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HashiCorp Raises $175M at $5.1B Valuation

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21–30 of 91 posts

Re: HashiCorp Raises $175M at $5.1B Valuation

#21
post #19

I wonder why HashiCorp needs to raise more money as they seem fairly profitable and in a very good position in the market? Why dilute your stocks and ownership of the company?

I don't they're quite profitable yet (source?). Hence, raising the money.

Re: HashiCorp Raises $175M at $5.1B Valuation

#23

Series E have never been a good indicator for success, especially with the stock market behavior of late, and I don't see how HashiCorp's enterprise offerings are worth a 5.1B valuation. They've continuously struggled to find a good fit for their "enterprise only" features, and the amount of money they charge for these features is nothing short of extortion. Vault seems to be the only runway they have, and I see that…

I know of orgs who are writing 7 figure checks to Hashicorp without batting an eye. They are seeing rapid adoption in large enterprises who are willing to pay for it https://stackshare.io/terraform https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/category/case-study/ It seems like you don't think the value is there, and I supposed for some use cases that may be true, but I assure you they're getting paid for the value they're deliveri…

My viewpoint is based on the products they're competing against:

- Their OSS offerings

- Other OSS offerings like Istio, Ansible, Conjour, and Kubernetes

- Hybrid cloud solutions like Outpost and Anthos

Additionally, I think HashiCorp not embracing kubernetes and trying to push Nomad was a huge miscalculation. None of their products have particularly noteworthy integrations with it, with the community picking up the slack (almost like internally they don't care).

Re: HashiCorp Raises $175M at $5.1B Valuation

#25
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems this company has a similar mode of operation as e.g. Docker: put a thin layer around Linux, and sell it as if it's something new.

What’s it like? To be so cynical that it makes you so blindingly wrong? Terraform, packer, consul, and vault are all ground up products that solve very interesting problems. Nomad is a solid product. They’re all written from the ground up. How many third party companies do you think get pre-release access to AWS, Azure, and GCE and many others so that their software (in this case terraform) supports it the day of ann…

I agree with you, but perhaps we could lay off the tone at the start. Maybe GP is not cynical but just uninformed

Re: HashiCorp Raises $175M at $5.1B Valuation

#27

Series E have never been a good indicator for success, especially with the stock market behavior of late, and I don't see how HashiCorp's enterprise offerings are worth a 5.1B valuation. They've continuously struggled to find a good fit for their "enterprise only" features, and the amount of money they charge for these features is nothing short of extortion. Vault seems to be the only runway they have, and I see that…

I know of orgs who are writing 7 figure checks to Hashicorp without batting an eye. They are seeing rapid adoption in large enterprises who are willing to pay for it https://stackshare.io/terraform https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/category/case-study/ It seems like you don't think the value is there, and I supposed for some use cases that may be true, but I assure you they're getting paid for the value they're deliveri…

How many checks does it take to payback $175M? The VC treadmill is concerning for many tech companies.

Re: HashiCorp Raises $175M at $5.1B Valuation

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know of orgs who are writing 7 figure checks to Hashicorp without batting an eye. They are seeing rapid adoption in large enterprises who are willing to pay for it https://stackshare.io/terraform https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/category/case-study/ It seems like you don't think the value is there, and I supposed for some use cases that may be true, but I assure you they're getting paid for the value they're deliveri…

My viewpoint is based on the products they're competing against: - Their OSS offerings - Other OSS offerings like Istio, Ansible, Conjour, and Kubernetes - Hybrid cloud solutions like Outpost and Anthos Additionally, I think HashiCorp not embracing kubernetes and trying to push Nomad was a huge miscalculation. None of their products have particularly noteworthy integrations with it, with the community picking up the…

As soon as you're working with more than a few people at a time, or in an environment that has compliance, governance, or auditing requirements, you're moving up to Terraform Enterprise (either SaaS or on-prem). I admit you can get pretty far on their OSS offerings, but most folks who need the enterprise features are going to pay for them (SAML/SSO, audit log emissions, private datacenter/on-prem installs, etc). Small shops, startups, and the like? Probably not, but they don't have that much cash anyway; the benefit of marketing to them is a) if they do get big, you're already in the door to sell to them or b) they don't get big, but they grow the ecosystem with engineers knowing and using the products. Those engineers might either end up working for Hashicorp, or landing a gig at a job where they can evangelize the tools and advocate paying for them. Very similar to GitHub's model, and I'd argue it works for everyone; people who can pay, do, people who can't or won't still get value they otherwise wouldn't.

IMHO, configuration management compliments Packer and Terraform, it doesn't compete against it (based on my experience using Ansible and Packer for VMs of all sorts). Kubernetes is a beast in itself; the firms who implement Nomad are not the same as those who would go all in on k8s. Personally, I think Kubernetes is overly complex and prefer Nomad as a scheduler, YMMV (my jobs are more batch in nature, less services).

Re: HashiCorp Raises $175M at $5.1B Valuation

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know of orgs who are writing 7 figure checks to Hashicorp without batting an eye. They are seeing rapid adoption in large enterprises who are willing to pay for it https://stackshare.io/terraform https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/category/case-study/ It seems like you don't think the value is there, and I supposed for some use cases that may be true, but I assure you they're getting paid for the value they're deliveri…

How many checks does it take to payback $175M? The VC treadmill is concerning for many tech companies.

Fortune 500 companies represent two-thirds of the U.S. GDP with $13.7 trillion in revenues, $1.1 trillion in profits, $22.6 trillion in market value, so there's money to be had in helping them accommodate cloud agnostic best practices through tooling.

There are lots of companies that aren't tech companies, but who still need tech (insert the caveat "software eating the world", "all companies are tech companies", and so on).

Re: HashiCorp Raises $175M at $5.1B Valuation

#30
Recall that VCs are all about finding the greater fool - actual value may or may not relate. One of my favourite videos on the subject (Chamath Palihapitiya):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vErPgQF3N38

I wonder if cloud-in-the-cloud.com is taken? That's 50% more cloud.

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