
HashiCorp Raises $175M at $5.1B Valuation - WestCoastJustin
http://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/03/16/2001541/0/en/HashiCorp-Raises-175-Million-in-Series-E-Funding-to-Support-Multi-Cloud-Transformation-for-Global-Enterprises.html
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derekchiang
I 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.

~~~
dlevine
One 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.

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candiddevmike
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 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? :)

~~~
scarface74
What is the purpose of Vault if you’re already on AWS?

Even though I prefer CloudFormation, Terraform is quite popular. As far as
Consul and Nomad, they are both nice for on prem infrastructure - I’ve used
both - but once you’re on either AWS or Azure, the native solutions are a lot
less of a hassle and Nomsd (sadly) will never get the mindshare of k8s.

~~~
chucky_z
You don't want to pay $1/month to store a single secret. You want a nicer
workflow for creating ephemeral users and tokens than AWS themselves have. You
want to do on-the-fly encryption of all sorts of things. You want a real PKI
without every bit of know-how.

~~~
wideem
1$ per secret a month sounds extremely cheap considered on how much does it
host to run vault

~~~
chucky_z
You can run vault on a single t3.medium backed by s3 with auto unseal and get
pretty decent performance.

~~~
scarface74
If you don’t care about silly things like high availability and reliability.
Hashicorp even recommends a cluster of three.

[https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/concepts/ha/](https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/concepts/ha/)

And what business at scale is optimizing over 0.25 per secret and doesn’t care
about HA?

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gz5
Their 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?

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rxin
You should take a look at Databricks, in all three dimensions.

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carlosf
Databricks 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
I 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.

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leetrout
Would you mind sending your feedback?

terraform-cloud-beta@hashicorp.com

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streetcat1
Just 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).

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nullbyte
Ew. I feel bad for their developers.

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thewarpaint
Care to elaborate why? Do you assume the company forces this on the
engineering team?

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RandyRanderson
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](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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rad_gruchalski
Congratulations! Fantastic products, regardless of my past complaints about
documentation :)

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tlapinsk
I'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.

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miohtama
They could not have more last minute timing. Now everything melts and the time
of funny money is over.

~~~
Deimorz
Last 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-powd...](https://www.axios.com/venture-capital-open-business-dry-
powder-b78e743b-f47d-42a2-ba17-15c245e13dd3.html)

~~~
supdatecron
I'd love to see the results of that call next Thursday

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whalesalad
Congratulations. 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.

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chisleu
Insanely cool that they are able to do it in this incredibly volatile market.

~~~
silentsea90
I suspect that the deal was signed earlier and this is just the press release.

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motohagiography
Even 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.

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aprdm
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?

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jdale27
No 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.)

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dynamite-ready
A bit of caveat, but do many people here still use Vagrant?

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inshadows
I'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.

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atomicnumber3
A 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
Didn'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.

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kawsper
I hope these news means that we get a native, Hashicorp-supported Podman
plugin to Nomad ;)

