Erik Berggren, CEO of Valhalla Capital Partners, joins Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, to explain why the founder who built everything in a company must be the first person to let go of it.
When a founder-CEO has personally built every core system in a company, Erik Berggren holds that the leader must still hand off entire domains, not just tasks, to named people: he coaches Oscar, founder of a Swedish defense-tech company that scaled from four employees to roughly 40 to 50 through a Series A, to stop leading product development himself, even though Oscar remains the most technically capable person at the company.
Berggren spent 20 years in management consulting and SaaS leadership, including seven years at SuccessFactors during its growth from under $15 million in bookings to a $3.5 billion acquisition by SAP, before founding Valhalla Capital Partners, a private credit fund that invests alongside its own partners with no management fees.
This episode is for CEOs who built their company’s core product or system personally and now struggle to hand pieces of it off as the company scales past what one founder can run alone.
Key Takeaways
- A CEO who personally built every system in a company must still delegate product development, fundraising, and external relationships to named people once the company passes roughly 40 to 50 employees, according to Berggren’s coaching of a Swedish defense-tech founder who scaled from four employees through a Series A.
- Being the most capable person for a task does not mean the CEO must perform that task. Berggren’s fix is to hand a trusted lead close to full ownership of a domain rather than splitting control down the middle.
- Berggren built a second software development team in Lviv, Ukraine in 2012, rotating engineers between the U.S. and Ukraine to prevent an “us versus them” divide between the two offices.
- Berggren’s own training as a competitive cyclist, studying power curves to commit effort only where it decides the race, is the discipline he now applies to deciding which coaching conversations and business decisions deserve his limited time.
How CEOs Learn to Delegate When They Built Every System Themselves
Erik Berggren learned the discipline of matching effort to what actually matters long before he ran a company. Training as a competitive cyclist against professional riders, he studied his own power curves to find where he could win and where he could not, then spent his limited energy only on the moves that decided the race. He carries the same rule into leadership:
“You kind of need to know what boils to hit and what is just kind of noise.”
Berggren applies that same filtering discipline to a live coaching relationship. He is an early investor and board member in a Swedish defense-tech company building autonomous seafaring drones, and he meets with its CEO, Oscar, twice a year to work through exactly this problem. Oscar built the company’s boats, its software, and its early client relationships himself. The company has since scaled from four employees to roughly 40 to 50 through a Series A round, and Oscar can no longer personally run product development, manage capital raises, set governance, and represent the company to organizations like NATO at the same time. Berggren’s advice to him is direct:
“Just because you are the best at all these things doesn’t mean you should do all those things because you can’t all of them.”
The decision rule underneath that coaching is specific: a CEO should keep the parts of the job that only the CEO can do, such as governance, capital, and external relationships, and hand off the parts that a named specialist can now own outright, even if that specialist is not yet as skilled as the founder. Since this coaching relationship began, Oscar has moved out of day-to-day product leadership and into the governance, fundraising, and external-representation role Berggren describes, while a named product lead now owns that domain outright. Berggren also holds that a leader has to be personally prepared to show up for the team before any of that delegation works, a lesson he traces back to his own training: “You can’t really win if you can’t sprint.”
How CEOs Delegate AI-Driven Growth Instead of Running It Themselves
The same domain-ownership rule Berggren applies to Oscar’s product development, he applies to his own firm’s growth engine. Valhalla Capital Partners is a private credit fund, which means it operates under SEC regulation. Berggren keeps AI out of that side of the business entirely. Fund administration, banking, and compliance run the way they have always run, with no automation and no experimentation, because the cost of a mistake in a regulated fund is too high to test against.
On the growth side, Berggren did not try to personally run outreach, content, and prospecting himself as the firm scaled. Instead, he handed that domain to an AI system built by a company Valhalla is an investor in and board member of, the same way he hands product development to a named lead rather than running it himself. That system studies Berggren’s own messaging, learns which prospects resonate with it, and reaches out to them directly in his voice using content built around Valhalla’s positioning. Berggren says that level of matched, individualized outreach could not be done by a team of human analysts at any size.
“We’re going to get to at least 100 million AUM without adding employees.”
The same AI-driven approach built the marketing around a longevity book Berggren wrote on hot and cold therapy, which the firm has since turned into video content, retreats, and speaking invitations that attract the exact client profile Valhalla is built for, extending the firm’s reach without adding a single new employee to run it.
How CEOs Build Unified Culture Across Global, Remote Teams
Berggren’s clearest example of cross-border leadership comes from an earlier role at a company called Think Tank, where the technology team could not keep up with client demand. Instead of trying to fix the existing team remotely, Berggren built a second, parallel development team in Lviv, Ukraine in 2012, staffed with 12 to 15 developers.
Rather than running the new team himself, Berggren gave full ownership of it to his CTO, whom he understood to be motivated by being the person that people trust and lean on. He then had two engineers rotate from Ukraine to the U.S. and two rotate from the U.S. to Ukraine at any given time, housed together in shared apartments, so the two offices integrated instead of competing as separate camps. The two Scrum teams still competed on speed and bug counts, tracked daily on a shared video call, but Berggren was deliberate about how much of that competitive edge he introduced compared to how much ownership he handed over:
“20% of that competitive spirit, but actually more 80% like, no, no, this is yours. You got this.”
That ratio, mostly ownership with a small amount of friendly competition, is what Berggren credits with building one culture across two offices instead of a divided one, an integration model that held as the Lviv team grew into a full-scale parallel engineering office rather than a stopgap.
Key Principles for Scaling Beyond Yourself
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| Delegate the domain, not just the task | Hand a trusted lead full ownership of an entire function, not partial help with it | Since Berggren began coaching him, Oscar has moved out of day-to-day product leadership at his defense-tech company and into governance, fundraising, and external representation, with a named product lead now owning development outright |
| Match effort to the highest-leverage decision | Filter routine operational detail out of the CEO’s time and reserve it for the decisions that change the company’s trajectory | Applying his cycling discipline to twice-yearly sessions with Oscar, Berggren’s coaching produced a concrete shift: Oscar moved out of running product day-to-day and into governance, fundraising, and NATO-facing representation, with a named lead now owning development |
| Give distributed teams ownership, not just oversight | Assign roughly 80% real ownership to a distributed team lead and keep only a small amount of competitive structure | The Lviv, Ukraine team Berggren launched in 2012 with 12 to 15 developers grew into a full parallel engineering office under his CTO’s ownership, integrated with the U.S. team through continuous rotation rather than remaining a separate, divided unit |
| Hand off growth execution the same way you hand off product | Delegate revenue-generating work to a named system or specialist rather than running it personally as the company scales | Valhalla Capital Partners built toward $100 million in AUM by handing outreach, content, and prospecting to an AI system Berggren co-invests in, freeing him to keep the firm headcount flat while its reach expanded through a published book turned into video content, retreats, and speaking invitations |
Quotes from This Episode
- “You kind of need to know what boils to hit and what is just kind of noise.” — Erik Berggren, CEO, Valhalla Capital Partners
- “You can’t really win if you can’t sprint.” — Erik Berggren, CEO, Valhalla Capital Partners
- “20% of that competitive spirit, but actually more 80% like, no, no, this is yours. You got this.” — Erik Berggren, CEO, Valhalla Capital Partners
Frequently Asked Questions
How does a CEO know when to stop doing everything themselves?
A CEO should step back from a task once someone else can own it fully, not just help with it. Erik Berggren, CEO of Valhalla Capital Partners, coaches founders to hand off entire domains, such as product development or fundraising, to a named lead once the company passes roughly 40 to 50 employees, even if the CEO remains the most technically capable person on the team. The test is not who does the task best. The test is whether the CEO’s time is better spent on governance, capital, and external relationships that no one else can handle.
How can a CEO delegate revenue growth instead of running it personally?
Berggren applies the same domain-ownership rule to his own firm that he coaches into founders like Oscar. Rather than personally running outreach and content, he handed that work to an AI system built by a company Valhalla co-invests in, which studies his messaging and reaches prospects in his voice. That let Valhalla pursue $100 million in assets under management without adding headcount, while Berggren kept regulated fund administration fully manual because the cost of an error there is too high to automate around.
How do you build a unified culture on a distributed global team?
Berggren built a second software development team in Lviv, Ukraine in 2012 rather than trying to run one office remotely. He rotated two engineers from Ukraine to the U.S. and two from the U.S. to Ukraine at a time, gave his CTO full ownership of the initiative, and ran daily scrum updates between both offices on a shared video call. He credits giving the distributed team close to full ownership, not just oversight, with preventing a divide between the two locations.
CEOs Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies and Careers
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach. He coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits. With 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital, Glenn helps leaders scale their companies by scaling themselves first. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
