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HashiCorp – S1

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Re: HashiCorp – S1

#101

Post by leftnode »

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!

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#102

Post by michelledepeil »

humantorso wrote: post #94

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.

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.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#103

Post by pphysch »

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.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#104

Post by alephnan »

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

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#105

Post by AtNightWeCode »

jordanbeiber wrote: post #92
AtNightWeCode wrote: post #75

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 co…

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…

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.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#106

Post by handrous »

ksec wrote: post #42

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 Ben…

> 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.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#107

Post by danielmarkbruce »

tptacek wrote: post #99
SassyGrapefruit wrote: post #50

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"

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 st…

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).

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#108

Post by __jem »

handrous wrote: post #106
ksec wrote: post #42

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 Ben…

> 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 reall…

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.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#109

Post by AtNightWeCode »

thunderthunder wrote: post #98
AtNightWeCode wrote: post #75

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 co…

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....

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.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#110

Post by reducesuffering »

mike_d wrote: post #96
ksec wrote: post #42

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 Ben…

> 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.

> 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.

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