Lessons from Hashicorp S1

Hashicorp has been on The Cloudcast more than any other company. As they prepare for their upcoming IPO, we look back at what makes them successful vs. other OSS-centric companies. 

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SHOW NOTES:

• Hashicorp (Eps.157) - Automating Data Center Scale Infrastructure
• Hashicorp (Eps.173) - Atlas
• Hashicorp (Eps.246) - Quest for 1M containers
• Hashicorp (Eps.309) - Secrets Management
• Hashicorp (Eps.387) - Service Mesh Architectures
• Hashicorp - Benchmarking the S1 Data (Clouded Judgement)

WHAT MADE HASHICORP UNIQUE IN THE INFRASTRUCTURE SPACE?

Hashicorp was not alone in the Infra-as-Code space, or the Security space, but they have been successful in building a commercial business based on OSS projects. Let’s look at what made them unique and successful. 

HOW DID HASHICORP GET HERE?

1. Hashicorp Revenue - $295M | Gross Margin 82% | Revenue Growth (LTM) 55%

Funding - $350M | NRR 124%  | Operating Margin 22%

Funding - $350M

GitLab - $179M | Gross Margin 88%  | Revenue Growth (LTM) 72% | 

Funding $414M | NRR 152% | Operating Margin 50%

Pivotal - $509M | Gross Margin 55%  | Revenue Growth (LTM) 22% | $1.7B

Pivotal (Subscription/ARR) $300M 

1. Always a pragmatic approach, from the perspective of users
2. Abandoned an early approach to building a “stack” (Hashicorp Atlas)
3. Aligned to the public cloud 
4. Didn’t try to change the world
5. Didn’t actively fight with their community; weren’t unpleasant
6. Had a single revenue producing product (Vault), and maybe Terraform
7. Good timing (hot market)

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