The following interview is a conversation we had with Egil Østhus, CEO of Unleash, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $16.5 Million Raised to Build the Future of Feature Management
Egil Osthus
Absolutely, thanks for having me.
Brett
Yes. So before we can talk about what you’re building, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Egil Osthus
Absolutely. So, as you said, my name is Egylstus. I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of Unleash. So Unleash is the largest open source feature management tool available in the market today. But on myself, growing up, small child in the basement, hacking computers, I always believe I wanted to be on and wanted to end up as a software developer. Luckily for everybody, I didn’t end up. So so after a few years doing programming for kind of profession, I realized much better getting people successful, running businesses, doing more leadership type of roles. So the past seven years before going into this startup, I was taking various management position in large corporations. Married, two kids, 14 and eleven. Love hiking, love running, getting outdoors here in a beautiful Norway. Amazing.
Brett
Let’s talk about Norway. So can you explain to us a little bit more about what the tech ecosystem looks like there today?
Egil Osthus
Absolutely, happy to. So, you know, Norway is this big oil country, so there’s a lot of engineering skills in this country. What we’ve seen lately or over the last couple of years, there has been AI transcription into more kind of or software is very important for any industry. So I would say that texting in Norway, very mature, very DevOps focused, very much frontrunners when it comes to kind of latest ways of delivering high quality software. And also I think what we are fortunate is kind of our high standards of living and very kind of modest salaries. So you would find very skilled developers at a very modest salary level here.
Brett
In Norway as a country. Norway is undergoing a very similar transition as Saudi Arabia. Right. It’s a very oil rich country that’s trying to transition to a kind of more tech in clean world.
Egil Osthus
Absolutely. You hit it directly on the header. I mean, we are fortunate with our resources, with the oil and everything. And obviously we also have this bias towards being environmental friendly, which is a very nice catch 22 for you. So there is a big conversation going on. We need to get out of all we need to kind of move into the environmental friendly industry and energy at the same time. It’s tough to move out of a very high payment type of industry. I mean oil business particularly lately with the macros that we see around us with the operating and everything of course is a difficult conversation and we are fortunate to make a lot of money out of that as a country.
Brett
And is there a sovereign wealth fund that’s doing a lot of this venture investing on venture?
Egil Osthus
Not so much. So basically how this is set up is the Norwegian government has set up this investment fund that is investing our oil money all across the globe. So make sure we don’t kind of overheat the Norwegian economy as per se. They do some venture funding but primarily kind of more kind of publicly traded companies properties, like really long term sustainable investments.
Brett
Got it. And then what’s? Like the big unicorn in Norway. I know your sister country, Sweden, has Klarna who’s like the Klarna of Norway or who’s the big company there?
Egil Osthus
I would say there is a handful of those with SoftBank lately. We had like auto store, we had Cahoots, we had also a grocery store that is sort of but all of these companies lately are taking a big hit with sort of the latest development on the markets. So who else? First search and research back in the days they were acquired by Microsoft. There’s a big tech scene around video conferencing. Most of the companies have been acquired by Cisco, to be honest. So there seems to be a big trend of acquiring Norwegian companies and we are on the track not to be acquired over the next couple of years, to be honest.
Brett
Got it.
Egil Osthus
Makes a lot of sense.
Brett
Now a couple of questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder and as an entrepreneur. Is there a specific CEO that you’ve really studied a lot and learned the most from and really admire?
Egil Osthus
I would say there are so many to kind of look up to. One of the guys that really are true inspiration to me is said over at GitLab. And the reason for why I looked so much of the GitHub or Said is they have created this very remote, first fully transparent organization. Right? And what really stands out to me is how detailed information they share with everybody on how they think about everything basically. So you can go in there and read their every handbook is very detailed, very kind of up to date at any time and really reading and looking to how they build their company as a remote first company at the same time fully transparent. I have a lot of respect for that. Not copying but kind of building into or getting a lot of inspiration on how we can apply the learnings into our context and our company.
Brett
Yeah, we work with open Core Ventures, which is, I don’t know what they call it, but it’s venture capital studio, basically. And there’s two companies that they’ve incubated and funded out of there called Fleet Device Management and Flow Forge. And it’s been an interesting look at how they’re just replicating that open core model. Everything’s very open and transparent. It’s been really interesting, just from my perspective, to have an inside look at how these types of companies are built. And I think that’s all Sid brainchild in terms of that structure and the approach.
Egil Osthus
Yeah. Makes tons of sense. Absolutely.
Brett
And what about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder? And this can be traditional business book, like The Hard Thing about Hard Things, or it could be a personal book that’s really just influenced how you view the world.
Egil Osthus
There are so many I honestly love to read. I was sort of thinking about two particular ones. One very local and one more kind of recognized by the historians, I assume. So the first one local one is an Ouchian book called Organizational Culture. It’s by a guy called Hanning Bang. And basically what it does is breaking down organizational culture into some tangible aspects. I’m a very engineering by heart kind of a guy and I’m growing up through my professional career, I’ve been very into or very inspired by what the strength of a company culture. But I always found it like abstract, very fluffy, really not tangible. So this book really gives you the framework of bringing that kind of what is and culture, what does it consist of? What can you work with? How can you work with that? And how can you really start assessing it in order to impact in the direction you need it to the best of the company.
Egil Osthus
And I would say the second one is the voltage effect. It’s this by John list. Very thought through, very experimentational, talking through how you want to go by learning and taking the experiments, making experiments to really understand if you’re onto something or if there’s false positives and all these kind of things. And very mathematical engineering type of thinking around creating a business. So those two is those I keep coming back to, if you know what I mean. Nice.
Brett
Is that first one available in English or is that a very Norway specific?
Egil Osthus
I would love it to be in English. I actually spoke with the author at some point and asked him if there’s an English version because I really would like to hand it out to my team. But unfortunately it’s only in Norwegian. So for now you need to kind of transition into this off language of Norway to read it.
Brett
It better be a good book if I’m going to have to learn Norwegian just to just read it. Perfect. Well, let’s talk a bit more about the company now. Let’s talk about Unleash. So at a high level, what are customers paying you to solve for them?
Egil Osthus
Yeah, so Unleash is official management tool. So really what we do is we are simplifying how software developers are delivering software through production. So releasing software today often is a very tedious and stressful moment for most developers, software engineers. And what we do, we are taking away that stress. We are allowing them to really be in control of how they want to release their new features to who, when or what kind of segments of the users and really testing this in a very risk less manner. And why is this important? This is important because software developers as I know them, software engineers, they’re really much looking for this Fry bill of learning. What software developer is doing is really solving really complex problems. And the way to do that is to chunk it into small steps and every step you validate or is this going as I expected to do, yes or no and so forth.
Egil Osthus
And you don’t really know if you solve the problem before you really have it as part of the production code. And of course, if you want to put it in production, it’s a high risk if you make mistakes. So that’s basically what we do. We decouple release to production from release to customers. And that’s basically what we do.
Brett
And what types of software, what types of organizations do they work for? Is this big Fortune 500 companies? Is this Forbes cloud 100. What does that look like?
Egil Osthus
It’s all over the place. And that’s the interesting part. And everybody knows this and you guys are there in San Francisco knows particular. Every company is a software company these days. So it’s basically anywhere. We are targeting our effort more and we kind offer SMB larger enterprises. That’s more of how we have designed the product and some of the features and how we think about things. But basically any software developer around the globe can benefit largely from this, either if they are a small company or if they are a huge corporation, like the Fortune 500 type of companies.
Brett
And if we look at the feature management category, is that a category that’s recognized by Gartner and Forester or what does that look like?
Egil Osthus
It’s getting recognized as a category. It’s still in the early phase. I think the Forester came out with a report on feature management and experimentation last year. So it’s sort of the first report in this category. It’s sort of being created, but still it has been sort of addressed by a few players already. So it’s in the early phase. But I would say it’s an established category as of now.
Brett
And in terms of what that landscape or that ecosystem looks like, I know you guys are open source. Are there closed source players then as well in future management or who controls the market today?
Egil Osthus
Absolutely, the two big players and they are closed source vendors and we are the biggest open source player in this category as of now.
Brett
Have you always been die hard on open source or what was the background there for you?
Egil Osthus
I would say more than anything, I co founded this company Unleashed together with my brother. And my brother is the true brain of Unleash and he was the one that decided to open source Ondish initially. So when this project was created, it was created for developers. It was developed by developers, for developers. It was launched as an open source because developers want to give back to community, share their code and really be part of a larger community. So it was initially created as an open source project for the better for the community. And what happens with open source project when they are successful, it starts organic to grow. And that was happened. So it was very much a bottom up adoption. And when Ivar, my brother came to me and said well, there is something going on here, we decided to kind of jump on this train and build this company together.
Egil Osthus
So I was sort of buying into this and being part of this journey for a couple of years now. The strength, the power and the momentum that is coming from the open source wave is absolutely astonishing. It’s all bolting up.
Brett
And how big is the community?
Egil Osthus
Oh, that’s a very good question. So when you look at the docker pools, we are close to 16.5 million docker pools, which is sort of an indicator. We have identified ten k or so community members altogether somewhere in the community. A few hundred of those are more kind of what we categorize as active on a more kind of frequent basis. So it’s getting there. Nice.
Brett
That’s amazing. And in terms of running an open source company, what are some of those challenges that you face? I think a lot of our listeners are founders who want to build open source. They believe in open source but there’s obviously some downsides. So how have you navigated the downsides of having an open source company?
Egil Osthus
Very good question and I very much relate to this. So when we started to kick up this company, we sat down obviously saying okay, we need to be true to the open source. There is certain kind of you need to really believe in it and be very transparent in doing so because you cannot take this. This is not something you can fake. So we also saw that there is a very clear tension between the commercial drivers because we are hairful business for sure. At the same time there is a tension between a commercial aspect of the company and the open source side of the company. So what we decided to do very early on is basically train on getting this tension right. Meaning it’s a good tension if it’s done right and it’s a very bad tension if it’s done wrong. And let me kind of go into a bit in details there.
Egil Osthus
So our belief is that you don’t want to oversell to developers, but at the same time, if you’re upfront very transparent, very kind of going along with the same metropolitan for a long time, saying, this is what we want to do. We want to kind of build a business around this and this is how we think around building that business. We will continue to invest in open source because that’s important to us. So that’s something we continuously are very aware of. At the same time, we need to also make sure we are building value for our enterprise customers that is paying the big dollars to use this service. So getting this kind of trained to get this right early was a very important momentum for us. And I would say maybe this is still our biggest challenge because when I talk to our sales team, they want us to kind of just slim down the open source, make it like as few features, no support, anything.
Egil Osthus
At the same time, we know open source needs to be the best product and Open source needs to be the best product for developers, individual developers. And the open source community is expecting us to be promptly responding, very engaging with them in discussing features, issues, problems, challenges. So this balance is never going to go away and it’s really difficult.
Brett
And that’s what I’ve heard a lot from open source companies, right, is that developer marketing doesn’t exist. So it’s very hard to do developer marketing because they’re very allergic to the traditional marketing approach and messages that companies have.
Egil Osthus
Absolutely. And we are fortunate to deal with a very skilled audience or market. I mean, developers, they are bright people. They are seeing right through if we do not have integrity in what we do. So I think it forces us to be very cautious and thought through on how we are dealing with our marketing effort, but also building the product. Because if we are devaluating the product for the open source users, that is also being to be highly recognized and they will tell by leaving company, they will not kind of speak up necessarily makes sense.
Brett
So in terms of the go to market then, what does the sales team look like and how do you start to convert those users when they’re just the individual contributors using the platform? How do you know they’re ready to convert and try to sell them?
Egil Osthus
Yeah, so this is how we’re spending a lot of thought into this. So for us, we obviously are an open core business model. So in our product bundling, we are facing or state that the open source, open core has to be the preferred tool by individual developers, which means anything for individual or small team of software developers. They should always kind of prefer to use over open source. And what we mean by that is by feature, what type of feature do they need, what type of complex features, what type of anything for them to be successful, removing the stress I talked about just a few minutes ago, while we are moving into an enterprise version where we are seeing we are making the dollars. It’s basically when you start scaling from individual developers into kind of teams, large organization, more kind of compliance needs, other kind of more enterprise needs, that’s where we start saying, okay, this is actually features that we develop for making this tooling available and applicable for a large organization to kind of larger rollout, obviously supported by very strong customer success.
Egil Osthus
Or we actually discussed quite a bit of, should we call it customer success? Yes or no? Because really what it’s about is about having technical people sitting together with developers, leaders, architects, similar kind of profiles, and really make them getting the most out of the product as absolutely possible, making their everyday life and processes as easy as absolutely possible. Some of the features, it’s very kind of obvious. Like single sign on. We do offer single sign on out of the box in enterprise. We do have documentation how we can do that in open source. You can build it yourself if you would like to. Of course, other more kind of complex needs such as large number of projects, or multiple environments, or role based access control with custom roles mapped back to your ad or whatever kind of authentication tooling you’re using. So that type of features and of course support customer success obviously comes with the enterprise as well.
Brett
And as I’m sure you know, over the last few years, there was a lot of funding being put into developer tools and I think that ended up creating a lot of noise in the market for developers and there’s just a lot of options. So if you were to boil down your success so far, what do you think you got right? What did you do specifically that helped you really rise above all that noise and convince developers to even give the tool a try?
Egil Osthus
Yeah, that’s a very good question and it’s a very difficult question as well. But one thing that we have been very focused on, and I think that’s also a large reason for our success is we’ve been very focused on really building a product that is needed and really loved by developers. And what we mean by that is really listening to what are the needs. Also kind of course, dog fooding. Always be having the developer first in when we design the product. And it goes all the way from have the Curl statements next to the UI. Easy to copy and paste into your terminal or developer documentation. Really putting a lot of effort into developer documentation or any type of tutorials, but also really focusing and be very cautious about what type of culture we really want to have in our community. So one of the things we are very consistent of is making sure if there is multiple contributors to an SDK or to any of the features, we always pick that version of the contribution that is having the author that is really truly living our values.
Egil Osthus
Because we think that if you want to be engaged in our community, you want to be part of a nice community where you feel welcomed, where you can kind of really exchange ideas, really challenge each other in a nice way to kind of lift up and have that growth mindset. So having kind of a positive criticism in making each other better, that’s really true to what we want to see in our community. And that’s also what we are pushing very hard for being ourselves and being very true that it’s ourselves, but also kind of inviting that kind of behavior in our community. So I think these two types together makes our community a very kind of welcoming, very kind of growth mindset type of community and it’s also a great product for developers. So more than anything, just staying late to focus on these two items, everything else will follow.
Egil Osthus
Amazing.
Brett
Last question for you. If we zoom out into the future, what’s the three year vision for Unleash?
Egil Osthus
Oh, my God. Three years. There’s so much that’s going to happen. Software developer and software experts, I truly believe they will always be there one way or the other. So we are here to make developers everyday life easier and simpler. I would say for us, the feature management is the first step on that road. So obviously we can discuss about commercial plans, we can expand into new markets. We are primarily looking at US and Europe at the moment. Obviously there is a huge community out there in Asia and Africa, but also when you think about the tooling and the capabilities within the software world or software developer, making software developer lives easier, there’s so many opportunities out there. So I definitely see ourselves moving and expanding into more product categories. Amazing.
Brett
Well, unfortunately that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today before we wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey as they build, where’s the.
Egil Osthus
Best place for them to go? Go to get on leash IO or follow us on Twitter. Get on leash or on LinkedIn. That’s where we keep our community updated. Or you are welcome to join our site. You will find the link on our Get On Leash IO web page. Awesome.
Brett
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat and share your vision and just share your perspective on market. This has been a lot of fun and I wish you best of luck in executing on this vision.
Egil Osthus
Thank you and thanks so much for having me.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. Let’s keep in touch.
Egil Osthus
Absolutely. Have a good one.
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