What was your experience back then of

AWS? Your honest view.

>> AWS was really arrogant. Felt like they

were doing us a favor. Subtle vibe of we

will spin up a product and kill your

company.

>> Terraform just seemed to be everywhere.

Why do you think that sudden popularity

was?

>> One of the things that frustrated me was

like, oh, they only won cuz they were

first to market. We were like seventh to

market.

>> It feels like most of open source will

have to change because of AI. AI makes

it trivial to create plausible looking

but incorrect and lowquality

contributions. Open source has always

been a system of trust. Now it's just

default deny and you must get trust.

>> Do you think Git will be around in a few

years?

>> What's interesting is this is the first

time in like 12 to 15 years that anyone

is even asking that question without

laughing.

If AI agents can write code, open pull

requests and ship features, do we even

need open source contributors anymore?

Michelle Hashimoto, the co-founder of

Hashi Cororp, has been thinking deeply

about this, the future of open source

and how to efficiently integrate AI into

his day-to-day workflow. Michelle built

the tools that power modern cloud

infrastructure, Terraform, and the Hashi

stack. He also created a popular

terminal, Ghosty, and I consider him to

be one of the most thoughtful voices in

the industry on how AI is changing the

craft of software engineering. In

today's episode, we cover the original

story of Hash Corp, a failed university

research project, a notebook of unsolved

problems, and an email from his future

co-founder that he answered in two

minutes. His honest unfiltered take on

working with AWS Azure and Google Cloud

as partners, both the arrogance and also

the brilliant engineers who never

thought about the business, how he's

adopted to AI coding tools, why he

always keeps an agent running in the

background, and his practical advice for

engineers who have not yet warmed up to

AI agents, and many more. If you're

interested to hear from one of the most

hands-on builders in the industry and

want to know where AI tools are useful

versus not, then this episode is for

you. This episode is presented by

Statsig, the unified platform for flags,

analytics, experiments, and more. Check

out the show notes to learn more about

them and our other season sponsors,

Sonar and Work OS. Michelle, welcome to

the podcast. It's awesome to be here in

person.

>> Yeah, it's it's cool to meet you in

person after so many years of following

you.

you've had such a massive impact on on

the tech industry on software engineers,

but how did it start?

>> I think the high level is the same story

as a lot of people. I self-taught uh

around 12, 13, early teens, motivated by

video games. Same like same as a lot of

people. Um although I really quickly

realized that I liked web, you know, web

was new. Google wasn't out yet. I think

web was new. And so I I kind of like

really quick I I never became a video

game programmer. I really quickly just

became a web programmer, PHP, um Pearl,

that sort of stuff. And uh because I was

so young, the only way I could learn was

through whatever code was published

online. And so that's how I got

acquainted with open source. I didn't

know that's what it was called then, but

a kid with no job, no money. Um parents

didn't want to buy, you know, uh

professional books were like I don't

know what they are now, but they were

like 50 bucks then, right? And and so

they were like, "No way, right? This and

also they didn't believe I was going to

read it." And so there was no way

they're gonna buy that. So, um, yeah,

just anything I find online was my my

inn into coding. I'd walk to school

every day with a group of friends.

There's a period of time where I printed

out the first or second chapter of the

PHP manual. I remember it was about 30

to 40 pages of of paper and I never

programmed. So, all the stuff and I'm 12

is it's very confusing. So, I read the

whole 40 pages every walk to school. And

I don't remember how long it took me,

but I did that a long time before, you

know, I remember this one moment where I

was walking to school where suddenly I

understood

what these dollar sign things were. I

like it like for whatever reason it just

came in.

>> Those are variables, right?

>> Variables. Yeah. Yeah. And I I really

understood I never heard that word

before. Like you don't hear the word

variable as a 12-year-old out in any

context. And finally at one point it

like hit me that they store things and

things could change and I remember just

like weeks of reading this thing and not

understanding it getting to school so

excited being like it it triggered and

then after that I remember stuff

happened really quickly.

>> What what kind of stuff did you build?

Websites.

>> Yeah, websites. It was gaming related

websites. It was like a lot of like

gamech stuff, forum software. Yeah, I

mean I had a lot of fun cloning

websites, you know, in a poorly, but

like uh PayPal was out and then and I

really wondered like how does money get

transferred over the internet? How does

that work? So I tried to build like

copies of cloning websites. I did like

masquerade as a 18-year-old on um uh

like freelance websites. And so I got,

you know, 100 bucks here, 50 bucks here

to do like image like upload stuff. I

decided to study computer science in

college. Um went to University of

Washington. I mean, I guess that's when

you would call it serious, but I was I

was like really I mean, I was coding

every day as much as I could through

high school.

>> Oh, okay.

>> Yeah, that's impressive. Were you alone

with this when your friend group there?

Were there other people doing it or was

it kind of lonely?

>> It was lonely. It was very lonely. It

was It was lonely in the real world and

then I quickly found online friends

through like MSN Messenger and ALS

Messenger and forums. I found online

friends which many I I have met now and

I still keep in touch which was cool but

no I mean like back then I mean being a

being a programmer when no one knew that

word but but being into computers was

like a social death kiss and so uh even

my closest friends didn't though my best

friends and stuff like I hid it from all

of them and I didn't talk about it at

school and stuff like that so it was

just a secret until I went to college

and college is when I decided to like

let it all out. The big like break that

I got was I blogged and uh my freshman

year, late freshman year heading into

summer um after it of college, someone

just emailed me out of the blue and I

kind of thought it was a scam. It was

just like do you want to, you know, it

was do you want to be a Ruby on Rails

programmer? And I didn't know Ruby. I

was a PhD programmer. Um I had never

done Ruby. I'd never done Rails. But I

got this email and I'd never been like

head-hunted before. Like I didn't know

what this was. I was also 18. So I

didn't really know what to think about

it. I probably would have not responded

except that the person contacted me was

in LA and so I did respond and we set up

a meeting like a real physical meeting

and I met him and met the company and

realized this is real and they're

serious and genuine and I took that job

and uh yeah I mean that was I learned a

lot on the job there. So that was a huge

change. Um

>> was it a startup or small company

something like that?

>> No, it was a consultancy. So, it's kind

of like one of those standard like this

like 2007 Ruby on Rails was had blown

up. It was already very popular and uh

there was all these consultancies that

that appeared out of nowhere that was

basically like we'll build your minimum

viable product and yeah and we're one of

those shops. So great job for a college

student cuz we'd see a client for like 2

months and I would build a YouTube style

website and then I would build like a

philanthropy website and then I'd build

an e-commerce website and like it was

just like I got to learn all these

different technologies and different

scale challenges and different like you

there wasn't a lot of scale because

we're building MVPs but different like

thinking of scale problems. Um yeah it

was it was great. How did eventually

Hashi Corp start or what happened

between like getting getting this this

Ruby job to a few years later?

>> It kind of starts with this Ruby job. Um

there was one guy that worked at the the

company and and he's he's pretty into

his privacy so I won't share his name

but he was my boss and there was no

Heroku, there was no engineard so you

had to like self-host and Ruby on Rails

hosting then was kind of like difficult.

So he was the guy who got all these

projects hosted on on dedicated servers

and I didn't know anything about that

and I and he ran Linux and he had long

black hair and he like didn't use a

mouse and all these things that were so

weird to me and I was just intrigued. I

just he sat in the corner. He didn't

want to talk to anybody. Um, and I just

wanted to know more about what that

world was. And luckily, despite

appearances, he's very nice. And so, um,

yeah, I I think as soon as I showed a

genuine interest, started asking a lot

of questions, he started just giving me

challenges like, well, the first

challenge I remember he did is he

unplugged my mouse. And it's funny cuz I

I don't think there's an era of time

where if you did that, it probably would

have been some kind of harassment or

something. But he he literally said

unplug he unplug my mouse and said

you're never going to work with a mouse

again. So figure it out. I'm not going

to tell you how. Just unplug my mouse,

restart the computer, your problem now.

And took the mouse away.

>> Mhm. Um took me about a week and I got

really good with the keyboard.

>> Harsh lesson.

>> Harsh lesson. And once I got good with

the keyboard, um he said, "Okay, here's

he he installed screen on my, you know,

early team. He installed screen in my

terminal and said, "Figure this out.

You're going to use this now." you know,

there's no questions like you will use

this and and he just slowly instilled on

it um on me and as we got there then it

became you know here's SSH here's a

package manager he's like it slowly

taught me more and more and that got me

just in I loved in like immediately it

was like this is super cool super fun so

that long-winded process got me into

infrastructure and then simultaneously

or very shortly afterwards I joined a

research project at the University of

Washington called the Seattle project

which is a terrible name cuz you can't

Google it, but it's called the Seattle

project. It was I'm sure it doesn't

exist anymore. And it was again another

popular thing during this time was uh

kind of like um folding at home. It was

this idealized folding at home which is

can a bunch of people compute of

different you know it could be your home

machine it could be a unused rack it

could be in your basement it could be

around the world but can you comp you

donate all this heterogeneous hardware

and then can you generalize auler on top

of it so that academic institutions

across the world could just run

workloads and not just like not just

research like the job I got was

basically to very vaguely to create not

the scheduler component but like create

the ability to spin up all these nodes

um and and and a bunch of other stuff.

It's very vague but but it was this

infrastructury problem and I completely

failed at it. like I I tried for a

quarter but um from a technical side I

just failed and and I wrote down on his

notebook like what I thought the pieces

were missing that I couldn't solve this

problem in a quarter in a 10e period

like why well we need this we need this

we need this it's interesting to see how

structured Michelle was in his approach

in defining components that would later

become parts of the hashy stack and this

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workwise.com. And with this, let's get

back to Michelle's notebook with all the

components he would end up building at

Hashior Corp. And I still have this

notebook um at my house here, but the

problems are really like, you know, I

have no way to declaratively manage the

different resources that are out there.

I have no way to network these together

in a private network. Um, you know, I

wrote these things down and there was a

lot of stuff there that I never ended up

building, but a subset of that was

ultimately what Hashorp would end up

building. And I shared this with my

undergraduate like boss who was Arman

who was my co-founder.

>> Y later became your co-founder.

>> Yes. He was the my my boss on the

undergrad side. And I shared it with him

as kind of an exit interview like this

is what it is. And then some period of

time passed, not much, weeks passed and

he emailed me out of the blue and was

like, "Do you want to do a startup

together?" That, you know, you're a

teenager and you have no idea what this

commitment is.

>> Well, you're like 21 or something at

this point.

>> Uh, probably not even. Probably probably

19 or 20. Yeah. And he emailed me out of

the blue like, "Do you want to do a

startup?" Like person you never met or

you barely met, never met personally,

like all this stuff. It's so funny. And

he emailed me that at like 11:30. You're

in college. I emailed him back in 2

minutes and said, "Sure."

and he remembers thinking, "Wow, yours

thought it so fast that he's just in.

He's ready to go." That was sort of the

start of our friendship. And then uh and

uh again like there's overlapping pieces

here, but I was also at the time working

on something called Vagrant. And Vagrant

was, you know, came out of the

consultancy less the less the research

project. It was solving the problem in

this consultancy where we had new

clients every two months and we had

different teams. How do we create

reproducible dev environments so I could

go help somebody without a lot of

billable hours? So, so this is a

development environment that you could

spin up quickly, right?

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The metaphor I always

had was I didn't use Windows then, but

the metaphor I always used was how could

I doubleclick and open a dev?

>> Yep.

>> That was a metaphor I used because

>> it's a good one.

>> Yeah. What what what the problem we're

having was

>> any hour waste in a consultancy that you

can't build is just a waste. And so it

was basically like if somebody else is

behind schedule, how can I jump in, help

implement a feature, and jump out? And

we were in that era, just setting up the

dev environment for a project might take

you half a day.

>> And you couldn't build that for the

client, right? The client would only pay

for the work.

>> Yeah. You couldn't build that for the

client. So it' be like 4 hours of work

wasted and it would probably mess up

your dev environment for your actual

client because you would be a different

Ruby version, a different Rails version

and so you would kind of destroy both

ends. And so vagrant came out of that

which was I just need to go over there

and what ended up becoming vagrant up

sweet you know few minutes let's help

you for the next two hours and then

>> and how how did you build it back then

was it some kind of virtual machine or

>> yeah I was with virtual box virt oracle

well it wasn't it was sun then but um

virtual box and and that's that's

another cool constraint which is that I

was a college student so I had no money

so

>> this was expensive back then right

>> uh virtualization was expensive virtual

box was free and open source I don't

care about the open source side um for

that. I was I was never going to read

it. But yeah, it was free. That was why

I did it and and that's why I did that

and not like EC2, which should come out

by then, but I didn't do EC2 cuz I I

didn't have money to pay for these

instances. So, um yeah, that's that was

the constraints and and I like bringing

that up because I think so much of

software engineering is understanding

constraints and working with these

constraints. And your prior podcast

there were, you know, called the forces

like static and dynamic forces. It's

that and and I think that helps create

better software um when you have

constraints and that was my constraint.

So yeah, so that was we have vagrant, we

have this failed infrastructure project.

Um we have uh sort of the my boss at

consultancy getting me into

infrastructure and all of the and then I

mean externally we had the cloud being

introduced AWS I I went to school

University of Washington so

>> oh

>> I was right there

>> right in the epicenter of it Amazon was

next door right

>> Amazon was right next door they donated

a bunch of credits right away I knew

about the launch um most of the CS

students at UDub interned at at Amazon

not necessarily AWS but also including

AWS but all over Armon on uh interned at

uh AWS and so like I I was in the bubble

of like cloud cloud cloud AWS as a when

people were pronouncing S3 like s cubed

like people didn't know how to pronounce

it right that's how that's how new it

was and so yeah all this stuff kind of

came together and uh kind of led me on

the path to to build tooling to better

manage it and

>> at that moment in time when you saw

cloud you know you saw it was being big

did you know or have a conviction that

it would be big or as big as cloud has

become cuz this was I'm just trying to

put yourself back like this was very

very new back then right

>> totally

>> and and I think you know like if if if I

imagine I assume more people would have

been skeptics or think that is just a

fat or whatever what was it like can you

can you bring us back a little bit there

compared to the to the to today it was

very unpolished I guess as I describe it

you know like EC2 was I mean I used AWS

in general was very unreliable um S3 was

the only ever reliable piece everything

else was was totally unreliable. Um, and

there was only a few services like EBS

didn't even exist when we started. So,

there was no durable storage besides S3

when when I first started with it. It

just felt very raw. Um, and I don't I

don't I never really viewed it as this

is going to be big. I mean, eventually I

thought it was going to be big. What I

viewed it as is this is the better way

to do it. This feels like the better way

to do it. Just Yeah. at a base level

like whether this wins or loses in the

realm of markets and social like

popularity I don't know but this felt

good and so that that's what kind of

pushed me towards it is and I say this

over and over I'm I'm really motivated

by like what's the most fun and what

like feels right and that it just felt

right to me. Um I think where I started

making the bet, me and Arman both

started making some kind of bet was not

just when we started Hashor but we

started Hashorb on the basis of like

multicloud and

I really like to like contextualize that

at the time we were starting this which

was like 2011 2012 which is that AWS was

huge Azure didn't really exist and

Google cloud didn't really exist. There

was Google App Engine, right? It wasn't

even cloud.

>> Correct. Correct.

>> I I used to use that when it was App

Engine. Yeah.

>> Yeah. Yeah. And so in that context, as

we were pitching these cloud agnostic

tools, I mean, we got a lot of raised

eyebrows being like, "This is a waste of

time because AWS is the only player in

town." And our conviction was at that

point cloud is going to be huge and

anything that's economically huge, other

people want piece of that pie. And so

you're not going to just have AWS. it'll

be huge, but you're going to have these

others pop up and Microsoft is not going

to sleep on it and Google's not going to

sleep on it and who knows who else and

who knows and that was our conviction.

That was our bet and uh it mostly played

out that way.

>> So when you decided to start Hashi Corp,

you had Vagrant like was the idea to

like you know like invest in

commercialized Vagrant and did you go

out to raise money or did you start

doing it with you know bootstrap? How

did that go?

>> It wasn't to commercialize Vagrant. But

what we had done is Arman and I both

worked at this mobile ads company

startup. Um there's like less than 30

people and we had built like with Python

and C like these really um rough

prototypes of these ideas that I had in

this notebook of like service discovery

and um like an early version of

Terraform we called Launchy. So we did

DNS based service discovery service

discovery by connecting an off-the-shelf

DNS server with Postgress and we did all

these like hacky things but they felt

good u and again we like get back to

this like how things feel to me to

motivate me like it felt right

directionally right. I graduated the the

environment in Seattle was not very

startup heavy at the time. It was

basically everyone was like are you

going to work for Amazon or are you

going to work for Microsoft? Yeah, that

was like kind of it and and like to a

certain extent Facebook was starting to

show up up there, but that was it. I

knew I wanted to work for startups. So,

I had I I moved to to San Francisco. So,

I moved to San Francisco, found a

startup that would hire me, which was a

mobile ads thing. Um and uh just wanted

to learn. So, that that's the short step

there. So, I ended up in San Francisco.

Um and I convinced Arman was actually

going to do a PhD at Berkeley and he was

accepted and in and he was this a huge

deal, huge deal. I mean, incredible

program. Um, and so he was going to go

there and he would have done amazing

things there. But I convinced him to

join this mobile ad startup. He actually

took a year to ferment on the PhD. He's

like, I'll give it a year.

>> Yeah.

>> I'll join this mobile ads

>> and I'll go back for sure.

>> If it doesn't work, I'm going to go

back. And what ended up happening in

that year is is now where we get to. Um,

which is that we had this these these

this hodgepodge of proto prototype tools

that felt right. and we were going to

all these little startup mingling

parties, you know, it's like things like

GitHub drinkups, but also just like our

this is such a San Francisco thing and

that's why I think it's even though I

don't want to live there again, it was

so magical at the time. Um was like

across the street was this company that

was called Zimrite at the time

ultimately became Lyft and they invited

us over to get drinks and have pizza to

demo this new app with a mustache that

like didn't have a name and

>> Wow. Yeah. So, like stuff like that.

>> You were there when I was born.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like that happens

all the time. Like all the time in San

Francisco and and it's not unique to me

at all. Like Yeah. There there's a bunch

of stories there that I think aren't

worth getting into. It's just like it's

fun. But I went to all these things and

people would just talk. They're all

bunch of tech guys, right? And and you'd

be like, "What what are you working on?"

And and there's two things I realized.

One is all these companies are cloud

first. They're all just adopting AWS

first. There was no there was no

dedicated

>> this was like in in 2011 2012 or so like

like they they just like went and paid

for paid for cloud which was brand new

right the previous generation just had

had onrem I repeat but server rooms and

and server admins they had roles for

those all all that jazz

>> that was just gone gone like

>> that must have been a massive shift

>> I I literally can't think of one social

event I went to where there was somebody

that had dedicated servers the only one

is

>> Twitter yeah but I I think you like we

probably have to emphasize that that

This is a massive shift in the industry,

right? And it probably was was only

happening in Silicon Valley or like

>> probably

>> yeah well well ahead of of everyone else

>> at a scale that was larger than anywhere

else. It was probably in Silicon Valley.

The joke used to be cuz AWS is so

unreliable. The joke used to be that

when AWS went down uh all these startups

finally became more cash flow neutral

and they would lose less money. Um so

there would be like a huge you know US

east outage and and everyone would be

like are you going to migrate regions?

like no, we're saving money right now.

But yeah, getting back to it, uh,

everyone was cloud first, cloudorn,

cloud native, whatever you want to call

it. And, uh, the other thing was they

were hitting all the same challenges

that we were hitting and they didn't use

our tools cuz they were just like

internal prototype tools, but

>> but I knew that our tools felt good. So,

I had these two things come together

where I had some ego, some hubris where

I'm like, I'm pretty sure we're building

the right thing along with I think the

industry is moving in that direction and

like we could we could come together.

Um, and so that led to let's start a

company based around that. The fact that

I had Vagrant was more of like a

industry respect. I mean, Vagrant wasn't

that big then, so that's not saying

much. Um but it was it I just had some

foundation publicly with to give some

credibility to head in this direction.

Um that was about it and we we started

Ashp.

>> And then when you decided you

incorporated you know got the things did

you decide to raise money cuz again back

then I guess it wasn't as common wisdom

you know why cominator was probably

starting around that time. So like

startups were startups a big thing or

was it a given that okay if you start a

startup you're going to raise money

>> in my social bubble it was pretty much a

given. Um, and and not not just that.

So, I we incorporated um I self-funded

um I I I transferred $20,000 from my

savings account into this corporate

account, initial funding. Um and I

worked off of that. I didn't I paid

myself $0 for the first 6 months. So,

the 20,000 was purely towards whatever

things the company needed. That was the

first 6 months. And then Arman joined

after 6 months. Um and and we decided to

raise uh and the motivation there really

is there weren't many there weren't many

other options. There are basically three

options as I saw it then which was uh

bootstrapping um right just like build

something make money and as it becomes

affordable continue to grow reinvest and

grow bootstrapping VC on the other side

and then in the middle was like what I

called patronage which was not not like

not not Patreon style stuff today like

that infrastructure didn't exist there

was no subscriber donate type

infrastructure then um patronage was

more like you might be able to convince

a company like VMware to pay your salary

for you to work on some idea and the

best example is Reddus at VMware and

yeah and we kind of laid out this plan

that we wanted to do um which was which

at inception of the company included

Terraform console no it included

everything but Vault uh Vault came a

little bit later and we looked at that

and said if we bootstrap this even if we

hit it out of the park this is going to

take us like a decade just to like build

the software and that's in Best case

scenario, this is just going to be slow.

And and the problem with slow is that

things have a window and and cloud was

growing so fast that if we were that

slow, someone else was going to do it

their own way. I mean, that was I guess

that was the primary issue is we really

just wanted to go fast.

>> You need you knew you needed to.

>> Yeah. I needed to we needed to hire many

engineers right away and start building

right away. And so VC was the route we

chose.

>> Can you talk us through the the first

several products and and what they do?

you know, we we know Vagrant, but just

for those who are less aware of of what

what became the hashy stack later,

right?

>> Yeah. Let me see if I can still get

these in order. I'm pretty sure I can.

So, this vagrant was predated it. The

first product that came out of Hashore

itself was a product called Packer. Um,

kind of understated

publicly, but kind of underpins a lot of

things in the industry to this day.

That's an image building uh tool. So,

building Amazon images, VMware images,

etc. Um, I'm not even sure how much like

publicly came out, but there are whole

cloud like multi-billion dollar cloud

platforms that all of their official

images are like the service images are

built with packer. Everyone was trying

to utilize this horizontal scaling

autoscaling nature of AWS. That was the

dream. And if you were, it's kind of

like the u what the cold star problem

with serverless today. If you were

waiting tens of minutes for your server

to be ready, you couldn't react. Um, and

so my idea was do that, snapshot the

image and then next time just spin up

that image. Um, and so that was Packer.

>> That was Packer.

>> So Vagrant Packer. The next one that

came out was console. Um, console was uh

solving the networking problem and not

networking. It was more solving the

service discovery problem which was you

have all these machines coming and

going. Before, again, like to

conceptualize this, before you would

have a static set of machines that had

IPs, and you would probably use DNS or

something, but the IPs didn't change

that much. So, you could be like, "Oh,

my database is here and it's not

moving." But if you're in this world

where web servers and load balancers and

databases are just breathing, you know,

they're that's how I always describe

breathing. They're they're creation

destruction. Creation destruction like

constantly. Then things are happening at

a scale where the service discovery

needs to be much faster. Um, and not

just faster, but you want to be have

better guarantees that when you get a

response that oh, it's at this IP

address, so that IP address is like

ready. It's not just Yeah, I I think

this is also kind of more mainstream

with like Kubernetes readiness checks

and health checks and things like that.

It was it was bringing that to more like

physical server or cloud servers,

virtual machines and things like that.

And so that was console. Then after

that, I think we did Terraform. Um,

Terraform uh spins up infrastructure

code. Describe your infrastructure in in

AWS parlament. It was things like all

the attachments to your EBS volumes,

gateways, VPCs, subnets and like

connecting them all together. Like the

idea was I wanted to have an empty AWS

account or any cloud account and I

wanted to have this text and I wanted to

say make this text reality and that's

what Terraform is and and you would wait

whatever amount of time it took AWS and

you would blink and you would have

thousands of resources and then you with

one command again you could just tear it

down to zero. That was Terraform. So

that came out like 2014. Um so that was

the next thing. Uh and then was vault.

>> Yep. Um, vault is is is the easiest to

describe as secrets management as core.

Secrets management encryption grew to do

a lot more things for that.

>> So it's like like well we have like our

on your local developer machine you have

you have like your environment variables

and doing that at scale at a team level

at a company level at a service services

needs to access all these stuff

securely.

>> Yeah, it was much more focused on the

like the the production environment

secrets. Um, I had dreams and visions of

really solving the developer secret

problem, but Vault really never never

did that well.

>> Mitchell just talked about secrets

management, which turned out to be a

pretty important focus area for him. In

general, security is both very valuable,

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And with this, let's get back to Hashi

Corp and why the company decided to

raise 6 months after founding. But yeah,

it it's just basically like, yeah, where

do you store your secrets? And and the

secrets were not just I I forgot the

words I use to describe this, but

secrets were not just like passwords,

but it was also like PII. So how do you

protect emails and addresses and stuff

for your customers

>> or credit card numbers?

>> Credit card numbers. Um so vault was

core to all of that and continues to be

>> that that is a part to build something

like that.

>> Yeah, we were really scared when we

built that actually cuz um we kind of

hid the fact we never lied about it but

nobody on the team that build vault had

more than one quarter of security

undergraduate security experience. There

was no professional security engineers

from industry. There was no professional

security academics and uh yeah we built

it. We got a lot of audits because of

that. Like we were scared. So we did get

a couple we for us it was very expensive

as a startup. We paid a couple firms

tens of thousands of dollars for vault

0.1 to audit it. We paid two. Um we got

we shared the early beta with a lot of

people who were security experts in

order to review it. Not publicly, just

privately. Um we got a lot of good

feedback. Um but yeah, we we didn't want

that exposed in a sense. So yeah, I I I

understand, but I mean it kind of

validates that you can build good stuff

with I guess people who might not have

the experience, but I guess people were

learning, right? Like yeah, the security

stuff ended up we you know, we really

quickly hired professionals that helped

of the product and and the security

stuff was always pretty solid. Um, but

but I think what it really showed was

what the security industry needed was a

shift in user experience more than a

shift in like what it did because like

what we were doing was not fundamentally

different than

existing multi-undred million billion

dollar companies that already existed

but the experience the way you interface

with it was dramatically different and

that was I think a good example of that.

Yeah.

>> And after travault came

>> Nomad

>> Nomad. Yeah. Nomad which was our

scheduler which was a couple years late

for to the market. Yeah.

>> What was you sayuler was it not an

orchestrator?

>> I always described it as scheduling.

>> What what did it do?

>> Simple thing. You have a pool of

compute. It finally solved that problem

that I had in undergraduate. You have a

pool of compute. You have an app that

has a certain set of requirements and it

needs to find a place to run it.

>> Yeah. Yeah. The the underground problem

we talked about. And as you're building

out like these, you said like some of

these took years like how did the

business like hash corp as a business

work? Like did you did you start to

generate some business?

>> There was so so like all right tell me

about this one.

>> Yeah. I I think we waited too long to to

develop a business but um for four years

there was there was actually revenue

from a couple random sources but there

was no real reproducible growing

business. So you were just building this

vision of of the the you know your your

the founders vision of like all right we

need all these things that would have

taken like a decade bootstrap let's

build it

>> build in 5 years and figure it out.

>> That was literally it.

>> Yeah that was literally it and and you

know it was it was all open source and I

always had this mentality which was

which was like if the company fails it

doesn't matter because if there are good

ideas the open source community will

just continue. Um, and so I don't think

I would ever tell that to my investors

at that time, but you know, I had this

idea which is like the technology was

the most important thing to get out into

the world. Um, the business I really

sure hope we could figure it out, but

it's not the most important thing. And

for those engineers who are thinking of

becoming founders or you know might

might be founders, how did this work

with your investors? You know, when they

put in money like did they get some

board sees? Did you have to you manage

manage expectations? cuz kind of I'm

hearing just putting a bit of my

business hat on is like you know for 4

years you're building these cool things.

You don't exactly have a business plan.

How did that work or or they just

believe that eventually you guys will

figure it out or or they saw some kind

of traction with like open source. It's

traction and I don't think what we did

was atypical for Silicon Valley. So the

really broad handwavy way I like to

describe it is you know your seed is

about building the product. You don't

even know if it's product market fit.

you're just guess not you're you're

making educated guess but you're

building something getting the A you've

sort of proven hints of product market

fit but you definitely don't have it

yet. You've proven hints and then when

you get the B you've proven product

market fit and now you haven't really

proven like repeatable revenue. You've

you you now have hints of revenue but

you know the product is useful. You know

people like the product and want to use

the product and maybe want to pay for

the product, but you don't know exactly

how to get everybody to pay for the

product. and then CD and so on is just

continued to build the repeatable

revenue machine. And so with that

framework in mind, we were on the right

track. It was basically like to build

the product. Um we had clear product

market fit by the a um in terms of the

open source, right? We had millions of

downloads, a lot of stars on GitHub, all

sorts of signals that showed that this

was resonating. We had zero revenue. And

so, you know, it was raise money and

slowly slowly get closer and closer to

solving the business problem. And I

think we were just a year or two late or

like later than the average startup, but

the general key frames were the same,

just on this slightly wrong timeline, I

guess.

>> And then when you decided to do a

business, this was you already had the

the hashy stack and then you built

managed offering. I remember.

>> Yeah. Our first foray into

commercialization was a total failure.

It was this

>> Oh, really?

>> Yeah. We had this product that some

people You had You would have to have

been a diehard like Hashukore product

fan to know this, but we had this first

product that was called Atlas. And the

idea was commercially shipping the

vision of running all the products. And

so the, you know, there's a couple death

nails there. Um, one of them was that

you had to run all the products. And so

if you were just like a vault user, you

had a really impossible time buying or

buying into our commercial product. And

the second was just that it was just a

huge problem to like attach on to

regardless of the adoption required.

You're trying to solve the problem that

multiple different buying organizations

in a company were fighting over. So like

even the people who had adopted all our

tools, we ran into the problem of who

pays for it.

>> It wasn't as simple as engineers paying

for it.

>> Correct. And I think um one of the

lessons that I would have, you know, I

would have for engineers that become

founders that don't have a business

background. One of the tough lessons I

had to learn is that companies want to

pay for software, but they will fight

over whose budget owns that.

>> Budgets are important, right?

>> Yes. So, the budget has to exist and if

it looks like a networking problem,

they're going to say, "Oh, networking

should pay for that." They so I have

more budget to buy my other toys that I

want

>> or I can hire more people or uh yeah, it

could get broken down into like vendor

budget. So, it could already be

earmarked for external purchase. Yeah.

So, we have this product that was like,

does security pay for it? Does

networking pay for it? Does um

infrastructure play pay for it? Like,

does dev tooling pay for it? Like, where

does this go? And it's just that

Spider-Man mean where everyone's

pointing at each other. Ultimately, you

don't sell anything. And so, that was a

failure for that reason. So, I don't

remember the total time we chased this

down, but uh we had a board meeting for

sure on a Friday, and board meetings

were usually on Fridays. And and we had

this board meeting. We're based in the

city of San Francisco. Um board meetings

were an hour south in in um real Silicon

Valley. And it didn't go well. It wasn't

there was no no yelling. There was

nobody saying you guys are messing up.

There was nothing like that. It was just

the way I describe it is when your

parents aren't happy with you, but they

don't have to say that they're not happy

with you.

>> You know,

>> but you know they're not happy with you.

We had this board meeting. We drove

home. our mom and I complete drive home

was silent and nor Friday it's Friday

night so usually what we do is we'd go

straight to our mom lived in the city

and I lived in LA already but we'd go

straight back to where Arman's place and

just like have a glass of wine debrief

talk through things and we didn't talk

on this car ride home Arman drove

straight to the office I didn't question

that uh we went into the office um sat

at a table not much larger than this

only difference was there would be a

whiteboard

I think one of us at that point said,

"Well, that didn't go well." Uh, we both

knew it. We didn't feel good. And, uh,

the the sequence of events here is now

very fuzzy. But at a certain point, we

decided,

let's play this experiment where if

there was no sunk cost, if we were

starting from scratch, what would we do

differently today? We whiteboarded all

this stuff out. What we whiteboarded out

was per product enterprise products and

doing vault first and all this stuff. We

wrote it out, spent some amount of time

there. It's still Friday. It might be

Saturday in terms of the time of day,

but it's still Friday. I think it was

Arman who looked at the board and goes,

"Why don't we just do that?" Like, why

not? Like, and and and I was like,

"Yeah, why not?" So, we decided over the

course of that weekend to just throw it

all away. Just throw everything we were

doing before way. We had two paying

customers. We're like just breach

contract. I don't know. Like figure it

out. Like get out of it. We're done. And

we convened an all hands meeting on

Monday. Probably only about 20 30 people

in the company that time, but we

convened an all hands meeting over Zoom.

Um I think and we might not have used

Zoom then, but whatever video chat. And

we said, "Okay, we're switching

directions. We are now enterprise as our

customer open core per product." We

would have this open source and we would

have a forked version internally that

had closed source features. Yeah, it was

a fork but yeah um open core business

model. Arman and I thought people would

quit like we thought we would lose like

we don't have exact number. We thought

it would uh shatter some level of

confidence and like wow these these guys

have no idea what they're doing. We

didn't have any idea what we're doing.

Um, and you know, yeah, open core even

then had a bit of a like icky taste in

people's mouth. And so like we thought

people would just like philosophically

quit being like, "No, I came here to

work on open source. I'm not going to do

open core." Um, enterprise was kind of

just like a sudy boring thing. There was

like so multiple facets of why people

might quit. Nobody quit. Uh, the vibes

in Slack were amazing, super positive.

>> Oh, what happened? You think like why

people internal

>> we asked about it in oneon ones and

follow-ups. We asked about it and it was

really like everyone was kind of just

like buzzing that we had a clear

direction and a conviction and you know

there was fear of the unknown. But but

before there was this feeling of like

we're just we're just throwing darts at

the wall and doing this thing and we

don't know who exactly who our customer

is. And there was all this uncertainty

in a different way. And now it was like

we don't know if this will work but at

least we're just gonna sprint towards

this like there's these clear things

which was like definitely enterprise

definitely open core definitely vault

like all these things were set in stone

that gave us a different set of

certainty that suddenly the company was

like let's go um so yeah nobody quit it

went super well and um we started I

don't the I don't know the time of year

but it was it was like in the fall we

built Vault Enterprise um by the new

year within like the first quarter of of

trying to do sales we could just

tell that it was different. It wasn't

like obviously successful yet, but just

the caliber of conversation we're

having, the the distance we were getting

in the buying process and the speed

we're doing it, it just felt different.

>> And what was different of this approach?

Yeah, I mean part of it just comes down

to like the classic startup like listen

to your customer and we we should have

listened from the beginning because uh

our potential customers were were

screaming at us to do what we ended up

doing which is we would give these

pitches about adopt all the products and

buy this pie in the sky thing and and

there were so many meetings where

someone would be like okay I'll think

about that but how do you replicate your

secrets involve you know they would just

like ask these questions where if you if

I was just listening I was so blinded a

lot of us were blinded, but I was so

blinded. If I was just listening, I'd be

like, "Wait, a lot of people are asking

about secrets replication." And that's a

at scale problem. Maybe we could close

source that, right? Like that's what we

ended up doing is that was our first

feature with with secrets replication.

Uh not even across data centers. The

first feature was just like a cluster of

vault servers in a single uh region. you

would sell this more focused product,

but now kind of the problems I talked

about earlier, security was definitely

the buyer. There was an obvious budget,

obvious person you were talking to.

There was a feature that it resonated

with that scale. And so we were just

having much higher quality meetings in

terms of uh getting this done. Michelle

just talked about how Hashorp managed to

build a product that enterprise

customers cared about and wanted to buy

because it resonated with their scale.

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And with this, let's get back to the

episode and what came after they built

Vault.

>> And I get asked on the open source side

all the time, but these buyers, like

corporate buyers, do not care at all

about open source. They don't care at

all. Like, they need a commercial

agreement. And so the the closed source

nature of it like some people needed

like legal protections around like code

escrow in terms of downtime and stuff

like that. That was about the extent of

it. Otherwise they were like you know we

need support. We need proof of concept

to prove it works. Um we need some white

papers in terms of like other customers

scale blah blah blah. Um and yeah that's

what we had to build up after that and

get going.

>> And then so you started selling at Vault

and then you did it for the other

products as well, right? Yeah, we did

Terraform and we did console. Um,

we had it for all the products but but

you know all this data is public. You

could look at it in and the well for a

period of time it was public. You could

look in like the public reports of when

Hosk was a public company. Um, you know,

it really broke down to all Terraform.

>> One thing I I remember is Terraform just

became so so so popular across the

industry. So like you know like there's

a hashy stack but I I only layer that

all the other parts existed cuz like

Terraform just seemed to be everywhere.

Why why do you think that sudden

popularity was?

>> It's so funny to hear that because I I I

accept and know that now and I feel the

same way that you feel now that

Terraform is this huge thing. But for

the longest time like we were the

vagrant company like all the other tools

were like no one knew the other tools

and not only that like Terraform uh I

one of the things that kind of

frustrates me I haven't heard it

recently but for a period of time one of

the things that frustrated me was like

oh they they only won because they were

first to market. I hear that a lot and

we were like seventh to market. Okay. So

like

>> to market in in in what category?

>> In terms of that infrastructure as

codes.

>> So there were like other like players

who you know

>> so many Yeah. Yeah. And and no one was a

clear winner. It was a waring market.

But like that first year 2014 when we

came out Terraform I you know at that

time one of my marketing strategies was

I was at every conference I I went to I

traveled an obscene amount. I was

speaking wherever I could, but even if I

couldn't speak, I was going just to talk

to people. Um, and there's actually a

little anecdote here was when the COVID

lockdowns happened in March 2020, my

wife and I had nothing to do at night.

We didn't have kids yet. And we opened

up our calendars and we realized that it

was a we had been dating since 2012 and

the first time in in almost 10 years of

our relationship that I will have been

in the same place longer than 8 days.

No, for for almost 10 it was at 9 years.

For 9 years straight, I had been

somewhere different at least every eight

days.

>> That's how much you traveled.

>> That's how much I traveled. Yeah. And I

know there's consultants that travel a

lot more and stuff, but like I was

traveling a lot. I was coding a lot. I

was like doing all these things. Um

>> you must have like coded while you

traveled as well.

>> All all the time. Yeah. I had a whole

system. When I started traveling,

inflight Wi-Fi didn't exist.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

>> Even now it's kind of patchy.

>> Yeah. So I wrote these scripts that I

end up iterating on but mostly used. um

where I downloaded all the GitHub issues

and I categorized them and I would just

break it down into tasks that none took

more than 10 to 15 minutes and I just

created this list and and when I was on

the plane I would just one by one bust

them out.

>> Uh there's no internet so just commit

them locally.

>> Yeah.

>> And then I would get back and and some

people used to notice this cuz I would

land and you would get this push and

people would get these email

notifications where like 30 issues were

closed all at once.

>> Wow. But I found the key was

pre-planning what issues you were going

to work on. I did that online on the

ground.

>> Yeah.

>> And then breaking them down into

15-minute chunks because I found it was

really hard to get into like multi-our

even when I was traveling to like Japan

or something. It's really hard to get

into like multi-hour flow on an

airplane. So I was like, I'm only going

to work on the stuff that isn't like

heavy design work, none of that. It's

just like bug fixes, right? Like just

cleaning stuff up. And so that was my

process. In 2021, Hashi Corp went

public. What is it like to go public?

Both in terms of preparing for it, how

did it feel? What changed after on the

prep side? I don't have the full answer

because I also stepped down from the

executive team about maybe 6 months

before we went public. So, I was part of

some of the planning and obviously I was

very aware that we were planning to go

public and but um like for example, I

wasn't part of the road show or any of

that. But yeah, you know, from my seat,

the the parts that I was part of, the

parts I had visibility on to, I mean,

it's it it takes over a year to to do

it. So, there's a lot of prep and and

there's some funny things that you do

like you do you start running like a

public company at least two quarters

before you're public.

>> Um, I don't remember what the drop

deadad date is, but there's a date where

you could just like cancel going public

and it's pretty close. Like, it's like

very close to to when you actually like

have that day. So you you kind of run

like a public company and to the point

where you do mock earnings calls like

you actually with a conference room

table. Your investors are the public

investors that aren't in the room. They

go somewhere else and they talk over the

speaker phone and ask you the types of

questions. Um your CFO or VP of finance

gives the full report of the quarter.

They try to frame the types of questions

you get. You run it and you try to

figure out like whether it's running

well enough, I guess. And that's sort of

what the prep feels like. And there's a

an obscene amount of secrecy because um

from a regulation standpoint, you can't

talk about any of this. And so I mean

you could look back at at even the dumb

stuff like hacker news comments like I

just went radio it's the clearest signal

that a company's going to go public cuz

I went radio silent on every topic

because everything became questionable.

I remember there was just a point cuz I

I there was a hacker news comment I gave

like eight months before it went public

and our general counsel like in the

middle of the night was like you have to

delete that after he talked to me I was

like I could see how that might affect

things but like I didn't realize the

matter and I ended up deleting it.

>> And is is this because you're not

supposed to give public information away

or something like that?

>> I don't remember the exact regulation to

be honest.

>> Yeah. But there there's some regulation

about like uh like not leaking

information or

>> not. It's not really I mean it is it's

all information but it's more about like

you can't influence the market uh in any

way. And so yeah and you can't make

promises because if you say oh we're

going to go public it might cause even

private funding to froth up and it's

it's a form of fraud. Um so yeah

basically like I just stopped talking

about everything. I don't know how

seriously other people take it, but I

took it to the point where I planned

this trip to New York to go public and I

invited my parents and I didn't tell my

parents why we were going to New York

and I just told them I want you to go to

New York. It's really really important.

It has to do with Ashp and they were

like, "Sure." And I said, "I can't tell

you about it." And they're said, "Sure."

And I told them maybe a month in

advance. We had a dog. We had to get our

dog sat by my aunt and I just told them

we're going on a family vacation up to

the point we left. They like I didn't

tell nobody except my parents knew

basically. Um none of my friends,

nothing. Um except the friends that

worked at the company. Um but yeah, it

it that's what it's like leading up to

it. Yeah, I I was at Uber when we went

public and and previously I read that uh

while before going public uh Hashi Corp

VMware made an offer earlier way

>> early that was like in super early

>> like two years into the company. We went

probably like 10 years in the company.

So yeah.

>> Yeah. So so like when when they tried to

to to buy you like what was it like did

you almost sell at some point? Was there

any point where where you were close to

potentially selling?

>> It felt close and and and

I got a lot of accounts afterwards that

it was very close. It came down to like

one vote on the VMware board was what I

heard about two years in the company. We

were only three employees me including

me and Armon. So we had one employee I

guess it was two founders and employees

three of us. We got approached by

VMware. Um you know I didn't know what

this would be like and and it is not

what it what it isn't is they don't show

up and say we would like to buy you.

>> No

>> no no

>> that would be too obvious. The way it

happens is you get an email from some

low-level business development person

that wants to just like talk vaguely.

And the vague talk is they're not

interested in buying you. The one of the

jobs of BD people at large companies is

just to have an understanding of the

ecosystem. So it's really just like

let's have an understanding. They might

have had an executive tell him or her to

go talk to this company. There might

already be an executive kind of poking

around, but yeah. So it kind of starts

out that way. It turns into would you

like to come by our offices and meet in

person? Um oh our VP of engineering

swung by let's talk to him nice to meet

you blah blah that uh then I think this

is like our actual timeline and then I

think uh there was a dinner where there

was three VMware executives at the

dinner. Um at that point we thought they

might be interested but it was still so

so much dancing. Oh, this is not even

this just this is months before there

was even an offer. It was still so

social like we drank, we talked about

our hobbies and interests and very not

about I mean very basic about like tech.

It's really more vibes. They go to

dinner. Uh and then it started to get

more serious. We spent more time impella

at the VMware offices where we started

talking about partnerships about how how

can VMware help our products more and it

starts about partnerships and then it

turns into like hypothetical if you had

the resources of VMware what what would

you do you know we're like six meetings

in at this point there's no no offer of

anything and then at a certain point um

honestly we were getting tired of it

because nothing was happening anyway

>> sounds like you're a startup and you're

going to all these meetings

>> oh I don't even live in the bear area.

So I was flying up all the time. It was

a waste of time. And um and to a lot of

founders that is the warning I give them

is M&A becomes a waste of time. So I

have another mer acquisition.

>> M acquisitions becomes a waste of time.

So I'll tell you another anecdote after

this but um ultimately we kind of

politely had the like okay let's like

or get off the pot kind of

conversation and they uh put an LOI in

front of us which is a uh letter of

intent. Letter of intent. The LOI was it

was one page. Um, you know, it was it's

basically like a non like semi-binding

promise that we're pursuing buying you.

Uh, no number on there. It's just like

kind of vain.

>> Still no number.

>> Yeah. Well, verbally, but they're not

they're not writing anything down.

They're not putting anything in email,

none of that. It's just verbal. And so

at that point, verbally,

>> we had gotten a drop of $20 million,

which

>> doesn't sound that much. Well, yeah, but

we're 23 years old. Oh, yeah. The three

of you 23 years old.

>> I'm 23 years old. Me and Arman together

own 70% of the company. Um

>> Okay. Yeah.

>> Yeah. It you know it it sounds

interesting to say the least. What I

tell people is you start you start

thinking about the things you will buy

is you start that's the that's the it's

a dangerous path. That's the that's what

happens. And we had advice from people

who said it's like phenomenally too low,

like wildly too low, so go ask much

higher. And we asked, I don't remember

anymore, but we asked for maybe like 40

or 50 or something. And they just said

yes. They said okay. And then, you know,

it's like way too low.

And uh and that was verbal, too. So,

there was nothing binding about that.

Yes. It was just it was it wasn't like

yes. It was more like okay, we'll work

on that, you know, but very positive.

>> Yeah.

like in this indirect. It's an indirect

>> indirect business sense in indirect.

Yes. And it turned into come meet the

CEO of VMware, you know, like clearly

they're interested cuz we're like

climbing still. Arman and I we kind of

started getting cold feet because it's

it's it's the way we described it is

it's a dreamkilling amount of money.

It's like you would take the money but

you're too small to be important to a

company like VMware. So they're gonna

just

>> because because even though it's like so

much money but

>> personally it's so much money

>> but but you know that at VMware level I

guess you see their revenue their all

that you realize that for them it's not

a big deal.

>> It's meaningless to them. Yeah. It's

meaningless.

>> It's crazy. That's that messes with your

mind you know.

>> Yeah. Yeah. So it becomes this thing

where it's like personally your life

could change but this thing that we both

were truly passionate about like the

thing I wanted to work on more than

anything else would end in a sense

because you know I would probably get

thrown into like working on ESX or

something you know and

>> you would get a manager of a VM where

not even the CEO

>> the executives make it sound like

they're going to do all this stuff with

your products but like that's just one

executive in a cog of corporate

machinery. So we started getting cold

feed being like if they're interested

maybe we're on to something. If we're on

to something we want to sell out early

and sell out in a way where our dream

dies. That's why it's like a dream

killer. Arman very maturely and he's two

years younger than me so he's 21 at this

time.

>> No, he's he sounds like the older one.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's very

mature. And Arman very maturely came up

with the uh I forgot where it comes from

but the the risk minimization uh not

risk um the um regret minimization

framework. He was like what personally

on your own go think and I'll do the

same and let's come up with a number

that if we walked in the next day and

they said we're killing everything.

You're going to go work on ESX for the

next four years cuz we had a we were

going to have a lock up no matter what.

you're gonna work next four years that

we would be like cool this was worth it

like what's the minimum no regret or

minimum regret we came back and I don't

remember exactly what our numbers were

but they were pretty close and we ended

up at 100 and we and so we're like it

felt so wrong like how could we possibly

ask for 100 but we're like we said this

is what we're going to do and we stuck

to it so we went back we asked for 100

and it wasn't a no

>> and they they wasn't a yes this one had

a lot more hesitance it was a lot more

like

>> uh we'll get back to you right like I

don't know but it wasn't a no

and basically they came back to us and

said this requires board approval so

we're convening a board meeting next

week like unplanned that's not when

their board like we're convening the

VMware board we're going to vote on this

and then we heard that uh the vote

didn't pass that was that

>> it's just crazy how

>> so such small things could you know like

influence if if that was an extra yes

>> who knows what your

one person you you might have, you know,

like it's hard to but you know in VMware

you might have been clogging away on

like this this project.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean we didn't build

terform yet. So Terraform

>> terform might have not probably never

would have existed. High confidence I

know who the vote was. I know why they

voted that way. Like I know a lot more

details but it's like I it's it worked

out obviously in my favor. But yeah.

>> So you've you've left Hashi Corp and and

you're you're independent. And one thing

about cool about being independent is

you're just very honest about stuff. And

there was this really interesting thread

where on on Twitter you wrote about you

said like ask me anything about the big

cloud providers because at Hashior Corp

you work with all of them. What was your

experience back then uh of you know like

Azure, AWS, Google Cloud like like your

kind of honest view of how they work

back then and possibly like how has your

views changed on them. The precursor to

that is while I was at hosp I I

obviously had to be very careful about

what I said about any of the cloud

fighters because we're partners with all

of them. We're partners and I didn't

want to insult anyone and and so I was

just very professional about all their

relationships and like

>> we like all of them like

>> yeah or just say nothing. You have

nothing nice to say don't say anything

at all. And then I left and I was still

I kept that up because it was too close.

I was I was still flying too close to

the sun as they say. and then enough

time passed where I was like ah like my

opinion doesn't really matter and um

yeah so my to answer your question um my

broad view of all of them was that AWS

was really arrogant annoyingly arrogant

was how I describe it

>> and and when you say arrogant like can

you help us understand like how you work

with them or what part of them or like

is just general I

>> I'll start disclaiming this though that

you know we worked with so many people

there that there for individuals and all

of them who are awesome and nice and

kind. And so I'm not trying to make like

individual judgments here. It was just

more of like how all of it came together

and how it felt as a as a whole. So by

arrogant I mean it always felt like they

were doing us a favor at every turn in

terms of partnerships, in terms of just

getting a meeting with them. It always

felt like you should be thankful that

we're spending time talking to you. And

not just that, but also like there was

always this subtle vibe of like we will

just spin up a product and kill your

company. You know, it it felt that no

one ever said that. Um well, it kind of

got to a point where it was sort of like

if we don't come to terms, we're going

to build this service. It it did kind of

come to that,

>> but you know, we did see that later on

with Elastic and

>> Oh, that had already happened.

>> Oh, it happened already.

>> Yeah. Just not with us, but with other

open search.

>> Yeah. and they always publicly spun it

as like, oh, it's so great and and

builds the builds the ecosystem larger

and we're doing it by the letter of the

license and you know, all has truth

elements to it, but it's still not a

nice thing.

>> No, I I I think like um I I I don't

think people paying attention to open

source appreciated what Amazon did with

with it. It it really hurt Elastic's

business and it showed how open source

can be weaponized against a company that

spends, you know, their blood, sweat,

and tears. And I guess you know Hashorp

you had the same thing right cuz cuz you

you were publishing permissive but I

mean open source needs to be permissive

so

>> it was MIT or MBL license. Yeah.

>> So like Amazon could have spun up any

anything they wanted.

>> Yeah.

>> There was like a 2-year period where I I

think for the entire two years the

entire leadership team was terrified

that at any moment there would be like a

vault service or something would pop up.

Um and so yeah that's that's sort of my

characterization of AWS. It really took

like for example teeth ringing to get

them to help with the AWS Terraform

provider. Um we had I don't remember the

exact number but we had something like

five full-time engineers employed

working on only the AWS provider for

Terraform which you know maths out full

benefits and everything to like a

million dollars a year.

>> Um and all of that was pure open source

pure integration with a commercial

entity and they were not helping us all.

and and they were the last of any of the

cloud providers to to provide any sort

of help there. And it it came down to

some drama where we went to a meeting

and basically said that we're going to

publicly say that the AWS provider is

deprecated and we're done. Like the

community could pick it up or whatever,

but we're not we're going to

>> Yeah. Cuz you didn't get any help from

them.

>> Yeah. And it's taking up too much work

and there's too many bugs and you're

shipping. Honestly, AWS is shipping

features too fast and like it's just

like not worth it. And that freaked them

out and finally they started helping.

You know, they might recount their side

of things differently, but that's pretty

much it felt like no movement for years

and we said that and movement started

happening really fast. So yeah, there

was that. Um Microsoft I would I have

the most positive view on Microsoft.

They had a really hairy technical

product is how I describe it. It was

very difficult to use

>> Azure

>> Azure and a lot of nouns like like

principles and I I didn't I still to

this day and I've integrated with the

service don't fully understand the AM

hierarchy of Azure

um I just kind of bolted it and got it

working with a team and and that was

that but so technically kind of h but

from the business side competent um

professionals and team players that's

like how I describe it. They we we went

into every meeting with them and a lot

of our meetings the first question was

how do we both win? That was like the

first question and and yeah, very

pleasant. Awesome. They were the first

people to jump on board uh supporting

Terraform. Sure, that's some kind of

bias, but like they were consistent

throughout the years. So positive on

Microsoft. Um and Google Cloud, you

know, my my or yeah, Google Cloud in

general, it was always like the best

technology, the most incredible

technology and architectural thinking.

And I swear none of them, it felt like

none of them cared or thought about the

business at all. It was like every

partnership meeting we'd spend hours

talking about the coolest edge cases and

scalability and how this is going to

work and like I I think the the best

public example that you could just see

in history was they were the only

company that when they partnered with us

to write the provider they spent a lot

of time building this very good I think

they called it magic something they they

they fully automated the whole thing. So

when they shipped the new Google Cloud

thing, it had a Terraform fighter

resource right away and not just like it

didn't feel automated. It felt very

ergonomic and like it was good. It was

really good. And so that they had that.

But whenever we would get into how do we

do co-ail? How do we like attribute your

sales engineers quota to selling like

infrastructure that's spun up by

Terraform? Like how do like how do we do