just had to watch a ton of sessions. And now, we've been able to leverage AI to basically, the way we put it is like, it watches the sessions for you and then highlights where opportunities for growth, what's really impeding your users and what are your opportunities for the biggest area to go work on to, to improve that, experience for them.

There's a lot of other really cool. Cool. Things you can do with AI across, the set of product tools are going on. What are some that you've seen that you have really stood out to you?

Carlos: Yeah. And I have a hot tech here for you. Because most of the work that we do at product school is actually for large enterprises. So we train JP Morgan or hospitals, other [00:23:00] banks very large companies that are at a different stage of maturity than. Small high tech companies in Silicon Valley or New York, right?

So for them making incremental improvements on something is massive. So that's where we actually focus on when we do our upskilling and transformation program. So the financial services industry, we have a lot of experience. We'll go in and they are not even in many cases, they might not even know what a session replay is.

So just by adopting that technology or that use case, that's already a massive win. I'm talking about in double digits percentage of productivity for a specific team. And then of course, if you layer AI onto that, then you can even shave more productivity points. But like for us what we try to do is to meet our customers where they are.

And I know AI is sexy. And everybody wants to know like the flashy use case that is going to sell cancer. And I hope that we'll get there. I don't know whether yet [00:24:00] for me, it's also about like, where are those smaller wins? So you can feel more comfortable with technology and then actually make you come up with other opportunities that you probably know better than me.

Jeff: Yeah. I think that's the thing is AI is we forget it hit really the public conscience what a year and a half ago is when, open AI released chat GPT onto the world and everyone's mind was collectively blown at one moment. It has not been that long though. And. To see the improvement and what people are doing with it is really astounding, but there's also a lot of bluster and show and just there's a lot of features that demo well, but don't actually do anything.

I think this is going to be one of the cool things to see over the next 10 years is where does this land? What ends up catalyzing into real benefit? And what ends up being just a little bit of, the VR, AR craze that has happened for 15 straight years, I feel and still is only just beginning to hit now.

It's going to be a fun ride. I'm looking forward to this one.

Carlos: Jeff I see you are [00:25:00] standing up and before, before we started the podcast, we talked about how you don't have a chair right now. So you're being forced to stand up, right?

Jeff: Exactly.

Carlos: up too. But if you think about this analogy now, it's in, in this previous transformation when was mobile, right?

There were a lot of new companies that had no, website. So they became mobile first by definition, while there were others that already had a website and they had to navigate that transition. I think we're now in an, in another paradigm where there's going to be a lot of new AI first companies. That really use that in a native way.

And there are majority of us who didn't start our companies when AI was cool and are trying to figure it out how to do that transition. Think we are in those baby stages right now. And I think it's good. And I want to encourage PMs to play with that technology. Even if that new feature that you launched that says it's going to save the world with AI doesn't fully work.

Like it's a good learning opportunity. Now, obviously at some point you are going to need to start showing real value. And now we're seeing some [00:26:00] cases of companies that are able to actually monetize AI and their different models. They are able to sell it in as an add on package while there are other companies that are integrating AI capabilities as part of their standard pay packages.

So I'm bullish and I want to encourage people to keep building because there is a. You cannot replace that aspect in order to truly build great products.

Jeff: yeah, I'm totally on board there, right? It's, we're baby days right now. Clearly there's gonna be something here. , it reminds me a lot of the back and forth kind of belt like, is it really going to have value? Reminds me a lot of the early days of e commerce when people would question, are people really going to buy anything online?

And Jeff Bezos and Amazon would probably say yeah, yeah, they will. 

Carlos: And also, yes, think about worst case scenario for a company. Let's say you try to integrate AI and it doesn't work. So what? Try something else, like it's not like you are operating a patient here and open heart surgery, like you are literally trying to add value and it's your responsibility to also choose when to plug the cord and find other ways to add more value to your customers.

Jeff: exactly. It's [00:27:00] another tool in the toolbox. It's not always going to work, but used correctly going to be hugely valuable. Speaking of value and product I want to move on to one other topic and it's again, product school, actually to go back to, I think at one point you offhandedly mentioned a little bit ago that you always thought about product school as a product.

And I think this is my favorite thing actually about product. I've realized this in talking to, um, VPs and CPOs for the past several years and really focused during the, while we were doing this show is yes, there's capital P product and it's a job and you get paid to do it. I think product focused thought is nothing new.

This is what people have been doing to build companies, to build processes, to build most of the enduring things that we have from a business standpoint. To this day, it just never had a, capitalized name capital P product. But you realize that looking at it this way, it helps you understand a lot of these things.

And, [00:28:00] I want to talk a little bit about product school from that lens, because, even you as a founder and entrepreneur and you run an, education and events company. That's still being a product person, right? Like you had to think about how you delivered it. You had to think about how it was designed to experience, to be the right experience for the right people who you were going to focus on, how you were going to serve them and whether it, it might not be a digital product always, but that's product.

And that's what I love about it is like this thought process is everywhere around us and can be just useful across a lot of things. Specifically, so you said what you guys are 2 million members now. That is mind blowing, first of all but take yourself , back to 2014 to 15 or whatever.

At one point, did you have that aha moment of product market fit? I know there was grinding at the beginning. I've read some of the early story, but at what point did you go We're on to something here. We've got something going.

Carlos: During the pandemic., so to your previous point around product treating my company as a product, yeah, to me, product is a [00:29:00] mindset more than a job title. And what I really mean by that mindset is that yeah, when I, my company was smaller and I was wearing the product manager hat, I was.

Solving problems for my customers. To me, ultimately product management is about solving customer problems in a way that is sustainable for your business. So now that there are more layers in my company where I run a hundred people full time, my product is my team. So they are the ones who have more interaction directly with customers.

And I'm trying to solve problems for my team so they can better serve my customers. But ultimately that mindset. It's the same. So when you asked me about what was that inflection point or like moment when I realized, Oh my God, why don't do something? This is not a niche anymore. That was the pandemic because for the first seven, maybe six years or so, while we were bootstrapping company was always growing.

But then when the pandemic hit, then online learning became the only type of learning and digital skills like product became more in demand than ever. So [00:30:00] that was an up or out situation when overnight we became mission critical for the majority of the world. So our business pretty much tripled during that time.

And that was the moment when we realized, Oh my God yes, I can continue bootstrapping this thing. But I also think we have a shot at making this really big while ensuring quality. We've been also doing so many iterations that I believe we're ready to go bigger. And that's when we decided to raise capital.

Here's the thing. We raised capital from a growth equity firm, which is the opposite of a venture capital firm which also gave me more confidence in And how I wanted to run the business is first of all, as a minority stake. So I still maintain the majority, but also they would align with the fact that we wanted to grow profitably because private equity in general, their expectation of a return is very different.

They are not going for the home run at all costs, right? They are fine with a three to seven X. [00:31:00] The thing for them is they don't want to lose. So we are like, we're a solid business that is doing something good for customers that wants to grow faster and still maintain profitability. That sounded like a perfect private equity fit.

Jeff: nice. Yeah. I remember still the day that you guys announced that first raise of 25 million and just thinking like this is going to be great because this is such a, needed thing right now where the demand for product is growing and the education level here is, spot on.

So I was really happy for you guys that day and it's been great seeing the growth. Um, talk about that though. I guess even before that, right? Like you, you were growing quickly, even in the teens, like what were the levers of that growth from a membership standpoint early on?

What did you find that was some of those early unlocks to make sure you were hitting that nest benchmark or bringing in the people you needed to continue to finance the company and grow profitably.

Carlos: So the product was working. It always worked. Even when the product was. But according to my quality standards, meaning [00:32:00] like when we were very early and I was the instructor, like they're much better product leaders out there that are teaching now, but like even at that small scale, the product was working and what I mean is that I was going out of my way to ensure that every single paid student would get a job.

Or a promotion and I would do it at a local scale, right in San Francisco. But that was the best marketing ever because I didn't have to go and sell someone on something that I don't believe in. I had my army of very successful graduates who they were already highlighting their new jobs on LinkedIn, so I was making introductions between prospective students and.

And previous ones. And that was like a flywheel unstoppable flywheel. Eventually that became more mainstream and more companies started believing in the value of our certification and started adding product school certifications as a requirement or nice to have in job descriptions. So now you have a ton of companies requesting our certification.

You have a lot of [00:33:00] successful graduates listing our certification on their resumes or LinkedIn profile. And you have a third stakeholder here. Which is instructors, all of our instructors, they keep their full time jobs and they are product leaders, right? That Netflix, Google, Airbnb. So they are also listing their experience on their LinkedIn profile.

So that makes it so powerful that when you are now looking for information around product. We come up as a trusted source

Jeff: And I'm sure it also doesn't hurt when you list the instructor and they have a pedigree of, some of those big, Silicon Valley success stories. It's, very validating to the audience. I'm sure. 

Carlos: That I believe that is what education, especially this type of professional education should be all about. It should be about showing the ROI and connecting education with employment. And the best way to do it these days is it's online, right? Like you can, you should be able to go to LinkedIn and other places and see where are those graduates working?

Who are the instructors? What is the comp increase that these people get within a certain period of time? Those are the things that [00:34:00] I. Believe that traditional education still has to catch up on,

Jeff: No, it makes sense. Especially something like this, where it's a professional certification, you're not going for fun. You're going to advance your career. So that's probably the best advertising right there. Is like you said it's people being successful and telling people, you know, it's like the best case study you could have, but it's done at scale.

Within the school, right? , great teachers are important. You also need a volume of students. But it's a little bit of a chicken and egg or kind of a marketplace problem where I assume you're probably knocking at the, huge name brand teachers, if. You only have five students, but you also need great teachers to bring students in.

What did you find was the first piece of that, or how did you solve that marketplace problem? Like, where did you drive that from?

Carlos: I'm going to give you another hot take here

Jeff: I love

Carlos: When I started I didn't know many people in the product space. So I had no right to really connect with them, but I didn't care either. So I would go and reach out to them on LinkedIn, Instagram. Email, [00:35:00] whatever. Sometimes I would see that they are giving a talk somewhere in San Francisco.

I would show up as a, as an attendee to then catch them after the talk and tell them about my business and invite them to participate. So I was literally hustling to try to go for the best. I never believed in a progressive improvement of the quality of the instructors. I was like, it's either me.

Or the best because I'm not the best, but I'm the most passionate one. So at least I want to, I can ensure quality here took me two years until someone said yes. That's why I kept doing the teaching part for so long, but the one, the first guy who said yes was actually. Top product leader and recruiter at LinkedIn.

He used to work with Mark Zuckerberg at Meta before LinkedIn. And then with one of the co founders at LinkedIn, he literally set up the product practice. And the reason why he said yes, other than me asking for it five times was that he really resonated with the mission of the company. He said, hell yeah, when I was in your shoes, when I was trying to break into product, I had no idea what I was doing.

So now that I'm in a [00:36:00] different position in life, I want to give back. And I think that's the beautiful thing about Silicon Valley, which is there, these people exist. And sometimes they say, yes, not always. That's why you have to keep pushing, but you will get to one or two and you don't need that many because to me, As a bootstrap founder, I wasn't going for like, Oh my God, I need to find a hundred of the best product leaders in the world.

I was like, I just need one so I can take a few afternoons off, and from there, little by little, that was the domino effect. Now it's not just me pitching a vision. Now it's Hey, me and my buddy, Mark, by the way, the same way I was introducing prospective students to successful graduates, I started doing the same with instructors.

I was introducing prospective instructors. To mark another, so they could also tell the story.

Jeff: Nice. Yeah. I do have to say, I think that is another one of my favorite things of the product community in general is there's just such a deep, like true feeling of people want to give back to the community. They want to help people learn. They want to help [00:37:00] people grow. They want to teach and, be a part of it.

And there's so many people I've talked to who, we've reached out and asked them to speak on a webinar or speak at a event we were putting on. Or even just. answer some questions for us because we were trying to teach ourselves or educate ourselves about something. And the just hospitality there and the willingness to take time out of their busy days to give back and to give of their knowledge is truly astounding.

And so I think that's been one of my favorite things about working in the space has been. Just the people there are also passionate about it, that they all want to just bubbling over with the need to tell people. So it's a fun place to work. It's been a fun area to really focus on for years now.

And you've had 10 years. I'm jealous. You've had even more time. Um. Looking at product though, like again, back to product school as a product you've gone from, kind of education and classes to, you have, you went from, small classes to big Online, many people classes you've gone to you start with certifications, but now you have the podcast, you have product con, which is where you and I met, five years [00:38:00] ago out in San Francisco.

You have the prod ease, you have I'm sure there's things I'm missing even, but you've really, you've stuck to a niche, but you've really branched out well across multiple ways of getting there. What was the logic behind this? Like, how did you look at each extension and say, now's the time.

Carlos: I love that question so much Jeff, because first of all, it just takes a long time, right? It's not that you, it's possible to diversify that rapidly took me 10 years or what I would say few five years until, for example, I launched the conference. But I think this is not a niche anymore. And that is the key part.

When I started product was a niche. Now it's really mainstream. It's not a secret anymore. So how can I maintain our identity and our brand positioning within that word and still add value? So education is our main part. That's the business model, but first and foremost, we're a community and over 90 percent of our resources are actually absolutely free [00:39:00] and available for everyone.

So the reason why I do that is twofold. One is because I believe. It's good for business, like adding value upfront, adding as much value as front as, as frequently as possible is good business. It creates a good relationship and it shows trust upfront. And even if whoever is receiving that value never ever becomes a paid customer, so be it.

There's no expectation in return. It's mostly about truly adding value because good things happen, especially if you are playing this over the long period of time as I am. But the other thing is It's also good, for the world in general, if I'm passionate about this thing, I don't think I'll be able to create this type of education business or community for cyber security.

Like it's just not my thing. So there is something about me truly believing in this, that it helped me push through the lack of data. And some of the other unconventional hypothesis that would say, do not do this. Now that we're here, how do I pick what's next? Trying to be smart about how I can repurpose what I have, [00:40:00] because no matter how big we are or will be in the future, I still want to keep that type of scrappy mindset and that focus on product.

So the next extension after our training was a book. It's called the product book. I was like, okay, not everybody can afford our paid certifications, but I already have the curriculum. So let me repurpose some of that in a way that can be easy to consume by anyone in the world.

And I'm also going to make it free because my goal is not to make money off a book. I just want to get more distribution and that's what happened. So we've got over 200, 000 downloads and a lot of people that started now actually Engaging with some of our other resources. We started doing events. Like we said, Oh my God, there's so many amazing product leaders here that want to teach.

Yes. Don't have the time, right? Like teaching is a big commitment because you need to invest a lot of time to prep and to spend with your students. But they, maybe they can give me 30, 60 minutes to give a free talk on a very particular topic. Cool. [00:41:00] Let's do it and make it free. So some of these things Sound like very rocket science from the outside.

It's not, it's just common sense. Just being there and saying, how can I open source, my product as much as possible with the intention to make it be knowing that even though there are no expectations return, if I play this game for the longterm, it's going to be a win for everybody.

Jeff: yeah, when you talk about like that, it makes sense where you took curriculum and knowledge and just find different ways to package it up and deliver it in different formats or different ways. But, we always hear because we create a lot of content here. We're very focused on educating the community on, product.

We have a big content set. We have a lot on engineering and we've always focused on. Can we build the content? Can we get the audience to read it? And then how does it grow the business and that's been one of those things looking at if we can create the base content There's a lot you can do with the knowledge once you've created it and you know turning into like in your case [00:42:00] right taking it from a curriculum into Taking that same set or similar set of people and turning into presentations at events or like you said a book You know, it's such a great lesson in how you grow a product without really having to do a ton of, you're not adding that same amount of work every time you're growing it.

Carlos: And there's one key thing here, Jeff, which is. For me, which is free, doesn't mean less quality or bad quality, right? Like the core part of anything that we create. And I tell this to my team, it has to be highest possible quality. I want the best product experts in the world, and they are also going to vote in free offerings as well as paid offerings, but we cannot sacrifice quality just because.

It is free that applies to the podcast, for example, or to the conferences. I believe that if you just, it's like similar to Nike, how they glorify athletes and for them, it's all about the athlete. This sounds crazy, but at product school, it's all about the product leader and we glorify them and we want to give them a platform because they didn't have a platform [00:43:00] that way too many platforms for founder CEOs.

And I. I'm here to blame myself, look at me in this podcast, but it's true. Like the real doers, they had no spotlight and now they, they do

Jeff: Yeah, no, it's, we have a rule about that too. A rocket and it's, I jokingly tell people, but I'm dead on serious that,, we don't half ass anything we're going to do needs to be at the quality level of full on excellence and the thing is, there's no half assing anything we do is going to have a whole ass on it.

We're not going to do it. And the point there is right like our content is all free. We give it away. It's a great way to similarly, build and build a community and build an audience. You can't compromise on it just because it's free. It's not less important than the core product itself.

The core session replay analytics. We don't build that in any way, but the absolute best possible way, but the content has to be the same way, right? Anything we're doing. And I think that, it sounds like you guys echo it over at product schools, anything you're doing do [00:44:00] amazingly well, whole ass on it, or just don't do it because that's going to compromise across the whole thing, potentially.

Cool. I think we started to get into it, right? I was going to ask you about, why stay focused on product. It seems like this educational model works and given your ability to execute, you could. Seemingly grow it into a lot of different areas. Bootcamps and the kind of education model seems to work across, like you brought up earlier, there's coding there's been data, data analyst bootcamps and stuff, and that kind of community focused education works across all that.

But I guess just to go back to it. You're passionate about product and that's what drives the company forward. You're not looking, you're not going to, immediately is least looking to branch out into other topics. It's how can you continue to grow this community and this kind of curriculum area.

Carlos: exactly. And the way we chose to grow is actually more B2B. So we do a lot of training for large enterprises and they are massive, right? They have hundreds, if not thousands of product professionals. So the room to grow there is [00:45:00] massive. It's just that they need some of the. The access and resources that other people have.

And that is the beauty of it. And then even within product, as we think about content categories, there's so much that first of all, AI, obviously now how to apply gen AI to product strategy, product growth, product marketing, product leadership. Like before, when I started, it was all about becoming a PM, but that's just the start these days, right?

That is an entire career ladder. All the way up to chief product officer. So how do you really crack the code and continue moving up? That is the type of certifications that we can offer. And I feel very proud saying, yeah, it's within product. I believe in the category and I don't need to diversify the category.

Jeff: Yeah, no, exactly. It's I love that you started as a kind of B2C company, but you've unlocked something I didn't even think about, which was how do you have the B2B application of the same things you've, you've nailed both ends of that market and, it's as typical, it's a little less visible and a little less, maybe sexy and outwardly [00:46:00] known.

But hugely value driving. And, one of those things operates behind the scenes, but, it's hugely important to the business. 

Carlos: That's what some companies now call PLG. To me, it's common sense. It's okay, if you are some employees of a company swiping the credit card, Then you should go and talk to the manager to tell them that they are your client. If you want to call it PLG or Bottoms Up, so be it.

Jeff: you just took the, you just took the Dropbox model and applied it to product education. It's, Hey, you got a bunch of people here who are all using it. You guys should probably just, pony up and centralize. That's all genius, right? Like way to, Way to take a proven model and just utilize it to grow the company and keep growing the product community.

Carlos, I could, I'll be honest, I could keep going with you for hours. It is, I've gotten over the hump of, there's not a thousand people around us right now. And, I think we got it done, but I, like you said, you're a CEO, there's a lot going on. I appreciate you coming on.

This has been a real blast, man. I hope, hopefully we can have you on again at some point. But I guess if people want to follow up, obviously, they can come out to product con and find you. I know San Francisco is coming up soon, but what, is there [00:47:00] anywhere else, should people reach out on LinkedIn or what's a great way if people have further questions here?

Carlos: LinkedIn is the best way to connect with me. And one of my productivity or anti productivity hacks, if you will, is that I actually blog 30 minutes every day to look at my LinkedIn inbox. So my commitment is that if someone pings me, I'll definitely get back to them at some point, not to, not too far.

Jeff: I can actually attest. It's true. I have bugged you a couple of times on LinkedIn and you've always been there. No, I appreciate the accessibility. You've built a great company here. We, we're big fans. We'll be there in San Francisco. When it happens and so yeah, any closing thoughts before we go?

Carlos: Jeff hope the next time we chat is not 10 years from now. I know I see you. I see you in a few weeks in San Francisco. Thank you for your support.

Jeff: Sounds good. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Carlos