2. Because being a CEO of a public company comes with a lot of rules around disclosure of material public information and equal access. It takes a special kind of person to disregard general consel and just shitpost on twitter with zero review while directly responsible to shareholders. I don't know what kind of safe harbor Elon thinks Twitter offers but I doubt it applies to Github code review.
CEO of a publicly traded company is a vastly different job than CEO of a private startup. Your job is to make money for shareholders, not pursue a vision. It's not something everyone wants to do and is likely a lot less rewarding for someone who successfully creates a technology company.
If I was to guess, he wants to write code and he started the company so he could write code. He just had to do those jobs along the way to get to the point where he could just focus on writing code and solving problems.
I think we need to see how it performs in the public markets for a couple years to define success of the model. At this point it is certainly a success for the early investors / co-founders.
Lots of interesting tidbits in here, not least that Armon Dadgar, who basically built most of the their revenue generating software, is paid considerably less than their CRO.
That's often the case when they have to bring a new executive on for the latter years of a company before going public... Look at page 174 though, Armon owns over 18M shares, the CRO owns 400k.
Assuming a share price of even $10/share, the $4M difference in 2021 comp will swing slightly in Armon's direction when his equity stake is worth $175M more than the CRO's.
Holy smokes.. Yeah, I didn't have a basis for the $10/share, it was just a random number since I didn't have valuation detail... but wow. So Armon's shares would be worth something like $535M more than the CRO's. I suspect he's okay making a bit less in W2 income this year!
Comparing salary is irrelevant when one person has a founder ownership stake while the other was hired as an employee a lot further down the line. Dadgar would be perfectly fine with $1/yr.
You are comparing salary when you should be comparing ownership. CRO has little ownership vs Armon who doesn't really care about his salary but rather the worth of his ownership position.
Also you are comparing an owner vs an employee, not apples to apples.
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?
Yeah, because the end result is people pointing to it as though it's some extraordinary change. My guess would be it was easier and they're lazy bureaucracy.
M1 money supply + endish of a bull cycle of tech companies founded early 2010s (coming out of the 10 year VC timeline) and also SPACs (Assuming SPACs are included that would be the driving reason)
The VCs need their exits to pay their funders back and the markets are very “hungry” at the moment so they are cashing out the only route they have available
There was actually a big decline in IPOs during that period. I honestly can’t say why but I remember it was starkly lower than average. Perhaps for regulatory concerns?
Successful companies seem to be more likely to be started during lean times, and startups take 10+ years to mature. We were in the recession aftermath ten years ago.
I wish I could take the time to analyze findings and correlate; could this be due to a period of fundings reaching a peak many years ago?
I recall there was a time it seemed a lot of celebrities were suddenly dying and there was an article that came out pointing that many of them simply belonged to an era of media growth (or something along those lines). So they were all roughly from the same age group and were well… For lack of a better way to put it, reaching their expected age range of demise together.
I recall that years back when I was in uni, the software funding market was becoming super active and people were predicting (and denying) a bubble back then. This was in the 2008 to 2012 time period I think. Are we just seeing a lot of these companies now all “graduating” together? It feels like it matches the timeline of around 10-12 years or so which is when they might be expected to IPO?
PS: I feel like a lot of what I said is based on vague memories of things I’ve read over the years so I apologize if any of that is untrue.
> As of July 31, 2021, we served 2,101 customers spanning organizations of a broad range of sizes and industries, compared to 1,473 and 831 customers as of January 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively.
> over 300 of the Forbes Global 2000 were our customers
>As of January 31, 2020, January 31, 2021, July 31, 2020, and July 31, 2021, our last four quarter average net dollar retention rate was 131%, 123%, 128%, and 124%, respectively.
> over 44% of our customers with $100,000 or greater ARR were licensing more than one product
You're absolutely right. I took a look at a handful of recent IPOs (Snowflake, Unity, Gitlab) and they all basically had just a month lag between S-1 filing and IPO date.
Absolute legend, rocket ship human Mitchell Hashimoto.
I still remember the excitement from Vagrant back in the day (which I think started it all). Here's the 1.0 announcement in 2012. [1]
The tools and vision they created after, just amazing coming from a small scrappy startup crew. Which, IMO, is totally wild given the offerings clearly tend to target bigger Enterprise who have bigger teams/apps/ops demand.
Then to walk away from $50MM barely older than drinking age. [2]
Seriously congratulations to them and the Hashicorp team. Will likely invest and hold for a long time.
You can buy the stock on the first day of trading. If you want to try and get an allocation of shares at IPO price, various brokerages have different processes where you apply. I use E*Trade mostly, but Robinhood does have the best IPO center of any brokerage I have seen.
He shared his dev setup at Dev Tool Time (https://srcgr.ph/mitchell-hashimoto) which shows how passionate he is about engineering. Going from CEO -> CTO -> IC solidifies his genuineness.
TBH what I got out of this is that he’s got a simple solid setup that works for him. He clearly doesn’t burn time changing his setup often and that makes sense.
On the face of it not, no. But when you consider the immense power and versatility of it (you can do anything from setting up simple virtual envs to automatically deploying a multi-container setup on AWS), it starts to become a lot simpler than the sum of all the other tools that it replaces. Nix is a single principled idea, but can be used in so many different contexts.
Ever since Vagrant, everything Hashicorp has developed has been outstanding! Furthermore, their open core model and this S1 is an inspiration. I wish all the best for Mitchell, Armon and the team!
I have a couple emails from Mitchell H circa 2014. He was doing front line customer support for the Vagrant VMWare Workstation provider -- I think it was just about their first paid offering. I was impressed that the head of the company would take time to help me troubleshoot my busted setup. Incredibly technical and incredibly hard working.
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 Bender (nickelcode.com) for the past 6 weeks. We're both daily HN readers and would like to use this as a starting point to show Vagrant to the public. Specifically, I'd like to open up to any questions and feedback, so that the HN community can get to know Vagrant. Your feedback is extremely valued. Thanks!
>A bit of background on this project: I work at a development company (citrusbyte.com) in LA. I see new projects almost every couple months, and I'm often working on multiple projects simultaneously due to work, freelance, and personal projects. Managing the development environments between many projects on a local machine became a huge burden and a coworker once mentioned developing in a virtual machine. I thought this was a great idea, and Vagrant was eventually born from it.
Really amazing achievement in such short space of time. Congratulations!
Edit: I wonder how many company started or partially started on HN that went on to IPO. I know Dropbox is one. Do we have a list somewhere?
>Mitchell was still on HN yesterday, as he was replying something about Backblaze IPO and its business. Today it is his IPO
Maybe that is because he stepped down from leadership to become an IC again? We could speculate that he didn't want to go public, or had no desire to do the S-1 work so he stepped down.
> I wonder how many company started or partially started on HN that went on to IPO. I know Dropbox is one. Do we have a list somewhere?
There are only a few places where you can easily promote your saas company, it makes sense that Saas startups that IPO now were promoted when they launched ...
An additional data point (read: anecdote): I applied for a job at Hashicorp in early July of this year. I have yet to receive any reply, including a "thanks but no thanks"
For reference, I also have a friend who applied there in late 2019; he apparently _did_ get a "thanks but no thanks" email about a month later.
Perhaps all of the company is short-staffed, rather than just engineering.
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 back saying they wanted it to be more tactical.
I pointed out what they said (it needs to be strategic), they come back two weeks later, very sorry etc, they would love to move me to next stage, one week later hiring manager doesn't turn up for interview, two days later apologises, asks me to meet with his senior manager in two weeks. I agree.
Recruiter then turns around and says, sorry not what they are looking for. No other explanation. Next day emails me asking would I apply for another position. I say, "Hmmm not so sure. Perhaps. What's the comp?" He says "Great, I think you will fit well. I will go check it." Then ghosted...
Was a cool role. But still. I'm in a position were I am also interviewing the people on the other side of the table. I'd love to have helped build something they needed about that fusion and analysis.
But sorry, in that context, just not good enough. That's my first dealing with your company. Why should I trust anything else will be better?
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.
Seems like they’ve never improved their process. I was put through an interview gauntlet and then ignored. The experience prompted lively discussion three years ago.
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 the replies. I read figures for FB and AAPL that are reported quarterly but missed that they are for a trailing 12 month period, not for the quarter itself.
> Hiring engineers away from FAANG is incredibly expensive.
That seems to be changing, as the employees at those companies are starting to re-evaluate the ethical choice of staying or leaving a company they thought was "good".
>Compare with APPL and FB doing $2.5M per employee per quarter.
your math if off - FB is $500K/employee/quarter, APPL is ~600K/employee/quarter. That still of course a boatload of money allowing them to pay $600K+/year to the engineers.
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.
The economy of scale - at FAANG(MAANG?) scale you can have extremely efficient money making features that only takes a few engineer to support thousands.
For things that are completely software, it does not surprise me that millions per employee in earnings is realized - that's just what happens when you operate at that scale. And that's accounting for all of the overhead in personnel that scale entails.
Every one of the Facebook companies is a household name with hundreds of millions of users. The same cannot be said for the Alphabet companies aside from Google.
You listed three Google products. Those are not alphabet companies. No one is trying to say Google is smalltime. Rather the point is, “Meta as an entity is comparable to Google, not Alphabet because it’s Units are Interesting”
I listed 4 actually, all with their OWN household name with plenty of users.
Under the Google umbrella or alphabet is the same. Just like under Facebook or Meta.
Nobody cares about the exact legal construction of those products. Plenty of people still say FANG, where it's short for Google and not Alphabet.
Nice nitpick, but you obviously mispositioned your initial comment by putting the emphasis on household names and not on the legal structure, which is a strange argument fyi.
While I'm doing a low-content post, here's a tangential fun fact: the Latin sequence "gn" (as in, say, "magna cum laude") was pronounced with the G nasalized. If magna were rendered in English spelling, it'd be "mangna". (Or, well, "mongna".)
True. The number of engineers is not linearly correlated with the number of customers, but the number of features. If you have a relatively simple product and you can somehow still compete (niche market, patents etc), you can get away with a very low head count. WhatsApp famously had only 35 engineers and ~450M users when Facebook acquired them.
> which is probably what happened to them inside facebook anyways
I think initially they only expanded to ~50 engineers until 900M users. Even today they are estimated to have only ~500 employees (no idea what percentage of that are engineers).
LinkedIn lists 1823 people working at Whatsapp, not sure how accurate that number is, probably self-reported so could be lower/higher, but ~500 seems off. Employee count seems to grow 1-5% month-to-month.
Engineering is listed as 25% of those 1823, operations 8%, education 6% and business development 6%.
One might argue that those are costs, not head count. By the same logic we can also assume that they use contractors who bake pizzas for Facebook employees when they order from Domino's.
I guess a somewhat better metric would be "profit per employee" instead of revenue.
Maybe. But the point is, ad absurdum, you can do business with zero employees and all contractors, or with zero contractors and all employees. It's not possible to measure efficiency with a simple "revenue over employee count" metric.
Point stands, but I'm not sure how you get that much for FB and AAPL. In 2020 (4 quarters) they made, per employee, ~$1.2M and $0.7M in gross profit, $1.5M and $1.9M in revenue. I didn't cross check the table but did get the same number for FB.
> 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.
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.
At least 80% of Docker's value to me is as a consistent-everywhere, very complete server daemon package manager. Serious packages for work? They're there, and up-to-date. Screwing-around stuff for home (Minecraft server, Jellyfin, et c.)? It's all there, same interface, just a couple minutes to add and configure another daemon at approximately its latest version, and I don't even have to think about which distro I'm running.
It's the container registry that I'd miss, not the actual container functionality, and that's what would have me reaching for Vagrant and distro packages again until something similarly good arose (or maybe there already is a viable replacement, which I'd find via search in short order if I actually needed it)
I wonder what sort of container registry are you looking for. There are a few alternatives to Docker Hub nowadays. For instance, GCP’s is quite affordable and straightforward.
I don't mean for hosting custom images—I mean for using it as a cross-distro (indeed, cross-OS) very up-to-date, server-oriented package manager. That's most of what I get out of it, right now. It's currently, maybe, my favorite Linux package manager + package repository, even if that's not its core purpose.
Vagrant can use containers, making it also a wrapper around OCI-compatible runtimes. In addition, it also supports VirtualBox, Hyper-V, VMWare, bare metal, SSH targets, and various cloud providers.
The real conclusion from your logic would be: why would you go to Docker rather than just using Vagrant?
> The real conclusion from your logic would be: why would you go to Docker rather than just using Vagrant?
I use Docker as a nigh-universal package repository and package manager, with a huge and up-to-date selection of packages. It gives me a consistent way to run daemons my software depends on, nearly everywhere, including pinning the version and ensuring they all use the same config. It's docker-hub, really, that provides most of the value I get from Docker on a day-to-day basis, and that's the part I'd miss. I know there are other ways to create images and run containers, but I almost never create—or even modify—them myself.
> Edit: I wonder how many company started or partially started on HN that went on to IPO. I know Dropbox is one. Do we have a list somewhere?
Let's not make whether a company went public a metric for assessing quality. Going public is mostly a matter of how much a company expects the public to pay to get a share for the company. Also, it is a matter of how much the bank which facilitates the offering expects to make. Currently, the markets are sky high, so even not so good companies will make crazy amounts of money for the bank and the company which went public. Just look at the dot com bubble and the IPOs for more information.
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)
The PO in IPO is public offering, meaning new shares are created. So generally speaking, the amount raised goes to the company. Dilution is a factor of what's raised and the vaulation. If you raise a 10% round, you dilute by 10%, so 10% is sold. It varies by company and preference. Existing shareholders can typically sell after the lockup (for common share holders, like founders and employees) and at any time (for preferred share holders, whose shares convert into unrestricted common shares as part of the IPO).
This S1 does not say how many shares they expect to sell, so at this time its unclear what percentage of the company new investors will hold. Presumably before the IPO date, it will be updated so investors have an understanding of what they are buying.
IPOs sometimes sell shares held by existing shareholders. The final S-1 should disclose any sales by existing shareholders. When you see them in roadshow, check for the final S-1.
Statements that proceeds will go to the company are not necessarily correct.
Slightly off-topic, if I wanted to buy some HashiCorp's stocks as a non-US resident, what would be my best options? Any good services allowing me to do that somehow, legally and easily?
Find a broker/platform in your country that lets you trade in the stock market they are listing on (if UK then IG and Hargreaves Lansdown are good), join, fill out the W-8BEN so you are able to buy US stock through the platform (they usually make this a 2 minute job) and then place an order when it’s live. You’ll be paying more than the true IPO price as the bank etc get preferential rates I believe but it’s as good as you’ll get
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 stream of dimes.
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).
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.
Given their proven track record with new products, it makes a lot of sense to keep spending on R&D. Mostly they’re a classic enterprise software business (with developer-led marketing) and so the wider array of products they have to sell, the better their future cash flow will be with subscriptions/maintenance. $100M and $1B in annual revenue tend to be important thresholds in the enterprise software biz, and they’re well past $100M.
G&A will of course get wrung out by professional managers.
> 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 the growth in platform adoption that moves the earnings number.
>They're making hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
No they are losing 10's of millions of dollars a year. Revenue is not earnings. Wework had revenue of billions of dollars a year and but the cost of that revenue meant they had no path to profitability.
I see the same thing here. The bulk of their revenue come from selling services on top of their software. Services have a high COGS. For every service contract you sell you have to pay someone to service the contract. Your costs grow linearly with your revenue. This is the trap yelp fell into. Making billions by paying 95-105 cents for every dollar because opening a new market meant building all the infrastructure for that market.
If hashicorp can't find a way to make the growth in adoption of their software directly influence their earnings I don't think this is a good investment.
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.
What are you on about? When I say "service" I mean people doing things for you. In order to have good economics you have to make money buy selling physical or digital goods. Its because physical and digital goods are intrinsically high margin. Its hard to make a support engineer twice as productive, but it's not hard to halve production costs by leveraging economies of scale. Furthermore, Saying "support != services" is ridiculous. Do you know what you would charge Hashicorp with if they failed to render the promised support you paid for?
Congratulations! The IPO is a confirmation of what many of us in this field already knew: Hashicorp makes amazing tools. I love Consul so much. I'm glad the larger world will appreciate the great work Hashicorp has done as well.
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-hashicorp
> I don't think we've ever claimed cloud portability through "write once run anywhere;" that isn't our marketing or sales pitch and if we ever did make that claim please let me know and I'll poke some teams to correct it. Our pitch is always to just learn one workflow/tool and use it everywhere, but you explicitly WILL rewrite cloud-specific modules/code/etc.
I think a big part of it is that Docker failed to expand much beyond their initial offering. They tried, but weren't able to get much traction. HashiCorp probably wouldn't be IPOing with a multi-billion dollar valuation if they continued to focus mainly on Vagrant.
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.
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.
276 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 288 ms ] thread1. Perhaps because he can.
2. Because being a CEO of a public company comes with a lot of rules around disclosure of material public information and equal access. It takes a special kind of person to disregard general consel and just shitpost on twitter with zero review while directly responsible to shareholders. I don't know what kind of safe harbor Elon thinks Twitter offers but I doubt it applies to Github code review.
Assuming a share price of even $10/share, the $4M difference in 2021 comp will swing slightly in Armon's direction when his equity stake is worth $175M more than the CRO's.
Also you are comparing an owner vs an employee, not apples to apples.
I guess it's because there's just so much money swishing around - why not?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1NS
Curious what is really going on that I'm not supposed to understand.
A high amount of money was printed in that exact timeframe though.
What’s a good graph to show that?
I recall there was a time it seemed a lot of celebrities were suddenly dying and there was an article that came out pointing that many of them simply belonged to an era of media growth (or something along those lines). So they were all roughly from the same age group and were well… For lack of a better way to put it, reaching their expected age range of demise together.
I recall that years back when I was in uni, the software funding market was becoming super active and people were predicting (and denying) a bubble back then. This was in the 2008 to 2012 time period I think. Are we just seeing a lot of these companies now all “graduating” together? It feels like it matches the timeline of around 10-12 years or so which is when they might be expected to IPO?
PS: I feel like a lot of what I said is based on vague memories of things I’ve read over the years so I apologize if any of that is untrue.
> As of July 31, 2021, we served 2,101 customers spanning organizations of a broad range of sizes and industries, compared to 1,473 and 831 customers as of January 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively.
> over 300 of the Forbes Global 2000 were our customers
>As of January 31, 2020, January 31, 2021, July 31, 2020, and July 31, 2021, our last four quarter average net dollar retention rate was 131%, 123%, 128%, and 124%, respectively.
> over 44% of our customers with $100,000 or greater ARR were licensing more than one product
Source: wife is c-suite and took company through ipo in the last year.
Roadshow may take 5-20 more days, so we may see them ring the bell by mid-December
The tools and vision they created after, just amazing coming from a small scrappy startup crew. Which, IMO, is totally wild given the offerings clearly tend to target bigger Enterprise who have bigger teams/apps/ops demand.
Then to walk away from $50MM barely older than drinking age. [2]
Seriously congratulations to them and the Hashicorp team. Will likely invest and hold for a long time.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3672149
[2] https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1357445215259250689
I have a couple emails from Mitchell H circa 2014. He was doing front line customer support for the Vagrant VMWare Workstation provider -- I think it was just about their first paid offering. I was impressed that the head of the company would take time to help me troubleshoot my busted setup. Incredibly technical and incredibly hard working.
$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 Bender (nickelcode.com) for the past 6 weeks. We're both daily HN readers and would like to use this as a starting point to show Vagrant to the public. Specifically, I'd like to open up to any questions and feedback, so that the HN community can get to know Vagrant. Your feedback is extremely valued. Thanks!
>A bit of background on this project: I work at a development company (citrusbyte.com) in LA. I see new projects almost every couple months, and I'm often working on multiple projects simultaneously due to work, freelance, and personal projects. Managing the development environments between many projects on a local machine became a huge burden and a coworker once mentioned developing in a virtual machine. I thought this was a great idea, and Vagrant was eventually born from it.
Really amazing achievement in such short space of time. Congratulations!
Edit: I wonder how many company started or partially started on HN that went on to IPO. I know Dropbox is one. Do we have a list somewhere?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hashicorp-files-u-ipo-said-18...
Maybe that is because he stepped down from leadership to become an IC again? We could speculate that he didn't want to go public, or had no desire to do the S-1 work so he stepped down.
There are only a few places where you can easily promote your saas company, it makes sense that Saas startups that IPO now were promoted when they launched ...
news.ycombinator.com needs a ycombinator.com/topcompanies equivalent.
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.
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.
For reference, I also have a friend who applied there in late 2019; he apparently _did_ get a "thanks but no thanks" email about a month later.
Perhaps all of the company is short-staffed, rather than just engineering.
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.
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 back saying they wanted it to be more tactical.
I pointed out what they said (it needs to be strategic), they come back two weeks later, very sorry etc, they would love to move me to next stage, one week later hiring manager doesn't turn up for interview, two days later apologises, asks me to meet with his senior manager in two weeks. I agree.
Recruiter then turns around and says, sorry not what they are looking for. No other explanation. Next day emails me asking would I apply for another position. I say, "Hmmm not so sure. Perhaps. What's the comp?" He says "Great, I think you will fit well. I will go check it." Then ghosted...
Was a cool role. But still. I'm in a position were I am also interviewing the people on the other side of the table. I'd love to have helped build something they needed about that fusion and analysis.
But sorry, in that context, just not good enough. That's my first dealing with your company. Why should I trust anything else will be better?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16127697
New HN entry for the updated blog post link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29116611
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 the replies. I read figures for FB and AAPL that are reported quarterly but missed that they are for a trailing 12 month period, not for the quarter itself.
That seems to be changing, as the employees at those companies are starting to re-evaluate the ethical choice of staying or leaving a company they thought was "good".
your math if off - FB is $500K/employee/quarter, APPL is ~600K/employee/quarter. That still of course a boatload of money allowing them to pay $600K+/year to the engineers.
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.
For things that are completely software, it does not surprise me that millions per employee in earnings is realized - that's just what happens when you operate at that scale. And that's accounting for all of the overhead in personnel that scale entails.
I like "MAGNAM" if you include Microsoft.
I think Oculus is much more similar to Stadia than something else too.
Additionally, all of those platforms you mention du the same thing: chat and share pics.
Under the Google umbrella or alphabet is the same. Just like under Facebook or Meta.
Nobody cares about the exact legal construction of those products. Plenty of people still say FANG, where it's short for Google and not Alphabet.
Nice nitpick, but you obviously mispositioned your initial comment by putting the emphasis on household names and not on the legal structure, which is a strange argument fyi.
While I'm doing a low-content post, here's a tangential fun fact: the Latin sequence "gn" (as in, say, "magna cum laude") was pronounced with the G nasalized. If magna were rendered in English spelling, it'd be "mangna". (Or, well, "mongna".)
Even then, they can still be insanely profitable per engineer.
I think initially they only expanded to ~50 engineers until 900M users. Even today they are estimated to have only ~500 employees (no idea what percentage of that are engineers).
Engineering is listed as 25% of those 1823, operations 8%, education 6% and business development 6%.
I guess a somewhat better metric would be "profit per employee" instead of revenue.
Clearly keeping facebook platform from breaking the law on childporn is pretty central to their business, but pizza is not
https://twitter.com/investing_city/status/142301690347634278...
HEY LOOK, IT'S A PARADE, I'M GOING TO GO RAIN ON IT!
"Hey so I joined the high school wrestling team." OH YEAH WELL I BET YOU CAN'T BEAT UP HULK HOGAN.
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.
It's the container registry that I'd miss, not the actual container functionality, and that's what would have me reaching for Vagrant and distro packages again until something similarly good arose (or maybe there already is a viable replacement, which I'd find via search in short order if I actually needed it)
The real conclusion from your logic would be: why would you go to Docker rather than just using Vagrant?
My point was not to defend Docker, but to suggest that Docker is increasingly irrelevant to the broader ecosystem.
I wouldn't use Vagrant because I (like many people) always target an orchestrator and not hypervisor or bare metal.
I use Docker as a nigh-universal package repository and package manager, with a huge and up-to-date selection of packages. It gives me a consistent way to run daemons my software depends on, nearly everywhere, including pinning the version and ensuring they all use the same config. It's docker-hub, really, that provides most of the value I get from Docker on a day-to-day basis, and that's the part I'd miss. I know there are other ways to create images and run containers, but I almost never create—or even modify—them myself.
https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/providers/docker/basics
[0] http://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple-c...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28625195
Bigger fish to fry. I wish I had that level of focus!
Let's not make whether a company went public a metric for assessing quality. Going public is mostly a matter of how much a company expects the public to pay to get a share for the company. Also, it is a matter of how much the bank which facilitates the offering expects to make. Currently, the markets are sky high, so even not so good companies will make crazy amounts of money for the bank and the company which went public. Just look at the dot com bubble and the IPOs for more information.
What percentage of the company gets sold in the IPO?
And does that money go into the company or does it go to existing shareholders?
For example, how can this information be found for Coinbase?
Hashicorp
https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search/#/dateRange=custom&ciks=000...
Coinbase
https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search/#/dateRange=custom&ciks=000...
S1 does not specify the amount.
> And does that money go into the company or does it go to existing shareholders?
The money goes to the company.
Statements that proceeds will go to the company are not necessarily correct.
Slightly off-topic, if I wanted to buy some HashiCorp's stocks as a non-US resident, what would be my best options? Any good services allowing me to do that somehow, legally and easily?
In New Zealand we also have https://www.hatchinvest.nz and https://www.sharesies.nz. You might have some similar services in your country.
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).
G&A will of course get wrung out by professional managers.
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 the growth in platform adoption that moves the earnings number.
>They're making hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
No they are losing 10's of millions of dollars a year. Revenue is not earnings. Wework had revenue of billions of dollars a year and but the cost of that revenue meant they had no path to profitability.
I see the same thing here. The bulk of their revenue come from selling services on top of their software. Services have a high COGS. For every service contract you sell you have to pay someone to service the contract. Your costs grow linearly with your revenue. This is the trap yelp fell into. Making billions by paying 95-105 cents for every dollar because opening a new market meant building all the infrastructure for that market.
If hashicorp can't find a way to make the growth in adoption of their software directly influence their earnings I don't think this is a good investment.
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.
Theft of service
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-hashicorp
> I've talked about this more with more references in this tweet: https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1078682765963350016
> I don't think we've ever claimed cloud portability through "write once run anywhere;" that isn't our marketing or sales pitch and if we ever did make that claim please let me know and I'll poke some teams to correct it. Our pitch is always to just learn one workflow/tool and use it everywhere, but you explicitly WILL rewrite cloud-specific modules/code/etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29051020
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.
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.