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HashiCorp – S1

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Re: HashiCorp – S1

#251

Post by tptacek »

SassyGrapefruit wrote: post #248
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…

> They have software economics, not commercial real estate economics. 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…

No. The bulk of HashiCorp's revenue comes from licensing and support. Professional services is a tiny percentage of their revenue. Preemptively: support subscriptions != consulting services.

I don't know if HashiCorp is a good investment or not. I'm not investing. But their economics are not Yelp's or WeWork's.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#252

Post by softwarebeware »

secfirstmd wrote: post #173
whimsicalism wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've applied to plenty of much larger and established companies without getting a thanks but no thanks. Twitter has the audacity to email a year after my application to let me know that I was "still under consideration." Google ended my hiring loop by having my emails to my recruiter bounce. So this is not just a shaky company problem.

My Twitter experience: Applied, rejected within a day, got an email from a hiring manager four weeks later asking me to re-apply, very sorry etc etc, bad screener he had to look over everything again. I re-apply, two interviews, asked to do a presentation and then a video on strategic threats to the org, spent two days of my holiday doing it (tight schedule from Twitter), sent, no reply for two weeks, get an email ba…

Hahaha Twitter in Seattle at least is infamous for experiences like this from my acquaintances and friends. I somehow got into an on-site there once only to find that the team I’m interviewing for doesn’t unit test anything or write any Scala, they’re not familiar with consistent hashing, and a bunch of other curious things that contradict what I had been told about the job and the company.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#253

Post by folkrav »

AtNightWeCode wrote: post #105
jordanbeiber wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 instea…

> All major clouds have better alternatives to Vault.

Debatable. From my experience, all major clours have alternatives to Vault, but not "better" by any stretch of the imagination.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#254

Post by bugsense »

It will be interesting to watch what new products the launch. I guess a monitoring solution would be next. Netdata could be a good fit with agent-first approach.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#255

Post by bklyn11201 »

kosinus wrote: post #250
jhugo wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually tend to agree, and am surprised that the discussion in this post is so breathless. Having used (and continuing to use) multiple Hashicorp products fairly extensively, they tend to have a lot of warts, just fewer warts than the alternatives. 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 issu…

What's slow in your opinion? I assume it's either config evaluation or the state refresh?

terraform plan -out takes a few minutes with a few hundred AWS objects in place. I imagine it takes quite a bit longer for a complex organization.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#256

Post by michaelt »

gorgoiler wrote: post #155
Sebguer wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends if you count Facebook's moderators, Uber's drivers, Apple's shop assistants, Netflix's film crews and so on.

Some of these measures make it look like Google's zero-customer-support approach is the 'efficient' way to run a business but for a lot of companies it'd be a false economy.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#257

Post by koffiezet »

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…

2100 customers seems low? I've personally worked for 3 companies in the last 3 years who had Vault Enterprise licenses, and in the grand scheme of things, these are pretty small companies in a single, pretty small country (Belgium)

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#258

Post by jhugo »

kosinus wrote: post #250
jhugo wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually tend to agree, and am surprised that the discussion in this post is so breathless. Having used (and continuing to use) multiple Hashicorp products fairly extensively, they tend to have a lot of warts, just fewer warts than the alternatives. 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 issu…

What's slow in your opinion? I assume it's either config evaluation or the state refresh?

No, state refresh is justifiably slow, it's a lot of API calls, which can only be done so quickly, and it can be skipped (with care) if desired.

Once you eliminate that with `-refresh=false` most of the time is taken building the graph. For our largest config that can take almost 5 minutes for each run, and throwing hardware at it doesn't really help; it doesn't seem to make much use of more than one core. Some TF version updates improve it, but more often the performance gets worse.

Recent relevant issues:

https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/27523 https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/26355

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#259

Post by koffiezet »

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.

It wasn't until they launched Vault that I saw where they were going commercially. Their other tools were excellent, but I wouldn't be surprised if Vault would be their #1 cash-cow, it's a massively useful tool in environments that require a support umbrella and love paying for expensive licensing.

Re: HashiCorp – S1

#260

Post by noidesto »

nailer wrote: post #230
mike_d wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Also few people i know that use terraform like it. HCL is really clunky when compared to typescript or python (pulumi or CDK or bicep)

Not until switching to pulumi, did I realize Terraform is a lot more polished and simpler to read/use.
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