This week, I’m joined by Egil Østhus — co-founder and CEO of Unleash, an open-source feature management platform used by teams at Wayfair, T-Mobile, Allianz, and more.
Before launching Unleash, Egil led engineering at Visma, a 6,000+ developer SaaS giant. He’s seen both the slow grind of corporate transformation and the chaos of building from scratch — and in this conversation, we talk about what he’s learned from both.
We get into:
Why leadership isn’t so different between big companies and startups
How they built a no-ego, high-trust culture at Unleash
Why being too frugal nearly slowed them down
Egil’s coaching-style approach to leading teams
How he handles remote work, loneliness, and vulnerability as a founder
There’s a moment in this interview — where Egil shares how he felt completely exposed in front of his team — that really stayed with me. If you’ve ever felt the weight of leadership, you’ll hear yourself in this episode.
Let me know what resonates with you — or forward it to someone building something brave.
🎧 Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
2:10 Why feature management matters
7:40 What changes (and what doesn’t) when you go from corporate to startup
12:00 Building culture from day one
16:10 Leading with coaching, not command
23:00 Vulnerability, trust, and showing up
28:00 Remote work, loneliness, and presence
33:00 What Egil’s still figuring out
📌 Subscribe for more interviews with scaleup leaders.
🔗 Learn more about Unleash: https://www.getunleash.io/
📣 Follow Egil: https://www.linkedin.com/in/egilosthus/
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