Egil Østhus

Egil Østhus is co-founder and CEO of Unleash, the open-source feature management company he runs with his brother Ivar. Unleash began at the Norwegian marketplace FINN.no in 2014 and was open-sourced the following year, according to VentureBeat.

Ivar's Side Project at FINN.no

Ivar was a tech lead at FINN, where deployment was fully automated but teams still held code back because it was not ready, Egil told Modern CTO. The tech stack spanned many languages, so Ivar built a feature toggle system that worked across all of FINN's microservices.

Bringing Egil In Over Beer and Food

Companies began emailing Ivar asking him to host it for them, and he started talking it over with Egil over beer and food, Ivar recalled on a podcast: "And this was about the time I brought Egil to the table." Egil joined as co-founder and CEO in 2019 to launch the commercial version, and both brothers later left their full-time jobs for Unleash.