HashiCorp IPO today

[NotSammyHagar]

Their symbol is hcp instead of hash, what a shame.

[thinkmassive]

I would have preferred HCL

[snarf21]

Well, it is kind of a hash of their name, no?

[brentis]

It is. Assumed it would be. Guess the negative connotation vs. the cool one. $&'*€&<

[atlgator]

Don't buy at IPO. Buy after the lockup expires.

[mancerayder]

Is that the pattern of other IPOs? I've seen lots of 'lockup expiry' fud that never materialized. No sudden dump of employee shares.

[oh_sigh]

Cloudflare(NET) was ~$18 at IPO. It was ~$19 at lockup expiration 180 days later(versus nasdaq being a few percent down). If you bought at IPO you'd be up 734% but at lockup you'd be up only 688%.

[politelemon]

What happens after lockup expires?

[stevofolife]

How do one check this?

[tomrod]

I gor hit by this once. Never again.

[nodesocket]

Thank you Mitchell and Armon. I essentially built my DevOps consulting company off the back of Packer and Terraform. I’ll be a long term $HCP shareholder.

[nunez]

You and a bunch of other founders!

[altdataseller]

Don’t understand why anyone would need their cloud products. Who needs Terraform or Nomad or Vault as a service?

[ignoramous]

They're like Docker for DevOps?

> ...a common confusion is multi-cloud vs. multi-vendor services. The latter is way more common, especially at smaller companies. Tools like Terraform are often touted as "multi-cloud" and people ask questions like "Why would I use Terraform if I use only AWS?" And the easy answer to that is tools like Terraform allow you to manage anything with an API as code. For example: do you want to manage DNS, or CDN, or DBs, etc. (that maybe aren't on AWS) as code? Terraform gives you the way to learn one config language/workflow to make that happen, even if 100% of your compute is on one provider. From a non-technical standpoint, this helps your organization start learning non-vendor-specific tooling, which better prepares you from a human standpoint for the future noted above.

> I think the #1 value of multi-cloud is organizational: you build your core infra/app lifecycle processes (dev, build, deploy, monitor, etc.) around a technology-agnostic stance. As technologies shift, other clouds become important, new paradigms emerge, etc. your organization is likely more prepared to experience that change. This is something that is core to our ideology at HashiCorp, its point #1 in our Tao that I published 4 years ago! https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/the-tao-of-hashicorp

-mitchellh, https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/91afzz/why_multiclo...

[mywittyname]

There are benefits to Terraform, even at basic levels. You can version control infrastructure, check if manual changes have been made, and quickly spin up new, identical environments from the same configurations.

Yes, there are alternative ways of accomplishing this, but simple config files that can be easily validated and used to check against current infrastructure is an ideal way to do this.

Before Terraform, I worked on a team that built what was basically terraform. It's just a natural, obvious, and effective way of managing cloud infrastructure.

[kache_]

Large tech companies that are paying hashicorp oodles of money, who get first class support from a really great team.

[driverdan]

Who needs RDS? You can host your own database instance. Who needs VPSes? Just run bare metal. Who needs S3? Host your own files.

[baby]

That’s what I thought initially, yet I know a bunch of companies that do (like slack) and my ex company used to as well (facebook). It’s not clear until you actually are faced with a problem at your job that this solves. The whole strategy of hashicorp is to make devs and infra engs life more easy

[ascendantlogic]

Large companies will always pay huge amounts of $$$ for support. They can't be telling engineers "Go google some stuff" if critical components go down.

[rad_gruchalski]

Because putting a complete end to end self service solution like their managed offerings is years of man work.

[manigandham]

Same reason companies also buy cloud infrastructure and platforms as a service; to offload the deployment and operations.

[hpoe]

I can tell where I work it came down to a simple question of having to maintain, control, update, publish and develop TF modules vs just buying the dang thing and not having to worry about it.

[Rantenki]

If you are operating at a scale small enough where a single person is responsible for applying Terraform, and there are never two or more users interleaving applies which could collide, then you don't need TF cloud.

If on the other hand, you have multiple devs, committing changes, and applying them, then you need something like TF to ensure that the applies are consistent, ordered, and auditable.

For personal use? You don't need TF cloud, but the problems it solves get obvious as you scale up.

[brightball]

I really like Vault as a stand-alone architectural solution fwiw. Great tool.

I’ve seen interest increasing in Nomad lately as well. More conversations about it.

Terraform has a huge following though.

[lysecret]

I use it to now and then reset the Dev DB. So it is marginally more convenient than running on your pc (since it takes 20 mins to reset the db). But im sure there are better usecases haha.

Setting all my infrastructure in Terraform in general has been a big waste of time for our startup since as soon as we got it running we never ever had to touch it again. Actually curious if somone touches their infra regularly.

[Suchos]

At my company, they don't want to deploy OSS Vault on prem. Apparently we need the enterprise edition, because it is easier for our operations team.

[spatley]

Terrraform is declarative and describes the end state of what you want your system to look like. Executing terraform on anything other than blank slate requires that the deployment needs to know state of the current system. You can store that state yourself, or you can have HCP store it for you as a service

[bigmattystyles]

I assume this is sarcasm? If not - portability comes to mind.

[bugsense]

I think Hashicorp will enter monitoring next. Netdata would be a great fit (OSS, fat agent, huge metric granularity, deep infra and network insights)

[zenlikethat]

It's _such_ a crowded space though. Getting into monitoring is often a death trap because companies often think, "Hey, that's gotta be a logical next step, everybody loves dashboards" and then they get smoked by Splunk and Datadog because it's way harder than it looks and already saturated.

[rad_gruchalski]

I’d love to see their managed platform on premise.

[roffo]

prometheus is amazing though, would be hard to pull me off that

[MetalMatze]

What makes you think they will enter monitoring next?

[sytse]

Congratulations Mitchell, Armon, Dave, and everyone else at Hashicorp. We made a blog post to celebrate https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/12/09/congratulations-to-...

[outside1234]

"please buy us with the money!"

[pas]

Hah, no IPO bump. Does anyone know any detail about their deal with their bank?

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/HCP:NASDAQ?sa=X&ved=2ah...

[khazhoux]

My understanding is that an IPO bump is good for optics, and good for underwriters, but bad for company itself (money left on table). Is that right?

[shortstuffsushi]

Could you explain what you mean by this? From their launch at 80, they pretty quickly went up to ~90, then dropped back to 83-84, which is up a few percent for the day. What sort of bump do you expect? (Legitimately, I'm not familiar with this sort of thing)

[Rastonbury]

Looked decent, they priced at 72 and opened at 81, whilst the wider market tanked pretty hard, everything was red. Many saas stocks are down double digit over past week too.

[morepork]

6% seems a pretty good bump to me. Enough to get people interested, not so high that the company left heaps of cash on the table.

[bugsense]

It was a pretty bad day for growth tech stocks today. Also they were already richly valued.

[rileymat2]

Can someone explain the revenue declines in 2019? https://www.google.com/finance/quote/HCP:NASDAQ

Or is this a Google Fiance Bug?

[shawabawa3]

99% sure those metrics are wrong

[poopypoopington]

Damn Google makes Fiance now??

[jakub_g]

Question to EU folks: do you see HCP at your stock broker?

Out of curiosity, I checked the two stock brokers I have accounts with (Revolut and DeGiro), and it's not there yet.

Do you know what EU (or French) brokers have the Nasdaq companies on the day of IPO?

[drexlspivey]

Trading 212 and Interactive Brokers have it

[politelemon]

Hargreaves Lansdown: Not seeing it.

[yawnxyz]

I just checked and found it on Schwab so bought a couple of share. Seems to work

[michelb]

I'm in the NL and I use Interactive Brokers, and it was available.

[random123450987]

BourseDirect has stocks at IPO

[wirelesspotat]

HCP is on Freetrade in the UK

[dddw]

Not on bux zero

[Animats]

So they sell orchestration tools for managing server farms, right?

[redisman]

Other then cashing in equity has anyone found that a IPO has made a place better or worse for the employees? Big fan of Hashicorp products btw

[nemo44x]

Better for your wallet, but worse for the job. The company changes. The type of people it attracts to leadership roles are not the kind of people you’d start a company with. They bring their “processes and methods” that they promise will scale the company and then they insulate themselves by hiring their friends to report to them. The culture is corrupt at this point and the technologists that built the company begin moving on to new challenges and you see an accelerating attrition. But the new leadership doesn’t mind as it removes credible threats to their questionable abilities. And they can backfill with more friends/lackies loyal to them.

Within a few years post IPO the Composition of the company will have totally changed. The special place becomes a regular corporation. The hyenas will try to move on to the next Prize.

[bri3d]

I bet most answers to this question will conflate IPO problems with simple growth problems, and the two are hard to separate. After all, a constant drive for growth combined with accountability to a public board usually makes strong leadership and strategy challenging - it's easier IMO for public companies to fall into "we must do what is easy to hit our numbers now."

On the flip side of the same coin, the ability to offer liquid equity and essentially pay employees using the company's projected growth (RSU issuance) is often financially lucrative for employees old and new and if done correctly, can attract a different group of really strong people who aren't in a place to take the startup gamble.

[quartz]

I was at Facebook when the IPO happened and it was a pretty positive experience overall.

We had an all-night hackathon the night before (one of the hacks was to wire into the "Nasdaq bell" button to post an opengraph story) and the whole company was mostly in a "stay focused and keep shipping" mode.

The leadership team shared a few funny jokes each week at the all-hands events leading up to it talking about the roadshow but prep work for the IPO was mostly framed as "this thing we've got to do" and not as some kind of goal. The company was overwhelming focused on the work at hand.

Overall the IPO was cool and I'm sure for many momentus, but as a somewhat newly acquired employee it was mostly a non-event and no one made me feel like I'd missed out by not joining earlier. Everyone was really just starting to feel comfortable at the newish physical HQ and morale was generally high. Most if not all the internal chatter was around the idea that "this journey is 1% finished" and at least everyone I knew there was in "let's do this and move on" mode.

Mark had publicly committed to not selling any shares for at least a year so no one thought he was going to bail or anything.

The stock price then proceeded to fall from $30's to the $10's and despite the on-paper financial hit for many of us it was kind of validating that "those silly people in wallstreet still don't get it" and that we weren't at the end of anything, we were still at the beginning.

As FB then consistently grew for the next 9 years to nearly $400/share there was still plenty of upside so there wasn't much of a pre-IPO vs. post-IPO tribal thing going on either.

In short, the culture was never built around "let's get this thing to IPO" so it wasn't really impacted negatively by reaching that milestone.

[gpm]

I've seen the opposite, lack of a long promised IPO causing morale problems amongst employees...

[dandigangi]

Definitely going to be buying up shares. Love their products and see Vault/TF (among the other products) growing their role in cloud/security.

[davewritescode]

Honestly I’m kinda not a huge fan of Hashicorp these days. They’re super late to managed services and they’re incredibly expensive.

[makeitdouble]

This could read as you being frustrated they're smaller than Amazon

[1cvmask]

What do you mean by incredibly expensive and compared to?

[jakub_g]

Edit: DeGiro seems to have it now.

[Lamad123]

I'd buy a few if they were 5 or even 30 dollars.

[andy_ppp]

Yes I think they'll do quite well, might be worth investing.

[lflux]

Maybe with this IPO they can finally start reviewing terraform PRs again

[988747]

I doubt it. IPO will be the end of it - original investors will cash out, and the company will be left to slow death.

[taf2]

Thanks HashiCorp... it's nice to write lines like this less often:

``` sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmpswap bs=4096 count=1M && sudo chmod 0600 /tmpswap && sudo chown root:root /tmpswap && sudo mkswap /tmpswap && sudo swapon /tmpswap ```

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I'm not following; what does HashiCorp have to do with needing a swap file?