This week’s SaaSiest Community Member of the week is Øystein Ellingbø, CTO at Ardoq. Øystein has been a member of the SaaSiest CTO Network for four consecutive years, always contributing with knowledge and valuable conversations. We also had the pleasure of meeting him at our Oslo meetup – which he (and his collegues) helped us host in the Ardoq office 🤩
We asked Øystein a couple of personal questions; see his answers below:
🧩 Tell us something about yourself that we wouldn’t find on your LinkedIn profile
“What LinkedIn doesn’t see, but Strava does, is that I’m a big fan of outdoor sports. Snowkiting and kitesurfing are my main passions. But also XC-skiing, mountain biking, road biking and running happen frequently. For me, planning time to disconnect and digest everything that is happening is extremely important. Especially now that doom-clauding has made me catch myself far up the cat-assing scale.”
💼 What’s the best part of your job?
“There’s two things that drive. I really like uncertainty. At least if that means that the potential upside is large. Asking “What if we could?” and “How can we achieve it?” is super exciting! I find that the thrill of the upside overshadows the anxiety of the downside. Secondly, it’s the variation of what I do and focus on. One week I’m heads down, running 5-10 parallel agents, bulldozing through adding German and French language support to our platform. Another I’m passionate about driving the culture we want and a third is all about company and product strategy.”
🤝 What does it mean for you to be part of the SaaSiest Community?
“What SaaSiest has managed to do, is to create a large community of highly engaged people. I think this is quite unique. Other communities of this size tend to become very passive and not very value adding. What I enjoy the most is the curated CTO group I’m in. Awesome people, super relevant topics and I always end up learning something.”
Thanks, Øystein, for being part of the SaaSiest Community 🩷
