Jan Oberhauser

Jan Oberhauser is founder and CEO of n8n, the fair-code workflow automation platform that grew from a Berlin side project into a default place many teams build AI agents and integrations. He came out of media studies and visual-effects pipelines, then spent years connecting tools that refused to talk to each other.

Stuttgart media studies and VFX pipelines

He studied media at Stuttgart Media University, then worked as a compositor and pipeline technical director in visual effects, where the job was less about pretty frames than about brittle chains of tools that had to survive production schedules. Prior startups followed, including work around creative tooling, before he settled on the automation problem he kept hitting: teams needed to wire SaaS, databases, and custom APIs without rebuilding the same glue every quarter.

Founding n8n in Berlin

In 2019 he founded n8n in Berlin as a node-based workflow tool that could self-host and stay under the user's control. He hired community talent early, including a prolific contributor who became one of the first employees after discovering the project on Product Hunt. Licensing stayed deliberately honest: source available and free to run, including in production, but not free for someone else to sell hosted n8n. On Sequoia's Training Data podcast he explained why he refused to call it open source: he had watched communities burn when projects changed the rules midstream, and he wanted the usage terms clear from day one.

Connect everything to anything

When generative AI arrived, n8n could have bolted on a chat feature. Instead Oberhauser pushed the product into agent building blocks: models, memory, tools, and parsers that non-Python builders could compose. On Training Data he summarized the stack philosophy simply: "you can actually connect everything to anything," and "I don't know what LLM is going to win the race in the end... But that's the great thing about n8n... you can use whatever is best for your use case." Community content and bottom-up adoption became the growth engine after the company stopped forcing a lead-gen culture that fought its own strengths.

On becoming the Excel of AI

Asked where n8n should land if everything goes right, he told Sequoia: "if people 15 years ago they heard 'spreadsheet,' they thought about Excel. And if people in a few years think about, 'Hey, I have to build AI...' the only thing that should come to mind is n8n." On Accel's Excel of AI conversation he framed the same ambition as empowering everyone from private builders to enterprises to get real value out of agents, not just demos. The through-line is horizontal orchestration: model-agnostic, community-first, and honest about how the company makes money.