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HashiCorp Raises $175M at $5.1B Valuation
- rad_gruchalski 7y agoCongratulations! Fantastic products, regardless of my past complaints about documentation :)
- eeZah7Ux 7y agoFantastic?! Hascicorp?!
- amelius 7y agoIt 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- boston_sre87 7y agowhat part of vault, consul, terraform or any of their other tools makes any of them a thin wrapper around linux?
- hylaride 7y agoWhat’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 announcement? Yeah. Do you know major financial and government institutions are using vault? Do you know how long it takes those organizations to use security software as core parts of their business? Vault is barely 3 years old and is extensively used by them. Where is the thin wrappper in Hashicorp’s case?
- philosopher1234 7y agoI agree with you, but perhaps we could lay off the tone at the start. Maybe GP is not cynical but just uninformed
- eeZah7Ux 7y agoI used all of them and they are really overrated. Also they are not solving much.
- manigandham 7y agoThat's not even true of Docker. Their business might have been poorly run but Docker containers as a universal package format and easily accessible over HTTP is a major innovation over what we had before.
- eeZah7Ux 7y agoWhere's the innovation compared to LXC and wget?
- manigandham 7y agoFast, easy and standardized product suite with a CLI, runtime and registry that led to massive industry-wide cross-platform usage and spin-off projects like Kubernetes compared to basically nothing for the decade before. You don't have to invent new tech. Better UX counts as innovation, enough to be worth billions. Your reply reminds of the infamous Dropbox HN comment that said it was nothing more than FTP with SVN.
- noptd 7y ago> spin-off projects like Kubernetes Not quite- Kubernetes was an open source "spin-off" of Borg, which has been in use at Google since 2003. However, Docker did quickly become the de facto standard for containerization on k8s, due in part to its prevalence and ease of use as you mentioned above.
- eeZah7Ux 7y agoAbsolutely spot on. They could try to sell find, grep and less. Most of the recent "hip" devops tools replace 100 lines of homegrown python with 10000 lines of lock-in and hype.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- derekchiang 7y agoI had the chance to work with Armon as a contractor at HashiCorp when I was in college. Armon was absolutely one of the most down-to-earth leaders I've ever seen. Even though he was technically brilliant and I was only an undergrad, he never made me feel like I was stupid or inexperienced, but rather patiently guided me towards the best solutions, so I was able to gain a lot of confidence and grow a lot along the way. If you are an aspiring distributed systems engineer (as I was), I highly recommend applying to HashiCorp. They are solving some of the most fun challenges in distributed systems and they have a great engineering culture, not to mention that they are remote-friendly.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dlevine 7y agoOne time quite a while ago, I randomly hung out with the Kiip team one day when there were like 6 of them. Mitchell struck me as a super nice guy, and at some point he randomly dropped the fact at some point that he wrote Vagrant. I'm glad that they have done so well.
- loeg 7y agoI went to college with Armon and highly enjoyed working with him. I've never been associated with Hashicorp and can't speak to his leadership there, but as a human being he's fantastic. And it seems like Hashicorp is doing well.
- FooBarWidget 7y agoAs someone who has met Armon, I second this.
- atonse 7y agoI've never met any of them but the culture just seems fantastic from the outside. Glad to see it isn't a facade.
- miohtama 7y agoThey could not have more last minute timing. Now everything melts and the time of funny money is over.
- Deimorz 7y agoLast Thursday, Axios contacted 40 VC firms and every single one said they were still actively investing: https://www.axios.com/venture-capital-open-business-dry-powder-b78e743b-f47d-42a2-ba17-15c245e13dd3.html https://www.axios.com/venture-capital-open-business-dry-powd...
- supdatecron 7y agoI'd love to see the results of that call next Thursday
- SteveNuts 7y agoIf they either turn Nomad into a full blown hypervisor stack or roll that into its own product, they could seriously put a dent in some extremely entrenched companies like VMware. I'm talking storage, networking, virtualization... They'd make bank.
- techntoke 7y agoLol, they'd never be able to compete and there are like 30 alternatives already.
- gz5 7y agoTheir execution is impressive. Very impressive. And, execution is what often separates the leaders from the pack, rather than some "unique" aspects. However, HashiCorp seems unique in a few regards: 1. A pioneer in monetizing OSS via SaaS services. 2. Many successes. Can't think of a recent startup in this space with so many successes - can you? Sentinel, Consul, Terraform etc. 3. Arguably at the start of the curve, e.g. service mesh automation is really difficult?
- rxin 7y agoYou should take a look at Databricks, in all three dimensions.
- carlosf 7y agoDatabricks is easily the best spent money in my stack. I also love Hashicorp's products, but unfortunately I'm not paying them anything. Before Terraform Cloud their enterprise offerings were quite bad IMO (no SaaS, had to talk with Sales, provision infrastructure yourself, high initial commitment, etc...). I will probably start using Terraform Cloud in a near future thought, just waiting for some key features to be released so I can integrate it to my pipe (Gitlab Groups integration, more flexible module layout).
- time0ut 7y agoI tried Terraform Cloud and went back to open source. I felt like it was a step backwards from Terragrunt. I'm only using it in the context of AWS though. I might try it again for a future project.
- chisleu 7y agoInsanely cool that they are able to do it in this incredibly volatile market.
- silentsea90 7y agoI suspect that the deal was signed earlier and this is just the press release.
- motohagiography 7y agoEven if it were the release, there is a lot of cash that needs somewhere to go right now. The market has volatility without the returns, whereas you can get nX yield for the same perceived risk in venture funds. This could be a very good time to be in VC or doing a startup. Liquid capital needs productive assets, and fed-backed crazy town might not be the place for it. Hashicorp also has awesome and sticky products, and they have earned whatever they got. With Vault, they got people to adopt their defacto HSM, without the friction of selling hardware, and all the benefits of being the root of trust in each enterprise. Everything about that company is f'ing brilliant, imo.
- streetcat1 7y agoJust to note that the relative test code to production code ratio in Hashicorp products is 10:1 (10 lines of test for every line of code).
- ianwalter 7y agoIs there an article on this or something?
- streetcat1 7y agoYes: @5:40 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yszygk1cpEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yszygk1cpEc
- nullbyte 7y agoEw. I feel bad for their developers.
- exac 7y agoI feel sorry for your employer.
- thewarpaint 7y agoCare to elaborate why? Do you assume the company forces this on the engineering team?
- jen20 7y agoThat seems unlikely to be true (I haven’t measured but worked there). Perhaps it’s true of Terraform where testing is verbose anyway, but it’s almost certainly not of Packer, for example.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y agoWhy not? Testing packer would mean specifying a large number of machine configurations, building them, and verifying the output images. Why would that be smaller than the actual code?
- candiddevmike 7y agoSeries 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 area ripe for competition (or even AWS Vault like they did with MongoDB). Also, based on the company's glassdoor reviews, it seems the exec team are a bunch of jerks, which is an interesting contrast to Armon/Mitchell. Unlike some of the other comments, I see HashiCorp as a textbook example of poor execution for converting customers. They clearly have the things people want, but they have always struggled to give people a reason to pay for them. They've created a community that would easily raze the goodwill they've floated on if they started to heavily monetize their products, so they're in a lose/lose situation to me. I see them being acquired, but I can't think of any cloud provider that would pay for them. Maybe Oracle? :)
- toomuchtodo 7y agoI 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://stackshare.io/terraform https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/category/case-study/ 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 delivering (which is substantial). Disclaimer: I am not associated with Hashicorp, just a satisfied user of their products who freely teaches Terraform and Vault usage and pays my own way to go to Hashiconf.
- candiddevmike 7y agoMy 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).
- aprdm 7y agoI 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?
- alloutblitz85 7y agoI don't they're quite profitable yet (source?). Hence, raising the money.
- jdale27 7y agoNo idea about their profitability, but doing a big raise before a recession to try and tide you through with minimal layoffs is probably not a bad idea. (Yeah, I'm sure this has been in the works for a while before the coronavirus hit the fan, but the signs of recession have been brewing for a while, bulls notwithstanding.)
- RandyRanderson 7y agoRecall 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vErPgQF3N38 I wonder if cloud-in-the-cloud.com is taken? That's 50% more cloud.
- atomicnumber3 7y agoA bunch of my friend group (average 5 years of experience each) just went through job searches, and all of us applied to hashicorp. Among us, we had big data experience, distributed systems experience, frontend, backend, etc. Very wide gamut. None of us even received a reply, and from what I've heard this isn't unusual. I'm always a bit flummoxed as to what companies like this want when they somehow even develop a reputation for ghosting. Vault is cool though I guess. Maybe they just get that many applicants.
- meowface 7y agoDidn't receive a reply after interviewing, or didn't receive a reply after applying? Not getting a reply after applying is pretty common. It could mean a lot of things, including that they might want to keep your resume on file for a future availability. I don't mind it, personally. It's the ghosting after interviewing that I find annoying.
- whalesalad 7y agoCongratulations. I have always had a love-hate relationship with Hashicorp's tools. In the end, though, the product that they provide freely to us all is absolutely phenomenal. I also have a lot of respect for Mitchell Hashimoto and really appreciate his humility. Great to see this positive news for Mitchell and the team.
- tlapinsk 7y agoI've only used Terraform out of their set of tools and loved every minute of using it. By far the most intuitive and the clear leader out of the Infrastructure as Code tools. Fingers crossed they can live up to this massive valuation.
- kawsper 7y agoI hope these news means that we get a native, Hashicorp-supported Podman plugin to Nomad ;)
- dynamite-ready 7y agoA bit of caveat, but do many people here still use Vagrant?
- inshadows 7y agoI'm playing with it. I don't like the "middleware" plugins, but after more research, since it's all Ruby, I managed to put a tweak into my Vagrantfile to force my order of execution (plugins vs. provisioners). The startup of the vagrant CLI is sooo damn slow! It takes seconds to print help... That's my major problem with it. I'd rather see something more lightweight, but this gets the job done quickly.