HashiCorp – S1

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,<p>$259 million revenue. 2100+ Customers, 1500+ employees, $10 Billion Valuation.........<p>I mean I felt it wasn&#x27;t that long ago Vagrant was &quot;the&quot; tool for the job.<p>How it all started, the submission on HN [1], quote:<p>&gt;<i>This project has been the love child of myself and John Bender (nickelcode.com) for the past 6 weeks. We&#x27;re both daily HN readers and would like to use this as a starting point to show Vagrant to the public. Specifically, I&#x27;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!</i><p>&gt;<i>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&#x27;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.</i><p>Really amazing achievement in such short space of time. Congratulations!<p>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?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=1175901" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=1175901</a>

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&#x27;s the 1.0 announcement in 2012. [1]<p>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&#x2F;apps&#x2F;ops demand.<p>Then to walk away from $50MM barely older than drinking age. [2]<p>Seriously congratulations to them and the Hashicorp team. Will likely invest and hold for a long time.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3672149" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3672149</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;mitchellh&#x2F;status&#x2F;1357445215259250689" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;mitchellh&#x2F;status&#x2F;1357445215259250689</a>

The impact Vagrant has had on my business is nearly immeasurable (and for free, no less). We&#x27;re a small startup, and I haven&#x27;t had the time (or motivation) to learn what Docker, Kubernetes, containers, etc are. Seems overly complex.<p>But, virtual servers I can understand. I&#x27;ve been using Vagrant since 2013 and it ... just works. We&#x27;ve built our own custom box to standardize our development environment as well.<p>If there is one company and person I&#x27;d like to mimic, it&#x27;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.<p>Congratulations on the success!

When HashiCorp first got announced I thought &quot;How is he going to make a company out of Vagrant?&quot; I was definitely wrong and on my own projects I&#x27;m using lots of their products from packer to nomad. Super cool to see someone&#x2F;people create something like HashiCorp out of what I originally thought would be a single product.

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&#x27;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.<p>I fail to see in what segment Hashicorp will remain relevant over time.<p>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.<p>Vault is an extremely complicated niche tool, most companies should not use.<p>Consul, the service discovery tool is mostly not needed in cloud environments. Don&#x27;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.<p>Vagrant, use whatever.<p>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.<p>When selecting an identity platform you mainly have to go along with the corruption in the industry...<p>I really wish Hashicorp good luck on this journey though.

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.

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!<p>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 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29044500" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29044500</a>). 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.<p>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.<p>All the best to him and HashiCorp going forward.

Does anyone have an idea regarding when the stock (HCP) will be tradable? It doesn&#x27;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 &quot;lesser known&quot; ones like Vagrant and Nomad.<p>Bearish on the now-public company, though. I think they grew too fast and the leadership will squeeze revenue out of their current headline &quot;cloud glue&quot; products (Terraform, Vault, Consul) without having incentive to push their other products.<p>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?<p>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&#x27;ve enjoyed using his tools more than I should. Most enterprise software is designed by committee. Hashicorp&#x27;s products feel like they were designed by one person -- or perhaps they know their users extremely well.

It&#x27;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 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stockanalysis.com&#x2F;ipos&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stockanalysis.com&#x2F;ipos&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;</a>) in spite of the pandemic.<p>I guess it&#x27;s because there&#x27;s just so much money swishing around - why not?

I&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>Congrats! I&#x27;m certain to buy the stock.

HashiCorp is like Docker Inc done right.

Mitchell stepping down to become a &quot;IC&quot; has got to be related to planning for this, right?

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.<p>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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;laptrinhx.com&#x2F;mitchell-hashimoto-is-automating-the-world-1359161374&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;laptrinhx.com&#x2F;mitchell-hashimoto-is-automating-the-w...</a><p>&quot;UW Robot was registering 70-80% of the undergraduate student body and &#x27;was pulling in about half a million dollars a year&#x27; for an automation program he only spent a few hours a year maintaining.&quot;<p>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.<p>Edit: I found the article! <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sports.yahoo.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;25-old-coding-genius-making-141500389.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sports.yahoo.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;25-old-coding-genius-making-141...</a><p>This stood out to me:<p>&gt; Hashimoto&#x27;s dad, who he describes as &quot;a very nice but very strict&quot; Japanese father, didn&#x27;t think much of his son&#x27;s love of computers. The cease and desist letter didn&#x27;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&#x27;t Thrilled<p>I recently realized Taiwan has 1&#x2F;5th the population of Japan, yet disproportionately has 33 billionaires versus Japan&#x27;s 45. I&#x27;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&#x27;s not the financing gating me. I&#x27;d have to quit my employment for I.P. reasons, but then I don&#x27;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

Off-topic but HashiCorp sounds a lot like the name of a company that manufactures life-like androids in a cyberpunk setting.

wow<p><i>&gt; 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.</i><p><i>&gt; over 300 of the Forbes Global 2000 were our customers</i><p><i>&gt;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.</i><p><i>&gt; over 44% of our customers with $100,000 or greater ARR were licensing more than one product</i>

Im gonna take this moment to plug cdktf: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hashicorp&#x2F;terraform-cdk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hashicorp&#x2F;terraform-cdk</a><p>It&#x27;s something I have been playing with recently and oh boy the possibilities here are really exciting.

Congrats to HashiCorp for their IPO and for building an awesome suite of tools.<p>I attended a Papers We Love meetup back in 2015 where Armon Dadgar, HashiCorp&#x27;s CTO, gave the main talk on Bloom filters and HyperLogLog (interested parties can watch a recording of the talk here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=T3Bt9Tn6P5c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=T3Bt9Tn6P5c</a>). 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&#x2F;Hashicorp achieve such a huge, positive milestone.

Terraform, IMO is the best piece of software invented for devs in the past 10 years. Congrats!

I love the products but that S1 didn&#x27;t exactly blow my socks off. They are hemorrhaging cash and their growth strategy is pretty WeWork-ish. Seems to boil down to &quot;Get more customers&quot;, &quot;HCP is probably going to make money&quot;, and finally &quot;the rest of the world needs hashicorp too&quot;

Would be great if someone with knowledge on how to read an S1 could help me figure out these two basic questions:<p>What percentage of the company gets sold in the IPO?<p>And does that money go into the company or does it go to existing shareholders?

Congrats to the team!<p>Slightly off-topic, if I wanted to buy some HashiCorp&#x27;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?

When can we expect the IPO to be after such a document is published?

I can think of no better person who should get a windfall for all his and his teams hard work than Mitchell. What an awesome human being.

From 2019 to 2021 revenue quadrupled but net loss only doubled. They’ll be profitable in no time. I will be buying shares.

Isnt this a wrapper script over VirtualBox?? Whats the value?!

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.

That hashicorp golang code is some of the best code I’ve got to read as a pentester. Looking forward to the IPO.

Awesome, I&#x27;m excited for this. Does anyone know of any services where I could add HashiCorp to a watchlist and get an email notification before&#x2F;after their IPO? (I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;ll see it on HN or other sites but I want to make sure I don&#x27;t miss it.)

Is anybody here an HCP user, and would be willing to comment on how valuable adopting HCP has been for your organization?<p>It seems to be a growing contingent of their revenue, in addition to being an interesting product. Curious to get HN&#x27;s take on it.

Love HashiCorp, though not sure what to think about Sales&amp;Marketing to R&amp;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.

Is it just me that while I hear good things about their product, I don&#x27;t find the need to use their product?<p>Do they have a product that has no good competition or is the first choice as a tool?<p>Nevertheless, nice accomplishment.

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.

Omg I still remember vagrant as the state of art for the job back then.<p>Great job Mitchell, one of the company that I have respect on goes public!! Good luck!!

This is awesome. Hashicorp tools are great and I&#x27;d argue that Terraform is one of the most important dev tools in the last ten years.

Percentage of quarterly subscription revenue from HCP (and its predecessor cloud offerings): 5.0%

Will you buy this stock at IPO?

Shoutout to Armon who was happy to give a talk at a DevOps for Startups meetup!

Any idea how to buy at ipo price outside of us?

Happy to see this, congrats to Mitch!<p>&lt;Void&gt; lives on

Love all their products. Best of luck!

When Armon giggled then laughed at me as I asked him about DigitalOcean buying Hashi back in the day, I knew they&#x27;d be a billion dollar company. Armon and Mitchell are as good as they come, certainly two of my favourite people I&#x27;ve met on my startup journey.<p>I&#x27;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.

Seems like another success of the hybrid freemium&#x2F;open source model. I think we will see more of these in the enterprise space.

Dupe of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29110469" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29110469</a>

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.

yikes all of SV is raining men from cloudflare into graves tonight

I haven&#x27;t read the S1; do they describe any recent customer outages due to their systems?