Holly mother of God. Mitchell was still on HN yesterday, as he was replying something about Backblaze IPO and its business. Today it is his IPO,
$259 million revenue. 2100+ Customers, 1500+ employees, $10 Billion Valuation.........
I mean I felt it wasn't that long ago Vagrant was "the" tool for the job.
How it all started, the submission on HN [1], quote:
>This project has been the love child of myself and John Bender (nickelcode.com) for the past 6 weeks. We're both daily HN readers and would like to use this as a starting point to show Vagrant to the public. Specifically, I'd like to open up to any questions and feedback, so that the HN community can get to know Vagrant. Your feedback is extremely valued. Thanks!
>A bit of background on this project: I work at a development company (citrusbyte.com) in LA. I see new projects almost every couple months, and I'm often working on multiple projects simultaneously due to work, freelance, and personal projects. Managing the development environments between many projects on a local machine became a huge burden and a coworker once mentioned developing in a virtual machine. I thought this was a great idea, and Vagrant was eventually born from it.
Really amazing achievement in such short space of time. Congratulations!
Edit: I wonder how many company started or partially started on HN that went on to IPO. I know Dropbox is one. Do we have a list somewhere?
If that’s $260M pa for 1500 employees then that works out as $40k revenue per employee per quarter.
Compare with APPL and FB doing [correction: over $600k] per employee per quarter.
Not a value judgment. But I only recently started noticing these numbers and it really puts the big players’ spending power into perspective. Hiring engineers away from FAANG is incredibly expensive.
Edit: thanks for the corrections in the replies. I read figures for FB and AAPL that are reported quarterly but missed that they are for a trailing 12 month period, not for the quarter itself.
> I mean I felt it wasn't that long ago Vagrant was "the" tool for the job.
Vagrant is my safety hatch, in case Docker goes under and aspect of it that's "the best centralized, cross-distro, server-oriented Linux package manager repository around" is, at least temporarily, thrown into disarray. Back to picking a distro and contorting it into what I need, in that case.
And it's still better than Docker if you're really in a hurry and need to get some pile of undocumented shit running locally ASAP.
>Mitchell was still on HN yesterday, as he was replying something about Backblaze IPO and its business. Today it is his IPO
Maybe that is because he stepped down from leadership to become an IC again? We could speculate that he didn't want to go public, or had no desire to do the S-1 work so he stepped down.
> I wonder how many company started or partially started on HN that went on to IPO. I know Dropbox is one. Do we have a list somewhere?
There are only a few places where you can easily promote your saas company, it makes sense that Saas startups that IPO now were promoted when they launched ...
> Edit: I wonder how many company started or partially started on HN that went on to IPO. I know Dropbox is one. Do we have a list somewhere?
Let's not make whether a company went public a metric for assessing quality. Going public is mostly a matter of how much a company expects the public to pay to get a share for the company. Also, it is a matter of how much the bank which facilitates the offering expects to make. Currently, the markets are sky high, so even not so good companies will make crazy amounts of money for the bank and the company which went public. Just look at the dot com bubble and the IPOs for more information.
2100 customers seems low? I've personally worked for 3 companies in the last 3 years who had Vault Enterprise licenses, and in the grand scheme of things, these are pretty small companies in a single, pretty small country (Belgium)
Absolute legend, rocket ship human Mitchell Hashimoto.
I still remember the excitement from Vagrant back in the day (which I think started it all). Here's the 1.0 announcement in 2012. [1]
The tools and vision they created after, just amazing coming from a small scrappy startup crew. Which, IMO, is totally wild given the offerings clearly tend to target bigger Enterprise who have bigger teams/apps/ops demand.
Then to walk away from $50MM barely older than drinking age. [2]
Seriously congratulations to them and the Hashicorp team. Will likely invest and hold for a long time.
He shared his dev setup at Dev Tool Time (https://srcgr.ph/mitchell-hashimoto) which shows how passionate he is about engineering. Going from CEO -> CTO -> IC solidifies his genuineness.
The impact Vagrant has had on my business is nearly immeasurable (and for free, no less). We're a small startup, and I haven't had the time (or motivation) to learn what Docker, Kubernetes, containers, etc are. Seems overly complex.
But, virtual servers I can understand. I've been using Vagrant since 2013 and it ... just works. We've built our own custom box to standardize our development environment as well.
If there is one company and person I'd like to mimic, it's Hashicorp and Mitchell. Work to build an amazing product or products, get it ready for a sale or IPO, and then transition into an IC to continue doing what I love: hacking.
You can basically just treat it like a package manager and config-assistant. It's often easier(!) to configure a Docker image than the corresponding package, or set of packages, in your typical distro. In part this is because documenting where all the config files and data live just kinda falls naturally out of creating a half-decent image, and in part because good images often put commonly-modified config options—which may correspond to multiple changes in the config files—in single environment variables, for common use cases.
The main gotchas are making sure you've mapped any data directories to something outside the image (which is trivial to do with command-line options, if you prefer writing bash scripts, or in docker-compose yaml, and very easy to test—add some data, destroy the image, bring it back up, is your stuff there? Yes? Good, you got it) so data isn't lost if the image is replaced or destroyed, and making sure your port mapping isn't doing anything dumb like exposing ports it shouldn't on a public interface.
You don't have to use swarm or even actually learn how images work. You can run your application outside of it and just use pre-built official images from PostgreSQL, or whatever, and enjoy a nice, cross-distro, also-sorta-works-on-Mac-and-Windows, consistent set of project daemon dependencies, with an interface that's the same on Red Hat or Gentoo or Arch or wherever, and far more up-to-date than major stable distros (so you could use Debian Stable for simplicity and reliability, for example, but run the latest MySQL or ElasticSearch or whatever on it without mucking with the distro's packages).
I find this massively simplifies server config scripts (Ansible, or bash, or whatever) since I can confine those to fairly generic housekeeping things and put daemon config in much-tidier Docker scripts or yaml.
When HashiCorp first got announced I thought "How is he going to make a company out of Vagrant?" I was definitely wrong and on my own projects I'm using lots of their products from packer to nomad. Super cool to see someone/people create something like HashiCorp out of what I originally thought would be a single product.
To me, the more astonishing thing is, "How did HashiCorp excel where Docker failed". I'd pay to read a case-study on it, if there's one.
Edit: May be this comment from Mitchell sheds some 1st-party perspective on why it may be so:
> ...Terraform is WORKFLOW agnostic, not TECHNOLOGY agnostic. This is a key part of our product philosophy that we make the 1st element of our Tao: https://www.hashicorp.com/tao-of-hashicorp
> I don't think we've ever claimed cloud portability through "write once run anywhere;" that isn't our marketing or sales pitch and if we ever did make that claim please let me know and I'll poke some teams to correct it. Our pitch is always to just learn one workflow/tool and use it everywhere, but you explicitly WILL rewrite cloud-specific modules/code/etc.
It wasn't until they launched Vault that I saw where they were going commercially. Their other tools were excellent, but I wouldn't be surprised if Vault would be their #1 cash-cow, it's a massively useful tool in environments that require a support umbrella and love paying for expensive licensing.
Congratulations! The IPO is a confirmation of what many of us in this field already knew: Hashicorp makes amazing tools. I love Consul so much. I'm glad the larger world will appreciate the great work Hashicorp has done as well.
My thoughts not facts. I know that there are more products then I mention.
I fail to see in what segment Hashicorp will remain relevant over time.
Terraform is the tool I mostly see companies pay for. Over time cloud vendors will make Terraform obsolete. In fact it is already a problem to use Terraform since it can not move at the same pace as major cloud vendors.
Vault is an extremely complicated niche tool, most companies should not use.
Consul, the service discovery tool is mostly not needed in cloud environments. Don't think any cloud vendor today have Consul as a service on their agenda even though this has been announced years ago which is a warning sign. Personally I really like Consul and the way you can set up ACL for instance.
Vagrant, use whatever.
Nomad has lost the battle with Kubernetes a long time ago. I never trusted Nomad and I never will but I can see that if you really want to orchestrate a lot of containers Nomad may be the right tool.
When selecting an identity platform you mainly have to go along with the corruption in the industry...
I really wish Hashicorp good luck on this journey though.
- Vault is not niche - it’s THE way to manage pki and credentials if you’re half serious about security.
Which is why you’re now are starting to see managed vault.
- Consul - EVERYONE should use service discovery, cloud or not. It’s indispensable for numerous reasons. If you doubt it’s relevance, check out the Kubernetes integration work - there’s a reason for that focus.
You need service discovery if you operate at any sort of scale, spanning multiple providers and teams (Azure have a managed consul offering btw).
- “Trust” nomad? The team and I have used it since 0.4 and 0.6 in full production at two different companies. K8s as well, but it lacks the unix vibe of “one thing, and do it well”, which is something you get with nomad, consul & vault.
Nomad has been rock solid and I’ve so far had no reason to not “trust” it, 100s of thousands of deploys later.
- terraform spans many providers. It’s a good tool, not without it’s quirks. But I’d rather have one quirky tool than multiple quirky vendor ones. Also, we use TF for basically everything - even the stuff we host in-house through lxc and postgres for example, and through home grown providers as well.
A lot of big finance companies use Nomad for all their compute scheduling. Citadel, for instance. They desire the ability to schedule Windows workloads, containers, regular processes, etc. through a common interface. They might not want or need to go all-in on containers.
Vault has a similar target market. Big high-paying institutions. It's not the average market of your tech company, and 100-200 person startups generally won't need it. If you're in the fintech space, maybe you do.
I would suggest that you reevaluate Nomad. It solves basically every one of (many) problem with Kubernetes in an elegant and reasonable way, at a scale Kubernetes is by no means capable of.
Further the idea that cloud vendors will make Terraform irrelevant is laughable. None of them have any impetus to provide a consistent workflow across multiple clouds. The shortcomings of CloudFormation in particular are unlikely ever to be overcome.
I really don´t feel K8S have won this battle. I agree people talk more about K8S but i have seen a trend in people that are disappointed with K8S and move against Nomad instead. I guess K8S is too messy. It´s like taking a 2015 enterprise vsphere datacenter environment and containerizing it. Too many layers..
But of course, there´s no fully managed Hashicorp offer for all products in GCP or AWS, Azure....
I have actively used Vagrant, Consul, Terraform, and Vault and I really have never understood all the fanboyism for Hashicorp. Their products are OK but easily replaceable and often redundant in modern cloud providers. Wish them luck on their attempt to cash in but I for one do not intend to buy any stock.
I actually tend to agree, and am surprised that the discussion in this post is so breathless. Having used (and continuing to use) multiple Hashicorp products fairly extensively, they tend to have a lot of warts, just fewer warts than the alternatives.
Terraform is a great example:
* It's slow, and new versions often get slower.
* Apart from the most serious ones, bugs often don't get fixed for years, and GitHub issues and pull requests (both for TF itself and the biggest providers) are a swamp of thousands of issues and hundreds of PRs dating back 4+ years. Issue triage is erratic and often fails to fully read or comprehend the reported issue.
* There are some design deficiencies that seem hard to fix. For example: first-class support for providers that are configured based on other resources in the same Terraform state. This usually doesn't work correctly without hacks like `-target`. The "right way" to do this is to have separate TF states for different "layers" of your infra, which is fine and ends up pretty tidy for large infra, but nobody really talks about this (not even the TF docs), so invariably things will not be architected that way at the start and by the time the TF config has grown, refactoring it to split out the layers will be a deeply unpleasant time-suck. (The awful experience that is refactoring large TF configs being another major negative all by itself.) This fundamental issue is the root cause of hundreds of TF GitHub issues.
* The major Hashicorp-maintained (or co-maintained) providers are often massively underresourced, leading to delays before new cloud features are supported, forcing users of TF to maintain those resources outside of Terraform, which is a mess. If a user of, say, the AWS provider tries to rectify the situation by sending a PR, it will just be lost in the sea of ~3000 open issues and ~500 open PRs unless they put in significant time and effort to get attention to it.
Despite all of this, we still use Terraform heavily because it's less crap than the alternatives, but I can hardly muster the love for it that is expressed elsewhere in these comments.
It is true that tools can be emulated (RedHat doing podman as a docker replacement, with same flags) but it is also work.
I wonder whether in the Cloud world, the fan factor is a sign of credibility in a market that is looking for tooling that works across cloud providers.
There have been hundreds of crazy tech success stories in the last few years, but as someone who considers himself an engineer at heart, this one gives me the greatest amount of joy and optimism. Both founders are industry-wide leaders in their field and still treat writing code and solving complex technical problems as their primary job.
Ever since Vagrant, everything Hashicorp has developed has been outstanding! Furthermore, their open core model and this S1 is an inspiration. I wish all the best for Mitchell, Armon and the team!
I have a couple emails from Mitchell H circa 2014. He was doing front line customer support for the Vagrant VMWare Workstation provider -- I think it was just about their first paid offering. I was impressed that the head of the company would take time to help me troubleshoot my busted setup. Incredibly technical and incredibly hard working.
Pretty funny to see this less then a week after Roblox had a huge extended downtime due to issues with their HashiCorp platform (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29044500). Obviously the two events are almost certainly unconnected, but it must have been a very busy week at HashiCorp nonetheless
Met Mitchell at a smaller Perth conference in 2019 where he did a talk on how Vault came to be.
Could tell how much he enjoyed what he was working on and the obvious passion for making better software, actually being down in the weeds and writing innovative things.
Does anyone have an idea regarding when the stock (HCP) will be tradable? It doesn't look like an IPO date has been announced. Perhaps, once an S-1 is filed, the IPO is usually X weeks after that?
I love HCP tools, especially the "lesser known" ones like Vagrant and Nomad.
Bearish on the now-public company, though. I think they grew too fast and the leadership will squeeze revenue out of their current headline "cloud glue" products (Terraform, Vault, Consul) without having incentive to push their other products.
Nomad in particular has a ton of potential but why push it when you can just provide services to enterprise K8s customers. Was major Roblox outage Nomad-related?
I have a feeling that someone will come along with a set of CUE-driven tools that have better UX than HCP tools and HCP will go the way of Oracle.
Mitch has always struck me as a singularly sincere and dedicated individual. His passion for the end user experience show in his every product decision. As a developer, I've enjoyed using his tools more than I should. Most enterprise software is designed by committee. Hashicorp's products feel like they were designed by one person -- or perhaps they know their users extremely well.
It's fascinating to see so many IPOs happen in the past two years. Apparently there have been more IPOs in the past two years than 2014-2019 combined (https://stockanalysis.com/ipos/statistics/) in spite of the pandemic.
I guess it's because there's just so much money swishing around - why not?
The VCs need their exits to pay their funders back and the markets are very “hungry” at the moment so they are cashing out the only route they have available
I wish I could take the time to analyze findings and correlate; could this be due to a period of fundings reaching a peak many years ago?
I recall there was a time it seemed a lot of celebrities were suddenly dying and there was an article that came out pointing that many of them simply belonged to an era of media growth (or something along those lines). So they were all roughly from the same age group and were well… For lack of a better way to put it, reaching their expected age range of demise together.
I recall that years back when I was in uni, the software funding market was becoming super active and people were predicting (and denying) a bubble back then. This was in the 2008 to 2012 time period I think. Are we just seeing a lot of these companies now all “graduating” together? It feels like it matches the timeline of around 10-12 years or so which is when they might be expected to IPO?
PS: I feel like a lot of what I said is based on vague memories of things I’ve read over the years so I apologize if any of that is untrue.
M1 money supply + endish of a bull cycle of tech companies founded early 2010s (coming out of the 10 year VC timeline) and also SPACs (Assuming SPACs are included that would be the driving reason)
There was actually a big decline in IPOs during that period. I honestly can’t say why but I remember it was starkly lower than average. Perhaps for regulatory concerns?
Successful companies seem to be more likely to be started during lean times, and startups take 10+ years to mature. We were in the recession aftermath ten years ago.
I've been using Terraform since 2018 and I love it. A benefit of using Terraform to explore AWS features is that I basically have the peace of mind that everything I create can be easily deleted when I'm done. That alone is huge. Plus, when I create cloud configuration via text, I seem to have a better mental understanding than clicking things in the console.
He was a class or so above me in university and, being a public university, it was competitive to get into courses. There were more student interest than class availability, so slots filled up quick. Students also squatted spots for their buddies then during the 3am off-hours would play tradesies. The school website were not immediately up to date, either.
Mitchell ran a paid service where you get a text message when courses opened up. This would give you a 30-60 second advantage to frontrun the thousand of other students who were concurrently refreshing the course availability page.
"UW Robot was registering 70-80% of the undergraduate student body and 'was pulling in about half a million dollars a year' for an automation program he only spent a few hours a year maintaining."
I think I read about him in the school paper. His parents were not keen on him studying Computer Science, and even after showing the financial success of this one app, they were still reluctant about Computer Science. This resonated with me because my family was actively discouraging me from studying Computer Science. Boy were they wrong.
> Hashimoto's dad, who he describes as "a very nice but very strict" Japanese father, didn't think much of his son's love of computers. The cease and desist letter didn't help. His parents limited him two hours a week of computer time. He had to sneak in his coding after they went to bed... $500,000 And Dad Still Isn't Thrilled
I recently realized Taiwan has 1/5th the population of Japan, yet disproportionately has 33 billionaires versus Japan's 45. I'm actually living in Japan right now and experiencing first hand the cultural aspect of risk aversion. I fell in love Kyoto and want to be base my startup venture here. It's not the financing gating me. I'd have to quit my employment for I.P. reasons, but then I don't have the visa status to stay in Japan. The business visa is too restrictive, but I actually qualify for permanent residency, which is the ideal legal status in terms of flexibility. The only bit I need to flip is a guarantor rep for P.R., but once again the cultural aversion to risk gets in the way. This makes me appreciate Masayoshi Son because his ventures are quite antithetical to the Japanese modus operandi. But I digress, just some thoughts on cultural aversion to risk and entrepreneurship
That's curious that his parents and your family discouraged him/you from computer science. I would've thought most parents would be happy about that choice of major for their kids.
> As of July 31, 2021, we served 2,101 customers spanning organizations of a broad range of sizes and industries, compared to 1,473 and 831 customers as of January 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively.
> over 300 of the Forbes Global 2000 were our customers
>As of January 31, 2020, January 31, 2021, July 31, 2020, and July 31, 2021, our last four quarter average net dollar retention rate was 131%, 123%, 128%, and 124%, respectively.
> over 44% of our customers with $100,000 or greater ARR were licensing more than one product
Right now, I don't see the point - It makes sense to use a special language, with a relatively short learning curve, to develop infra as opposed to executable code. But maybe I'm not thinking big enough.
Did not know it existed, extremely cool indeed! By skimming it I still think Pulumi might have a better Dev UX, but surely Terraform is still catching up
Congrats to HashiCorp for their IPO and for building an awesome suite of tools.
I attended a Papers We Love meetup back in 2015 where Armon Dadgar, HashiCorp's CTO, gave the main talk on Bloom filters and HyperLogLog (interested parties can watch a recording of the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3Bt9Tn6P5c). It was an awesome, very educational talk (on a topic I was previously unfamiliar with), and based on my very limited impression, Armon struck me as a really smart, intellectually curious and nice person. Great to see Armon/Hashicorp achieve such a huge, positive milestone.
I love the products but that S1 didn't exactly blow my socks off. They are hemorrhaging cash and their growth strategy is pretty WeWork-ish. Seems to boil down to "Get more customers", "HCP is probably going to make money", and finally "the rest of the world needs hashicorp too"
They're making hundreds of millions of dollars per year. They have software economics, not commercial real estate economics. Most software companies are "hemorrhaging cash" by the time they file an S1, because if you invent a machine that turns nickels into dimes, the obvious thing to do is spend all your money making as many of those machines as you can, not cranking a small number of them for a small, consistent stream of dimes.
This S1 does not say how many shares they expect to sell, so at this time its unclear what percentage of the company new investors will hold. Presumably before the IPO date, it will be updated so investors have an understanding of what they are buying.
The PO in IPO is public offering, meaning new shares are created. So generally speaking, the amount raised goes to the company. Dilution is a factor of what's raised and the vaulation. If you raise a 10% round, you dilute by 10%, so 10% is sold. It varies by company and preference. Existing shareholders can typically sell after the lockup (for common share holders, like founders and employees) and at any time (for preferred share holders, whose shares convert into unrestricted common shares as part of the IPO).
IPOs sometimes sell shares held by existing shareholders. The final S-1 should disclose any sales by existing shareholders. When you see them in roadshow, check for the final S-1.
Statements that proceeds will go to the company are not necessarily correct.
Slightly off-topic, if I wanted to buy some HashiCorp's stocks as a non-US resident, what would be my best options? Any good services allowing me to do that somehow, legally and easily?
Find a broker/platform in your country that lets you trade in the stock market they are listing on (if UK then IG and Hargreaves Lansdown are good), join, fill out the W-8BEN so you are able to buy US stock through the platform (they usually make this a 2 minute job) and then place an order when it’s live. You’ll be paying more than the true IPO price as the bank etc get preferential rates I believe but it’s as good as you’ll get
Hashicorp makes some incredible software and I love their open source culture. Pretty much everyone I know genuinely enjoys using their tools. Congrats to Mitchell, Armon, and the whole team.
Awesome, I'm excited for this. Does anyone know of any services where I could add HashiCorp to a watchlist and get an email notification before/after their IPO? (I'm sure I'll see it on HN or other sites but I want to make sure I don't miss it.)
Personally we don't use it in my org, and the mix of on-prem Kubernetes and GKE is just a shitshow.
I recently started learning Nomad, and Nomad (+ Terraform for cloud) is the only thing that makes sense (for our use cases). That said, I think higher management is too highly invested in K8s and they won't backtrack on this.
Love HashiCorp, though not sure what to think about Sales&Marketing to R&D ratio, which is 2:1 (141kk vs 65kk in 2021). Maybe people who read S1s more often can tell if this a normal ratio? Seems pretty high to me.
It will be interesting to watch what new products the launch.
I guess a monitoring solution would be next. Netdata could be a good fit with agent-first approach.
When Armon giggled then laughed at me as I asked him about DigitalOcean buying Hashi back in the day, I knew they'd be a billion dollar company. Armon and Mitchell are as good as they come, certainly two of my favourite people I've met on my startup journey.
I'm beaming with joy at the prospect of becoming a shareholder. Well done team, well done.
Lots of interesting tidbits in here, not least that Armon Dadgar, who basically built most of the their revenue generating software, is paid considerably less than their CRO.
That's often the case when they have to bring a new executive on for the latter years of a company before going public... Look at page 174 though, Armon owns over 18M shares, the CRO owns 400k.
Assuming a share price of even $10/share, the $4M difference in 2021 comp will swing slightly in Armon's direction when his equity stake is worth $175M more than the CRO's.
Comparing salary is irrelevant when one person has a founder ownership stake while the other was hired as an employee a lot further down the line. Dadgar would be perfectly fine with $1/yr.
You are comparing salary when you should be comparing ownership. CRO has little ownership vs Armon who doesn't really care about his salary but rather the worth of his ownership position.
Also you are comparing an owner vs an employee, not apples to apples.
I think we need to see how it performs in the public markets for a couple years to define success of the model. At this point it is certainly a success for the early investors / co-founders.
Lots of IPOs out there (~3x the normal number). Looks like companies are betting hard times are ahead and trying to create cash floats to sail the rough waters.
ksec|4 years ago
$259 million revenue. 2100+ Customers, 1500+ employees, $10 Billion Valuation.........
I mean I felt it wasn't that long ago Vagrant was "the" tool for the job.
How it all started, the submission on HN [1], quote:
>This project has been the love child of myself and John Bender (nickelcode.com) for the past 6 weeks. We're both daily HN readers and would like to use this as a starting point to show Vagrant to the public. Specifically, I'd like to open up to any questions and feedback, so that the HN community can get to know Vagrant. Your feedback is extremely valued. Thanks!
>A bit of background on this project: I work at a development company (citrusbyte.com) in LA. I see new projects almost every couple months, and I'm often working on multiple projects simultaneously due to work, freelance, and personal projects. Managing the development environments between many projects on a local machine became a huge burden and a coworker once mentioned developing in a virtual machine. I thought this was a great idea, and Vagrant was eventually born from it.
Really amazing achievement in such short space of time. Congratulations!
Edit: I wonder how many company started or partially started on HN that went on to IPO. I know Dropbox is one. Do we have a list somewhere?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901
gorgoiler|4 years ago
Compare with APPL and FB doing [correction: over $600k] per employee per quarter.
Not a value judgment. But I only recently started noticing these numbers and it really puts the big players’ spending power into perspective. Hiring engineers away from FAANG is incredibly expensive.
Edit: thanks for the corrections in the replies. I read figures for FB and AAPL that are reported quarterly but missed that they are for a trailing 12 month period, not for the quarter itself.
mike_d|4 years ago
According to LinkedIn the average tenure of employees is a little over a year (likely to hit the vesting cliff and bounce).
Two months ago they didn't have the staff to review pull requests: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28425849
You can love the product, but investors are ultimately betting on the company - which seems shaky.
ignoramous|4 years ago
news.ycombinator.com needs a ycombinator.com/topcompanies equivalent.
handrous|4 years ago
Vagrant is my safety hatch, in case Docker goes under and aspect of it that's "the best centralized, cross-distro, server-oriented Linux package manager repository around" is, at least temporarily, thrown into disarray. Back to picking a distro and contorting it into what I need, in that case.
And it's still better than Docker if you're really in a hurry and need to get some pile of undocumented shit running locally ASAP.
ryanar|4 years ago
Maybe that is because he stepped down from leadership to become an IC again? We could speculate that he didn't want to go public, or had no desire to do the S-1 work so he stepped down.
polote|4 years ago
There are only a few places where you can easily promote your saas company, it makes sense that Saas startups that IPO now were promoted when they launched ...
huijzer|4 years ago
Let's not make whether a company went public a metric for assessing quality. Going public is mostly a matter of how much a company expects the public to pay to get a share for the company. Also, it is a matter of how much the bank which facilitates the offering expects to make. Currently, the markets are sky high, so even not so good companies will make crazy amounts of money for the bank and the company which went public. Just look at the dot com bubble and the IPOs for more information.
sneak|4 years ago
Bigger fish to fry. I wish I had that level of focus!
rvz|4 years ago
[0] http://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple-c...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28625195
mirekrusin|4 years ago
koffiezet|4 years ago
romanhn|4 years ago
aronowb14|4 years ago
throw123123123|4 years ago
WORMS_EAT_WORMS|4 years ago
The tools and vision they created after, just amazing coming from a small scrappy startup crew. Which, IMO, is totally wild given the offerings clearly tend to target bigger Enterprise who have bigger teams/apps/ops demand.
Then to walk away from $50MM barely older than drinking age. [2]
Seriously congratulations to them and the Hashicorp team. Will likely invest and hold for a long time.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3672149
[2] https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1357445215259250689
v1g1l4nt3|4 years ago
mootpt|4 years ago
ryanisnan|4 years ago
leftnode|4 years ago
But, virtual servers I can understand. I've been using Vagrant since 2013 and it ... just works. We've built our own custom box to standardize our development environment as well.
If there is one company and person I'd like to mimic, it's Hashicorp and Mitchell. Work to build an amazing product or products, get it ready for a sale or IPO, and then transition into an IC to continue doing what I love: hacking.
Congratulations on the success!
handrous|4 years ago
You can basically just treat it like a package manager and config-assistant. It's often easier(!) to configure a Docker image than the corresponding package, or set of packages, in your typical distro. In part this is because documenting where all the config files and data live just kinda falls naturally out of creating a half-decent image, and in part because good images often put commonly-modified config options—which may correspond to multiple changes in the config files—in single environment variables, for common use cases.
The main gotchas are making sure you've mapped any data directories to something outside the image (which is trivial to do with command-line options, if you prefer writing bash scripts, or in docker-compose yaml, and very easy to test—add some data, destroy the image, bring it back up, is your stuff there? Yes? Good, you got it) so data isn't lost if the image is replaced or destroyed, and making sure your port mapping isn't doing anything dumb like exposing ports it shouldn't on a public interface.
You don't have to use swarm or even actually learn how images work. You can run your application outside of it and just use pre-built official images from PostgreSQL, or whatever, and enjoy a nice, cross-distro, also-sorta-works-on-Mac-and-Windows, consistent set of project daemon dependencies, with an interface that's the same on Red Hat or Gentoo or Arch or wherever, and far more up-to-date than major stable distros (so you could use Debian Stable for simplicity and reliability, for example, but run the latest MySQL or ElasticSearch or whatever on it without mucking with the distro's packages).
I find this massively simplifies server config scripts (Ansible, or bash, or whatever) since I can confine those to fairly generic housekeeping things and put daemon config in much-tidier Docker scripts or yaml.
that_guy_iain|4 years ago
ignoramous|4 years ago
Edit: May be this comment from Mitchell sheds some 1st-party perspective on why it may be so:
> ...Terraform is WORKFLOW agnostic, not TECHNOLOGY agnostic. This is a key part of our product philosophy that we make the 1st element of our Tao: https://www.hashicorp.com/tao-of-hashicorp
> I've talked about this more with more references in this tweet: https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1078682765963350016
> I don't think we've ever claimed cloud portability through "write once run anywhere;" that isn't our marketing or sales pitch and if we ever did make that claim please let me know and I'll poke some teams to correct it. Our pitch is always to just learn one workflow/tool and use it everywhere, but you explicitly WILL rewrite cloud-specific modules/code/etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29051020
koffiezet|4 years ago
hangonhn|4 years ago
abledon|4 years ago
AtNightWeCode|4 years ago
I fail to see in what segment Hashicorp will remain relevant over time.
Terraform is the tool I mostly see companies pay for. Over time cloud vendors will make Terraform obsolete. In fact it is already a problem to use Terraform since it can not move at the same pace as major cloud vendors.
Vault is an extremely complicated niche tool, most companies should not use.
Consul, the service discovery tool is mostly not needed in cloud environments. Don't think any cloud vendor today have Consul as a service on their agenda even though this has been announced years ago which is a warning sign. Personally I really like Consul and the way you can set up ACL for instance.
Vagrant, use whatever.
Nomad has lost the battle with Kubernetes a long time ago. I never trusted Nomad and I never will but I can see that if you really want to orchestrate a lot of containers Nomad may be the right tool.
When selecting an identity platform you mainly have to go along with the corruption in the industry...
I really wish Hashicorp good luck on this journey though.
jordanbeiber|4 years ago
- Vault is not niche - it’s THE way to manage pki and credentials if you’re half serious about security. Which is why you’re now are starting to see managed vault.
- Consul - EVERYONE should use service discovery, cloud or not. It’s indispensable for numerous reasons. If you doubt it’s relevance, check out the Kubernetes integration work - there’s a reason for that focus. You need service discovery if you operate at any sort of scale, spanning multiple providers and teams (Azure have a managed consul offering btw).
- “Trust” nomad? The team and I have used it since 0.4 and 0.6 in full production at two different companies. K8s as well, but it lacks the unix vibe of “one thing, and do it well”, which is something you get with nomad, consul & vault. Nomad has been rock solid and I’ve so far had no reason to not “trust” it, 100s of thousands of deploys later.
- terraform spans many providers. It’s a good tool, not without it’s quirks. But I’d rather have one quirky tool than multiple quirky vendor ones. Also, we use TF for basically everything - even the stuff we host in-house through lxc and postgres for example, and through home grown providers as well.
I could write pages on the hashicorp products!
vngzs|4 years ago
Vault has a similar target market. Big high-paying institutions. It's not the average market of your tech company, and 100-200 person startups generally won't need it. If you're in the fintech space, maybe you do.
jen20|4 years ago
Further the idea that cloud vendors will make Terraform irrelevant is laughable. None of them have any impetus to provide a consistent workflow across multiple clouds. The shortcomings of CloudFormation in particular are unlikely ever to be overcome.
thunderthunder|4 years ago
runlevel1|4 years ago
That's not all companies. It's not even the majority of them. But those companies do tend to be the ones who can afford HashiCorp's premium offerings.
Edit: Fix typo.
shironandon|4 years ago
jhugo|4 years ago
Terraform is a great example:
* It's slow, and new versions often get slower.
* Apart from the most serious ones, bugs often don't get fixed for years, and GitHub issues and pull requests (both for TF itself and the biggest providers) are a swamp of thousands of issues and hundreds of PRs dating back 4+ years. Issue triage is erratic and often fails to fully read or comprehend the reported issue.
* There are some design deficiencies that seem hard to fix. For example: first-class support for providers that are configured based on other resources in the same Terraform state. This usually doesn't work correctly without hacks like `-target`. The "right way" to do this is to have separate TF states for different "layers" of your infra, which is fine and ends up pretty tidy for large infra, but nobody really talks about this (not even the TF docs), so invariably things will not be architected that way at the start and by the time the TF config has grown, refactoring it to split out the layers will be a deeply unpleasant time-suck. (The awful experience that is refactoring large TF configs being another major negative all by itself.) This fundamental issue is the root cause of hundreds of TF GitHub issues.
* The major Hashicorp-maintained (or co-maintained) providers are often massively underresourced, leading to delays before new cloud features are supported, forcing users of TF to maintain those resources outside of Terraform, which is a mess. If a user of, say, the AWS provider tries to rectify the situation by sending a PR, it will just be lost in the sea of ~3000 open issues and ~500 open PRs unless they put in significant time and effort to get attention to it.
Despite all of this, we still use Terraform heavily because it's less crap than the alternatives, but I can hardly muster the love for it that is expressed elsewhere in these comments.
t_sawyer|4 years ago
nodesocket|4 years ago
My prediction, HashiCorp after IPO'ing will get acquired.
viewfromafar|4 years ago
paxys|4 years ago
v1g1l4nt3|4 years ago
wdella|4 years ago
I have a couple emails from Mitchell H circa 2014. He was doing front line customer support for the Vagrant VMWare Workstation provider -- I think it was just about their first paid offering. I was impressed that the head of the company would take time to help me troubleshoot my busted setup. Incredibly technical and incredibly hard working.
nightpool|4 years ago
dbetteridge|4 years ago
Could tell how much he enjoyed what he was working on and the obvious passion for making better software, actually being down in the weeds and writing innovative things.
All the best to him and HashiCorp going forward.
kaycebasques|4 years ago
pphysch|4 years ago
Bearish on the now-public company, though. I think they grew too fast and the leadership will squeeze revenue out of their current headline "cloud glue" products (Terraform, Vault, Consul) without having incentive to push their other products.
Nomad in particular has a ton of potential but why push it when you can just provide services to enterprise K8s customers. Was major Roblox outage Nomad-related?
I have a feeling that someone will come along with a set of CUE-driven tools that have better UX than HCP tools and HCP will go the way of Oracle.
dreyfan|4 years ago
They haven't posted a detailed post-mortem yet but it's more likely consul related that in-turn brought down vault and nomad.
picardo|4 years ago
endisneigh|4 years ago
I guess it's because there's just so much money swishing around - why not?
simonbarker87|4 years ago
988747|4 years ago
nstart|4 years ago
I recall there was a time it seemed a lot of celebrities were suddenly dying and there was an article that came out pointing that many of them simply belonged to an era of media growth (or something along those lines). So they were all roughly from the same age group and were well… For lack of a better way to put it, reaching their expected age range of demise together.
I recall that years back when I was in uni, the software funding market was becoming super active and people were predicting (and denying) a bubble back then. This was in the 2008 to 2012 time period I think. Are we just seeing a lot of these companies now all “graduating” together? It feels like it matches the timeline of around 10-12 years or so which is when they might be expected to IPO?
PS: I feel like a lot of what I said is based on vague memories of things I’ve read over the years so I apologize if any of that is untrue.
that_guy_iain|4 years ago
boringg|4 years ago
reilly3000|4 years ago
jackcosgrove|4 years ago
shoto_io|4 years ago
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1NS
goodpoint|4 years ago
sjg007|4 years ago
MangoCoffee|4 years ago
ushakov|4 years ago
kccqzy|4 years ago
Congrats! I'm certain to buy the stock.
gtirloni|4 years ago
fideloper|4 years ago
mootpt|4 years ago
alephnan|4 years ago
Mitchell ran a paid service where you get a text message when courses opened up. This would give you a 30-60 second advantage to frontrun the thousand of other students who were concurrently refreshing the course availability page.
https://laptrinhx.com/mitchell-hashimoto-is-automating-the-w...
"UW Robot was registering 70-80% of the undergraduate student body and 'was pulling in about half a million dollars a year' for an automation program he only spent a few hours a year maintaining."
I think I read about him in the school paper. His parents were not keen on him studying Computer Science, and even after showing the financial success of this one app, they were still reluctant about Computer Science. This resonated with me because my family was actively discouraging me from studying Computer Science. Boy were they wrong.
Edit: I found the article! http://sports.yahoo.com/news/25-old-coding-genius-making-141...
This stood out to me:
> Hashimoto's dad, who he describes as "a very nice but very strict" Japanese father, didn't think much of his son's love of computers. The cease and desist letter didn't help. His parents limited him two hours a week of computer time. He had to sneak in his coding after they went to bed... $500,000 And Dad Still Isn't Thrilled
I recently realized Taiwan has 1/5th the population of Japan, yet disproportionately has 33 billionaires versus Japan's 45. I'm actually living in Japan right now and experiencing first hand the cultural aspect of risk aversion. I fell in love Kyoto and want to be base my startup venture here. It's not the financing gating me. I'd have to quit my employment for I.P. reasons, but then I don't have the visa status to stay in Japan. The business visa is too restrictive, but I actually qualify for permanent residency, which is the ideal legal status in terms of flexibility. The only bit I need to flip is a guarantor rep for P.R., but once again the cultural aversion to risk gets in the way. This makes me appreciate Masayoshi Son because his ventures are quite antithetical to the Japanese modus operandi. But I digress, just some thoughts on cultural aversion to risk and entrepreneurship
godot|4 years ago
sedatk|4 years ago
Sohcahtoa82|4 years ago
marc__1|4 years ago
> As of July 31, 2021, we served 2,101 customers spanning organizations of a broad range of sizes and industries, compared to 1,473 and 831 customers as of January 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively.
> over 300 of the Forbes Global 2000 were our customers
>As of January 31, 2020, January 31, 2021, July 31, 2020, and July 31, 2021, our last four quarter average net dollar retention rate was 131%, 123%, 128%, and 124%, respectively.
> over 44% of our customers with $100,000 or greater ARR were licensing more than one product
humantorso|4 years ago
It's something I have been playing with recently and oh boy the possibilities here are really exciting.
michelledepeil|4 years ago
Right now, I don't see the point - It makes sense to use a special language, with a relatively short learning curve, to develop infra as opposed to executable code. But maybe I'm not thinking big enough.
hackandtrip|4 years ago
shubik22|4 years ago
I attended a Papers We Love meetup back in 2015 where Armon Dadgar, HashiCorp's CTO, gave the main talk on Bloom filters and HyperLogLog (interested parties can watch a recording of the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3Bt9Tn6P5c). It was an awesome, very educational talk (on a topic I was previously unfamiliar with), and based on my very limited impression, Armon struck me as a really smart, intellectually curious and nice person. Great to see Armon/Hashicorp achieve such a huge, positive milestone.
misiti3780|4 years ago
SassyGrapefruit|4 years ago
tptacek|4 years ago
TekMol|4 years ago
What percentage of the company gets sold in the IPO?
And does that money go into the company or does it go to existing shareholders?
ac29|4 years ago
rogerkirkness|4 years ago
adamsvystun|4 years ago
S1 does not specify the amount.
> And does that money go into the company or does it go to existing shareholders?
The money goes to the company.
chernevik|4 years ago
Statements that proceeds will go to the company are not necessarily correct.
ggregoire|4 years ago
Slightly off-topic, if I wanted to buy some HashiCorp's stocks as a non-US resident, what would be my best options? Any good services allowing me to do that somehow, legally and easily?
nathan_f77|4 years ago
In New Zealand we also have https://www.hatchinvest.nz and https://www.sharesies.nz. You might have some similar services in your country.
simonbarker87|4 years ago
apayan|4 years ago
baby|4 years ago
tomnipotent|4 years ago
marc__1|4 years ago
Roadshow may take 5-20 more days, so we may see them ring the bell by mid-December
unknown|4 years ago
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gigatexal|4 years ago
gigatexal|4 years ago
sydthrowaway|4 years ago
rmetzler|4 years ago
But Hashicorp has a lot of tools which make sense as building-blocks in a software architecture or in CI/CD pipelines.
Most of the tools I would put in the DevOps space, so they enable people to build, deploy and release more consistently.
unknown|4 years ago
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dcchambers|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
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baby|4 years ago
nathan_f77|4 years ago
ramesh31|4 years ago
gen220|4 years ago
It seems to be a growing contingent of their revenue, in addition to being an interesting product. Curious to get HN's take on it.
Uberphallus|4 years ago
I recently started learning Nomad, and Nomad (+ Terraform for cloud) is the only thing that makes sense (for our use cases). That said, I think higher management is too highly invested in K8s and they won't backtrack on this.
adamsvystun|4 years ago
jcdavis|4 years ago
HatchedLake721|4 years ago
mekster|4 years ago
Do they have a product that has no good competition or is the first choice as a tool?
Nevertheless, nice accomplishment.
bugsense|4 years ago
robertwt7|4 years ago
Great job Mitchell, one of the company that I have respect on goes public!! Good luck!!
nkotov|4 years ago
redwood|4 years ago
xwdv|4 years ago
lamroger|4 years ago
uf00lme|4 years ago
stefanmichael|4 years ago
<Void> lives on
pid-1|4 years ago
neom|4 years ago
I'm beaming with joy at the prospect of becoming a shareholder. Well done team, well done.
jaxxstorm|4 years ago
mikeyouse|4 years ago
Assuming a share price of even $10/share, the $4M difference in 2021 comp will swing slightly in Armon's direction when his equity stake is worth $175M more than the CRO's.
paxys|4 years ago
boringg|4 years ago
Also you are comparing an owner vs an employee, not apples to apples.
klelatti|4 years ago
ryan93|4 years ago
sam0x17|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
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unknown|4 years ago
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1cvmask|4 years ago
boringg|4 years ago
sciurus|4 years ago
simlevesque|4 years ago
dang|4 years ago
m0zg|4 years ago
trueman3|4 years ago
throwaway95118|4 years ago
redwood|4 years ago