HashiCorp – S1 • Hacker News Board

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#151

Post by hnmullany » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 10:45 PM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #68

that_guy_iain wrote: post #57

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.

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-hashicor…

The Terraform ecosystem worked with VM's - big difference vs. Docker. The VMware ecosystem spends a TON of money on software.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#152

Post by noway421 » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 10:45 PM UTC

988747 wrote: post #47

endisneigh wrote: post #7

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?

VC investors are cashing out - a sign of impending doom. Expect Dotcom Crash 2.0

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?

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#153

Post by t_sawyer » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 10:46 PM UTC

shironandon wrote: post #140

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.

Vault is only replaceable in cloud. Idk of any on-prem products that have anywhere near Vaults functionality.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#154

Post by pintxo » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 10:56 PM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #118

godot wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Coding is the baseline. Being able to apply it to the problems of an industry helps a lot.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#155

Post by gorgoiler » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 11:00 PM UTC

Sebguer wrote: post #130

gorgoiler wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Does this account for how much those companies offload to contractors / staffing agencies?

I don’t know. I do know that “number of employees” metric is a shorthand way of measuring the operational weight of an organisation. As long as it is measured consistently, it’s a good proxy for size-of-tech-company. It might not work so well when comparing a pharmaceutical manufacturer to a main st retailer though.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#156

Post by Uberphallus » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 11:01 PM UTC

gen220 wrote: post #65

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.

Personally we don't use it in my org, and the mix of on-prem Kubernetes and GKE is just a shitshow.

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.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#157

Post by pertymcpert » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 11:08 PM UTC

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #107

tptacek wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (w…

Your explanation had roughly the same number of words but included multiple figures and acronyms while saying the same thing. I don't think that's easier.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#158

Post by tptacek » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 11:10 PM UTC

pertymcpert wrote: post #157

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (w…

Your explanation had roughly the same number of words but included multiple figures and acronyms while saying the same thing. I don't think that's easier.

It's more explicit! You had to take my word for the nickels->dimes machine.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#159

Post by rvz » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 11:28 PM UTC

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…

Freshworks started by a HN comment [0] and now they went public. [1]

[0] http://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple-c...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28625195

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#160

Post by m0zg » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 11:42 PM UTC

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.