$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?
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.
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.
https://twitter.com/investing_city/status/142301690347634278...
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".
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.
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.
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.
news.ycombinator.com needs a ycombinator.com/topcompanies equivalent.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
Bigger fish to fry. I wish I had that level of focus!
[0] http://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple-c...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hashicorp-files-u-ipo-said-18...
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
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!
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.
My original reply was going to be something along the lines of "Bwahahahaha" followed by a comparison of how many seconds it takes to `pip3 install torch` vs how many hours you'd rip your hair out trying to get that running in Docker, let alone on a GPU, and let alone in a way that you can actually develop on it.
Perhaps it's easier to say, "We're not smart." Like Racket, Docker is a marvelous tool, and I'm sure a lot of smart people use it in some incredible ways.
I'll be 34 in Feb. Do I want to spend a month trying to force myself to use Docker for no apparent reason?
At my first job (gamedev), one of my coding heroes happened to work there. One thing he said really bugged me: "Shaders are a young person's game." By "hero" I mean that he single handedly wrote most of the Planetside 1 client code, as well as having developed many other titles that I grew up playing on MPlayer. (God help you if you know what MPlayer was.)
I tried explaining to him, no no, you see, it's not so bad! You can do it! I believe in you. Once you put in a little effort, you'll understand all the parts, and you'll see there's really not that much to it.
Yeah, uh, I was 19. He was like 40. I get it now.
I've personally deployed multiple services to production whose reliability can be measured in years: https://status.shawwn.com/
Sure, none of those are too impressive. Except the one I can't talk about, ha. But they're all variations on "get the server running, make sure the process is simple, make sure it's fail-safe, and put failsafes in place to notice if it breaks."
To my surprise, they almost never break. Isn't that marvelous? Here's me, someone inching closer and closer over the hill, delivering robust software that lasts years. Hell, you can even see for yourself: https://tags.tagpls.com/uptime
508d 00h 04m 14s
Sure, I'm being unfair. Because you'll rightly say that there's a world of difference between this and the situations DOcker's designed to solve.
And yet, as I go from company to company, I keep being surprised to find zero people using Docker. Isn't that strange? My wife just got a job at a YC co. I'll ask her whether anyone there uses Docker either. Maybe they do.
Docker's stolen days of my life for no gain. Painful days, because they were days when I was really into hacking, and I could've been busily building a big beaver dam instead of learning infrastructure that none of my colleagues ended up using.
Docker is a time vampire. It's "Nerd Snipe: The Game." You'll want to play with it, and it'll give you just enough happiness to keep you going. But, like a cat, the love is one-way. If Docker were a person, they would totally ditch you on your birthday.
It was much more satisfying to write this than to spend that time staring at yet another damn variation of "how do I forward the port properly?" torrent of blog posts from the legions of developers that Docker has managed to curse, by making the impressive decision to eschew simplicity in favor of being Smart with a capital-S.
But hey, Docker will be around longer than I will, I'm sure. So it'll get the last laugh. In seriousness though, you can get by without it, which is pretty remarkable -- almost as remarkable as it was to try out vagrant and discover that it's the polar opposite of Docker's philosophy.
The difference is easy to spot: Vagrant just works.
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.
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.
I could write pages on the hashicorp products!
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.
Discovery means that you don’t know your service name? Or endpoints? How can one lose his service? Im def missing something :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
My prediction, HashiCorp after IPO'ing will get acquired.
Im in cloud automation 8+ years. No they are not de-facto standard. For AWS projects, I much prefer Cloudformation. App devs use venv or similar, not Vagrant.
I’d use their CI/CD if they had one, like GitLab, but looks like they don’t?
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.
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.
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.
They haven't posted a detailed post-mortem yet but it's more likely consul related that in-turn brought down vault and nomad.
I guess it's because there's just so much money swishing around - why not?
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.
Congrats! I'm certain to buy the stock.
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
'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.'
> 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
It's something I have been playing with recently and oh boy the possibilities here are really exciting.
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.
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.
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).
I don't believe this. Snowflake for instance could be profitable if they chose and they have almost no debt. Furthermore their expenses grow logarithmically with their revenue. It doesn't cost much more to have 2 customers as it does to have 1, but the revenue doubles. Their services are an add-on that supplements the revenue from the platform. Its the growth in platform adoption that moves the earnings number.
>They're making hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
No they are losing 10's of millions of dollars a year. Revenue is not earnings. Wework had revenue of billions of dollars a year and but the cost of that revenue meant they had no path to profitability.
I see the same thing here. The bulk of their revenue come from selling services on top of their software. Services have a high COGS. For every service contract you sell you have to pay someone to service the contract. Your costs grow linearly with your revenue. This is the trap yelp fell into. Making billions by paying 95-105 cents for every dollar because opening a new market meant building all the infrastructure for that market.
If hashicorp can't find a way to make the growth in adoption of their software directly influence their earnings I don't think this is a good investment.
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?
For example, how can this information be found for Coinbase?
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.
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?
In New Zealand we also have https://www.hatchinvest.nz and https://www.sharesies.nz. You might have some similar services in your country.
Source: wife is c-suite and took company through ipo in the last year.
Roadshow may take 5-20 more days, so we may see them ring the bell by mid-December
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.
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.
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.
Do they have a product that has no good competition or is the first choice as a tool?
Nevertheless, nice accomplishment.
Great job Mitchell, one of the company that I have respect on goes public!! Good luck!!
<Void> lives on
I'm beaming with joy at the prospect of becoming a shareholder. Well done team, well done.
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.
Also you are comparing an owner vs an employee, not apples to apples.