From Corporate VP to Startup CEO — Egil Østhus on Leadership, Culture, and Letting Go of Ego

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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