[HN Gopher] HashiCorp - S1
___________________________________________________________________
HashiCorp - S1
Author : mootpt
Score : 493 points
Date : 2021-11-04 17:58 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sec.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sec.gov)
| humantorso wrote:
| Im gonna take this moment to plug cdktf:
| https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-cdk
|
| It's something I have been playing with recently and oh boy the
| possibilities here are really exciting.
| michelledepeil wrote:
| What kind of possibilities do you see?
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| shubik22 wrote:
| 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.
| hangonhn wrote:
| 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.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| 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?
| gtirloni wrote:
| HashiCorp is like Docker Inc done right.
| sciurus wrote:
| Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29110469
| simlevesque wrote:
| it's actually the opposite
| dang wrote:
| simlevesque is right - this one was posted a hair earlier, so
| we've merged the other thread hither. Thanks for pointing it
| out!
| adamsvystun wrote:
| 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.
| jcdavis wrote:
| Pretty standard for enterprise SAAS companies.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Why does it seem high to you and what is it based on?
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| v1g1l4nt3 wrote:
| Agree! Here's a recent video of Mitchell at Dev Tool Time
| proving your statement: https://srcgr.ph/mitchell-hashimoto
| sedatk wrote:
| Off-topic but HashiCorp sounds a lot like the name of a company
| that manufactures life-like androids in a cyberpunk setting.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Their logo reinforces that. It looks like it had the same
| designer of the OCP logo from Robocop.
| fideloper wrote:
| Mitchell stepping down to become a "IC" has got to be related to
| planning for this, right?
| mootpt wrote:
| Almost certainly
| mromanuk wrote:
| why he stepped down as CEO, then CTO and now IC?
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| CEO of a publicly traded company is a vastly different job
| than CEO of a private startup. Your job is to make money
| for shareholders, not pursue a vision. It's not something
| everyone wants to do and is likely a lot less rewarding for
| someone who successfully creates a technology company.
| v1g1l4nt3 wrote:
| He's a true engineer at heart. This is him at Dev Tool Time
| recently: https://srcgr.ph/mitchell-hashimoto
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| If I was to guess, he wants to write code and he started
| the company so he could write code. He just had to do those
| jobs along the way to get to the point where he could just
| focus on writing code and solving problems.
| SteveMorin wrote:
| Yes that's exactly the reason. I know them through
| friends
| estro0182 wrote:
| So the company can bring in outside execs without ousting
| one of the founders from a C-suite role.
| jldugger wrote:
| If I had to guess:
|
| 1. Perhaps because he can.
|
| 2. Because being a CEO of a public company comes with a lot
| of rules around disclosure of material public information
| and equal access. It takes a special kind of person to
| disregard general consel and just shitpost on twitter with
| zero review while directly responsible to shareholders. I
| don't know what kind of safe harbor Elon thinks Twitter
| offers but I doubt it applies to Github code review.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| 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.
| runlevel1 wrote:
| Multi cloud, hybrid, and on-prem often need solutions that
| aren't married to a single cloud provider.
|
| 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.
| vngzs wrote:
| 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.
| thunderthunder wrote:
| 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....
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| I do not really understand why people run so many things in
| containers in the first place. Sure, for sand-boxing and
| sometimes resource utilization, but the large services I
| worked on have always been on 10+ dedicated high-end servers
| with 200GB+ memory each. Absolutely zero need for any
| additional abstractions. You can also design solutions that
| use a lot of memory in contrast to containers.
| jordanbeiber wrote:
| I feel I need to reply with my thoughts.
|
| - 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!
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| All major clouds have better alternatives to Vault. Vault is
| mostly for really large companies that want to run things
| like this by themself.
|
| There is no need for service discovery in the cloud in
| general.
|
| I have also used Nomad a lot. Maybe it is because we always
| needed the cutting edge features in general, but in general
| not very good quality. Core features always worked though.
| People should use Kubernetes instead in most cases.
|
| There is simply no way Terraform and the HCL2 will survive
| for cloud environments. For other use cases I do not know.
| jordanbeiber wrote:
| "People should use Kubernetes instead" is an interesting
| take considering your first paragraph. :) You've perhaps
| not had to troubleshooting issues in a more advanced k8s
| setup - that is something that is not "for most people".
|
| Keeping services discoverable, with service health-checks
| and configuration data at hand in the k/v is not needed in
| the "cloud"? I guess a lot comes down to how you opt to
| manage you services... It's what etc does, but worse (imo),
| for k8s. My usual work with larger infrastructure spans
| more than k8s or a single provider, hence consul is a
| given.
|
| To my knowledge no other secrets solution exists that cover
| all the things vault does, and at the same lets you stay
| provider agnostic. It integrates well with the major cloud
| providers though!
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| What I am saying is that Kubernetes has become the
| mainstream tool to use. You have to put up good reasons
| or custom needs to use something else.
|
| A thing I like about Consul is that you can also use it
| as a KV. Something I lack in the cloud.
|
| The Vault in Azure is the Keyvault which is all around
| terrible but Keyvault in conjunction with how Azure works
| in general is sufficient to build secure infrastructure.
| neom wrote:
| 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.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Seems like another success of the hybrid freemium/open source
| model. I think we will see more of these in the enterprise space.
| boringg wrote:
| 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.
| gigatexal wrote:
| 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.
| lamroger wrote:
| Shoutout to Armon who was happy to give a talk at a DevOps for
| Startups meetup!
| marc__1 wrote:
| wow
|
| _> 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_
| baby wrote:
| When can we expect the IPO to be after such a document is
| published?
| [deleted]
| tomnipotent wrote:
| Usually within 3-6 months, depending on how many rounds of
| comments the SEC has.
| farmerstan wrote:
| Way too long. Less than a month after filing S-1. Company
| already went through the rounds with SEC confidentially.
|
| Source: wife is c-suite and took company through ipo in the
| last year.
| mootpt wrote:
| my guess is early Dec
| tomnipotent wrote:
| You're absolutely right. I took a look at a handful of
| recent IPOs (Snowflake, Unity, Gitlab) and they all
| basically had just a month lag between S-1 filing and IPO
| date.
| marc__1 wrote:
| After the JOBS act, roadshows can start 15 calendar days of
| publicly filing the registration statement with the SEC (before
| it was 21)
|
| Roadshow may take 5-20 more days, so we may see them ring the
| bell by mid-December
| [deleted]
| stefanmichael wrote:
| Happy to see this, congrats to Mitch!
|
| <Void> lives on
| picardo wrote:
| 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.
| gigatexal wrote:
| From 2019 to 2021 revenue quadrupled but net loss only doubled.
| They'll be profitable in no time. I will be buying shares.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3672149
|
| [2] https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1357445215259250689
| ryanisnan wrote:
| Newb investor here, but huge hashi user. Do you have any
| insight as to when stocks become available after an IPO?
| nodesocket wrote:
| You can buy the stock on the first day of trading. If you
| want to try and get an allocation of shares at IPO price,
| various brokerages have different processes where you apply.
| I use E*Trade mostly, but Robinhood does have the best IPO
| center of any brokerage I have seen.
| mootpt wrote:
| seems like just yesterday:
| https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/267047991674810368
| wdella wrote:
| 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.
| nkotov wrote:
| This is awesome. Hashicorp tools are great and I'd argue that
| Terraform is one of the most important dev tools in the last ten
| years.
| shironandon wrote:
| 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.
| t_sawyer wrote:
| Vault is only replaceable in cloud. Idk of any on-prem products
| that have anywhere near Vaults functionality.
| nodesocket wrote:
| You are missing the point. They are the de-facto standard in
| DevOps tooling from one person startups to gigantic public tech
| FAANG companies.
|
| My prediction, HashiCorp after IPO'ing will get acquired.
| antoinealb wrote:
| Which FAANG is public about using one of those?
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| 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.
| ignoramous wrote:
| 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 '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
| hnmullany wrote:
| The Terraform ecosystem worked with VM's - big difference vs.
| Docker. The VMware ecosystem spends a TON of money on
| software.
| loosescrews wrote:
| I think a big part of it is that Docker failed to expand much
| beyond their initial offering. They tried, but weren't able
| to get much traction. HashiCorp probably wouldn't be IPOing
| with a multi-billion dollar valuation if they continued to
| focus mainly on Vagrant.
| leftnode wrote:
| 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.
|
| Congratulations on the success!
| handrous wrote:
| > Docker
|
| 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.
| robertwt7 wrote:
| Omg I still remember vagrant as the state of art for the job back
| then.
|
| Great job Mitchell, one of the company that I have respect on
| goes public!! Good luck!!
| pphysch wrote:
| 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.
| dreyfan wrote:
| > Was major Roblox outage Nomad-related
|
| They haven't posted a detailed post-mortem yet but it's more
| likely consul related that in-turn brought down vault and
| nomad.
| alephnan wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Just my N+1 anecdata, but knowing what I know now I'd never
| encourage a young person to step into the tech industry. It's
| genuinely brutal, people should focus on specializations
| instead of assuming that knowing how to code will make you a
| valuable asset.
| pintxo wrote:
| Coding is the baseline. Being able to apply it to the
| problems of an industry helps a lot.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| He started the major in 2007. In my experience, CS only
| started being a famously lucrative major around ~2016. Before
| then, parents especially weren't up to date and still
| considered medicine and law to be the good careers. And of
| course, after reading the article:
|
| 'When Hashimoto went to college, his dad told him he had one
| year to pursue "that computer thing."
|
| "If I couldn't prove to him in a year it was useful in some
| way, I either had to pay for college myself or become a
| lawyer or doctor," Hashimoto says.'
| jaxxstorm wrote:
| 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.
| klelatti wrote:
| Higher salary probably needed to attract the CRO to the role -
| not an issue for Armon.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Also interesting to learn that a CRO is a thing. I swear there
| is a new C-level title invented every few seconds.
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| "Lead growth hacker" doesn't convey the same amount of
| prestige
| mateo411 wrote:
| It turns out that Revenue is important, which means that
| there is a C level role to make sure that a company's revenue
| outlook is good.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It's really just formalizing and enterprising a lead growth
| role.
| awad wrote:
| It's actually a very common role that encompasses far more
| than the traditional "head of sales" role
| mikeyouse wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| Based on their last valuation, Armon's shares should be worth
| around $550,000,000.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Holy smokes.. Yeah, I didn't have a basis for the
| $10/share, it was just a random number since I didn't have
| valuation detail... but wow. So Armon's shares would be
| worth something like $535M more than the CRO's. I suspect
| he's okay making a bit less in W2 income this year!
| boringg wrote:
| 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.
| ryan93 wrote:
| Figure he brought in a major client.
| [deleted]
| ksec wrote:
| 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?
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _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?_
|
| news.ycombinator.com needs a ycombinator.com/topcompanies
| equivalent.
| mike_d wrote:
| > 1500+ employees
|
| 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.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| > According to LinkedIn the average tenure of employees is a
| little over a year (likely to hit the vesting cliff and
| bounce).
|
| I think this is usually the case for fast growing companies
| that typically double employees every year, because:
|
| 1/2 people avg. 1/2 year tenure
|
| 1/4 people avg. 3/2 year tenure
|
| 1/8 people avg. 5/2 year tenure
|
| etc. Which approaches something around ~1 year tenure. You'll
| notice the same 1.1 year tenure at Stripe, Affirm, etc.
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| An additional data point (read: anecdote): I applied for a
| job at Hashicorp in early July of this year. I have yet to
| receive any reply, including a "thanks but no thanks"
|
| For reference, I also have a friend who applied there in late
| 2019; he apparently _did_ get a "thanks but no thanks" email
| about a month later.
|
| Perhaps all of the company is short-staffed, rather than just
| engineering.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Where can I see $10B valuation to confirm?
| ksec wrote:
| Sorry I think it should be _seeking_ $10B according to Yahoo
| / Bloomberg.
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hashicorp-files-u-ipo-
| said-18...
| gorgoiler wrote:
| 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.
| missedthecue wrote:
| I think a lot of startups could be a little more lean than
| they are right now.
| capableweb wrote:
| > Hiring engineers away from FAANG is incredibly expensive.
|
| That seems to be changing, as the employees at those
| companies are starting to re-evaluate the ethical choice of
| staying or leaving a company they thought was "good".
| trhway wrote:
| >Compare with APPL and FB doing $2.5M per employee per
| quarter.
|
| your math if off - FB is $500K/employee/quarter, APPL is
| ~600K/employee/quarter. That still of course a boatload of
| money allowing them to pay $600K+/year to the engineers.
| dhosek wrote:
| I'm guessing that was a typo and he meant per year since
| the comparison number was also annual revenue.
| Sebguer wrote:
| Does this account for how much those companies offload to
| contractors / staffing agencies?
| polskibus wrote:
| They have lots of contractors though , ppl that censor posts,
| etc. You're probably not taking them into consideration.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| Point stands, but I'm not sure how you get that much for FB
| and AAPL. In 2020 (4 quarters) they made, per employee,
| ~$1.2M and $0.7M in gross profit, $1.5M and $1.9M in revenue.
| I didn't cross check the table but did get the same number
| for FB.
|
| https://twitter.com/investing_city/status/142301690347634278.
| ..
| aronowb14 wrote:
| coinbase one is here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26815403
| polote wrote:
| > 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 ...
| ryanar wrote:
| _> 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.
| [deleted]
| handrous wrote:
| > 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.
| __jem wrote:
| Docker at this point is just a wrapper around OCI spec... why
| would you go back to Vagrant rather than just using any of
| the other tools that can build OCI images? Vagrant and Docker
| seem like fundamentally different tools to me.
| handrous wrote:
| At least 80% of Docker's value to me is as a consistent-
| everywhere, _very_ complete server daemon package manager.
| Serious packages for work? They 're there, and up-to-date.
| Screwing-around stuff for home (Minecraft server, Jellyfin,
| et c.)? It's all there, same interface, just a couple
| minutes to add and configure another daemon at
| approximately its latest version, and I don't even have to
| think about which distro I'm running.
|
| It's the container registry that I'd miss, not the actual
| container functionality, and that's what would have me
| reaching for Vagrant and distro packages again until
| something similarly good arose (or maybe there already is a
| viable replacement, which I'd find via search in short
| order if I actually needed it)
| miere wrote:
| I wonder what sort of container registry are you looking
| for. There are a few alternatives to Docker Hub nowadays.
| For instance, GCP's is quite affordable and
| straightforward.
| redwood wrote:
| Percentage of quarterly subscription revenue from HCP (and its
| predecessor cloud offerings): 5.0%
| misiti3780 wrote:
| Terraform, IMO is the best piece of software invented for devs in
| the past 10 years. Congrats!
| dbetteridge wrote:
| 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.
|
| All the best to him and HashiCorp going forward.
| nightpool wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| gen220 wrote:
| Is anybody here an HCP user, and would be willing to comment on
| how valuable adopting HCP has been for your organization?
|
| 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.
| xwdv wrote:
| Will you buy this stock at IPO?
| TekMol wrote:
| Would be great if someone with knowledge on how to read an S1
| could help me figure out these two basic questions:
|
| 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?
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| 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).
| ac29 wrote:
| 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.
| TekMol wrote:
| Thanks. How does one find the complete S1 when it is updated?
|
| For example, how can this information be found for Coinbase?
| phonon wrote:
| SEC/Edgar
|
| Hashicorp
|
| https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search/#/dateRange=custom&ciks=00
| 0...
|
| Coinbase
|
| https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search/#/dateRange=custom&ciks=00
| 0...
| chernevik wrote:
| 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.
| adamsvystun wrote:
| > What percentage of the company gets sold in the IPO?
|
| 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.
| nathan_f77 wrote:
| 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.)
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Webull is pretty solid
| uf00lme wrote:
| Any idea how to buy at ipo price outside of us?
| dcchambers wrote:
| 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.
| endisneigh wrote:
| 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?
| shoto_io wrote:
| Jap, I bet it's related to this chart
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1NS
| yellow_lead wrote:
| You might want to read that footnote about the definition of
| M1 changing at May 2020
| ushakov wrote:
| as inflation rises, it's good times to attract investors
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| 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
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| I believe the surge in IPOs isn't in spite of the pandemic but
| because of the pandemic.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| dotcom bubble started with many IPOs
| sjg007 wrote:
| Musical chairs maybe...
| boringg wrote:
| 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)
| goodpoint wrote:
| Expect a huge crash...
| 988747 wrote:
| VC investors are cashing out - a sign of impending doom. Expect
| Dotcom Crash 2.0
| noway421 wrote:
| VC investors are in the business of cashing out, that's the
| mandate of the funds that they raise. Why would that signal
| an impending doom?
| ggregoire wrote:
| Congrats to the team!
|
| 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?
| apayan wrote:
| Try out Interactive Brokers. They seem to serve a lot of non-
| USA customers. Disclosure: A happy USA user.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| 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
| nathan_f77 wrote:
| You could probably get an account with Interactive Brokers.
| Here's their list of available countries:
| https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=7021
|
| In New Zealand we also have https://www.hatchinvest.nz and
| https://www.sharesies.nz. You might have some similar services
| in your country.
| SassyGrapefruit wrote:
| 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"
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| You are right, and this is a decent analogy, but isn't it a
| lot easier to say:
|
| Look at YE 2021, they spent $140 mill on sales and marketing.
| Next year they could turn that down to $20 million and they
| would be instantly profitable and almost certainly grow a
| little bit too. They could also likely slash R&D and G&A by
| 30-40% without affecting current products. They are very
| valuable as is, but growing significantly (which isn't free)
| makes them even more valuable (most likely).
| throwaway95118 wrote:
| I haven't read the S1; do they describe any recent customer
| outages due to their systems?
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